novelraw Chapter 260: The Airless Land
Chapter 260: The Airless Land
Lin Jie ultimately did not reply to Julian's telegram.
This was not an easy decision.
Lin Jie could imagine how Julian, alone in the chaotic city of Saigon, was maneuvering among various factions.
That piece of "thousand-year-old Tai Sui" capable of healing William was like a treasure at the eye of the storm, attracting countless schools of greedy sharks.
Every choice could mean life or death, and he, as the tactical core of the team, was currently thousands of miles away.
But his silence was his answer.
Ethan understood this silence.
He patted Lin Jie's shoulder without saying a word, but the trust and support in his eyes said it all.
Hawk had no interest in this whatsoever. What happened in the East was none of his concern. He only cared about the scientific cage before him that he was about to split open with his battle axe.
As for Phineas, the young technical expert, he wisely remained silent, knowing this involved far more than just the mission itself.Some responsibilities must be shared. Some battlefields must be divided.
Under the Sword of Damocles that was the Aether Tower, a weapon capable of overturning all rules, any hesitation would be a betrayal of the future.
They rode in that unmarked black carriage, leaving the New York city limits in the thin fog before dawn.
As the carriage gradually moved away from that steel jungle, the city's clamor was left behind. Before them stretched the vast yet monotonous pastoral scenery of the Long Island suburbs.
However, this tranquility did not last long.
After the carriage entered an area dominated by farms and woodlands, a strange sensation began to invade everyone's senses.
It was an extremely subtle, yet omnipresent "humming" sound.
It was unlike any sound Lin Jie had ever heard. It was neither the roar of machinery nor the sound of natural wind.
It was more like a frequency, a low-frequency resonance that acted directly on bones and nerves.
It seemed to emanate from deep within the earth, yet also permeated every particle of dust in the air.
At first, it was faint, masked by the sound of rolling wheels. But as they ventured deeper, this humming became increasingly noticeable, increasingly irritating.
"Do you feel that?" Ethan was the first to speak, unconsciously rubbing his temples. "There's a... very uncomfortable feeling."
"Hmm." Hawk's reply was just one syllable. The fine hairs on his bronze skin were standing slightly on end due to this strange vibration.
He behaved like a beast that had strayed into a trap, instinctively sensing the "impurity" of this land.
"This is a continuous, extremely low-frequency resonance," Phineas said, pulling out a notebook and quickly jotting something down. "Its vibration is already below the audible threshold of the human ear, but its power output is abnormally constant."
"My eardrums feel a slight pressure. This isn't normal. It completely defies the laws of nature."
Lin Jie didn't speak. He closed his eyes, carefully feeling this invisible wave.
The wave formed an invisible ocean composed of countless tiny steel needles, continuously washing over his spirit.
This feeling was very uncomfortable for him. His brain felt like it was being repeatedly ground by a coarse file.
The carriage finally stopped at a fork in the road about five miles from the core area of Wardenclyffe.
For the remainder of the journey, they had to proceed on foot to avoid leaving overly obvious traces with the carriage.
The four of them got out. That oppressive humming sound became even more pronounced in the silent wilderness.
The air itself seemed to have become viscous because of it. Every breath carried a texture akin to metal grinding.
The surrounding fields appeared tranquil, but birds were nowhere to be seen. Even the chirping of insects had vanished.
This land seemed to have had all its vitality sucked out, leaving behind only a deathly silence and that annoying hum.
Their cover identities for this trip were electrical engineers, responsible for preliminary surveying for a new Long Island telegraph line.
Phineas skillfully produced a set of rather professional-looking measuring instruments and began conducting a convincing survey by the roadside. Hawk was disguised as his locally hired guide and bodyguard.
Lin Jie and Ethan were responsible for keeping watch and observing the surroundings.
"The 'Qi' here is wrong," Hawk suddenly spoke, his tone certain.
He had keenly detected a deeper anomaly. "It feels... drained."
Lin Jie's gaze immediately turned to him.
The "Qi" Hawk spoke of was a method of perception passed down through generations of Native American hunters.
It was a collective term for the life force, emotional currents, and natural rhythms within an environment.
In other places, even on ordinary streets, the air was always filled with a "background radiation" woven from various human emotions, historical memories, and even faint natural spirituality.
It was an ecosystem upon which UMAs and Alchemy depended for survival.
But here, all of that had vanished.
"The air is as clean as a blank sheet of paper, and as dead as one too."
Hawk frowned. He had never felt such an "empty" environment before.
There was no breath of birds or beasts, no whisper of grass or trees. Even the pulse of the land itself had ceased.
This land was dead.
To verify Hawk's conjecture, Lin Jie walked to the roadside. There was an abandoned horseshoe lying in a ditch, covered in dark red rust. It had clearly been lying there quietly for many years.
For [Reverberation Touch], this was a good historical medium.
