Flying on a clear winter day, watching the endless snow beneath his feet, and eating ice cream mid-air, was quite a pleasant feeling.
Although there was only a little left, they hadn't reached their destination before it was finished. However, within seconds of finishing the dessert, the cloak had already carried them thousands of kilometers away, arriving at their destination.
"Is this the place where Dark Energy appeared?"
Su Ming and Wang landed on the ground, looking at the huge crater in front of them, confirming with the cloak.
The collar of the cloak bent a few times, like a human nodding. It sensed that the kind of dark energy was just underground, though it was only a faint presence. It was unknown how deep the main body existed underground, but it should be here.
"This looks like a nuclear test site."
Wang leaned over to look into the bottom of the deep pit. In front of them was a funnel-shaped large crater with a diameter of hundreds of meters. At the bottom of the pit was a hole, presumably the entrance leading underground.
"No, it's not. Look at those small houses on the other side of the crater."
Su Ming pointed to houses on the opposite side of the crater that looked like shipping containers. These simple homes are often used by research teams at the poles, but here they should be Leviathan's facilities.
"No one would live so close to a nuclear bomb crater. From the invention of the nuclear bomb to now, it's only been ten years, far from enough for the radiation to dissipate, let alone a funnel-shaped bottom with a passage."
"But it seems like there's no one over there." Wang put his hand over his eyes to make a visor, peering in that direction amidst the reflection of the snow.
There was no sight of any activity, not even smoke from the chimneys on those small houses — unthinkable in Siberian winter.
Naturally, Su Ming noticed this too. He shrugged and walked toward the building area: "This is Tungus, where anything seemingly unreasonable could happen."
Originally just a river in Siberia's Aivanger Autonomous Region, the name Tungus gradually came to mean a mysterious phenomenon — the Tungus explosion — after 1908.
On June 30, 1908, at 7:17 AM local time, a massive explosion occurred in the Tungus River basin, 800 kilometers northwest of Lake Baikal. Scientists estimated the power of the explosion as equivalent to 20 megatons of TNT, instantly destroying and toppling 80 million trees within over 2,150 square kilometers.
In subsequent years after the explosion, scientists found three explosion craters similar to Moon's volcanic craters there, with diameters ranging from ninety to two hundred meters.
An area of 2000 square kilometers of primeval forest was knocked down by the shock wave, at least 300,000 trees died in a radial pattern, neighboring permafrost melted into swamps, and some animals exhibited radioactive mutations and genetic declension.
The cause of the explosion remains a mystery; even in 1956, let alone Su Ming's past life future, there wasn't a unified opinion in the scientific community about how this place came to be.
Some believe it was caused by an alien spaceship crash, with its nuclear-powered engine explosion, while others think an ice crystal comet hit the Earth or that trace amounts of Antimatter fell from the sky. Some even say a black hole briefly interacted with Earth.
Well, in this world, perhaps The Ancient One knows what's going on, but she's not here, so for now, Su Ming has to figure it out himself.
The largest of the three craters they were looking at now; the other two smaller ones were also seen from the air earlier, but they looked like frozen winter ponds, the ice shimmering under the sunlight.
Unlike this one, there was no water accumulation, and there were traces of human activity around it.
To be precise, traces of extensive human activity were visible. Next to the sinkhole, there were densely packed footprints of all kinds, as if an army treated this place as a training field and ran there.
The winter advantage is that footprints are obvious.
However, there were so many footprints it was impossible to determine how many people were involved; not only were there footprints circling around, but also those leading to the tunnel at the bottom of the big crater, heading in various directions, including animals.
"Hmm, interesting, it seems our timing is perfect," Su Ming hovered above the footprints, quickly heading towards the residential area.
The breeze stirred the snowflakes, the fine granules gently scraping against the armor. Su Ming reached the residential area in just a few seconds, standing atop one of the small houses, looking down.
Xiaowang also arrived next to him through a teleportation gate, his brow tightly furrowed; although the mask covered the lower half of his face, his serious expression was apparent.
"They're... all dead?"
Just as Wang said, amidst the orderly array of houses, many corpses were scattered chaotically, as if a typhoon had swept through, lifting large chunks of frozen soil and stones everywhere, revealing the black earth beneath.
Most of these corpses didn't have obvious external injuries; Su Ming didn't see much red, except for the red flag waving over the small playground.
