Chapter 330 First Deep Exploration into the Far Side of the Moon

Old Liu sat in the driver's seat, his hands steadily pushing the control lever, barely saying a word the whole way. Li Xiang, the head of the formation research group, sat in the passenger seat, staring intently at the terrain scanning screen. Two Golden Core stage sword cultivators stood guard, one in front and one behind, holding unsheathed flying swords, locking the observation windows on both sides of the vehicle.

The young underworld messenger, Zhou Huai, clung to the deepest corner of the carriage. He gripped the gray-white bone talisman Zhao Feng had given him tightly, his knuckles turning white.

Before coming to the moon, he had dealt with thousands of troublesome riots of the dead in the underworld and ventured into the extremely dangerous realm of the dead. He thought he had long forgotten what fear was.

Until today, when we set foot on the far side of the moon.

The darkness on Earth, even in mass graves, has a "human touch," a lingering accumulation of the dead's resentment. But the darkness of the far side of the moon is a vacuum devoid of any emotion.

It doesn't hate you, doesn't want to kill you, and isn't even aware of your existence. It simply exists there objectively, like a piece of cold iron without boundaries, ruthlessly pressing down at the edge of your field of vision.

"We are about to enter the lunar far side obscuring zone."

Li Xiang's hoarse voice broke the oppressive silence on the channel. "Once we cross that ring-shaped ridge ahead, direct communication with Earth will be cut off. The signal from the Guanghan Base's base station is weakening, and Lunar Orbit Station 1 can only provide intermittent relay forwarding."

He quickly entered the command: "Everyone, check your life recorders. Low-frequency detection array, switch to standby mode. Exoskeleton life support system, switch to internal circulation."

Old Liu glanced up at the rear-view detection screen. The lights of the Guanghan Base were already as distant as a blurry firefly. Lunar Station 1, suspended in low Earth orbit, passed overhead, leaving a faint trail of light.

Further ahead, this planet will completely block out Earth with its massive size.

Old Liu cursed under his breath, "It's so damn deserted."

The probe rolled over the highest point of the gentle slope and then tilted sharply downwards.

The next second, the world outside the car window seemed to be brutally covered by a black cloth. The grayish-white lunar soil, which could still be seen in the starlight, instantly turned into a dull, dead black. The eight high-powered spirit-gathering searchlights on the top of the probe were turned on at full power. The cold white beams of light that should have illuminated several kilometers only advanced less than a hundred meters, as if they had hit an invisible wall and were swallowed up little by little by the shadow in front of them.

Li Xiang frowned deeply: "The light scattering parameters are abnormal. The refractive index of the surrounding space is incorrect, and the photon kinetic energy has experienced a precipitous decrease."

"Then drive slowly. As long as the tracks are still turning, we'll keep pushing forward even if the sky falls." Old Liu pulled the lever back halfway and readjusted the direction.

The heavy-duty exploration vehicle slowly advanced through the abyss-like basin. As it rolled over a highly fractured basalt belt, a dull tremor came from its tracked chassis.

Zhou Huai, who had been keeping his eyes closed, suddenly raised his head.

He heard a sound.

Extremely low, extremely fine. Intermittent.

It's like someone buried in a very distant underground place, desperately scraping an iron wall with their worn-down fingernails.

rustle……

Zhou Huai's pupils contracted sharply, and he instinctively gripped the bone talisman pressed against his chest tightly. But this bone talisman, which was supposed to warn of evil spirits, remained completely unresponsive, as still as an ordinary dead bone.

He swallowed hard, forcing down a trembling voice: "Did you... hear anything?"

Li Xiang's finger hovered for a moment: "What was that sound? The spiritual pressure alarm didn't go off."

"It sounds like... the sound of fingernails scraping against metal. Deep inside."

Old Liu suddenly pulled the brake.

With a hiss, the probe slid forward half a meter due to inertia before coming to a sudden stop.

The channel fell silent instantly. The two Golden Core sword cultivators placed their hands naturally on their sword hilts. Inside the carriage, only the faint hum of the life support system's carbon circulation pump could be heard.

Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. Thirty seconds.

There was nothing there.

A Golden Core guard broke the silence in a low voice: "It might be vehicle resonance. The temperature difference in the permanent shaded area is large, causing the titanium steel shell to contract rapidly, and metal fatigue can produce a scraping-like noise."

This is an extremely reasonable engineering explanation. Zhou Huai looked at the unresponsive bone talisman, finally nodded, and did not argue.

