As everyone could have imagined, it didn't take long for the corpse of the giant beast in the ice to suddenly change and the light dimmed. In the original cave, people seem to be in a palace made of crystal, surrounded by shining light, and with every step, the chains wrapped around their feet collide with the ice, making a crisp collision sound, like a beautiful dance music, which makes people's mood can't help but become cheerful.

However, when you pass over the corpse of the giant beast, the dream-like scenery around you quickly disappears, as if you have been awakened from a sweet dream. The surrounding crystal palace was gone, replaced by a dark and oppressive cavern, no longer surrounded by shimmering ice, but a rough gray earth mixed with gravel. The dirt is not brown or black, as it is on the outside, but has an unhealthy gray color, and when touched by the hand, it freezes at low temperatures and is extremely hard, even harder than ordinary rock. Moreover, the tunnel formed by this frozen soil is no longer a standard arch type like the previous half of the ice, and the four walls are smooth and flat, in this tunnel, the four walls are uneven, the ground is also pitted, and from time to time there are sharp rocks sticking out of the soil, like the teeth of a beast, from here you must be cautious, if you are not careful, you will be hit by the stones drilled out of the soil, the rock fragments under the low temperature freezing are sharper than any weapon, without opening the shield, a light touch, it will be a deep wound。

"Why is the quality here so different from the outside? Catherine asked a little puzzled: "It is said that they are all the works of ice crystals, so they should be relatively close, why did they suddenly become like two worlds." ”

"No way, because they're ice crystals. Pannis didn't answer directly, just casually said an answer that seemed unrelated. Still, though he was vague, Catherine quickly understood what he meant.

"Oh, then I see. Catherine nodded, "You mean, they can only manipulate the ice element, but they can't do anything about the earth element. So when you get to a place like the permafrost, where most of the earth is an element, the quality of the burrowing decreases?"

"That's it. Pannis nodded, "They dig holes in the permafrost layer entirely by penetrating deep into the permafrost layer and entangled with the ice element. Drive the earth elements to squeeze all around. Because it is driven, it is difficult to be as neat as the ice outside. In fact, the effect here has exceeded my imagination, originally in my plan, there were still some locations that we needed to dig up by ourselves, but now it seems that we don't need to. ”

"Look ahead. "In the middle of Catherine and Pannis. Lina suddenly pointed to the front and said loudly, "That piece of stuff, which looks like a cobweb, has blocked the road. ”

Catherine turned her head, and sure enough, under the illumination of the light, she could see a large mesh of objects blocking the passage in front of her. However, Lina did not describe it exactly, this web-like object, each thread is very thick, there could be no such cobweb, it is not so much like a cobweb. It's more like ......

"The roots of the plant. Vivien preemptively said what had in Catherine's mind: "This should be the complete root system of the plant, there is not such a big difference between the trunk and the end of the cobweb." No, it's not complete, you can see that there is a trunk missing on the left, I don't know if it was broken when it was still alive, or if it was broken just now when the ice crystals were manipulating the elements. ”

"It doesn't look like it's new. Catherine was the first to approach the root system of the plant, touched it through the glove and said, "The hardness is very high, but it should feel very brittle, after all, it is too thin, I just don't know if it will have any effect if it breaks." ”

"It wasn't the ice crystals who broke it. "They control the principles of the elements. It is an element that converts ice into a free state and then squeezes it around, rather than forcibly tearing apart the materialized element, so such damage is generally not formed. ”

"It doesn't make much sense to think about that anymore. Catherine shook her head and said, "I just watched it." This root system doesn't look like a structure that supports the force, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem to destroy it. But to be on the safe side, you better stand back and don't involve you in case of a landslide. My defense is relatively high, even if there is a cave-in. As long as the whole cavern doesn't collapse completely, even if I can't escape, I can hold on for a while. ”

"Forget it, big sister. Freya pouted and said, "When have you been talking nonsense like this?" Besides, if you look around, if it does collapse, where can we hide? And Vivien and I have also analyzed the load-bearing structure of the cave, which is completely frozen into a monolithic structure, and unless there happens to be a new ice crack, it will not collapse at all. ”

