Chapter 1362 — Riding the Waves
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
The ancient space station's hatch slid open without a sound. Just as Gao Yang had said, every bulkhead gate within this section had been unlocked. Cassandra stepped cautiously into the room directly adjoining the hall, her gaze sweeping across her surroundings.
Bright lights illuminated this place that had gone so long without a visitor. Silver-white, pale gray, and a sparse scattering of blue ornamentation were the dominant colors of the room. She judged it to be something like a monitoring station or control room—along the walls stood numerous holographic projection devices emitting a faint glow, and in the center of the room was a pillar-like apparatus topped with a slanted surface set with crystal-like control panels whose function was utterly incomprehensible.
On the wall directly facing the door was an exceptionally wide window. Beyond the high-strength transparent polymer "glass" all was dim and dark—it did not look like outer space.
Inside this space station, vast enough to be shocking, Asharina always felt disoriented. She could not tell direction here, nor make sense of the rooms' structure or their relative positions within the station as a whole, which made her every step more cautious.
But Cassandra, walking beside her, seemed free of this confusion. She explored eagerly in every direction, poking at anything that caught her interest—after receiving Gao Yang Cecil's assurance of safety, the siren's curiosity seemed to have been unleashed to its maximum, and so it was now: she walked right past Asharina, who was examining the equipment in the center of the room, and pressed up to the wide window at the far end, practically flattening her face against it, then let out a wildly exaggerated cry: "Whoa—come look at this!"
Asharina walked over and peered out the window curiously. At first she saw only a dim, murky space with a few faint glimmers dotting the darkness, but soon her eyes shifted into golden vertical pupils, and she made out the situation beyond the window—and nearly cried out herself—
She saw a stretch of "land"—strictly speaking, land that had lain abandoned for an unknowable number of years. Beyond the polymer window lay unmistakably a vast expanse of rolling plains and slopes, as open and natural as the ground of a planet's surface, with artificial channels threading across the plains and structures like bridges and docks dotted alongside. Sparse, withered remnants of dead plants were scattered across the few areas lit by lamps, perhaps evidence that this land had once known a lush and verdant age.
Asharina drew a soft breath. Her gaze drifted instinctively farther out, and there she saw the barrier that suddenly rose at the end of the land, steeped in darkness: the station's hull wall, proof that this land was not on the surface of a planet but inside an artificial spaceborne structure.
"...Your Majesty Gao Yang, we've found something extraordinary..." she began instinctively, but received no immediate reply. "Your Majesty Gao Yang? Are you listening?"
"...Oh, I'm here," Gao Song's voice came through. "Sorry, I was thinking something over. What did you find?"
"A..." Asharina began, wanting to describe it, but suddenly found herself at a loss for how to put what she saw into words—it was something that did not exist in her system of knowledge. Fortunately Cassandra beside her immediately picked up: "We've found an ecological section—an extremely, extremely large one. It has artificial land and rivers inside; from the remnants, it must once have been an ecosystem—but it looks like it's been shut down for many years. Also, we observed dried but undecomposed plant remains. I suspect the exterior has lost pressure and is in a vacuum state."