Xyrin Empire

There's no denying that the Eternal-class "conventional spaceship," created by Empire engineers challenging the limits, is a monstrosity that leaves one aghast. I think that apart from the Xyrin Apostles, no one else would be insane enough to build a nearly hundred-kilometer-long battleship, with the front twenty kilometers being just a cannon. A main cannon section twenty kilometers long — no wonder someone said the design concept of the Eternal-class is just an engine-mounted gun barrel. Do you think the Empire engineers who designed this thing still have a shred of humanity?

Such a gigantic interstellar warship, when dismantled, still has an awe-inspiring size. Even as debris, the largest piece is nearly ten kilometers in size. And this colossal starship naturally has a complex energy supply network that matches its scale, ensuring that during extreme situations, the energy supply to various parts doesn't simultaneously cut off. Using an overall circuit to power a seventy to eighty-kilometer (special models even over a hundred kilometers) spaceship is downright foolish. The energy system of the Eternal-class consists of numerous modules. Apart from the core reactor functioning for the Galaxy Main Gun and the main engines, it has a small Ghost Energy extraction factory every ten kilometers internally. Each set of battleship modules even has an independent small reactor. It's like a walking battery with generators everywhere, leading to abundant residual energy in every fragment, enough for intact machines within the fragments to remain operational for a long time. So don't think an Eternal-class starship fragmented is safe and harmless. Many who attempted to seize Imperial Starship Wreckage during war ended up dying under the perseveringly operating Near Defense Guns, even if those guns were reduced to just a firearm and a scorched fixed deck.

And just how astonishingly complex is this energy system?

Let me put it this way: with detailed blueprints provided, drawing just its Ghost Energy Pipeline is enough to exhaust every single mapmaker in North America.

Why am I so focused on describing the trait of the Eternal-class operating tenaciously even after being shattered? Well, let's look down at Visca's face…

The little girl's half face is still inky black, a result of smearing a few seconds ago, causing an originally egg-sized black spot to spread into a partial solar eclipse. And she's still occasionally wiping, making her little face increasingly messy, seemingly reaching Bao Zheng's sister's alert level.

A few minutes ago, shortly after entering the corridor, we discovered a sparking Guard Tower. These automatic turrets used to suppress enemy invasions have recording functions. So Visca went to fiddle with the control core of that thing, hoping to see if its recording device could still retrieve anything. Because the scars on the starship wreckage's surface evidenced it endured fierce attacks prior to breaking apart, regardless if the enemy invaded the warship or not, the Guard Tower's recording device should have at least captured the last scene before the spaceship's disintegration. That's precisely something Sandora and I cared deeply about.

After inspecting the already completely destroyed recording device, Visca did something exactly fitting her 1.2-meter height, filled with childish innocence and reminiscent of my childhood when I almost scared Big Sister to death, in short, a very foolish act: she took a look hugging the Guard Tower's barrel.

And then that happened.

What was this silly girl thinking just now, hugging the Guard Tower to check its caliber, Visca's brain being this adorably odd is a bit too cute. Also, why does this scene feel familiar somehow, with a certain fool at 1.2 meters hugging some strange thing and then being smudged with black?

Of course, this shot didn't harm our little General. She just got startled and faced a slight blow to her self-esteem. Now Visca is still wiping her little face in grievance, her mouth pursed, looking on the verge of crying—not from being hurt, but because she felt completely embarrassed in front of her brother: although I thought this was simply explosively cute.

"Idiot."

Pandora walked beside, occasionally glancing at Visca's dirty little face, muttering two words, while I really couldn't bear it any longer. I took out a bottle of mineral water from the Personal Space and casually washed the cat-eyed Loli's face, restoring her original appearance — although there was still a tiny blackened spot, it was better than before. Speaking of which, should I be concerned about the face skin that not even a Guard Tower can penetrate…?

Due to the debris's fall direction and the distortion of the internal environment, we're actually walking on this corridor's wall now. It's completely overturned inside, with the original walls becoming the floor, and the ceiling becoming the walls. The road ahead extends into the deep darkness as if endlessly. Based on this environment, Visca judged the group is now on the longitudinal corridor of the Fourth Ghost Energy Acceleration Track. This corridor runs through the energy acceleration coil, at least two thousand meters long, and while lengthy, it leads straight to the control center of this cabin section. That place is the most solid part of this ship cabin section. If any place remains intact after the spaceship's breakdown due to attacks, it's only the control centers of various cabin sections.

The lighting and air pressure inside the corridor are fluctuating, seemingly due to energy shortages in the environmental control system. There might also be leaking nearby. The footsteps of the five people monotonously echo between the metal-cast walls, occasionally pausing when Visca checks whether the information nodes along the way can still connect to the debris's "Final Recorder" (something akin to a black box). However, it seems the spaceship's damage is indeed too severe; its data network is fragmented, completely unreliable.