As for why it's determined to be Leviathan? Because almost every cabin has this answer written on their walls in big slogans:
'Obtain our position in the world.'
Alright, it seems like the position is clear, but it's unknown if they are satisfied with the position in another world.
Su Ming didn't rush to answer Wang's question. Instead, he dropped from the eaves and turned back to open the door behind him.
The room was as simple as expected, with traces of sleeping on the three bunk beds, two tables piled with clutter, and a coal stove, dust flying everywhere in the sunlight.
"Not all dead. If all the houses are arranged like this, there are about fifty of these houses, but we've seen roughly only a hundred corpses; the numbers don't add up."
Su Ming entered the room for a detailed inspection. After all these years, Leviathan's soldiers are still so unhygienic. This place is messier than Spider Hero's room.
On the table, there was dried bread and a bottle of vodka half-drunk.
"Wang, go do an autopsy. I need to know their cause of death and time of death. Don't forget to account for the weather's effect."
"Yes, Master, but in this environment, I can only estimate. If they are frozen, we will need professionals." Wang nodded and agreed, adding a line before moving toward the bodies.
"No worries, I just want to know if they died today." Su Ming ran his hand over the table, rubbing the thick dust on his fingers.
The barracks had clearly been uninhabited for a long time. The bread, beds, dust on the ground, and furnishings inside all indicated this, even the stove inside had frozen.
Yet the corpses outside the door and the footprints at the entrance clearly said otherwise.
Su Ming circled around the room, which was not big to begin with and didn't have much. The only valuable thing he retrieved was a box of matches, simply because it was adorned with a beautiful picture of a Mao Sister under a symbolic shimmering red star driving a tractor to transport grain.
As for the paper-wrapped Mohe tobacco that came with the matches, Su Ming didn't even give it a glance.
"Master, I discovered something strange. The core temperature of this corpse's chest is still warm, in weather that's minus thirty degrees..." A few minutes later, Wang returned to the cabin, his eyes filled with shock.
"Which means they've been dead for less than an hour, right?"
Su Ming knew this would be the answer because looking at the expressions and hair of the corpses, they clearly hadn't shown rigor mortis. Asking the medically skilled Wang to check again was just to confirm.
The normal body temperature is dynamically stable through the body's heat production and dissipation, generally around 37°C.
After death, due to metabolic cessation, the body cannot continue to generate heat, while the still-existing heat energy within continues to dissipate to the outside world through radiation, conduction, convection, and evaporation of moisture, causing the body's temperature to decrease gradually until it approaches or is slightly lower than the external temperature.
Generally, children and the elderly's bodies cool down quickly, while young and middle-aged people cool down more slowly; Fatty is slower to cool than thin people.
Bodies of chronic wasting disease, massive bleeding, drowning, and death by grave burns cool rapidly. However, sudden death, mechanical asphyxia, and carbon monoxide poisoning bodies cool more slowly.
Additionally, some bodies' temperature doesn't drop and may even rise temporarily due to bacteria and viruses enhancing decomposition speed, increasing heat production, as in encephalitis, epidemic meningitis, and flu pneumonia complications.
Another case is intense activity before death, increasing heat production, causing postmortem body temperature to continue to rise for a short while.
An ordinary adult body in normal room temperature decreases about 1°C per hour on average within 10 hours of death, slowing down after 10 hours, equating with ambient temperature in about 24 hours.
In frozen storage or snow, a corpse fully cools within about 1 hour, freezing takes a little longer; internal fluids can freeze into blocks of ice, limbs and torso fully harden, and eyeball fluid expansion from freezing can cause eyeballs to protrude.
But those previous bodies were obviously dead not long ago.
"It's just as you said, Master, but now we have a problem. The footprints in the dust inside the room date about a month back, but even if it's the same person, the footprints in the snow outside are from an hour ago..."
Wang had a boot in hand; he had stripped the shoe off a nearby corpse to compare the footprints.
Su Ming gestured for him to discard the shoe, casually taking someone else's shoes wasn't worth the athlete's foot risk: "I think I can guess the situation. Besides Leviathan, we have two other groups of opponents. One might have a handle on some application of time, or Spiritual Energy skills; while the other arrived before us, probably before we roasted meat."
Xiaowang exhaled slowly; it seemed an imminent battle was unavoidable.