Why it never ends

Chapter 1200 Shelter
"Was he killed or—"

“No, no, she was very old,” Turan explained. “She died of illness. Her name was Isore Collier.”

Isore Collier...

Isn't that the person Victoria mentioned to her in the underground of Avad prison? Hershta even vaguely remembered that the person seemed to have mentioned that Turan should have met her.

"Are you familiar?"

Turan nodded: "Most of my projects in the Mother City are based on her research. She is a very good person, especially to young researchers like me, she is always exceptionally patient."

“Really?” This comment surprised Hershta. She rested her chin on her hand. “I heard she was particularly unfriendly towards mercury needles?”

"Who told you that?" Turan frowned, patting her chest. "I'm also a mercury needle, but Isore gave me so much help and advice... almost without reservation! That statement is extremely irresponsible and a terrible misinterpretation of her—don't say things like that again!"

Hershta and Rico both instinctively shrank back—even though Rico hadn't done anything, he looked at Turan cautiously as if he had done something wrong.

Turan's gaze fell again.

"It's a pity I didn't get to see her one last time."

……

That evening, the three returned to the palace together. The gentle night breeze rustled the roadside trees in the distance, reminding them of the reserve base far away in Tanyi.

This suddenly reminded Hersta of her conversation with Office 2 at the workstation that afternoon. She happily told her two friends that they would be moving again soon, this time to the reserve base in Emmanuela, District 12.

“Office 2 said it’s special,” Hesta said. “It seems to be the only reserve base that is directly connected to the mother city.”

Turan and Rico both let out a soft sigh, seemingly lost in thought.

The group took a few steps forward, and Turan suddenly sighed, "...Actually, now that I think about it, even if you told me that every base was connected to the mother city, I wouldn't be surprised."

Hersta suddenly looked at her.

“Think about it, the main body of the base is also underground.” Turan looked at the clouds in the distance. “Whether it’s the hospital or our training room, the more critical the place, the deeper it is underground—the sheer scale of that kind of engineering is something that humans could not have accomplished after the Great Blackout.”

“Is that so?” Rig suddenly turned around, facing her two friends as they walked backwards. She pondered Turan’s hypothesis with great interest. “I always thought that our people would decide where to set up the base first, and then figure out how to build it.”

“I’m afraid it’s the other way around,” Turan said. “The number of bases in the world is fixed. Only when a certain number of mercury needles are recruited can one or more be activated and used.”

"Doesn't that mean that, theoretically, there should still be some reserve bases that have never been used?"

"What's impossible?"

Rig was speechless for a moment. She thought for a while and said, "It seems...too wasteful, doesn't it?" "It seems that the higher-ups don't have that idea at all," Hersta added at the right time. "They repeatedly refused to let me use this reserve base...their attitude was that they were determined to leave it idle."

Turan slowed her pace, her throat bobbing slightly as if she were considering something.

“I felt this way when I was at the base,” Hester said, “that large area was particularly suitable for refuge. Once the entrance was closed, the entire underground base could be sealed off and operated for a very long time, completely unaffected by either a chelate tide or a hot war outside—”

Turan clapped his hands almost immediately: "Yes! I was just about to say that! And the internal details of the base also follow the same defensive approach. You can certainly say that the steel plates that could fall down in the corridors at any time are to prevent the chelates from escaping to the ground—but conversely, they can also resist external intrusion. That density of partitions is designed entirely along the lines of some kind of extreme urban warfare."

“Maybe this is what the bases were actually doing before they became bases?” Rico said. “All the bases are operating at minimal efficiency, with some set up for AHgAs’s reserve training—in a way, the latter also helps maintain the facilities?”

The three of them looked at each other and fell into a silent understanding. The wind blew from afar to them and then quickly swept away into the distance.

“Doesn’t this mean…” Turan narrowed his eyes, “Doesn’t this mean…”

The other two did not respond, but they were indeed thinking about the same thing at that moment—that once brilliant golden age had come to an abrupt end after the Night of the Stars, followed by two hundred years of dim civilization.

If their reserve base was built as a shelter, then it must have housed many refugees from the Golden Age—at least it must have been used during the Great Blackout.

However, to their recollection, they had never been told about any other uses of the base, nor had they found any trace of previous inhabitants there, nor had they read anything similar in any history books or news reports.

Each underground base has a similar structure and configuration. Such a complex and highly consistent project, if not interpreted as a unified plan of AHgAs, can only be attributed to one or a group of designers from the golden age who foresaw a catastrophic future and therefore prepared such disaster prevention facilities in advance.

This sudden conjecture sent a chill down their spines—

If that's the case, where did the people inside go? Did they leave the base in batches after the Great Power Outage ended? But there are no reports of that. Such a major event, a large-scale return to the surface, could not possibly go unnoticed in history.

So...they all died underground?
Where is the body? How did it die?

"Hey--"

A familiar voice came from afar, and the group looked up at the same time, seeing Lai Lin smiling and waving at them all.

"Good evening!" Hersta waved to her.

“Victoria just asked me why Jane hasn’t come back yet,” Leilin said loudly as she walked quickly toward the group. “She said you should have arrived before her.”

"She's back already?"

"We're back now, we got back around dinner time," Lai Lin said. "You came just in time, we would have been late if we had come any later!"

The group looked at each other, bewildered: "Late?"

“Tonight is the children’s talk session, you’ve forgotten? It’s Tuesday night,” Lai Lin reminded them. “Everyone has to go—didn’t Packard require it before? Because this is the first time!”