He took a deep breath, put on a thin leather glove, then crouched down and placed his hand on the horseshoe.
In the past, when Lin Jie did this, countless memory fragments would flood into his mind like a tide.
He would see the blacksmith who forged it, feel the jolts of the horse wearing it as it ran, hear the crisp sound it made striking the cobblestones.
This time, there was nothing.
The moment his mental energy probed into the horseshoe along his fingertip, a surge of noise carrying chaotic signals slammed back.
That omnipresent humming sound was amplified thousands of times on a spiritual level, becoming a barrier composed of purely meaningless information.
It was like a powerful jammer, covering, shielding, and crushing all the dormant historical memories within the horseshoe.
Lin Jie felt like he had crashed into a wall made of television static. Not only did he fail to read any information, but the backlash caused a sharp, stabbing pain.
He quickly withdrew his hand, his face turning somewhat pale.
"What's wrong?" Ethan noticed his abnormality.
"My ability... is being suppressed," Lin Jie said gravely. "The environment here is a vast 'Spiritual Silence' field. All information is being blocked."
This was the first time since his transmigration that he had encountered such a complete failure in his core ability.
For the first time, he so tangibly understood what Morgan meant by that scientific dimensional reduction strike against the mystical.
"This also confirms my guess," Phineas said as he walked over, his expression equally serious.
He was holding a brass instrument similar to a Geiger counter. The needle hung limply at the zero point on the dial, motionless.
"I call this an 'Aether Spectrum Analyzer'," he said, pointing at the device in his hand. "It measures the intensity of background spiritual radiation in an area. In downtown New York, its reading is usually between fifteen and twenty. In London's Underground City, I suspect that number might break a hundred. But here..."
He handed the instrument to Lin Jie.
"The reading is zero. Absolute zero. The spiritual field here is an absolute vacuum, clean to the point of being eerie. This indicates that an energy source of unimaginable power is continuously emitting a singular, domineering frequency, forcibly eliminating all other spiritual fluctuations of any nature within this area."
Phineas's scientific data provided strong corroboration for Lin Jie's subjective experience.
They were standing on the enemy's home ground, a death zone thoroughly purified by science, extremely hostile to all mystical powers.
"This time, we've really become dwarves who have wandered into a giant's realm," Ethan said with a self-deprecating smile, but his grip on his gun handle tightened.
Hawk remained silent, vigilantly scanning the distant horizon.
Inexplicable frequencies and data held no meaning for him.
But he could feel that deep within that land, a dangerous beast slumbered.
The four continued their journey in silence.
They didn't take the main road. They cut through a dense pine forest, heading towards an abandoned farm marked on the map Morgan provided.
That location was on higher ground, a suitable temporary observation point for miles around.
The farm had long been abandoned. The wooden barn was on the verge of collapse from erosion by wind and rain. The windows of the house were shattered, leaving only dark, gaping holes.
They carefully navigated around the rotten floorboards and climbed to the hayloft on the barn's second floor.
The view here was open, offering a panoramic view of the plains to the south.
Phineas skillfully retrieved a German-made high-power military telescope from a case and set it up on a sturdy wooden beam.
He carefully adjusted the focus, the lens slowly moving across the distant horizon.
"Found it," he said, his voice excited.
Lin Jie, Ethan, and Hawk immediately gathered around, taking turns looking through the eyepiece into the distance.
On the horizon several miles away, a colossal construct that defied any known architectural style stood between heaven and earth.
Its main body was a massive tower nearly two hundred feet tall, woven from countless steel trusses and support structures.
The tower's structure was incredibly complex, embodying the cold, symmetrical beauty of the industrial age.
Thick copper wires coiled around the tower's body like giant pythons, stretching from the base all the way to the top.
And atop that soaring pinnacle was a hemispherical dome, seventy feet in diameter, shaped like a mushroom cap.
The dome's surface was completely covered in smooth copper sheets, reflecting a blinding glare under the midday sun.
It resembled a deformed steel mushroom that had grown from the depths of hell, arrogantly presiding over this peaceful land with an overbearing posture.
Despite the great distance, Lin Jie could still feel the heart-palpitating pressure emanating from that tower.
He saw the air around the massive copper dome at the tower's top shimmering slightly with heat-haze-like distortion.
Countless invisible energy waves were continuously radiating from there, forming a giant force field enveloping the entire Wardenclyffe area.
That was precisely the source causing the "Spiritual Silence."
That tower was the ultimate weapon of the Brotherhood of Light, a war machine capable of overturning the rules of the entire inner world.
—The Aether Tower.
A storm of shock surged in everyone's heart.
Witnessing this legendary "scientific miracle" firsthand delivered a far more powerful visual and mental impact than any written report.
It was not merely a building. It was the materialization of a will.
Looking at the silent giant tower in the distance, Lin Jie knew with absolute certainty that he had made the right choice.
Some threats must be strangled in the cradle.
At any cost.