novelraw Chapter 152: The Silent Valley
Chapter 152: The Silent Valley
Early the next morning, before the daylight could pierce the thick cloud layer over the Bavarian plateau.
A specially modified Daimler steam-powered vehicle carrying the five members of the joint investigation team drove away from Munich's steel fortress.
The vehicle headed south, the city's outline quickly dissolving, replaced by dark green coniferous forests and the rising silhouette of the Alpine mountains on the horizon.
No one spoke inside the cabin, the air filled only with the roar of the engine and the vibration of wheels crushing over gravel.
This did not stem from unfamiliarity or hostility, but from a tacit understanding shared by professionals before entering a hunting ground.
Everyone was adjusting their state in their own way, preparing to face the unknown lurking beneath ice and rock.
Klaus rested with his eyes closed, his resolute face appearing cold and hard in the dawn light.
Universal Scale, Gretchen, was repeatedly adjusting the "Hertz Resonator" on her wrist, data flickering in her eyes, her world consisting only of parameters, waveforms, and theoretical models.
Julian held an ancient book recording legends of mountain spirits and earth deities in the Germanic region, trying to find clues related to the "petrification" ability.
William remained silent as ever, quietly sitting in a corner, repeatedly wiping his [Zulu's Gaze] telescope with deerskin.And Lin Jie, his gaze fixed on the snow-covered Zugspitze outside the window.
He wasn't thinking about the UMA's abilities or weaknesses, nor was he formulating specific battle plans.
All preparatory plans were largely meaningless before the truth was revealed.
What he needed to do now was simply empty his mind, adjust his perception to its most acute, and prepare to listen to the story frozen in stone that this valley was about to tell.
When the vehicle reached the end of the road at an altitude exceeding two thousand meters, they had no choice but to abandon it and proceed on foot.
A biting cold wind carrying ice crystals whipped against their faces, bringing a stinging pain.
Underfoot was thick snow, each step laborious.
This world was reduced to only three colors: black, white, and gray. Black exposed rock, white boundless snow, and the gray firmament enveloping heaven and earth.
This was the UMA's hunting ground, a vast, dead, natural morgue.
"From here on, everyone stay alert." Klaus's voice cut through the wind and snow, reaching everyone's ears. "Gretchen, activate environmental monitoring. Sergeant Keen, your eyes are our only radar."
Gretchen activated the portable environmental monitoring equipment she carried. The numbers jumping on the screen showed that the air composition, temperature, humidity, and spiritual concentration here were all normal to a disturbing degree.
And William had long since placed that bizarre [Zulu's Gaze] before his eyes.
The physical world before him disappeared, replaced by a chaotic, kaleidoscopic dimension composed of spiritual trails and emotional echoes.
The wind retained traces of fear left by ancient animal migrations, the rocks held within them the power accumulated over millennia of geological changes—a landscape of the inner world inaccessible to ordinary people.
In this turbulent sea of information, William, with his hound-like sharpness, immediately caught an incongruous "discordant noise."
"Here... something has passed." William said hoarsely, extending a hand clad in a thick glove, pointing toward a seemingly flat patch of snow ahead. "Very faint, about to dissipate. Not left by a human."
Everyone stopped.
"Can you discern its form and direction?" Klaus pressed, his hand already resting on the gun grip at his waist.
"Difficult." William shook his head, the scene before his eyes was very blurry. "The trail is strange, intermittent, like a ghost hopping sporadically across the snow. It has no fixed form. The emotional echo it leaves behind isn't malice or hunger, but a kind of 'indifference' akin to a natural geological process."
This description left everyone bewildered.
A UMA with no fixed form and indifference? This differed from the predatory creature they had anticipated.
"But its direction is clear." William finally gave a definitive conclusion. "It shares our target, both heading toward the last known coordinates of the 'Glacier Eye' team."
With a direction, the team no longer hesitated.
Guided by William, this "human-shaped radar," they avoided some dangerous areas concealing hidden crevasses, trekking with efficiency far surpassing that of an ordinary mountaineering team toward that cursed landslide zone.
An hour later, they reached their destination.
It was a shocking sight.
A massive fractured cliff face resembled a wound, exposing a fresh, savage cross-section of rock.
Countless tons of rubble and ice piled at the valley's base, forming a vast hill of death.
Everything here was shrouded in deathly silence;
even the wind seemed to skirt around this area.
"This is where Heinrich and the others sent their last signal." Klaus's voice was low. He looked at the massive graveyard before him, his eyes unable to conceal his grief.
Gretchen immediately got to work.
She deployed all her detection equipment, including the "Hertz Resonator" upon which Lin Jie had placed high hopes.
Yet the result aligned with her earlier prediction.
All screens displayed nothing but flat, straight lines.
No life signals, no energy residue, no spiritual fluctuations.
This place was clean, as if life had never existed here.