Old Liu didn't start the vehicle immediately. He took a deep look at Zhou Huai, then turned to Li Xiang and said, "Record this situation in the core mission log with utmost precision."

Li Xiang hesitated: "There's no instrumental evidence, it's just suspected auditory hallucinations..."

"I told you, write it down." Old Liu stared intently ahead. "In a place like this, I'd rather trust my intuition than your broken machines."

Li Xiang did not refute, but silently wrote the signal into the bottom of the log.

The probe started up again and drove deeper into the basin.

……

Three hours later, the probe arrived at its first designated landing point.

This is the edge of an extremely ancient meteorite crater, with gentle terrain, suitable for setting up the first set of low-frequency communication repeater piles.

"Get out of the car. Hurry up." Old Liu turned on the exterior light on the roof of the car.

The airlock door opened, and the five people stepped onto this land that had not been set foot on for billions of years.

Without the filtering of the atmosphere, the stars are too bright and too dazzling, like countless eyes carved from ice, coldly nailed to the black curtain.

Li Xiang dragged out a heavy black array box. Old Liu pulled out a plasma welding torch and helped him align the three sturdy pressure anchors with the rock strata: "Good sinking point. The Yin Cold Pressure could cause microscopic disturbances at any time. If the base is too light, the repeater piles might float into the pit by themselves, and you'll have to jump in to chase after them?"

With a mechanical creak, three short alloy pillars engraved with spirit patterns popped out. The array patterns at their base glowed with a faint icy blue light, like three red-hot nails forcefully piercing through the lunar shell.

"The first set of low-frequency repeater stations has been deployed." Li Xiang stared intently at the tactical terminal.

After the encrypted signal representing the Guanghan base flickered for two seconds, a green data link stabilized. "Underlying signal feedback is normal. Communication latency: 3.7 seconds."

Old Liu stared at the blue light and let out a sigh of relief. With a relay, there's always a way out.

On the other side, the underworld messenger Zhou Huai stood alone like a statue at the edge of the massive circular pit, staring intently at the bottomless abyss.

It was darker there than the surrounding area. When the searchlight swept down, it could only vaguely reveal the texture of the rock's fault lines before disappearing completely below, like a dry well that could never be filled.

Zhou Huai spoke with difficulty over the channel: "It's not clean down there..."

The Golden Core sword cultivator beside him narrowed his eyes: "A wandering soul?"

"No." Zhou Huai shook his head very slowly, a blank look appearing on his bloodless face. "He has no soul."

For a grim reaper to utter the words "no soul" signifies something utterly terrifying. No soul, no lingering regrets, no karmic residue left behind after death.

Clean. So clean that it defies the natural order of the universe's creation and destruction. It's as if something once conducted a "cleansing" here, uprooting the very concept of "existence."

Li Xiang took a deep breath, took out a portable low-frequency sonar detector, and attached it to the rock strata at the edge of the circular pit.

Ten seconds later, a slow, undulating gray ripple appeared on the miniature screen.

It's very thin, with no peaks, no diffusion, and no attenuation. It's exactly the same line I saw in the Kyoto control room.

"Found it." Li Xiang said in a very low voice.

Old Liu strode over: "The source is down there?"

"Deeper. This is just a leaky reaction at the edge. The real source of energy is deep underground."

Old Liu looked up at the darkness at the end of his vision. The planned route was to drive another fifty kilometers deeper into the shadowy zone, where there was an area marked with a huge lunar rift.

Old Liu fastened the safety harness around his waist again: "Pack up the equipment. Get in the car."

Li Xiang looked at him: "Aren't you going to wait for the second set of relay links to be fully stable before the backtest?"

"No time to wait. This place doesn't give us the time to conduct experiments slowly." Old Liu strode towards the probe vehicle. "But for the road ahead, we must drive in a set of relay stakes every five kilometers. If we miss a set, this vehicle won't move forward even half a meter."

……

The deeper you go into the shadowy area, the more bizarre the terrain becomes.

Large basalt layers, weighing thousands of tons, rolled outwards, exposing sharp, blade-like fracture surfaces.

The probe struggled to climb. Finally, one of the Golden Core guards couldn't help but ask, "Team leader, were these really formed by a meteorite impact?"

Li Xiang stared intently at the geological scan map, his face extremely grim: "The surface is covered with gray material resembling an impact crater, but what lies beneath the surface is not."

He projected the three-dimensional fault map onto a public screen. The rock strata deep within the lunar crust did not exhibit the arc-shaped stress structure of natural geological compression. Instead, several extremely straight and smooth fracture zones were clearly visible within the intricate rock layers.

