There can't be a Harvest Moon in the RimWorld.

An endless cycle of life?!

The "Lord of Light" and the "Tawer At Umur" mentioned by Old Man Hook are clearly embroiled in a protracted, nested war...

Suddenly, after a tremendous tremor, the transparent sphere I was in was ejected from the Buddha's palm and flew into the extremely high and distant sky!

The giant Buddha, whose eyes had been lowered for a long time, suddenly emitted a burst of light from its head and uttered a single word! A "Hum" syllable, which subdues anger and dispels demonic obstacles, spun and rose into the sky, suddenly transforming into a violent burst of gamma rays that spread indiscriminately in all directions!

A powerful gamma-ray burst, lasting between 0.1 and 1000 seconds, can release energy comparable to the total energy released by the sun in its entire 10 billion-year lifespan in just one second.

Even a planet with life would be a huge disaster if struck head-on by such terrifying energy, let alone humans who are as fragile as can be.

A nuclear fusion burst, brighter than the explosions of thousands of suns, was only a hair's breadth away from me as I flew at high speed, propelling me to instantly break through the infinitely nested cycle of reincarnation and shoot towards an unpredictable place!

After the shooting light bursts brilliantly on my retina like fireworks, I can no longer perceive the image!

At this moment, a force completely opposite to destruction was enveloping my entire body; it was clearly the transparent sphere itself, namely the causal chaos effect. But at this moment, the causal chaos was like a rusty and damaged part, creaking and struggling to turn on the machine of the Heavenly Dao, unable to function normally.

I am completely blind, but I can occasionally "feel" the shimmering light flowing around me. The endless light seems to foreshadow something, and it also brings an unsettling silence to this area, as if time itself has stopped in the chaos.

Even with the powerful causal chaos effect on Black Tide Island, such an attack seemed unable to directly bridge the chasm between life and death. Only a faint white image approached, slowly appearing before my eyes...

…………

Like experiencing a sudden dream, I fell into a state of nothingness and drifting.

After flying over a world filled with destructive power, my consciousness recovered very slowly, the whole process accompanied by excruciating pain and bizarre, absurd dreams.

When I opened my eyes again, I was in a quiet river valley.

The first thing that caught my eye was a massive stone pillar. Looking up, the pillar's waist alone was already higher than the human eye could see!

After my wildest observations and bold guesses, I realized that it was merely the base of a pillar—a pillar of unimaginable magnificence! And the surface of the pillar was covered with enormous, strange characters that I could clearly touch and feel, yet whose scales and claws were completely obscured.

What a magnificent building it is that the Eiffel Tower appears both low and small, relying solely on a base supported by a single column!

In the valley I see, there are thousands of similar buildings...

I climbed a hill and observed the stone pillars in the dim sunlight. Strangely, although they were magnificent, they carried a sense of desolation and silence.

Standing here, I feel as if I have stumbled into a mythical city that once belonged to giants and is now silently abandoned. I can only rely on the melancholy that comes with the shock to imagine how the giant hands that once existed quietly carved those magnificent works of art on this land where civilization is now only sung in the wind.

Thousands of stone pillars stand throughout the valley, their surfaces carved with hieroglyphics, but without any pictorial embellishment or blank space.

This practice is less like a monument to historical achievements and more like an epitaph for commemoration. It's as if a dying civilization is racing against time to carve every memory of its past onto stone and entrust it to the finite hand of eternity.

I descended the hill and came to the other side, where thousands of pillars stood like a dark, gloomy forest. In an open space without any cover, stood an equally magnificent colossal statue.

The exquisite carving technique is so full of emotion that even after the erosion of time, its majestic body made of huge stones can still be clearly revealed.

The surrounding earth still bears some clever and fitting faded decorations, indicating that in its glorious era, these decorations made the colossus appear both complete and magnificent.

This place is like a forgotten dream. My gaze shifts again, and to the east of the valley, an eternally flowing river shimmers quietly. To the west, the vast estuary gently glows with a faint light.

After climbing onto a huge rock, I sat down facing the silent, mocking statue.

The ancient craftsmen's chisels brought the colossus's expression to life, its wisdom seemingly surpassing all humanity and memory. A sense of historical desolation washed over me, and I suddenly felt compelled to say something, to pay tribute to this vanished civilization.

