"Wow..."
"Is... is this the legendary 'Karl Genesis'?"
"It's so vast!"
Xu Tuantuan had just descended the floating airship's gangway onto the platform when she stopped at the edge of the hard alloy deck.
She tilted her small head back, her large, watery eyes wide and round as she gazed at the enormous dungeon before her, steeped in the epic grandeur of endless ages. Her little hands tightened involuntarily around the straps of the lightweight leather pack on her back.
Ahead stood a gigantic steel fortress city built above a vast, desolate gorge.
Hundreds of heavy energy tractor beams shot skyward from the ground, firmly locking down the rift in the void ahead, which looked as though heaven and earth had collapsed.
Deep within that rift, an ancient mechanical dome large enough to rival an entire mountain range drifted in and out of view.
Black machine oil had long since weathered into layers of rock, and the heavy alloy gates were covered in mottled rust left by the ravages of time. Even from several thousand meters away, the cold, oppressive presence of a technological civilization thirty thousand years old still struck her full in the face.
Xu Tuantuan pressed her somewhat dry lips together and silently swore to herself.
No matter what difficulties I face this time, I must obtain resources and ancient blueprints of sufficient quality in the dungeon "Karl Genesis."
She would exchange them for vast quantities of money and high-tier mechanical units, not only to give her parents, who had toiled for half their lives, a comfortable life free from worries about food and clothing, but also to use this as a stepping stone to truly join the ranks of the strongest.
Of course, buried deepest within the girl's private thoughts was a tiny, secret hope that