But just as we prepared to abandon inspecting this corridor and proceeded directly to the control core, Qianqian, who had been curiously looking around, suddenly pointed to a dark corner beside the corridor and shouted: "Look over there! There's someone!"

"Where, where?" I hurriedly followed Qianqian's finger to look, and indeed saw the "person" she mentioned. Of course, in this situation, it should be called a corpse.

A corpse wearing what looks like a somewhat odd one-piece work suit, collapsed in a corner. The corners like this, we've already passed several along the way. They directly recess from the alloy walls of the corridor, just enough for two or three people to operate inside. These niche-like small spaces are control terminals monitoring the energy circuit's operational state. Most times, these terminals autonomously operate, but in emergencies, they can be manually operated to forcibly shut down the spaceship's power furnace. And the soldier collapsed here most likely is responsible for controlling the power cabin, but I noticed the clothes on that corpse are quite strange, a one-piece work suit? There's no such thing as that in Imperial Army Uniform.

With this curiosity and the sense of achievement from finally seeing a fallen soldier amidst this vast debris, we approached the corpse. He rested against a crystal panel that had darkened due to ceasing operation, his whole body oddly twisted, with a large pool of blood beneath him — not just blood, strictly speaking, half his body seemed to have turned into a tuft of matter, shattered limbs, and blood sprawled on the ground. His death was so gruesome that Qianqian almost instantly switched to a dark persona, to avoid an on-spot vomit.

Even I felt a bit nauseous, though I've weathered plenty of storms, this kind of death looked outright tragic.

"It's caused by the crash impact," Sandora's expression was remarkably calm; perhaps to her, a half-tuft corpse is really no different from a bowl of jellied tofu. "He might have tried stabilizing the power furnace's output, with half his hand still gripping the emergency stop switch."

"More importantly, this guy is not an Imperial Soldier."

Visca casually pointed at the corpse, turning the tufted matter into a pitch-black dust. "A carbon-based life."

I felt a hint of bafflement in the situation. Amid an Imperial Battleship wreckage, its Guard Tower attacked its original owner — this can perhaps be explained by turret control system malfunction, but why is there a carbon-based lifeform's corpse here?

"Let's go." Sandora glanced at the distorted alloy walls around and took the lead heading towards the control center.

Along the way, we discovered more corpses, one after another.

Just like the corpse encountered earlier, these unknown warship members wore coarse work suits not belonging to Imperial Army Uniform, collapsed in various control node operation rooms, both men and women, all sharing miserable deaths. After the battleship wreckage plummeted onto Mars' surface at several times the speed of sound, they all without exception shattered into nearly pulverized states under the impact. These individuals are carbon-based lifeforms, moreover, ones without Body Enhancement; their fragile bodies couldn't withstand such energy.

Pandora casually collected some samples of corpses along the way, performed a rough analysis, discovering that these crew members didn't die from the impact of the crash, but from a fierce Ghost Energy burst, the radiation source likely being the warship's energy pipeline, indicating they were already all dead when the warship exploded. Subsequently, the spaceship's wreckage, in an uncontrolled state, dropped into this world.

The previous three pieces of wreckage impacting the lunar surface merely took a "shortcut" and entered this universe a few days earlier.

"Why are they on my spaceship!"

The cat-like pupils of Visca flashed with an unstable red light, indicating that the little girl was not in a good mood. The Xyrin Apostle had an extremely sensitive reaction to the phrase "Empire's property," which was headache-inducing, and Visca, in particular, was extremely protective of her belongings. She absolutely couldn't accept that her warship was taken over by a group of unknown "carbon-based monkeys" (a term of mass mockery), even if it were a spaceship she no longer needed—and more importantly, those carbon-based monkeys had sunk the spaceship!!

So now, Visca's heart was filled with an irrational anger, which I found utterly unnecessary: you didn't want this spaceship anymore anyway, and it might have been floating junk in outer space for hundreds of thousands of years. How could you not allow people to occasionally find it?

Of course, that's just my worldview, totally incomparable to Visca's way of thinking. We all know Visca is a little bit out there in the head…

Additionally, I'm also curious, how could there be not a single Imperial Soldier on an Imperial Battleship? Its crew was entirely made up of these unknown carbon-based creatures. After Pandora examined their cells, she discovered that these "people" had genes very different from those of Earthlings, with different body structures, only similar in appearance. She also found basic elements in their cells that do not conform to the material list of our universe, indicating they came from an evolutionarily similar environment to Earth but were not natives of this universe. This matched our previous hypothesis that the spaceship crash-landed from another world.

"In front of us is the central control room of the propulsion section."

We stopped in front of a severely deformed heavy gate. Visca pointed at the door and turned her head, Pandora pressed a couple of buttons on the door's control panel, but after a burst of metallic noise, the door remained unmovable: it was jammed, mechanically jammed.