"The ancient one from the forgotten land."

"I have set foot in the mad mountains in the dead of night."

"There, in the dark caves built by ancient evils covered by the dust of history, even the ultimate calamity that stretched into mountains could not subdue me."

"The ancient one from the forgotten land."

"I have traversed an endless sea of ​​death stars."

"There, the vast and complex universe stood still before the eerie vertical pupils, and even the death messenger that proclaimed the end of all things did not make me despair."

"The ancient one from the forgotten land."

"I have witnessed the profane shadows of the deep sea."

“There, a non-geometric palace, stained with aquatic plants and moss, stood imposingly, and even the scaly demons that poisoned the very essence of all things did not make me back down.”

"The ancient one from the forgotten land."

"But today, as I set foot in this ancient city that resembles a jungle, I have seen the remaining landscapes up to the very end of my true self, and I can feel the desolation of time with my fingertips."

"Civilization...civilization isn't about climbing mountains, it's about remembering the beautiful scenery you once admired even after you've descended...I should be moved to tears...Holy crap!"

As I casually recited verses to express my restless emotions, I suddenly saw two lines of unidentified tears streaming down the eye sockets of the huge stone statue in front of me. I was so frightened that I started rambling incoherently on the spot.

"...Hello? Are you there?"

The stone statue emitted an earthquake-like sound, and the Thousand Pillars Forest not far away began to sway gently from side to side, like a real forest, as if a breeze was blowing.

“I’m touched by you, stranger… I’d like to talk to you…”

The stone statue emitted a muffled buzzing sound and spoke in a language I could understand. Its body, buried in the soil, slowly rose up, making its towering figure even taller.

I have a keen eye, and I immediately noticed the rusted steel remnants exposed where it stood, its cold shape clashing with the ancient ruins.

As the colossus rose at an absurdly slow pace, I managed to make out what was buried in the ground: destroyed heavy bombers and giant self-propelled artillery pieces.

A while later, the wreckage of joint land-sea combat vehicles and next-generation attack helicopters were also exposed to the air, including even wide-area scorched earth footed combat vehicles and rolling thunder missile vehicles—making me wonder if an entire arsenal of World War II was hidden beneath its feet...

Even more remarkably, on the still-unrusted and uncorroded exterior of the machinery, I recognized traces of waterproof paint markings, and coincidentally, the handwriting on those marks was also easily recognizable.

"Ptolemaic Scientific Legion".

Chapter 653 Dig a hole and bury some soil

Covered in damp moss, the scattered stones, all enormous, became my foothold. Before this place was abandoned, the complex they formed was once magnificent and imposing.

Their builders exhausted all their strength to erect these stone pillars, hoping they would stand forever; and now, they still noblely fulfill their duty, but their builders are nowhere to be seen.

"Before you, others have come here..."

The narrator was a huge stone statue with a mocking, sarcastic face, slowly explaining to me at half speed, "But to be honest, I'm not used to their way of communicating..."

The stone statue's expression remained calm and serene. It turned to the side and parted a patch of vines on the mountainside, but did not completely leave the place where it had stood for so long.

Those were even more mobile armored vehicles, crawling all over them, with bent gun barrels, shattered armor, and the driver's compartment squeezed into a narrow space.

"...They even spoke to you?"

Is this stone golem black inside? It's killed so many people and it acts like nothing happened.

"That's right, these cute little guys vary in size, and their mouths are mostly round... They can emit light and heat, but their voices are monotonous... Look, these are the remnants left by their vocal organs..."

A giant hand covered in moss spread out in front of me, making it easy for me to see the bullet marks left by the gun—if these 40mm rounds count as ammunition, then the M79 40mm grenade launcher can certainly be considered a gun.

"The little ones' pronunciation is noisy and sharp, with a slight rhythm... I tried sixteen different languages, but I couldn't communicate with them successfully... So I tried to communicate in their own way, but they just stopped moving..."

The stone statue scratched its head. "I can still vaguely remember their appearance, because they are quite similar to those created from iron rock; now that I think about it, perhaps their language... is neither phonetic nor semantic, but a kind of frequency wave?"

I couldn't help but glance again at the empty burial pit left behind by the stone statue. It was overgrown with weeds, but shallow, muddy water flowed slowly, seemingly emerging from a hidden spring and trickling into the cracks in the ground.

