In Zheng Qing's imagination.
The control center of Yuanshi should have looked like the cockpit of the robots he watched as a child. It did not necessarily have to be full of cyberpunk or postmodernist style, but it should have had all sorts of screens, joysticks, buttons, crisscrossing wires and pipes, as well as some sweet-voiced auxiliary control system.
Unfortunately, reality was ultimately different from imagination.
Yuanshi's control center was an altar.
Beyond the corridor lay an enormous cavern plaza, several hundred meters across, with the altar situated at its center—the word "altar" was not something Zheng Qing had recognized himself, but something Old Man Ruo Yu had said.
Standing at the end of the corridor, Zheng Qing could only make out an empty, spacious plaza ahead of him.
The plaza was encircled by the cavern's stone walls, where Ionic-style colonnades stood supporting the dome overhead. Beneath the colonnades ran a low ring wall, set with high-relief murals of White Marble. The reliefs depicted a giant battling firebirds, dragons, great serpents, and countless unfamiliar enemies who had crossed the stars to arrive. The entire structure strongly resembled First University's First Grand Hall. Although the figures in the murals remained perfectly still when Zheng Qing looked at them, like genuine stone, their dynamic poses created an overwhelming atmosphere of tension that made him unconsciously hold his breath.
Zheng Qing guessed that the giant was the legendary remains used in the forging of Yuanshi—just as the legendary giant Artu Grut had been used for his Taiyi—and that the scenes on the reliefs were likely the legendary being's past exploits.
Above the colonnades, the dome was filled with stars.
Yet those stars were not lifeless, because in the mere seconds since entering, Zheng Qing caught a faint streak of a meteor crossing a