A low hum and tremors continued without end, as though the entire colossal wreck were convulsing in pain.
The dark red anomalous glow on the walls flickered erratically, intertwining with the original pale blue glimmer of Order to form an eerie play of light and shadow.
A faint burnt smell, like scorched ozone, spread through the air, mingling with the stale scent of dust shaken loose.
The facility consciousness's warning repeated itself in Ming Xin's perception, the green shelter coordinates flashing like a beacon. But Ming Xin chose another path.
He controlled the Shadow Fiend Fragment like a blind deep-sea eel sensing a shift in the currents, sliding close to the trembling wall toward an unmarked side passage.
The entrance to this passage was extremely well concealed, half-covered by a rusted metal panel that had shifted slightly due to the vibrations.
Had Ming Xin not caught scattered fragments of information about "a secondary maintenance branch not fully archived due to structural damage" while "listening" to the information flow earlier—
—and had the vibrations not happened to move the obstruction aside now, he would never have found it.
The fragment squeezed through the gap. Inside, the passage was even narrower and lower, filled with thick, exposed energy conduits, some of which had already melted apart.
The conduits were coated in thick, caked dust and some kind of dark, oily residue.
This place had clearly been abandoned for countless years. Even the most basic illumination patterns had gone completely dark.
Only the unstable red-and-blue glimmer filtering in from the main passage barely outlined its twisted contours.
The vibrations were amplified here.
Fine metal debris and dust constantly rustled down from overhead, while clearer and more chaotic stress transmissions came through the ground beneath him.
But the advantage was that the facility consciousness's