The Culprit

"No matter where we are, we need to secure the ecosystems before considering anything else!" Tang San patted the captain on the shoulder.

The captain hurriedly nodded and flipped open the armrests of his command chair.

There was a button beneath each armrest. These two buttons had to be pressed simultaneously by two people aboard the ship with activation authority in order to initiate the Andromeda's harvesting mode.

Only eight people aboard this ship possessed that authority: the former captain and three first officers of Galaxy Heavy Industries, along with Titan Group's four principal executives.

After exchanging glances, Tang San and the captain both placed their hands on the buttons.

As the deck began to tremble, the lights throughout the bridge turned red and yellow, flashing alternately.

A holographic projection of the Andromeda itself began to appear in the center of the bridge.

Four fissures opened beneath the Andromeda, and the entire ship slowly began to unfold downward.

At the same time, the ship's power source—the spherical reactor—was hoisted upward by the cylinders at the top. The bridge rose continuously as though it were being squeezed out of the ship. Once the structures supporting the bridge left the main body of the Andromeda, they unfolded outward, leaving a hollow sphere at the ship's top.

By then, the ship's four sectors had been firmly sealed off by metal partition walls, isolating the ecosystems within them from the vacuum of space.

Inside the ship, aside from the reactor core radiating red light, the laser collectors connected to its surface, and vast amounts of harvesting equipment, there were twelve mechanical claws with diameters of twenty thousand kilometers—twice the diameter of the Andromeda itself.

Calling them claws was somewhat inappropriate. They were better described as tentacles.

These tentacles, formed from countless interconnected mechanical components,