...This thing is just too big; even 14.5mm caliber sniper rifle ammunition is useless against it.

Besides the wreckage of tanks and cannons, there were also many skeletons dressed in camouflage, their empty skulls staring at the sky, dark and full of confusion—they had come in tanks and cannons, yet they were wiped out by the stone golems.

"Uh... in my humble opinion, these people probably aren't here to 'communicate.' In this state, they're basically dead..."

Well, if "military exchanges" count as "exchanges," then military spies can be considered peace envoys, and I'm willing to apologize to the Ptolemaic Legion.

"Hmm... I don't understand... I buried them underground, hoping the spring water would nourish them and awaken them again, but there's never any movement..."

Well, actually, the dead are brought back to life through equivalent exchange, not by digging a hole, burying some soil, and counting one, two, three, four, five.

But the stone statue, adept at judging others by its own standards, didn't understand. It remained silent for a long time before emitting a dull, vibrating sound: "Stranger, why have you come here?"

The white bones scattered all over the ground proved that this stone statue was extremely threatening, indicating that if you dared to do something reckless here, you really would die. After a simple assessment, I knew that I should be careful with the stone statue to prevent it from being dug up and buried underground, where it would end up alongside the fertilizer that nourishes the soil.

"I don't know how I got here."

I sat down on the spot and confessed, "One second I was watching others play circus in some strange place, and the next second I was thrown here. Judging from the speed of this scene change, I seriously suspect that God decided it by rolling dice."

After listening to my cryptic explanation, the stone statue neither pressed for details about where that place was nor expressed curiosity about my purpose. Instead, it earnestly explained to me, "If this God is the will of the gods, then the gods never roll dice. Everything can be traced back to its source, which is what manifests in the outcome..."

...Is this something that carbon-based organisms would be concerned about?

Oh, sorry, the Stone Man should be considered a silicon-based life form. Perhaps its head is filled with magma instead of brain matter, which explains its hot and spicy thoughts.

Besides, even if I were to take the biases of wave-particle duality Einstein and quantum astrologer Bohr and assume that God doesn't play dice, I still couldn't guess that God likes to play marbles, and that he can bounce them incredibly far!

"Then I can't answer that."

I decided to lie down on a sunny rock to show that I was just an ordinary piece of nationally protected waste.

"Feel sorry……"

Lush vines and creeping plants climbed over the pebbles at the feet of the stone statue, forming a perfect green carpet, but it had not completely left the cave, only shifted a little to the side.

A prolonged silence.

Faced with this peculiarly conceived stone statue, I said helplessly, "Forget about that for now. By the way, where did you come from?"

The colossal stone statue murmured, the moss on its surface turning into deep wrinkles. "Hmm... I've been here since the moment I was created... never arriving, never leaving..."

I was somewhat surprised: "You're the guard here? There aren't many people who would leave a stone giant to guard the gate..."

Was your creator a one-eyed madman holding a broken tree branch?

The stone statue shook its head. "I don't know... They left after I was created. They told me someone would come looking for me and that I should stay here and guard this place..."

The shimmering bay is tranquil and natural, like a gentle arm encircling the sky. The sunlight is her skin, and the dappled shadows are her necklace, yet it faces the towering stone pillars all over the mountain. Her tenderness instantly turns into a futile, infatuated effort.

"Who are you waiting for?" I asked.

The stone statue hummed wistfully.

“I don’t know… A long time ago, the Creator left this place by ship. The Creator also told me that they would sail back through towering waves and come back to me… Then, I can end my mission…”

“But I waited a very, very long time, and only your fellow Tin Man and you came here and spoke to me…”

The stone statue remained silent for a long time, as if the question of what "existence" and "non-existence" meant was a difficult one for it.

Finally, it said, "This is everything. The Creator told me that their forgotten story is written on the pillars, and that future generations will find it. Then, everything will have meaning..."

Wow, your words are truly insightful. The last time I heard something so enlightening was... Can anyone tell me the difference between this long passage and nothing at all?

I said with even more helplessness, "You really haven't seen the Creator return here? Nor has a single ship returned?"

The stone statue pondered for a long time before slowly saying, "Yes, there was. A ship once drifted here..."