Chapter 1359: The Ultimate Exploration Team

Asalina was deeply awestruck by the endless sea of stars stretching across the vast expanse of space. Throughout the entire “observation pod” segment of their journey, her gaze barely left the view beyond the transparent polymer tube—the boundless starry sky outside. Even though the overwhelming spectacle sent a shiver of pressure through her on this first direct encounter with the cosmos, even though she felt as if she might fall right out of the tiny orbital cabin and plunge into the infinite darkness, she simply couldn’t tear her eyes away.

The stars seemed to possess a kind of magic, drawing every intelligent being who beheld them into their depths.

After a while, something else caught Asalina’s eye—floating in the distance, like a jewel sparkling under the starlight, was a metallic object gleaming brilliantly.

She recognized a Pioneer satellite drifting along a nearby orbit. Its metal shell still shimmered against the black backdrop of space, though patches of pockmarked scars from tiny meteorite impacts were visible along its edges. As a Dragonmark Witch who had never experienced the Pioneer era and was new to space, Asalina didn’t know what it was at first—but the word “Pioneer” immediately sprang to her mind, and her eyes widened.

“Ms. Cassandra!” she quickly turned to her temporary companion. “Look out there! That thing looks like… Ms. Cassandra? Are you okay?”

Asalina stared in surprise at the sea witch beside her. For the first time, she saw a complex expression on the usually carefree, cheerful face of this race. Cassandra gripped the nearby handrail tightly, her gaze fixed on the shining satellite and the even more imposing space structure beyond it. Yet her eyes seemed focused on something farther away—deep within the starry expanse, somewhere Asalina couldn’t comprehend. The sea witch’s tail tensed and coiled slowly, then relaxed bit by bit. Finally, she spoke in a low, murmuring voice: “Ah… they’re still up there in the sky…”

“Are you alright?” Asalina asked, a little shaken. “You look… like you’ve seen something before.”

Cassandra seemed to suddenly remember she wasn’t alone and turned back. “Sorry, I just recalled some things from the past… I lost my composure for a moment.”

“Things from the past?”

Cassandra gave a faint, complicated smile. “You know, we sea witches aren’t originally from this planet. Long, long ago, we were forced to crash-land here after an accident.”

“I’ve heard about that…” Asalina nodded thoughtfully. “The official ‘World Races Encyclopedia’ published by Cecil mentions it, and I’ve heard the local dragons in Talrond talk about it too.”

“When we fell from space back then, I saw these things,” Cassandra said softly, looking up at the starry sky beyond the polymer tube. “That was the last time I gazed out beyond the atmosphere… I never imagined the second time I’d see such a sight would be under these circumstances.”

Asalina opened her mouth but found no words. Then, a startling realization dawned on her, and she looked down at her feet. “Wait… we came from that tower… so that tall structure standing on the sea… it actually extends all the way into space?! The Pioneers really built something like that!?”

“If I’m not mistaken, that’s an orbital elevator,” Cassandra chuckled, explaining to the Dragonmark Witch. Though trapped on the planet’s surface now, her people had once roamed the stars, so many Pioneer relics were easy for her to imagine. “There should be two of these elevators. The other one is also on the equator—the very tower that High King Gawain Cecil once climbed.”

“Orbital… elevator?” Asalina repeated the unfamiliar, awkward term. “I’ve heard of ‘elevators’—Byron said Emperor Gawain liked to call the magical lifts inside large buildings that—but where would this ‘lift’ take us?”

“If my memory serves and my guess is right… it’s something even more astonishing than an orbital elevator,” Cassandra said thoughtfully. Then her eyes suddenly brightened as she looked outside the polymer tube. “Ah, yes! From this angle, you can see it—Asalina, look over there!”

Following the tip of Cassandra’s tail, Asalina’s eyes widened in shock and a wave of overwhelming pressure washed over her. She saw a massive, arc-shaped “landmass” hovering above the planet, encircling it with breathtaking grandeur. The endless steel ring was covered with complex structures and enormous modules whose purpose she couldn’t even guess or name. Within some transparent sections of the ring, clusters of buildings lay shrouded in dark silence, faint lights flickering and flowing between them. It looked like a mythical giant serpent coiled around the planet, slumbering for ages—and she was hurtling straight toward its belly.

Only now did she realize that the vague, colossal space structures she had glimpsed from afar were just part of this ring—and this ring was the “top end” of the tower rising from the sea.

“How is this possible…” Despite the shock, Asalina’s mind remained clear. “Something this huge circling our planet… no matter how far away, it should be visible. Yet for thousands of years, we’ve looked up at the sky…”

“Optical cloaking,” Cassandra shook her head. “Everything is invisible, probably to avoid interfering with the natural development of intelligent species on the planet’s surface. Just like the ‘authentication’ we went through entering the tower, all Pioneer relics have strict ‘security measures’… They seemed very concerned about ‘civilization developing normally.’ I think it’s almost a law etched into their very bones.”

Asalina blinked, about to say more, when the synthetic voice echoed again in her mind: “Cabin deceleration, approaching terminal station, guidance protocol activated… missing core process group, switching to default docking procedure…”

Accompanied by a series of unintelligible announcements, the floor beneath them trembled once more. The elevator cabin inside the transparent polymer tube rapidly slowed down. Moments later, a swiftly descending metal structure appeared outside the tube, blocking their view of the stars—they had entered the Skyward Station and were undergoing the docking process.

