When Hao Ren crawled out through the breach in the elevator shaft, he saw what the interior of this hundred-kilometer-long interstellar battleship looked like—and it was astonishing.
He saw a vast internal space stretching far beyond the reach of his eyes. Within it stood a starship city. Countless buildings sprawled across the ground, which gradually rose and warped in the distance before finally joining the other side of the sky. The entire city had been built inside a sealed, oval-shaped container resembling an eggshell, with all the artificial ground and buildings clinging to its inner wall.
He looked in all directions, and a strange sense of vertigo dazzled him. There was no sky here, nor any strict distinction between up and down. The enclosed ground formed a spherical shell, and no matter which way one looked, one could see rows of buildings and enormous, bizarre mechanical devices. Hao Ren glanced back at the elevator shaft he had descended through, only then realizing that it was actually a metal tube running through the entire spherical space. More than a dozen such tubes ran parallel behind him, extending from a large building in the city inside the ship before finally disappearing into another massive building, inverted on the opposite side. Along the middle sections of these parallel metal tubes were numerous platforms suspended in the center of the space, along with pipes jutting out from them. Clearly, these were major transportation routes.
Nor was this "cluster of parallel metal tubes" unique. When Hao Ren gazed into the distance, he could make out other metal tubes standing far away in the faint silhouettes cast by the dim light. Like the skeleton inside a monster, they crisscrossed the giant ship, connecting the city within to the outside world.
Vivian was the last to come