This is an unknown world, and it is also the end of the world that the people of Sunset City have never reached.

There is no record of the great wilderness behind the mountains, or the desert in the great wilderness. But when you think about it, isn't that a weird thing?

Is it true that no one has ever come to the distant mountains and seen the boundless wilderness, and even if there were, they would not have been able to bring back the information?

Gu Chuan stared at the gear man walking in front of him, leading two people from far away to the depths of this dungeon.

Their communication with each other has stopped at simple words, and they are unable to understand complex sentences.

Silence at first, silence all the way.

Even Chu Yun and Gu Chuan only exchanged their thoughts with each other.

"Do you think learning to communicate with them is something that isn't worth doing?"

Gu Chuan asked.

Chu Yun had no concept of worthiness or unworthiness, she bit her nails and only asked:

"How long will it take?"

"It may take a few solar terms."

Gu Chuan said uncertainly. According to the example of the previous life, it is not difficult to simply master the basic listening and speaking of the language, and it only takes about 300 to 400 hours of learning, which is changed to 8 hours a day, and it only takes a month. A full month of learning may not be good and difficult to stick to, but it is only three months to triple it.

The only problem is that the pronunciation of this language may exceed the structure of the human larynx, followed by ...... There are no textbooks and excellent familiar teachers.

While thinking about it, Gu Chuan added:

"But maybe there will be changes along the way, and then time will not pass so peacefully. Our main goal is to gather enough travel resources. ”

"That's not bad, right?"

Hatsukumo has never been indifferent.

Most things seemed to her to be similar, and she didn't know why people should separate many things into important and non-important.

The pipe was dark, and they made an unknown number of turns, and finally turned a corner. In the corners are rows of gears, each of which is a door. In each door lives a cogwheel man.

Gu Chuan asked:

"Do you all live alone? Individually? Reside? ”

This means that there are no families.

The Gear Man replied blandly:

"There are some, no."

It shoved its hand into a geared door, and the door opened. They knew it was where they were going to stay for a while. Inside, there is a small light bulb-like glow that resembles a cogwheel man's eye. The lights are dim, sometimes flickering.

A series of accidents had already exhausted Gu Chuan's energy, and after he and Chu Yun agreed on a vigil time, he hastily ate something - it was the meat provided by this solution city, it tasted a bit like a mixture of chicken and beef, a little dry - and then insisted on keeping watch for half a night, and after Chu Yun woke up, he closed his eyes on the grass provided by the gear man and sank into a foreign dreamland.

In his dream, he seemed to hear the children's songs sung softly by Chuan's mother, which were the first memories he obtained when he woke up in this world.

So his pain dissipated, and he stopped dreaming, but fell asleep.

At some point, a distant bell rang out.

He woke up from his dream and heard Hatsuyun whisper:

"It has nothing to do with us. You can sleep a little longer. ”

Gu Chuan hesitated twice in the turmoil of the camp, signaling that he knew, and opened half of his eyes and closed them again.

It's just that at this moment, a face that is not Hatsuyun's, and he has never seen before, a face that belongs to the appearance of a sixteen or seventeen-year-old girl came into his field of vision.

At first, Gu Chuan thought he was in a dream. The girl was still a human at first, like a lotus flower, and her soft skin sat on the gears. And in Gu Chuan's misty gaze, she was using a sharp needle-like object to lightly point to her eyebrows, until the painting was as long as a willow.

When she finished painting, she looked like a peerless beauty, sitting motionless, exuding a childlike pure radiance. The beautiful face is like the pure white flower bones that bloom at the beginning of spring, and the blush is like a flower about to bloom.

She's smiling.

But at this time, Gu Chuan realized that something was not quite right with this dream.

Because the girl was turning her head towards him. He saw that her eyes were different from them, with the texture of a light bulb belonging to the Gear Man.

Then, she takes off her skin like a person takes off her clothes.

Gu Chuan woke up suddenly, stood up, and startled both Chu Yun and the girl.

The girl's clothes were only halfway off, the skin and hair of her head had been taken off, only the hands and the body below the hands were still pulling the human skin, and the hands were stretched out in the hands of the seamless human skin, reluctantly.

Her body, hidden under the skin, is a cogwheel man.

She's a gear man.

This house is where Gear Man was born and raised.

In the dim light, her true body and her skin were pure. She had no ill will, but raised her bright eyes to look at the young man who had suddenly stood up, and heard him tremble and say:

"This is your clothes?"