Asalina gripped the handrail nervously, fearing some malfunction in the ancient alien machinery. But in the end, everything proceeded smoothly. The elevator came to a halt, and the transparent protective walls around the cabin reverted to their silvery metallic sheen. After a few seconds, a faint humming sound came from nearby, and a wide “doorway” appeared in the silver wall, just like before.

Outside was an unfamiliar, spacious chamber. Dim lights and dusty corridors of the space station beckoned the two explorers inside.

“…Well, good thing I left my two sisters waiting below,” Cassandra exhaled, stepping forward while muttering, “No matter how powerful the magic network terminal is, it can’t reach this far…”

“You can still communicate with the two sea witches down there?” Asalina looked at her in surprise. “You sea witches can maintain psychic links over such distances?”

“It’s not psychic links, it’s psionic resonance—a racial gift,” Cassandra corrected seriously. “Our minds are ‘unified’ on a higher level, like how lower elements in the elemental plane are extensions of the plane itself. On the same planet, all sea witches can sense each other… Of course, distance affects the clarity. Here, I can’t communicate directly with my sisters on the surface, but at least we can sense each other’s presence and confirm we’re safe.”

“…That’s an enviable talent,” Asalina couldn’t help but say. “We Dragonmark Witches have a similar ‘resonance’ skill, but we can’t sense each other across such vast distances.”

Muttering to herself, she followed Cassandra’s lead, stepping cautiously into the ancient alien facility sealed off for 1.8 million years.

The first thing to greet her eyes was an immense hall—so vast it reminded her of the massive docks in North Harbor. A faint, dim light bathed everything, allowing her to barely make out the silent, colossal machinery and the dark, yawning entrances to corridors around the edges. Many passageways branched off from this hall, but all were cloaked in darkness.

Given this was the terminal station of the orbital elevator, the hall should have been a bustling transit hub. But after a million years, it was now empty and deathly silent.

“…Completely different from the surface,” Asalina murmured. “Down there, it’s still brightly lit…”

“Maybe space-based facilities are more prone to damage and decay in harsh environments. This place clearly isn’t in good shape,” Cassandra analyzed. “In theory, places like this should have automatic welcoming systems, especially since the design includes processes open to ‘native species.’ But we came all the way up and saw nothing activating… so it’s probably broken.”

“As long as the orbital elevator still works,” Asalina glanced back at the silver metal pillar standing in the hall’s center. The passenger doors remained open, as if waiting for visitors to return at any moment. “If this breaks, we really won’t get back…”

“I’m fine—I can die and be reborn in the planet’s seas. You’re in trouble. Jumping from this height toward the atmosphere? Forget the vast vacuum and radiation zones in between, the heat entering the atmosphere alone would be deadly. Even a dragon would probably die halfway down,” Cassandra said matter-of-factly, analyzing what sounded like madness to others. “But if it comes to that, I can try turning myself into a giant pufferfish. You hide inside me, and we jump together. I’ll try to hold on until the magical turbulence layer, then die. After I’m dead, you figure out how to slow down yourself—of course, that assumes we can find an airlock to get outside, and that it actually opens…”

The more Asalina heard, the more horrified she became. Finally, she stared wide-eyed at the sea witch, “Is this how you sea witches normally think?”

“Is something wrong?” Cassandra looked utterly baffled. “Does it sound unreasonable to you?”

“Unreasonable? No, no,” Asarena said with a tone of reluctant admiration. “…When it comes to courting death, you sirens are definitely on a whole other level…”

Suddenly, she felt that compared to these sirens who just wouldn’t die and kept pushing themselves to the brink, even those dragonborn brats who used to jump off Dragon’s Leap Cliff every day seemed as gentle and harmless as toddlers under three.

“Most of the systems here seem to be offline,” Cassandra said, paying no mind to what Asarena was thinking. She had already started exploring this ridiculously huge place on her own and now stood before a device that looked like some kind of control terminal. “Our arrival hasn’t triggered any response…”

“Which direction should we explore next?” Asarena followed her, asking the siren who, though she seemed unreliable, was at least a member of an ‘advanced civilization.’ “Should we try to find a corridor to go down?”

“…Better not wander too far right away,” Cassandra said seriously. “You can’t even imagine the scale of a ring-orbit space station. With just the two of us, expanding our search too much won’t mean much for the whole station. We might just get lost in those complex, now-defunct corridors. I suggest we start by thoroughly checking out this main hall—gravity here is normal, and the air is still circulating. That means at least the life support systems in this area are still running, so it’s relatively safe.”

Hearing the word “safe” from a siren who had just been seriously analyzing ways to die felt a bit strange, but Cassandra had to admit the logic was sound. She didn’t know much about space facilities or spaceflight, but it wasn’t hard to imagine how dangerous it would be if some sections of this massive “space station” went completely haywire—energy conduits leaking, toxic gases escaping, air circulation failing, or even a breach in the hull. Out here, far from any planetary shelter, even a mighty dragon was no different from a helpless rabbit.

Meanwhile, Cassandra had already circled the control terminal twice. After a moment’s thought, she stepped back a little and carefully poked the panel with the tip of her tail at a spot that seemed like an operational interface.

Asarena watched this unfold—her mind completely blank, unable to form any coherent thought.

Then, in the next instant, the surface of the terminal, which looked like it had been offline for years, suddenly lit up.

Cassandra’s voice rang out, sharp and clear:

“Deep sea, this thing is lighting up—ahhhhh!!!”

(End of chapter)