Ten thousand I am across the heavens

Chapter 1873 Supernova Era?

The nuclear reactor was originally surrounded by heavy defenses, but the heavy defenses of the cold weapon era were of limited use to real masters. Lan Nuo could easily pass through the blockade even without the use of high-tech equipment such as night vision goggles.

After entering the gate, he suddenly felt the temperature gradually rising, and at the same time there was a stuffy feeling. Even through the gas mask, he could feel how bad the environment here was.

Lan Nuo chose an internal circulation gas mask, so that he would basically have no material exchange with the outside world. Sodium peroxide is a very good source of oxygen. The tank on Lan Nuo's back is filled with this substance, which can absorb the carbon dioxide exhaled by it and generate oxygen.

In this way, even if there is a lot of radioactive dust in this harsh environment, it will not cause fatal harm to him. There is no way, he is just an ordinary person now. If he is directly exposed to the radiation environment, no matter how strong his survival experience and fighting instincts are. No matter how many layers of his gene lock are unlocked, he still cannot avoid the end of gene collapse.

Fortunately, the internal passages of the reactor were well preserved. Lan Nuo only needed to activate the manual valves of various gates according to the rules to open the passages. At least there was no need to clean up the ruins.

The hot and humid environment inside the reactor gave him a bad feeling. This harsh environment was probably caused by a cooling water leak, and such a strong radiation environment proved that it was not just the cooling water that leaked. Fortunately, the reactor seemed to have a safety measure so that the contaminated nuclear wastewater did not flow to the outside world. If this wastewater entered the water cycle outside, the people outside would probably be extinct.

In order to save exploration time, Lan Nuo directly started the rehearsal, exploring the nuclear reactor from different routes to understand the working principle of the nuclear reactor.

After walking around the reactor, Lan Nuo roughly understood the working principle of the reactor. This is a relatively primitive nuclear fusion power generation facility. It can be seen that the civilization was reluctant to move this thing on the spacecraft. The power generation facility is divided into two parts. One part is a huge magnetic confinement ring, and the other is an ordinary fission reactor to provide energy for the magnetic confinement ring.

This design sounds a bit like taking off your pants to fart. Nuclear fusion reactions themselves can generate huge amounts of energy. Extracting a little bit of this energy can provide energy for the magnetic confinement device. In theory, there is no need to waste resources to build a nuclear reactor.

But the actual situation is not like this. Major accidents are not allowed to occur during long space voyages. Even a short-term interruption in energy supply may bring catastrophic consequences. If there is only a nuclear fusion reactor, once it stops for some reason, restarting the reactor is bound to be a very difficult task. Even if technology has developed to their level, it is still very difficult to rely on devices such as batteries for energy storage. If you want to restart the magnetic confinement ring, you will inevitably need a lot of energy. Often, you need the help of other spacecraft, and the time difference in between is enough to cause a large number of casualties.

For this reason, they designed the spacecraft like this. Ordinary fission and reactors provide energy to maintain the existence of the magnetic confinement ring to ensure that no matter what kind of accident occurs, the magnetic confinement ring can always exist and can be re-ignited at any time. This is also the reason why the power outage in the spacecraft is often very short. Just after the power outage due to an accident, the reactor will restart under the action of the program, and it may only take a few hours or even minutes for the power supply to be restored.

According to the current investigation, the problem should be with the fission reactor, which is good news in some ways. After all, the technology required to repair a fission reactor is much lower than that required to repair a fusion reactor. The bad news is that a leak in a fission reactor often causes serious radiation, which is extremely harmful to the health of the repair personnel.

Lan Nuo had found several major safety hazards during the survey, and found equipment that had serious faults. These included a leaking fuel rod and a partially damaged cooling tower. These things were not something he could repair by himself, and he did not know whether there were other hidden dangers in the reactor. The only thing to be thankful for was that most of the faults could be repaired using existing equipment. After repairing these faults, the spacecraft could survive in the starry sky for a long time.

"In addition to the conventional power generation facilities, there seems to be another facility below the reactor that is not used for power generation. It feels like a shelter or something. However, there are multiple gates blocking it. Previously, it was a waste of time to open multiple gates during the exploration, so I didn't take a closer look. This time I have to go down and take a closer look. Maybe I can find information left by people from the previous era and figure out what happened."

When Lan Nuo explored before, he chose relatively easy paths to pass through. Opening a series of gates in succession would waste a lot of rehearsal time, so Lan Nuo only took a cursory look at the series of gates.

There are so many gates for isolation. Obviously, there are great risks in this area. Lan Nuo started the rehearsal at the last gate. Although no danger was found after opening it, the danger inside may be invisible. For example, poison gas, virus, curse, ghost, or even the subspace opposite when the door is opened.

He was very careful about this door, and pushed it open to go in. Lan Nuo couldn't help but frown, and what came into view were abandoned culture chambers, which he was very familiar with, and were basically used for treatment or genetic modification, and sometimes for hibernation.

After disassembling and analyzing several of them, Lan Nuo roughly judged that the functions of these things were more like hibernation chambers. Although they had medical and transformation functions, they were relatively weak.

There are a lot of these hibernation chambers, and they are densely packed, just like the remaining insect eggs after breaking out of their cocoons. Looking at them makes one's scalp tingle, and one feels like they are suffering from claustrophobia.

Lan Nuo felt creepy about the environment here, but he still moved forward slowly and explored further inside.