He should have known.

Clothes are things that people put on their bodies to protect themselves from the wind and rain, and gear people understand this concept.

She nodded wordlessly.

This dress is rarely worn by the Gear Man, as it is the first dress she has ever received at a bar mitzvah. She has always cherished it. And in the last mission, all she burned was the clothes she applied for when she did the mission.

"How did you make this garment?"

Cogwheel couldn't explain the matter in the Sunset City language she knew now.

She or it just obediently posed for Gu Chuan to observe and stroke. The cool touch stunned the young man, and then he realized that this was not real skin, but a silicone of extremely pure purity.

The human face is also subtly different from the Sunset City's human face, with the face being shortened and narrowed, for example, more like a character from a TV anime than a real person.

"W-Terrible?"

The Gear Man asked quietly.

Gu Chuan didn't know how to answer, so he only took a few steps back, returned to Chu Yun's side, and hugged his legs. Many grotesque conjectures arose in his mind, and he was extremely flustered, and said:

"I'm sorry, I may have gotten dirty."

The Cogwheel knew that sorry was the kind of clan used to show apologies, and she nodded slowly, signaling that she knew.

Hatsuyun was on the side, observing the behavior of the two men. She doesn't care if the Gear Man wears human skin.

Gu Chuan wanted to divert his attention, so he said to the gear man:

"Let's start learning languages."

"It's on."

The Cogwheel Man put the horrific garment into a box, then flicked a cog, which summoned the linguistic residents of the Answer City who lived in the Thirteenth District.

The inhabitant was clad in furry animal skins and looked like a super-large upright cat. This made both Gu Chuan and Chu Yun feel at ease.

"You may call me Twenty."

He said.

At first, Gu Chuan didn't know that his name was 正廿 (niàn), but he only knew that the Gear Man relayed the pronunciation of his title as 正廿, and he didn't understand the meaning of this name.

He stumbled to imitate the Gearman's pronunciation in Sunset City, and asked the Gearman:

"What's your name?"

She said slowly:

"Ziyuan."

Their learning begins with the reading of names.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to learning a language is the mother tongue. Learning a language from scratch is an experience that everyone has - no one is born to speak Chinese and English! Anyone starts from nothing, learning pronunciation, learning all kinds of pronunciation and all kinds of symbols and all kinds of real things to refer to each other.

The only problem is that once there is one, the mother tongue of this one, it will have an impact on the learning of other languages.

Gu Chuan thought he was like this at first.

Similar to his initial assumption, the phonemes of the Gear People's language can also be roughly divided into vowels and consonants, and there are about seventy kinds of phonemes in their language, ten of which are difficult for Gu Chuan to imitate, and definitely not like them, just like people who are difficult to distinguish n and l or people who can't pronounce the r sound.

This was undoubtedly a huge headache for its language teacher.

Zheng Twenty has educated several batches of gear people. This experience gave him the confidence that he thought that his language studies were already the most wonderful disciples, enough to teach all the wise people in the world.

Until the gear man notified Gu Chuan to open his mouth.

Gu Chuan glanced at Chu Yun and opened his mouth cautiously.

Zheng Twenty looked at it for a long time with a strange glowing needle, drew a rough picture of the man's mouth and throat on the cardboard, and frowned:

"No, it's not a knot in the tongue, I'm afraid he can't pronounce it, his mouth is quite different from ours, so it can only be approximate."

The learning of pronunciation hit a wall.

One hit a wall, one is smooth, and the text of this answer city unexpectedly has something in common with the text of Sunset City, which is more pictographic. Although the strokes are all new, they are grammatically close and have concepts similar to subject-verb-object-definite complements.

The main difference is that the word order of the Answer City language is extremely complex, the same words at the beginning and end are actually different meanings, and there are many clauses, and it is difficult to identify the subject followed by the clause, and there is also a point of verbs, the verbs of the Answer City language are divided into four types, the master is called transitive, the master is called transitive, the other person is called transitive and others are intransitive, which is completely different from the four mixed use of Sunset City language. And all of the above have exceptions that Gu Chuan does not understand, and does not obey the general law.

Therefore, it is much more difficult to understand the sentences in the Chengcheng language than in the Sunset City language or Gu Chuan's native Chinese. But this difficulty is nothing more than the difficulty of rote memorization, just like memorizing words, and there is nothing terrible.

Gear City has a strange technique of etching a lot of tiny characters on glass blocks, and then lighting them up on the wall.

