Extreme Cold Era: Shelter Don't Keep Waste-Chapter 913 - 141

Although it wasn't the temple she was looking for, and she wasn't very interested in excavating this site, Perfikot still patiently tolerated the scholars leading the archaeological team to conduct a thorough excavation of the entire temple.

She stood beside the temple's broken pillars, watching the scholars carefully direct the workers to clean each inscribed stone slab and document every detail of the murals.

A cold wind carried fine ice crystals through the temple's gaps, turning the workers' breath into frost in the frigid air, but the scholars seemed oblivious to the cold, wholly engrossed in deciphering the ancient symbols.

Just as Perfikot was about to lose her patience, they indeed discovered a buried secret chamber in the temple's rear hall.

The entire chamber had long been flooded by seeped groundwater, now completely frozen within thick layers of ice, like a massive amber sealing unknown secrets.

The scholar lay atop the ice, carefully recognizing the faint murals and inscriptions beneath the ice's surface by the lamp's glimmer.

His voice trembled slightly with excitement: "Madam, these inscriptions... they seem to mention the 'Era of Frost' and 'Unending Winter Night'..."

Though not entirely deciphered yet, based on the scholars' interpretation of the discovered content, this information likely shares some connection with the end-of-world prophecy Perfikot was searching for.

Thus, Perfikot changed her mind.

She did not have the scholars decipher on-site, instead directly ordered the whole surface to be unearthed, preparing to cut out the frozen chamber entirely, along with the surrounding permafrost, to be packed up and transported away.

Workers opened the ground, using steam to melt the edges of the ice layer, driving support frames around the chamber, preparing to package this ancient frozen secret in its entirety to take back to the Floating City's laboratories for slow disassembly and study.

With this unexpected discovery of the chamber as a gain, Perfikot's attitude towards exploring ancient ruins significantly changed.

She began to push the work forward with rigorous demands, not only urging the Governor to immediately recruit more scholars proficient in ancient texts to join the research team, but also dispatching several exploration teams, requiring them to systematically investigate all known temple sites within the Desert Kingdom.

This time, her target was no longer limited to the temple of the Ice Goddess.

Perfikot signed a detailed investigation list, enumerating all divinities recorded in the Desert Kingdom's history—from Rahmat, who governs the blazing sun, to Sekhmet, ruler of sandstorms, and even some long-forgotten subordinate deities were not overlooked.

She demanded that scholars thoroughly screen the murals and inscriptions of each temple, searching for any trace that might relate to the end-of-world prophecy.

To ensure the comprehensiveness of the investigation, she even had the Governor summon the chieftains of the Desert Kingdom, ordering them to provide assistance as the Empire's Regent.

Any chieftain who could provide valuable clues would receive a small mobile Energy Tower as a reward, causing a stir among the chieftains present.

In Perfikot's eyes, these small Energy Towers were nothing more than mass-produced ordinary equipment from the Floating City's industrial zone.

With the industrial zone's relocation and capacity enhancement complete, as long as sufficient raw materials were available, such equipment could be mass-produced like steam engines.

Essentially, they were just convenient mobile heat sources and generators for field surveys, with limited technical content; even if handed to these tribespeople, they would not understand the core principles, and subsequent maintenance would still depend on the Empire's technical support.

But to the Desert Kingdom's chieftains, this was practically a Divine Artifact capable of changing their tribes' destiny!

Those tribal leaders who had already witnessed the Energy Tower's power called it the "mobile oasis" in private long ago.

In extreme cold below minus tens of degrees, equipment that could provide a stable heat source meant the tribe could expand its activity range, ensure the survival of the elderly, weak, and women and children, and even maintain military deterrence under extreme weather.

Thus, an unprecedented "treasure offering competition" unfolded among the tribes of the Desert Kingdom.

Some chieftains offered family-guarded Scarab Beetle statues, others handed over ancient stone slabs engraved with mysterious symbols, and others even led their troops to excavate ancestral forbidden grounds.

Within just half a month, the Governor's Mansion received "valuable cultural relics" enough to fill three warehouses.

And Perfikot, too, kept her promise, allocating a batch of small Energy Towers just off the production line to those tribes that provided effective clues.

Watching the chieftains leave with the Energy Towers as if they were prized possessions, Perfikot couldn't help but shake her head.

These tribespeople would never understand that, in their eyes, the invaluable Divine Artifacts were just mass-producible industrial products; instead, the ancient relics they turned over were the truly priceless items.

Yet it was precisely this gap in perception that allowed her to acquire the deepest buried secrets of this ancient kingdom at the smallest cost.

With the information obtained, Perfikot quickly pieced together what she wanted to know.

The "Book of Helipolis Frost Prophecies" — this is the true name of the end-of-world prophecy Perfikot has been tirelessly pursuing.

An elderly chieftain offered a fragment of the prophecy book that his family had preserved for a millennium. Though the papyrus had become fragile and yellowed, and the text blurred with age, through the collective effort of over a dozen top scholars, key information was successfully restored.

The faded illustrations on the papyrus depicted that it was once Sirius's sister star, deprived of its radiance and exiled to the eternal winter land at the world's edge for defying the will of the Sun God Rahmat.

The ancient cuneiform described: Her breath turned into piercing cold winds, her tears condensed into unmelting ice, and her fury foretold that the world would ultimately usher in the "Era of White Silence" — the ultimate cold winter where everything froze and life stilled.

Legend has it she was once one of the brightest stars in the night sky, Sirius's twin sister, stripped of its glory for challenging the authority of the Sun God Rahmat and banished to the eternal icy prison at the world's end.

Her every breath turned into cold winds sweeping the earth, every tear condensed into millennium-old ice, and when her rage peaked, the whole world would usher in the "Era of White Silence" — when even time would freeze, leading to the ultimate cold winter.

This highly matched some of the information Perfikot already had, though some aspects differed, but this was not significant.

This prophecy book was formed thousands of years ago, a product of the mythical era; some information not aligning with the present is natural.

What truly mattered was that Perfikot finally acquired specific information directly related to the prophecy, not just fragmented legends.

More crucially, by cross-referencing the clues provided by multiple chieftains, she successfully pinpointed the main temple of Safura's location — a massive structure deeply buried beneath shifting dunes, said to preserve the most complete text of the prophecy.

This discovery might be the final piece to solving the mystery of the end-of-world winter.