Chapter 522 - 519: The Way to Leave

Chapter 522: Chapter 519: The Way to Leave

"Is this how you do it? Don’t mess it up..."

"I’m the one who installed the beacon. How could I possibly mess it up!"

A few team members were fiddling with the beacon. After getting everything in order, the investigation team was discussing how to leave the Sky Island.

"The beacon’s departure function requires the captain’s authorization..."

"Forget that. Hasn’t the beacon been activated already? Why don’t you try reasoning with it?"

"Will that work?"

"We won’t know until we try, right?"

And so, a few of the members started talking to the beacon again.

"Beacon, please open the departure function."

"Denied."

"Why denied? You can see the situation we’re in."

"Insufficient permissions. Departure function cannot be enabled..." the beacon stated rigidly. But a moment later, it changed its tune. "Recommendation: use the emergency escape function..."

Hearing this, the team members’ eyes lit up.

"Oh, right! Why didn’t we think of that? Let’s activate the emergency escape function," the members quickly said to the beacon.

"Sky Island environment confirmed. Initiating emergency escape function. Simultaneously sending distress signal to the monitoring station..."

As the beacon recited this, the tall signal tower slowly began to rotate.

The incredibly complex-looking control console suddenly clicked open with a KACHA, and a black device popped out from the bottom.

Upon seeing this device, the team members all cried out in excitement.

"There it is!"

"Now we’re all set!"

They couldn’t wait to move the black, box-like device to an open area and begin adjusting its position.

Li Luo, watching from the side, was completely bewildered.

"What are they doing?" Li Luo asked Zhou Dynasty.

"They’re positioning it. It needs enough space to deploy..."

Zhou Dynasty’s answer only confused Li Luo further.

But soon, she understood the purpose of the black box.

After the team members had placed the box, they all moved away from it and returned to the beacon’s control console to perform a series of operations. The distant box suddenly opened, and a white balloon floated out from the top.

Simultaneously, the box at the bottom began to transform and stretch like building blocks. In no time, it had taken on the long shape of a ship’s hull.

The white balloon was also slowly inflating, gradually floating higher and higher, pulling the black vessel below it up until it was suspended in the air.

"Is that... an airship?"

"That’s right." Zhou Dynasty nodded. "Never seen one before?"

Li Luo nodded back. "Only in history books."

"Everything in that box is made of special materials. The balloon is a specialized retractable fiber, and it’s filled with a specific gas that allows it to float in the Sky Island’s turbulent airflow. The black gondola is also made from the same special alloy as the beacon..."

Zhou Dynasty proudly explained as the airship continued to inflate.

"There are many reasons airships were phased out... high construction costs, slow speeds, enormous size, and extreme danger. The invention of the airplane also rendered them completely obsolete."

"However, on the fourth layer of the Abyss, airships are the most commonly used form of transportation. Due to technological advancements, they’ve become portable, and their safety has been greatly improved..."

Listening to Zhou Dynasty’s explanation, Li Luo nodded in understanding.

’I’d thought of many ways to leave the Sky Island, but I never imagined we’d end up using a mode of transport that appeared so early in human history.’

However, as she watched the airship slowly expand, Li Luo noticed something that confused her.

"Where’s the propulsion system?"

The deploying airship before her looked more like a hot air balloon without its burner. Other than the white gasbag and the sealed black gondola, Li Luo didn’t see any other components, nor could she spot any device that could provide propulsion.

Hearing Li Luo’s question, Zhou Dynasty decided to be mysterious.

"You’ll see in a bit. If I tell you too soon, it’ll spoil the surprise..."

Before long, the airship stopped expanding. The balloon above slowly formed into an elongated oval, looking exactly like the airships in the books.

However, the airship wasn’t very large. It was quite exquisite, yet big enough to carry every member of the investigation team.

Once the gondola was fully deployed, the team members spontaneously began to carry their luggage aboard.

"Someone give me a hand! Let’s move the captain’s corpse up!"

"What nonsense are you talking? It’s his ’body’! Not his ’corpse’!"

"My bad, my bad..."

A few team members moved the captain onto a collapsible stretcher they had found near the beacon and carried him into the airship’s gondola.

Strangely enough, the captain’s body still retained its vitality. It was as if he were merely asleep, and he might wake up at any second.

The investigation team members present also felt full of energy. Logically, having not eaten for so long, their bodies should have perished long ago, but right now, they felt completely normal.

When they asked the Eye of the Stars, it explained that this was a protective mechanism.

To ensure the bodies remained usable, these unconscious forms had undergone a degree of "preservative activation" to prevent them from decaying like corpses.

The team members didn’t care much for the principle behind it. The fact that they could still move normally was something to be grateful for. They could get a detailed check-up of their physical condition once they returned to the monitoring station.

"Hurry up and get on. Once the balloon is fully inflated, we’ll rise into the air," Zhou Dynasty urged.

"Okay," Li Luo replied, leading Block onto the gondola.

...

The tall signal tower rotated, emitting a faint humming sound as if bidding them farewell. The team members watched the ground grow more and more distant, their hearts filled with complex emotions.

"It feels like it was all a dream... swimming in a sea of consciousness, gradually becoming muddled, only to be pulled out and stuffed into a crowded relic, where my thoughts became incredibly sluggish..."

"It feels a little unreal."

"Yeah. If it weren’t for the captain, we would have been lost forever, wouldn’t we?"

At the mention of the captain, the gondola fell silent again.

They would laugh and joke around, teasing Zhou Dynasty and even making light of the captain’s "corpse," but these were all ways of suppressing their grief, of diverting their attention to other things.

But true sorrow is inescapable. The pain buried in their hearts would always reveal itself in an unguarded moment.

The airship climbed higher and higher, rising into the cloud layer. Through the thin mist, the entirety of the Sky Island below came into view:

Outside the Central Forest, now devoid of starlight, lay countless fallen ancient trees.

The circular areas all over the Sky Island, left behind by the "garbage cleanup."

These were all traces the captain had left behind...

The brown filter was gone, but Lord Ying’s actions had already completely transformed this Sky Island.

"This is the altitude of the lens..." someone in the group suddenly said.

"You can see everything clearly from here."

The airship rose to the position where Lord Ying had once been, and the investigation team members once again saw everything their captain had seen.

"It’s high, but not *that* high..."

This Sky Island, which had imprisoned them for half a year, floated quietly amidst the clouds, growing ever more distant. Watching it from afar, everything on it seemed so minuscule, as if none of it was that important after all.

But the familiar sights proved that they had been there, that they had existed.

A thin layer of mist obscured their view. This Sky Island was no different from any other; if not for the living contamination, it would just be an ordinary giant rock floating in the clouds.

The sky up here was no different from the sky above any other island.

Except, here, there had once been a projector that gazed down upon the earth.