"The control center's self-destruct device is still operational. Luckily, we didn't forcefully cut through the outer armor earlier… How peculiar, if the self-destruct system is functioning, why didn't it explode upon crashing," Visca's eyes glimmered with starry light like a data stream. She reached for a cable exposed beside the gate, already connected to the control database inside the center, her gaze a bit puzzled, then she shook her head and confidently said, "I'll need to fix the door, it should take a few minutes."

The little girl spoke while her hands were already in motion, her index finger occasionally becoming a probe, occasionally transforming into a cutting light blade, moving swiftly. In less than ten seconds, she dismantled a large section beside the mechanically jammed door, revealing the messy power devices and unclear crystal structures inside, and then like a workshop foreman, she started biting the cables to work busily on…

The more I watched, the more incongruous it felt. A little loli of one meter twenty, a decisive killing by an Imperial General, now sitting on the floor like an old technician fixing the door access, you say does what she's doing have anything to do with her two attributes? Moreover, the technique doesn't seem to be inferior to those specialized Imperial Technicians or Autonomous Machines. What I viewed as an incredibly complex gateway power device, that could only be taken apart with a cannon shell, actually became a pile of parts scattered across the floor in her hands in no time.

And then she couldn't put it back together…

"Anyway, just take apart the jammed part," Visca said awkwardly scratching her head, "I'm not a technician… um, Sister Sandora, could you please help pry open the door? Now it won't trigger the self-destruct."

Sandora rolled her eyes upward, with a wave of her arm, she summoned her mighty claw again, which, on the battlefield, could strike terror in the hearts of foes but was now relegated to door-knocking duties. But to be fair, its efficiency was indeed noteworthy. The gate, made of indestructible interstellar alloy, obediently clattered down with a couple of pries and shoves from Sandora.

Visca stared dumbfoundedly at the door that had long turned into a decorative piece, pouting after a long pause: "Wahhh… I worked so hard to dismantle that!"

I scratched my head: "Why didn't we just give it a push earlier?"

Sandora casually rubbed her claw against the wall beside her, looking at us with a helpless expression: "Alright then, you have to expect some trouble when doing anything. I've gotten used to it by now."

"Also, bro, I have confirmed something as well," Visca defeatedly rubbed against my arm, "I'm afraid its self-destruct system also failed, we didn't have to be so cautious while entering."

I awkwardly whistled to the side and led the girls into the control center, barely avoiding a fall as I stepped inside.

"What's… going on with this…" I staggered and then steadied myself in the center hall, inclined nearly forty-five degrees with cracks and exposed piping all around, staring at the slanted walls and bloodstained control terminals, "almost tripped."

"The gravity system is still functioning," Sandora also wobbled before finding her footing, slightly embarrassed with a smile, "Unfortunately, it's not too normal. There are at least a hundred different direction and strength gravity fields distributed here, so be careful when walking, you might suddenly feel the world flip upside down, and the floor becomes the ceiling with just one step…"

"Like this, you mean?" A voice from Qianqian came from above and behind, I turned around to look, and there she was, standing head down on the ceiling not far from us, at a thirty-degree angle to my head. Remarkably, her skirt didn't reveal anything: because the gravity in her area was upward.

"I'll be darned, today's been quite an eye-opener." I muttered, clumsily making my way toward the control core. I have to admit, walking like this is quite awkward, even trickier than in a zero-gravity environment, as my reaction speed always seemed a tad late. Humans (I think?) somewhat lack the adaptability to the new environment compared to Sandora and Pandora, only Qianqian played gleefully bouncing around due to her ability to pause time, making gravity changes no issue for her at all.

The control center also had many gruesomely dead corpses, and due to the chaotic gravity here, they were shattered into fragments during the impact and seemed to cover all surrounding machinery, floor, and ceiling. Walking in such an environment, with flickering lights and persistent electrical sparks above and unsteady gravity below, made me feel like I was walking in Silent Hill. The only difference was that Silent Hill didn't have a silly girl carelessly bouncing on the ceiling. Qianqian was being quite a handful.

There still wasn't a single Xyrin Apostle's body, only those aliens from who knows where. With these corpses from which we had already collected samples, we didn't pay much more attention, yet, respecting the dead, I still had Visca cremate these bodies along the way, much like the ones in the hallway earlier. After all, being spread across over 500 square meters post-mortem is truly a painful experience.

"Voyage log… excellent, there's still an online database here!"

Visca suddenly exclaimed in delight, standing beside the central core in the hall. Before her was a large dim light ball, surrounded by a row of data terminals, from which she found what she was looking for.

Sandora and I exchanged glances, smiling simultaneously:

Not a wasted trip! (To be continued. If you enjoy this work, feel free to vote for it on Qidian (qidian.com) with recommendation and monthly tickets. Your support is my greatest motivation.)