The maintenance passage could not lead directly to the propulsion unit, but it did reach the maintenance area in the rear half of the unit. The thrusters used by this space island were extraordinarily huge devices. Their main bodies were hundreds of meters long—if placed on the ground, they would look like a small mountain—and the maintenance area in their rear section was an equipment room shaped like a factory. This place, crammed with machinery, pipes, magic arrays, and flashing indicators, lay dozens of meters underground beneath the city, toward the lower rear of the propulsion device. When the unit exploded, it had not completely torn this place apart, but it had ripped open a huge crack in the upper protective shell.
Hao Ren found himself in a very spacious room, with strange devices whose names he could not even guess scattered everywhere around him. The artificial gravity here had completely shut down, and the propulsion unit's most intense acceleration phase had already passed, so countless pieces of equipment and other debris floated through the air. The ceiling slanted off toward one side. A huge breach split this sloping alloy roof, and dazzling light poured in through it. In the glare, the shattered floating objects cast a vast array of bizarre silhouettes onto the opposite wall, making the scene look eerie and dangerous.
Hao Ren first ran over to inspect the devices that appeared to be control consoles. He knew they were already inside the unit, and if he could shut down the system from within this gigantic thing, that would undoubtedly be the best solution. He might not know how to operate the equipment, but he could transmit whatever he saw directly to the Data Terminal and have it display everything to the elf experts above. But he soon