The plunder of the heavens begins with the Spirit Cage.

The remote-controlled heavy machine gun on the roof of the vehicle rotated and swept across the dense alien forest belt around it, first driving warning posts into the four corners of the square.

Following closely behind, armored personnel carriers, geological exploration engineering vehicles, tracked self-propelled anti-aircraft guns, modular logistics support vehicles, and other vehicles drove into the passage in turn.

It took about half an hour for thousands of soldiers and equipment to set up a six-kilometer-wide cordon around the square.

Hundreds of drones took off and spread out into the depths of the forest along the ruined streets buried by vegetation. Thermal imaging sensors transmitted the signals of living things in the entire area back to the command vehicle in real time, and no movement could escape the monitoring.

Lu Qianwei followed the research team led by Cole through the portal.

As soon as I stepped onto the dry, hard granite plaza, an alien wind carrying the scent of crystal dust and humus rushed towards me.

The research team looked around in surprise, waiting for the soldiers to clear the rubble again.

They used robots to begin checking and recording information one by one along the streets.

Samples were taken from the crystalline bone structure fragments that had fallen to the side of the road.

The blurry pictographic relief on the wall was captured by a high-definition camera from all angles in 360 degrees.

The tool fragments and utensil pieces scattered in the grass were all sorted, packed, and labeled...

We walked and stopped along the way, and it took us half an afternoon to reach the half-collapsed main building at the end of the square.

Analysis of the model reconstructed from the graphic architecture shows that this is the tallest central building in the entire city.

However, the upper part has now completely collapsed and even been broken into pieces by the towering trees, leaving only the lower core area buried in the mountain intact.

Two half-broken giant statues stand on either side of the entrance. Their bodies are slender and their proportions are much larger than human skulls. Their arms are also one-third longer than normal people's, and their skin is engraved with regular crystalline patterns.

It is unclear whether this is the image of a certain civilization or a similar stone lion.

After a few professors offered various opinions and made guesses, they quickly lost interest and walked into the main building through the sloping passageway.

To everyone's surprise, the dome of the entire underground hall was exceptionally well preserved.

The pale blue crystalline wall naturally absorbs the light that seeps in from the outside, emitting a soft, cool light that perfectly illuminates the entire main wall facing the entrance.

It was a single crystal plate, a full twenty meters high, with the upper half densely covered with strange, twisted characters, and the lower half a continuous hieroglyphic pattern from top to bottom.

"The logic behind the writing system is completely detached from all known civilization systems. It needs to be fully scanned and brought back to headquarters to be slowly deciphered. It will take at least several months to decipher it."

Cole pushed up his black-rimmed glasses, placed the carbon isotope analyzer on the cool crystal surface, and a few seconds later the calculation results appeared: "The engraving time is about 31,000 years ago, which matches the time when the city was abandoned exactly as we calculated before."

Everyone's attention quickly focused on the lower half of the linked patterns. Without any textual interference, the meaning of the pictographs was so straightforward as to be almost alarming:

The topmost image depicts countless slender little people working among clusters of crystalline bone buildings. In the sky are two suns representing the planet, surrounded by symbols representing crops and livestock, clearly depicting a peaceful and stable life scene in this civilization.

In the second picture, a black crack appeared in the originally clear sky, and a group of strange little people marked with sharp flames rushed out of the crack. Wherever they passed, the original crystal bone buildings were marked with crosses representing shattering, and large numbers of their own little people fell to the ground.

In the third scene, the surviving members of their tribe retreated into the last city deep in the mountains, concentrating all their remaining strength on the main building.

A circle, only half-drawn, was painted on the wall, with arrows pointing outwards drawn around its outer edge. A large group of thin, elongated figures were lined up and walking towards the circle...

Everyone can see at a glance that this is the wormhole connecting to Earth.

The fact that the last painting can be completed also confirms this.

Before the circle representing the escape wormhole was even completed, the invasion of another civilization had already arrived.

Cole nodded repeatedly. "So the crack we found on Earth was caused by a lack of management... an accident!"

Chapter 244 The Mist 4

It is indeed a tragic thing that civilization perished before it could complete its escape.

But thankfully, they have all turned to ashes; otherwise, it would be uncertain whether humanity would have even existed on Earth.

Cole pushed up his glasses, which had slipped down to the tip of his nose, and pointed to the half-finished circle on the crystal plate with his fingertip, continuing to analyze the logic from before.

"In that case, it's not hard to guess why the crack appeared."

The original civilization perished, but the escape wormhole project is still in operation.

There may have been some kind of error, or it could be an energy issue, that caused this semi-activated device to only activate recently.

"So...where is that device?"

“It’s hard to say!” Cole shook his head. “The hostile civilization is aiming for annihilation.”

After the raid, they didn't even take the wormhole equipment, which means there are only two possibilities.

One type was too well-hidden for them to detect, the other they disdained to take, and they even carried out the extermination prematurely because they detected energy fluctuations.

"Now, 3 years later, it will be even more difficult for us to search in such a pristine environment."

“But leaving it running isn’t a solution either; we still need to find a way to turn it off or destroy it!” Lu Qianwei said leisurely.

The fog wasn't just appearing in North America; it was detected through global satellite data collection.

This anomaly had already spread throughout the world.

Twenty-seven space rifts have opened globally.

Here, the white mist serves as the vessel for wormholes, and on Earth, it becomes a hunting ground where monsters hide.

On the continental shelf off the coast of Iceland in Northern Europe, a rift two kilometers wide has torn open from the seabed.

The gray fog drifted with the ocean currents across most of the Scandinavian Peninsula, and Oslo, Norway's third-largest city, was completely shrouded in fog in less than two days.