"Impossible... still the same..." Gretchen muttered to herself, unable to accept her invention performing so "uselessly" at a critical moment.
She repeatedly checked the instrument's wiring and parameters, but the result remained unchanged.
Klaus's expression turned grim.
The reality of the survey results was negating Lin Jie's earth-shattering hypothesis.
If there were no life signals here, it meant his two subordinates were either already buried under dozens of meters of rock strata, or had been taken away from here by the UMA.
Either possibility was more plausible, and more despairing, than Lin Jie's "petrification" hypothesis.
Just as team morale dipped due to this cold reality, Lin Jie slowly stepped out from the group.
Ignoring the rubble underfoot that could collapse again at any moment, he walked step by step toward the center of the rock pile.
His movements were steady and firm, not like walking toward a place of death, but like keeping an appointment.
"Lin Jie! Danger!" William was the first to warn.
"Mr. Lin! Your hypothesis... the instrument hasn't..." Gretchen also cried out urgently.
But Lin Jie did not stop.
He knew why the instrument had failed.
Because the theoretical basis of the Hertz Resonator was detecting the neural signals of carbon-based life.
And if his hypothesis was correct, the victims here were fundamentally no longer carbon-based life.
They were "silicon-based minerals," part of geology.
You couldn't expect a life detector to read a heartbeat from a piece of granite.
There was only one way to prove this.
To use his own soul to directly touch their "souls."
Lin Jie finally stopped before a peculiarly shaped rock.
This rock was roughly the height of a person, its twisted form resembling a person screaming at the sky but instantly frozen.
Its surface was covered in rough granules, seemingly no different in material from all the surrounding rocks.
But Lin Jie sensed a faint, imprisoned "consciousness" from it.
He removed his glove, revealing the hand that had touched countless secrets.
"Don't..." Julian began to speak out to stop him, worried the rock might retain unknown curses or toxins.
But it was too late.
Lin Jie's hand had decisively pressed against that humanoid-shaped rock.
[Reverberation Touch].
In that moment, the world disappeared from Lin Jie's perception.
No sound, no light, no temperature.
Only darkness and cold like the vacuum of space.
His consciousness was dragged out of his own body by an irresistible force, then stuffed into a narrow, hard, immovable "container."
Immediately after, endless despair and fear belonging to another soul flooded his consciousness like a tidal wave.
He saw.
He saw everything a man named Heinrich experienced in his final moments.
He saw the cliff face above drip down silently like melting wax, saw his companion Bernd right before his eyes, the terror on his face not yet fully formed before he, along with his flesh and blood body, solidified into a piece of grayish, lifeless rock.
He felt his own body, starting from his feet, being "rewritten" by an incomprehensible force.
Skin, muscle, bone, internal organs—all the organic matter constituting his life was transforming into cold silicate minerals at an astonishing speed.
He wanted to scream, but his vocal cords turned into hard stone after vibrating for less than a hundredth of a second.
He wanted to run, but his legs had already merged with the earth beneath his feet.
He wanted to close his eyes, to refuse witnessing this horrific transformation happening to himself, but his eyelids were also forever frozen at that desperate angle gazing at the sky.
His consciousness was preserved completely intact, then imprisoned within this eternal "stone prison" constructed from his own body.
He could feel the wind, feel the snow, feel the passage of time.
But he could never move, never speak, never die.
He could only remain as a "living stone," forever imprisoned here, watching the world until the seas ran dry and the rocks crumbled.
This was a torment more terrifying than death.
"Ahhh——!!"
A piercing scream erupted from Lin Jie's own throat.
He yanked his hand back, his body collapsing backward, landing heavily in the snow.
His body trembled, his face pale as paper, gasping for breath like a fish thrown ashore.
"Lin Jie!"
"Mr. Lin!"
William and Klaus rushed forward, lifting him from the snow, one on each side.
"Water... give me water..." Lin Jie's voice was hoarse.
Julian immediately poured some strong brandy from his canteen and brought it to his lips.
The spicy liquid slid down his throat, the burning sting finally pulling Lin Jie's shattered consciousness back to reality from that "stone prison."
Leaning against William's sturdy arm, it took a long time for his violent trembling to gradually subside.
Klaus's eyes were full of urgency and concern. He stared intently at Lin Jie, asking in a pleading tone, "What did you see? Tell me, what exactly did you see?!"
Lin Jie slowly raised his head. His black eyes, still holding traces of fear, swept over everyone present, finally landing on the surrounding pile of bizarrely shaped rubble.
He raised his still-trembling hand and pointed at those silent rocks.
His lips moved a few times before he forced the confirmed truth from the depths of his throat.
"All of them are here..."
"They are watching us."
The moment his words fell.
A faint sound of tumbling gravel abruptly came from the fog-shrouded ridge above their heads.
*Rustle... rustle rustle...*