A few minutes later, under Tertia's guidance, Ivette arrived beneath the dean's residence. She followed a long corridor into an enormous metal space resembling a battleship command center.
The room had a perfect hemispherical dome. Its walls were seamlessly fitted with dark gray magic-metal plates, while at the center floated a silver-white sphere over twenty meters in diameter, silently rotating. Its surface consisted of tens of thousands of precisely assembled hexagonal metal plates, each as thin as a cicada's wing and edged with a faint blue glow.
Tertia did not need to explain it for Ivette to recognize it as the Antigravity Engine left behind by the Ultra-Ancient Civilization. The way it hovered in midair left no trace to follow and had nothing to do with wind elements.
After confirming it with Tertia, Ivette walked to the railing of the innermost platform and directly launched a hacking attempt.
The result, however, was far from satisfactory. Within only a few minutes, she triggered the engine's defense system. Had she not been experienced enough to withdraw in time, she might even have activated the Rune Array's self-destruction mechanism. That would have been irreversible.
For a super-civilization capable of creating an Antigravity Engine, a powerful firewall system was only natural. Even a top master of Rune Compilation like Ivette would need at least a decade or two to breach it alone—and even then, it might prove futile.
After several consecutive failures, Ivette quickly decided to abandon the Rune Hacker approach. Her Rune Compilation techniques and theories all came from the legacy of the Origin Civilization, while the Ultra-Ancient Civilization's technology might have been no worse than, or even far ahead of, the Origin Civilization's. Overcoming such a super-firewall was naturally difficult.
Fortunately, she still had Shadow Tendrils. Using the tendrils' Devouring and deconstruction