Loneliness could destroy a person, especially when one was aboard a scarred refugee ark drifting endlessly through darkness. That loneliness would be magnified many times over: the ruins beyond the ark's Safe Zone, the dark space outside the ship, the unchanging cabins, and the rigid Shipboard Mainframe. These things could drive even strong-willed soldiers to the brink of collapse. Apart from long-lived beings such as Shilin Apostles or gods, few mortals could face such long, lonely years. I believed Commander Warren Field had been a well-trained soldier, and as a member of the Old Empire's Minion Army, he should have possessed tenacity and courage. Yet none of that had helped him endure past the twelfth year—regrettably, the records we found showed that the last trace of his sanity had vanished in that twelfth year.
But nothing could be concluded yet. There were still rooms deeper in the work area that we had not searched, and they might contain records from the final days of Warren Field's life. Even in his madness, this starship commander had continued, driven by instinct, to carve things of great significance to him into walls and equipment. Though much of the writing was incoherent nonsense, careful sorting could still yield information related to this Ghost Ship. At the very least, based on what we had found so far, we had already determined this ship's purpose, hadn't we?
One room after another in the work area was opened. More than half the doors had been locked shut and required Sandora to cut them open by force, but the other half were easy to enter: their doors were unlocked. That was only natural. After all, there had originally been only one crew member living here, so locking doors had been rather pointless. Little Crow released all her Split