This kind of thing, Gu Chuan called it a glass book.

Gu Chuan was reciting, and Chu Yun was sleepwalking half-understanding and not knowing whether he had learned or not. Zheng Jie replaced the glass book used for teaching on the side.

He seemed to be looking for a way to make Gu Chuan fake his pronunciation.

And the continuous replacement of the glass book also made Gu Chuan gradually understand the level of the gear man's study of the rules of language-

"Great."

Answer City's research on language is indeed great, and it has long surpassed Sunset City, and it is not even inferior to Gu Chuan's previous life.

Not to mention the phonemes and syllables of their own tribe, and even the vocal laws of ordinary animals—this kind of intersection between biology and language—have been clearly parsed by the Gear People. Their field of research has been incomprehensible to the layman's Gu Chuan-

They are studying the subtle connection between the mother tongue and thinking in the organs of thinking, how it responds to external stimuli, how associations and reinforcements are formed, and the impact of language development and evolution on society, and the impact of social relations on language development. An example of the latter is the linguistic information of a clan provided by Region 12.

"And what are you working on now?"

Gu Chuan tried to ask Zheng Twenty in his newly learned Answers.

This thing, dressed in the skin of a big cat and something that I don't know what it was in the mainland, was lying in the grass with a glass book, and when I heard Gu Chuan's question, I raised my head lazily and said:

"Chuan, there is no difference between the present and the past here, we, as a disciple of the thirteenth region, and the organization to which I belong, have always, always, and only one thing that we are studying."

That is the thirteenth question that has been handed down since before the birth of the Answer City.

It states with great solemnity:

"What can we express? And how can it be expressed? ”

Gu Chuan didn't know if the answer he understood, or whether he understood it correctly as the answer to the question, but he began to understand the deepest grotesqueness of the answer city.

"A question that had to be solved from the beginning."

He silently read it again, and then asked:

"What about Ziyuan? Ziyuan is also working on a certain issue. ”

Zheng Twenty and Ziyuan are not familiar, and after thinking for a while, they remembered Ziyuan's belonging:

"The place where she belongs is the twelfth problem, and we often borrow information from the twelfth kingdom."

Speaking of this, Zheng Twenty didn't say more, and only took out a record document of a certain Great Wilderness Biological Clan, and asked Gu Chuan to follow the language he learned according to this document.

This biological clan of the Great Wilderness looks similar to the tribe of the Face-Swapping, and they have a trait that they can't count, they can only count to three, and they can't understand the concept of more than three.

This article cites a lot of knowledge about mathematics and physics, and it also involves a lot of units.

This is another interesting feature of the Answer City language.

The cogs don't have the concept of scientific notation. Scientific notation is a convenient way to count the earth in modern times, for example, 100 million can be counted as 16 to the 16th power of ten, which can easily express some large numbers with hundreds of zeros at the end.

But the answer city is different, the answer city will record 100 million into a trillion.

Gu Chuan is understood in Chinese for counting.

That is "thousands of lives, thousands of lives, billions of trillions, trillions, jingshengjing, jingshengzi, zisheng, shengyang, soil, ditch, ditch, stream, and zhengsheng".

They used a syllable, which can be translated as "trillion" instead of billion, then 10 trillion, 100 trillion, all the way to 10 trillion, and then as if to avoid the syllable being too long, 100 trillion is also used as a syllable, which can be translated as "jing" instead.

He followed the readings one by one, and suddenly found that the pronunciation of Zi and Ziyuan here is the same, and the pronunciation of Zheng and Zheng Twenty is also the same.

He noticed another strange feature, and looked up in disbelief and asked:

"Does the circle also refer to a number, and does twenty also refer to a number?"

Zheng Twenty was unaware of the huge secret contained in it, and said indifferently:

"Yes."

In the language of the city of answers, the circle means sixty, and the twenty means twenty.

Therefore, Ziyuan and Zheng Twenty are both a string of numerical numbers.

The former means: ten to the power of forty plus sixty.

The latter means: ten to the seventieth power plus twenty.

What does this mean?

Gu Chuan didn't know that he was on the ground, using a straw pole to write this number in scientific notation, and Ziyuan, who knew the number symbol used by Gu Chuan, happened to open the door at that time.

She saw the numbers and didn't show them.

Before she was born, her name was decided by the Celestial Mentor, and she has been using it since she was born. Everything is just ordinary.