Continuing forward, he encountered a blocked gate, and it was a very heavy gate. After groping for a long time, he finally found the mechanism to manually open the door. The heavy gate could only be opened slowly by his own strength. The half-meter thick metal gate slowly rose. If it were not for the labor-saving pulley and lever, Lan Nuo would never have been able to open the gate with his strength.

As the gate opened, Lan Nuo saw an even more horrifying scene. In this room, there were mummies lying one after another, neatly arranged in grids that seemed to stop time. There were so many of them that it was impossible to see the end. There were probably tens of thousands of corpses in this room. Just seeing the scene in front of him was enough to scare people with weak minds to madness.

"Hiss... How many people died? The ancient civilization probably emerged because of this mass extinction?" Although he had such a guess in his mind, he needed evidence to verify this guess. After all, it is possible that the ancients had different funeral customs and liked to display the corpses like this. There are also people on Earth who like to dig out the internal organs of corpses and make them into mummies. More abstractly, there are even people who stuff their own corpses into Buddha statues to make them into Buddha statues. There are cultural differences. This is the case on a planet, let alone in the universe. Lan Nuo has a strong acceptance of these weird scenes. He chose a very well-preserved corpse. He pulled her out of the cabinet. He began the autopsy with the knife he carried with him.

According to observations, the vast majority of the corpses had no external injuries, and judging by the bones, skin and other conditions of the corpses, most of them were not particularly old when they turned into mummies. To be more precise, there were old and young among these corpses, which basically conformed to the age distribution in a normal society, but this age distribution among the corpses was not normal.

Normal deaths are usually relatively old, and only a few accidental deaths are young people. This discovery also basically denies the previous speculation about special funeral customs.

The blade cut through the shrunken skin. Lan Nuo began to check the internal organs of the corpse one by one. The environment inside this isolation room was cold and dry, and the internal organs of the corpse were not decomposed at a very low level, and they dehydrated quickly in a short period of time. Therefore, they were relatively well preserved. Judging from the preservation of the internal organs, it did not seem that there was any serious disease. Of course, it was also possible that Lan Nuo did not have a detailed understanding of the physiological state of this race.

As the autopsy continued, Lan Nuo soon found the most likely cause of death. An extremely unnatural crack appeared in the skull of the corpse, and crystallization appeared in the crack. The abnormal growth of the crystals had invaded the skull. The cause of death was probably caused by the abnormal growth of these crystals. Even if the growth of the crystals was prevented by technical means, the cracked skull could still cause fatal damage.

Lan Nuo also dissected the heads of several corpses and found that they all had similar injuries to varying degrees. After summarizing the injuries based on the age of the corpses, it was obvious that the older the corpse was at the time of death, the more cracks there were in the skull and the more serious the crystallization in the brain.

Elderly people over the age of 60 generally have a complete crystallization of their brains, which means that the cause of the mass death of these people is likely a common disease among them, perhaps an epidemic, perhaps some infectious disease, or some special curse that is not a disease.

"If the older the age, the more serious the disease, then we can also infer that the younger the age, the milder the disease. The youngest of these corpses may be only 16 or 17 years old, and the degree of their brain lesions is indeed low, and the cracks on the skull are even barely detectable.

If that's the case... the civilization gap seems understandable. And I seem to have seen a similar situation in a book. "Lan Nuo tried hard to search the memories in his mind. The brain of a carbon-based creature made it difficult for him to sort out the memories that existed in his soul. After recalling some things, he had to forget the other parts.

After a moment, he remembered a work with a very similar plot. This work was called "Supernova Era" in that world. The background of the story takes place on Earth at the end of the 20th century. At that time, all adults on Earth were trapped in a death countdown, but underage children were not affected. After the efforts of the whole world, it was finally discovered that even if all means were exhausted, the adults who were already sick still had no possibility of being saved.

Eventually, adults have to give up hope of continuing to live and find ways to pass on hope to the next generation, that is, children who are not affected by the disease.

However, the oldest of these children are only in their teens. Even if they are selected, forcefully indoctrinated with a large amount of knowledge, and appointed as future rulers, it is still difficult for them to maintain the functioning of society.

Before they died, the adults left a lot of wealth to their children, produced a huge amount of food tools, and left behind a large number of complete factories, for fear that their children would not be able to survive in the future.

At first, these children barely managed to keep the society going, but the repetitive work day after day was not something they had the patience to complete, and soon they found that the adults had left them a lot of food and candies that they could not finish. And now there was no one to control them.

So they opened the warehouse and consumed the accumulation recklessly. They ate whatever they wanted and played whatever they wanted. When they were tired or bored, they would sleep. They ate and slept anytime and anywhere. However, no matter how much supplies they had, they would eventually run out.

For that planet, after the massive consumption of materials, people have the possibility to unite again, and there is a large enough industrial base to feed these children and maintain the survival of civilization.

But for this spaceship, all this is not feasible, because this spaceship is too small. Unlike an entire planet, which has a huge margin of error, if you want the society composed of children to develop again, you must ensure zero mistakes and ensure that every step will not go wrong.

Lan Nuo realized something when he thought of this: "If the civilization in this ecological drum wants to develop normally after losing the adults, there must be a key person, that is, a guide. He must exist, whether he is an adult or an artificial intelligence. The people on this spaceship may have ushered in an unprecedented civilization regression because of the lack of such a guide."

[To be continued]

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