Nowadays, satellites can only capture a gray-white expanse, with the once towering skyscrapers reduced to blurry outlines of their spires, and enormous shadows looming over them.

Although you can occasionally catch a glimpse of a tank-sized beetle slowly crawling across the city center square, it basically only goes in and doesn't come out.

Clearly, millions of people in the entire city have lost contact.

In another part of the Alps, glaciers in the heart of the mountains collapsed due to energy impact.

Hidden beneath a kilometer-thick ice core, several ice beetles, each larger than a main battle tank, broke through the ice and burst forth.

The well-known resort town at the foot of the mountain was reduced to rubble in half an hour. The two mechanized infantrymen sent by the small country as reinforcements could not hold out for three hours. The last message they received before communication was cut off was...

The fog has now spread to the outskirts of Munich, and people are being evacuated overnight throughout southern Europe.

Three days ago, fog began to drift outwards from the ancient, uninhabited primeval forest area in northern Fujian, East Asia.

The fog has now spread for hundreds of kilometers, approaching the prefecture-level city with a population of over one million at the foot of the mountain. The advance reconnaissance team sent by the garrison troops was wiped out after entering the fog. In the last footage sent back, tentacles thicker than telephone poles wrapped around armored vehicles and tore them into pieces as easily as tearing waste paper.

On the edge of the Congo Basin in Africa, a fissure is hidden deep in the rainforest. Fog spreads down the Congo River valley and has already swallowed up three border towns on both banks.

Swarms of strange beasts moved along the highway toward densely populated areas. The defenses built by the local government forces collapsed completely in less than a day. The highway was crowded with fleeing people, and vehicles and corpses that had been gnawed to the bone were everywhere on the roadside. The survivors could only run frantically to the south with their heads in their hands.

The upper reaches of the Amazon rainforest in South America, the glacial valleys of New Zealand's South Island, the permafrost zone of Siberia... red dots fill the entire world map.

The fog zone around each fissure is steadily expanding at a speed of three to five kilometers per hour.

Before they entered this world, eleven towns with populations exceeding half a million had completely lost contact.

Lu Qianwei and the others could actually ignore this mess, but they still needed the wormhole technology.

The multi-faceted alliance now has its own wormhole technology, but there are countless ways to teleport using wormholes alone.

The technology used by the extinction civilization—spreading energy through 'mist' to spatially transfer life forms from different parts of the planet to Earth—is something they don't possess.

Let's look for any clues first.

Even without Lu Qianwei's prompting, the researchers had already deployed their own small robotic assistants to conduct a dispersed search, even using them to sweep up pebbles from cracks in the walls.

It wasn't until someone came to the entrance and touched the two ancient statues that a discovery was made.

After professional scanning with several devices, it was found that the crystalline textures on the surface of the statue, which were originally considered natural decorations, were not randomly carved at all.

Instead, it is a neatly arranged encrypted code. Inside the hollow skull cavity of the statue on the left, there is also a fist-sized, perfectly sealed memory crystal core.

Thanks to the inherent stability of the alien crystal, the data within the crystal core has been completely preserved even after 30,000 years.

Cole carefully removed the crystal core and connected it to the decoding device. Soon, a string of numbers with coordinate markings appeared on the screen.

But everyone frowned.

If we send them a location and let them search for it, we might be able to dig it up.

But even if they were given coordinates, specifically a location 3 years in the future, and they weren't familiar with the planet, finding it wouldn't be an easy task.

Moreover, it's not certain whether it's a wormhole device.

"How do we find the coordinates mapped by the original civilization's celestial bodies?"

"Well, what else can we do but map out this planet first?"

"That's all we can do."

The professors offered various opinions, and then all looked at Lu Qianwei in unison.

Lu Qianwei took out several space bracelets, each containing a spaceship that was over 120 meters long.

The old professor and his professional team went up there, but it's impossible for them to complete the planetary mapping in a short time.

With nothing to do, Lu Qianwei began to wander aimlessly through the city. After looking at these ancient sites for a while, he lost interest.

"Tsk, let's go, let's go kill some monsters in the forest for fun!"

Lu Qianwei waved, and ten power armored vehicles immediately followed. The team walked along the slope at the edge of the ruins toward the misty primeval forest.

The deeper they went into the forest, the thicker the pale gray alien fog became, reducing visibility to less than fifty meters even with their specially designed tactical optical equipment.

Turning on thermal imaging didn't prevent them from seeing the shadows of living creatures moving in the woods.

As soon as Lu Qianwei led his team through a forest of fallen trees covered with parasitic vines, the mist-patterned forest python, hidden in the canopy of a 20-meter-tall giant tree, made its move.

This thing is over thirty meters long, and the color of its scales blends almost perfectly with the mist.

It spat out its venomous tongue and bit down hard on the armor at the rear of the column, its bite force capable of penetrating half a meter of granite.

Before they even touched the armor, Lu Qianwei, who was at the head of the group, suddenly swayed and the Tang sword on his wrist flashed cold light, cleaving the python's head in two at its seven-inch mark.

The fluorescent, poisonous blood splattered into the mist, and the pungent, fishy smell instantly spread, attracting many covetous eyes in the shadows.

The group continued walking forward, but less than two kilometers later, a buzzing sound of wings suddenly came from mid-air.

A massive swarm of fist-sized, poisonous horned flies burst out of the mist, their needle-like proboscis clanging as they pierced the energy shields activated by the group.

It's unclear who threw the first high-explosive incendiary grenade, but it instantly wiped out the monsters within a radius of several hundred meters!

"These guys seem even more eager to die than the creatures on Planet Gina," Lu Qianwei muttered to himself.

The mist monsters here are definitely much weaker than those on Planet Gina.