Just then, Zhou Huai's body suddenly trembled violently.

He heard that scraping sound again. And this time, it wasn't just him.

A short, sharp electronic noise suddenly came through the channel.

Nourishes—

It wasn't a resonance from underground; it exploded directly in everyone's helmet headsets. It was as if something had gotten close to the communication frequency and gently inhaled a breath of cold air near their ears.

Clang!

Two high-level flying swords were simultaneously drawn half an inch from their sheaths, their dazzling sword light illuminating the cramped carriage.

Old Liu slammed on the brakes: "Everyone, silence!"

The channel fell silent. But the sound didn't disappear; like a ghost, it slowly rose from the extremely clean background noise of the communication.

Sizzle. Sizzle sizzle. Sizzle—

Li Xiang stared at the signal monitoring screen, his face ashen: "Old Liu, this isn't external sound! It's being generated directly in our communication link! The problem is coming from directly in front!"

He pushed the directional gain to maximum. On the screen, the gray waveform suddenly flickered violently, then stabilized into a glaring red line.

"Three kilometers." Li Xiang's voice changed.

Three kilometers away lies the black rift valley that spans the basin.

……

Old Liu forcibly reversed the vehicle and hid it behind a huge basalt rock.

"Sword cultivators, establish a cross-defense formation. Do not use spiritual pressure without authorization!" Old Liu issued tactical orders.

Li Xiang deployed a high-powered directional array, aiming it intently at the front. Zhou Huai placed the bone talisman on his chest, closed his eyes, and extended his divine soul outward.

Just five seconds later, Zhou Huai suddenly leaned back and slammed heavily into the seat, his forehead covered in cold sweat: "There really is something down there..."

"A living thing?" Li Xiang pressed.

"It doesn't seem like it." Zhou Huai stared intently into the darkness ahead. "There's no deathly aura, but it's not a living creature either. It feels like... a piece of rotting flesh has been driven deep into the ground by an incomprehensible nail. It should be completely dead, but I can feel... it's waiting."

"What are you waiting for?"

"Wait for someone to pull out the nails."

Old Liu didn't curse; he looked through the bulletproof glass at a distance of three kilometers.

The searchlights could barely illuminate the edge of the rift. It resembled an ugly, deep black wound, devoid of light and heat. Yet, all the high-precision instruments inside the carriage were issuing low, overload warnings.

Li Xiang's palms were sweaty: "Old Liu, report back to the Guanghan control room immediately?"

Report.

Li Xiang connected to the communication terminal and initiated the highest-encryption relay link.

"Guanghan Control Center, this is the Deep Exploration Team. We have reached the outer perimeter of the target rift valley, three kilometers away, and have detected a stable high-dimensional anomaly. Requesting the upload of the detection data packet."

The progress bar for sending is now lit.

One second. Three seconds. Six seconds. Twelve seconds.

The progress bar is stuck at 99%.

Li Xiang suddenly looked up: "The handshake agreement has failed! The delay is increasing exponentially!"

Old Liu's heart sank: "Where's the signal from the repeater?"

"Group 1 is normal. Group 2 is normal. Group 3..."

Li Xiang's voice abruptly stopped. On the screen, the blue dots of the third set of relay stations flickered twice in a very strange manner, and then went out completely.

Communication routes have been cut off.

A few seconds later, the previously quiet channel was suddenly filled with intermittent, severely distorted sounds from the Guanghan control room.

"...Deep Dive Team...buzz...data packet corruption...your location...buzz..."

The controller's voice was drawn out and distorted, turning into an extremely sharp, inhuman shriek.

Nourishes—

The scraping sound appeared for the third time. This time it was so clear it sounded like something was crawling on the outer armor of the reconnaissance vehicle, scraping against the titanium steel blast-resistant door with sharp claws!

The grayish-white bone talisman in Zhou Huai's hand emitted a very faint, crisp sound at that moment. *Crack*. A black crack split open from the very center of the talisman.

Old Liu stared intently at the extinguished relay signal, his inner lining soaked with cold sweat.

"Full power reverse! Cover our retreat to the second set of relay stations!" Old Liu roared.

Just as Li Xiang was about to cut the line, the tracked detection vehicle, weighing tens of tons, suddenly vibrated very slightly up and down.

Three kilometers away, deep within the black rift valley, a kind of darkness silently surged.

Then, a faint, dark red light flickered in the depths of the bottomless crevice.