The Record of Unusual Creatures

Panda Novel

Although it might sound untypical, Hao Ren felt that Vivian was one of the most functional ones in his family. Lily was only good in work that involved physical labor and not necessarily reliable, Nangong Wuyue just washed things, Y’zaks would only of help when the house ran out of cooking gas, and Rollie’s only contribution was taking care of the fish. In contrast, Vivian was very versatile. She could cook, do laundry and stuff like that, moonlight as an air conditioner when the weather was hot, and become a charging port—it was Lily who discovered this function. Everyone in the family loved this. Ever since they no longer carried power banks and chargers. They would habitually look for Vivian every time their phones were out of battery.

Hao Ren handed the cable to Vivian. She pouted. “Why do I always have to do this kind of thing?” she asked.

Despite the complaining, she still summoned a bat, stuffed one of the cables into the mouth of the little bat, and bit the other cord herself. She rolled her eyes and said, “I’m going to open the gate. Step back and watch out for the escaping air.”

They held on to whatever on the wall they could find or just got out of the ramp. Hao Ren held on to the frame of the steel panel with one hand and grabbed Vivian’s arm with the other so that when the door opened, the escaping air would not blow him away. It was difficult to know whether its airlock would still work by judging from the condition of the spaceship. As everyone was out of the way, Vivian and her little bat sent a current through the cables. A string of small sparks immediately came out of her teeth.

Connected to the cables was a relay. There was a slight click in the relay before Hao Ren felt a slight vibration coming from his hand, and then the seemingly heavy door moved.

The heavy steel door slid open from the middle accompanied by a series of metal grinding noise, but there was no air escaping from the inside. It was dim inside with some weird silhouettes in the foreground when looking through the still opening door.

The door ground to a halt after a violent vibration. The opening was only one-fifth of the width when the door was fully open. Vivian squeezed her bat a little, trying to send more current to the door, but there was no response.

“Mechanical failure. It looks like this is how far the door would open,” Hao Ren said, stopping Vivian from further sending a higher voltage to the door. He came up, made sure that the door would not close suddenly before he carefully poked his head through the gap. “Well, it’s wide enough. Let’s go in. Try not to touch anything,” he said.

They sneaked through the gap into the darkness inside. Though there were only a few sparsely arranged lights, which looked not for lighting use, on the inside, they were still able to see things clearly with their unique vision. Hao Ren squinted deeper into the darkness. There was another door about tens of meters away, but it was open, which was a bad thing.

“There is no air here,” Vivian said. She then released a bat. The little bat struggled to flutter, but it could not fly. “Unless those inside the spaceship do not need air.”

“They need to breathe; this is an airlock chamber. Look at the two door structures,” Hao Ren said, pointing to the door at the other end that seemed to have malfunctioned as well. “The airlock has failed. There was no air escaping out when we opened the outer door just now. I’m afraid that this place has completely lost its pressure. There might be a bigger leak somewhere else in the spaceship,” he said.

As he spoke, he took the lead and floated forward. Of course, he knew that the situation might not be as bad as he said: it was a massive ship of more than 100 kilometers long, almost a mini artificial planet. It could not have only one airlock chamber. Probably they just happened to come in from one of the airlock chambers that had failed. There might be some sealing mechanisms ahead. If what he thought was right, there might be survivors on this spaceship.

But as they moved deeper into the spaceship, the situation became less optimistic.

They moved through a vast and old steel corridor and saw all equipment had exceeded their service life and broken down. The lighting system of the spaceship seemed to be entirely out of order, leaving only some emergency lights occasionally flickering like ghost fires in the darkness. They found some computer terminals along the way, but even Vivian could not power up these terminals with her power source.

“Could all the people here have died?” Nangong Wuyue carefully crawled along the huge pipes in the passageway, all the while grabbing on anything she could get hold of to make sure she always stayed on the floor and felt secure. “I couldn’t feel any water element here. There is only ice within a few kilometers radius. Ice without any signs of life,” she said.

Hao Ren remained silent. He felt the darkness was depressing. With the shared senses with the MDT, he could see the deep layers of the steel corridor. The electronic system and mechanical devices were all dead. Other than the propulsion system of the spaceship, everything was down.

After passing through many malfunctioned doors and junctions, they came to a vast space. The place looked like a transportation hub; oval like the egg of a monster, it seemed like a converging point of many passages from other directions, almost like a waiting hall. The lighting here was slightly better. Perhaps the backup generator was still running; one-third of the lights in the hall were functioning.

There were many vertical pillars in the center of the hall. Hao Ren thought that these pillars were the supporting structure, but when he came closer, he found that these things were like elevators that led to the other parts of the spaceship.

“They’re all broken. Maybe because there’s no power,” Nangong Sanba knocked on a few control panels of the elevator. “Looks like this is the only way,” he said.

Hao Ren thought for a moment. He then patted Lily on the head. “Cut this open,” he said.

Lily wielded her Flamejoy and went up happily. Before doing it, she turned her head around and asked, “Are you sure you want me to do that?”

“Yeah, the scan shows that there are no more signs of life beneath,” Hao Ren said, pointing to the MDT. “There is no signs of life within at least several kilometers.”

Lily proceeded. She wielded her claws and began to cut one of the elevator tubes. Sparks were flying. Before they knew it, she had cut out an opening, revealing the dark vertical shaft inside. Poking his head inside and looking down the dimly lit shaft, Hao Ren could not see where the elevator car was.

Vivian wanted to summon a small bat to scout out the shaft. But since bat would not fly in a vacuum, she took out a slingshot instead. She aimed and shot the bat down the shaft.

A moment later, a bloody mist floated up from the dark shaft. Vivian re-absorbed the bloody mist into the body. “It’s safe down there. It’s a long elevator shaft. There are some cracks in the middle section of the shaft, from where we could get out,” she said.

Hao Ren checked the status of his Steel Membrane Shield before leaping into the shaft.

There were only dim guiding lights in the shaft. When Hao Ren descended deeper, he began to see a bright light. So he sped up the descent.

Just like what Vivian had said, there were several cracks on the elevator shaft. The cracks seemed to be torn apart by the twisted old steel brackets in the shaft. Light shone through the cracks, meaning outside was a bright space.

Hao Ren gestured to his teammates so that they kept their alertness high. He then squeezed through a crack that was large enough to allow an adult to pass.

When he got through, his jaw dropped.

He saw a city.

A silent city in the shimmer.

“Mr. Landlord, what do you see?” Lily’s voice was heard on the radio. He felt a furry head slamming him from behind. When Lily finally crawled out from the crack, she was rooted to the spot just like Hao Ren did.

“Wow! It’s a space fortress!”

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