We had been curious about this Great Cathedral from the moment we first laid eyes on it. It stood out so sharply in the Ruins World, not merely because its pristine, intact shell looked utterly out of place beside the ramshackle patched-together buildings around it, but also because Sandora had determined that it had been built before the great war hundreds of thousands of years ago. In other words, this Great Cathedral was a genuine ancient relic, not some junk heap the local inhabitants had assembled from materials scavenged out of the ruins. That alone made it extraordinarily eye-catching. What was even more intriguing, however, was its internal structure. A place called a cathedral contained nothing related to religion: no reliefs, no murals, not even a single mention of anything divine. What it did have everywhere were alloy walls and holographic screens like those in a warship's corridors, along with Isolation Chambers appearing at intervals down the passageways. At first, such a layout made no sense, but the moment we watched it detach from the highlands and slowly rise into the air on the Holographic Projection, all our questions were answered...
This strange cathedral really was a spaceship?
"Attention, personnel aboard the ship. This vessel has departed its fixed berth. The entire ship is now sealed. This vessel will disengage from the external gravitational system. Artificial gravity system activating... activation complete."
A gentle yet emotionless synthesized female voice suddenly sounded in the room, much like the Shipboard Mainframe aboard an ordinary vessel. At the same time, we felt a brief moment of weightlessness before everything returned to normal. This giant hunk of metal, which had abruptly changed from a building into a spaceship, seemed to have severed its gravitational connection with the entire planet and begun using its own gravity