Han Sen picked up his tools and left the swimming pool. He didn't mind working, but he could take a walk around the fortress. Perhaps he'd find something else. He was curious about the place.
Exquisite and Li Keer seemed to know what Han Sen was thinking. They looked at each other, picked up their tools, and left.
But before they left, the small Crocodile God stopped them. The small Crocodile God pointed at the trash on the beach. It was telling them to clean up the area first.
Han Sen took his tools and left the swimming pool. Since the Crocodile God wasn't following him, he wasn't in a hurry to clean up. He walked around the fortress.
The fortress had been damaged too badly. Most of the equipment was broken. Even if it hadn't been broken, Han Sen didn't know what it was for.
The weird thing was, aside from the demon crocodiles, he couldn't find any other bodies or bones.
"Judging from the damage done to the equipment and buildings, this place must have been hit by something like a meteor shower. But why can't I see anything that fell?"
Han Sen kept walking, thinking to himself. Han Sen returned to the crystal jars that held the demon crocodiles. He entered the area to take a closer look.
He couldn't sense any lifeforce from the demon crocodiles. Underneath the broken jars, there were no bodies of demon crocodiles. There wasn't even a trace of dried liquid.
"This is weird. Are the other crystal jars empty?" Han Sen frowned. He kept walking.
Han Sen looked at the crystal jars one by one. They were all the same. There was nothing out of the ordinary.
Suddenly, Han Sen stopped in front of a broken crystal jar. There was something underneath the broken crystal jar.
Underneath the broken crystal was a hand that looked like a human man's. The bones were big, and the skin was dark and rough.
The hand was perfectly preserved. It wasn't rotting. If it wasn't for the lack of lifeforce, Han Sen would have thought it was a living person's hand.
Han Sen was a little excited. He moved the broken crystals away. Han Sen gradually pulled out the hand, but Han Sen quickly realized that it was an arm that had been cut off at the shoulder. There was no body behind it.
The arms were very sturdy. Judging from its length, its owner was estimated to be about two meters tall. He was a tanned man like an iron tower.
On the side of his arm, where his biceps were, there was a tattoo. The tattoo was in the shape of a clown, and all the clues were dark red.
The clown's symbol was a jumping pose. It was like running sideways with its legs spread apart. Its body was sideways, but the clown's face was facing the front. It wore a pair of horns on its head. Its eyes were squinted, and its mouth was curved into an arc.
Han Sen did not find it funny. Instead, he felt that this clown tattoo was very strange. That smile made him very uncomfortable.
Putting the arm aside, Han Sen continued to clean up the broken crystals. He hoped to dig out the arm's owner and find out who it was.
The crystals were heavier than steel, but to Han Sen, they were nothing. He quickly put all the crystals away.
Strangely enough, Han Sen couldn't find the owner of the arm underneath the broken crystals. There was only an arm there, and there wasn't even a trace of blood.
Han Sen used his Purple-Eye Butterfly to look around. He wasn't sure if there really wasn't any blood, or if it had been too long, but aside from the arm, there was no trace of the same substance.
"Did the arm get cut off somewhere else, and for some reason, it ended up here?"
Han Sen looked around. The fortress was like a big city. It would be difficult to clean up this place.
Han Sen planned to look elsewhere, but when he turned around to pick up the arm, he was given a shock.
The arm had been fine a moment ago, but in the ten minutes that Han Sen had been cleaning up the broken crystals, it had rotted to the point where only the bones were left.
His originally tanned skin and strong muscles had turned into a puddle of liquid that emitted a putrid stench.
Han Sen was used to seeing corpses, so he didn't think it was strange. But he did think it was strange, and he thought to himself, "This arm has been here for so many years. Why did it rot so quickly?"
Looking at the rotting arm, Han Sen's eyes froze. There was only bone left, and Han Sen was able to see something special about it.
The clown tattoo on the skin hadn't disappeared. It was still imprinted on the bones of the arm, and it was still smiling as it ran.
It was different now. Before, there was only the clown tattoo on the skin. Now, there were other tattoos on the bones. Or rather, there were words.
"Crystallizer words!"
Han Sen was both shocked and happy. He looked at the words that looked like tiny carvings. If he didn't have the Purple-Eye Butterfly, he would have needed to use a high-powered magnifying glass to see what the words were.
He had learned the crystallizer language from Stay Up Late, so he could recognize the words. But someone had carved words on the arm. That was too weird.
The arm had been fine before, and there were muscles on the bones. How had someone carved them?
Han Sen picked up the bones from the corpse water and cleaned up the dirt. The bones were white, and there was no sign of life. But he could see that the clown tattoo and the words had been carved by some sort of machine. There were marks on them, but they weren't marks of some sort.
"What is going on? Why would a person use a machine to carve words on his arm? Or did someone else carve them there after he died?" Han Sen wondered as he read the words on his arm.
"Test subject M67 has mutated. Test results unknown. Core God-making Project 7586 has failed …" Han Sen read on. It was a summary report.
Han Sen didn't know what M67 was, but from what he could tell, the crystallizers were trying to make a God-making Project. But the test subject had mutated, and the experiment had to be stopped.
There was some data that Han Sen didn't understand. It was the data of M67's mutation. He didn't know why it had been carved into the bones of the arm.
"Are these guys crazy?
They could have just stored the data on a crystal card. Why would they carve it into the bones?
Unless they had a reason to do so. "Han Sen looked at the words on the arm in a daze.
While Han Sen was thinking, he heard the small Crocodile God bark. It wagged its tail and crawled over. It barked at Han Sen, urging him to get to work. It wasn't happy that Han Sen was just standing there.