"Click. Before Freya's words were finished, Pannis didn't know when he had run in front of Catherine, and the sound was that he broke off a half-human-high piece from the main trunk of the root system, took it in his hand and broke it a few times, put it under his nose and sniffed it, pouted and said: "It's really brittle, it smells like a plant like a big-leaf fern, that kind of thing is poisonous to humans, it's not delicious at all, and there will be a lot of rashes on the body after eating, but it's a pity, I also said to taste it, this is a plant that was tens of millions of years ago." ”

Catherine looked weakly at the path that had been opened by Pannis, sighed deeply, bent down and drilled through the gap that had been broken, and when she passed by Pannis, she kicked Pannis's calf. Pannis, who seemed to have expected it, twisted his body to avoid Catherine's kick that was still some distance away, and gave her a thumbs up and bared his teeth with a smug expression.

Passing through the root system of the plant, it feels like a door has been opened, and many strange creatures appear in the permafrost behind the root system. Most of the creatures are insects, there are more ordinary creatures, and there are relatively few magical beasts, and the special appearance of these insects makes it impossible to distinguish their species at all, and they don't seem to belong to any of the existing creatures. Even if they are ordinary insects that are not Warcraft, they are larger than the existing bugs, and they are about to catch up with the size of some of the current Bug Warcraft. However, compared to the giant bugs they encountered at the Scar a few months ago, they were far from in size.

"If the creatures in the Marks of the Earth were all left over from ancient times, then by the beginning of the First Age, they had shrunk a lot. Pannis said: "And looking at the ratio of demonic beasts to ordinary creatures in these creatures, it is much lower than now, but it seems to be much higher than the proportion in the traces of the earth." ”

"This can actually be a new research topic. Vivien's eyes flashed, and she said with some expectation: "I thought before in the Marks of the Earth, that there has been such a big change in living things, maybe it is because at some point in time before the First Age, the environment has undergone a drastic change, well, it may be what Eva said just now, called an elemental explosion?"

"Well, the elemental burst. Eva nodded and said: "The information shows that not long before the appearance of the Three-Eyed civilization, the environment of the Yala world underwent a drastic change, and no one knows what the specific changes were, but the effect is that many large creatures are extinct, and the number of demonic beasts stronger than large creatures is gradually increasing, it seems that there have been some incomprehensible changes in the elemental barrier outside the world." Some scholars among the Mighty of the Three-Eyed Clan have used the protection of divinity to see it, but there is no convincing conclusion. Anyway, because of that upheaval, even the growth of energy crystals has accelerated. ”

"So I guess that the upheaval was due to a significant increase in the concentration of free elemental energy in the Yala world, and then correspondingly, the concentration of some of the components necessary for sustaining life in the air decreased a lot. That's why those super-large animals will become extinct, while the monsters that are large but can absorb free energy have survived. Vivien said seriously, "This is the only way to explain what we have seen before and what we are seeing." ”

"What about the evidence?" Freya, who is also a scholar, asked sharply as if she was attending an academic seminar: "Conjectures without evidence are just conjectures, and if you want to establish this opinion, you have to come up with evidence, do you have evidence? Anatomy, biology, energetics, history, environmental science, the proof data of these disciplines, you must always take out one of them, otherwise how will I know if you are talking in a dream." Physical proof alone is nothing, come up with data. ”

"Isn't this evidence you've seen with your own eyes?" Vivien had long since adapted to arguing with her peers at the academic conference of the Magic Tower, and replied in a familiar tone with the same bitterness, "Could it be that you who study machinery are also occupied by parts?

"Huh, we don't think about problems?" Freya habitually rolled up her sleeves and laughed exaggeratedly: "You theorists are so interesting, you think you can live in a house when you draw a house in your head? ”

"I've heard that every time there is a large-scale academic seminar of the Mage Guild, many clergy from the healing department are invited to the Mage Guild as guests?" Pannis crossed his arms around his chest and asked in a low voice to Lina in the same posture beside him, "And it is said that the budget for each large-scale academic seminar is very high, and it is almost time to renovate the Mage Tower, is there such a thing?"

"Yes, yes. Lina nodded affirmatively, "I was invited once, and there are often pairs of people who are carried out for first aid, and now this atmosphere is very harmonious for the discussion between mages." ”

"Bang", sometimes, violence can solve everything, Catherine punched the two arguing girls in the head, and immediately stopped their friendly discussion: "You two fools show me ahead, the gate has arrived, and you are still arguing." (To be continued.) )

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