"I know what you're talking about, and I'll take all the responsibility. Now, everyone's cheering up, we're going to get out of this hellish place! The Master Chief finally concluded their departure from the Ring with such a sentence, and after that, he asked Cortana to officially start the main engine. A few seconds later, a violent hull shake came.

Then, the Precursor spaceship they were on was like a chicken that broke out of its shell, shook open the structure around the hull and slowly flew into the sky. Naturally, their takeoff could not have been hidden, and the expedition team and the Star Alliance, which were still in the ring, observed this scene.

The expedition team that had already received their "prize" naturally did not say anything, but the Covenant troops who did not know the truth were confused. The Covenant's fleet wanted to intercept it, but some of the Covenant soldiers on the ground thought it was a "miracle" and began to kneel and pray.

This is not to say that the soldiers of the Covenant can't see that it was just a spaceship taking off, the problem is that the Covenant has never seen a Precursor ship take off before. This is because the Precursor ship operating system is only allowed to be used by the same clan.

Although the Star Covenant has unearthed many ships left behind by the Precursors, due to the mismatch of genetic information, they have never been able to drive the Forerunner ships out except for indirectly using the energy cores left behind by those ships.

Suddenly, seeing a Precursor spaceship take off in front of their eyes, many Covenant soldiers thought they had seen a living "Creator", so they had a situation of collective prayer. The Covenant fleet in space basically doesn't have this problem.

On the one hand, it is because they are more educated and less superstitious, and on the other hand, because they have the task of preventing the spread of the Zerg. Whatever craft leaves the ring, they must intercept and inspect it, or they will all be out of luck if the Zerg is allowed to spread.

And while the Covenant's fleet was busy chasing the Precursor ship. The people on the spaceship were also watching the Covenant's movements, after all, whether they could successfully escape or not would depend on the next few minutes.

"What about our enemies?" After the Master Chief saw the Star Covenant battleship icon displayed on the platform, he asked with a little concern.

According to 343 Spark of Sin, the ship they are now flying on is at least 100,000 years old, which is 1,000 times higher than the maximum service life of a UNSC ship.

Although the technological level of the Forerunner is much stronger than that of UNSC and Star Alliance. However, the ship's appearance when it took off just now shows that the ship is not in the best condition, and if they can't quickly get out of the Covenant's tracking after liftoff, they may eventually need to make a forced landing back to the ring to ask for the help of the expedition.

"They're catching up, but don't worry, our boat is cruising slightly faster and is expected to be ready to jump in a minute!" Cortana replied confidently. Even if it was a relic from 100,000 years ago, the performance of this Precursor ship was still slightly better than that of the Star Covenant's warships.

Although the Star Alliance has been reverse engineering for many years, the sub-light cruise speed of the self-built spacecraft has been similar to that of the ships left behind by the Forerunners, but due to the bottleneck of engine technology. It's still a little worse than the genuine Precursor spacecraft.

After a while, Cortana's prophecy was fulfilled, and before the Covenant fleet that was tasked with intercepting them could get closer, the Precursor ship they were aboard completed their transition preparations, opening a wormhole and taking them to other systems.

Fearing that they would be followed by the Covenant following the wormhole trail as they had come, they first jumped to a nearby unfamiliar galaxy. After making several jumps in a row to make sure they weren't tracked by the Covenant, they finally set their course for the solar system. Back to the UNSC.

And after their successful escape, the expedition's work on the ring belt had only just begun. Under Hargrave's direction. Shen Chao began to try to dig out the original database and energy core of this ring, and finally brought the supercomputer and energy core left behind in this ring back to study slowly.

This is an extremely ambitious and technically difficult project to implement. Because even a genius like Hargrave can't get around the defenses of the ring security system, and just by checking the data, he can find out where the devices are on the belt.

In fact, they could only find out the most energy-consuming underground areas in the ring zone through the energy trend map that Guò had already cracked on the control platform of the ring belt control room, and excavate and search in these areas bit by bit.

The journey to search for the energy core is smoother, after all. As an extremely large system, the energy consumed on the ring at any given moment is huge, and the pipelines used to transmit this energy are also huge, so it is easy to bring the expedition to one of the energy cores.

This power core has a slight appearance like the Elemental Zero core of the Mass Effect plane, but it is huge. With a diameter of nearly 4 km, it is completely fixed to the surrounding capsule and does not make any noise when operating.

After preliminary identification, this energy core is composed of some unknown man-made matter, and its operating principle is similar to that of the mass effect core, both of which can output a large amount of energy steadily. However, this energy core does not produce a mass effect field when it is running, and can only be used as a power source.

And because the output ratio is not very impressive. In addition, the volume is too huge, far beyond their initial imagination, and the difficulty of dismantling is also against the sky, and if one is not done well, there will be a big explosion, so in the end, Shen Chao gave up, and they turned to find the database.

To find the database, they'll have to use some special digging tools, because it's deep underground! The Forerunners also obviously took into account the factor of being damaged by external forces when creating the ring, and set up an armor layer nearly 1 km thick above the important hidden compartment on the ring!

Places like this have only one communication and energy supply line and no maintenance routes. Obviously, the forerunners were very confident in the quality of their work and did not worry about any accidental damage.

This makes them have no way to cut corners, only to honestly choose a good excavation point and try to dig down with various equipment. But it soon became clear that regular digging tools were largely useless here.

Excavation equipment that relies on physical drill bits is basically useless after chiseling through the soil and rock layers above, because the armor layer below is so hard that the drill bit does not penetrate much deeper. Only high-energy laser drills obtained from the 062 plane were able to dig, but the digging speed was still unsatisfactory.

At this rate, it is expected to take at least a week to dig to the depth they want, but the expedition is ready to withdraw from the ring within 24 hours. Although the Zerg in the ring belt is no longer a problem for them, the Star Covenant is still expanding its range of activities after all.

There has been a team in the reconnaissance mission due to too much cover and a team of senior scouts of the Star Alliance, although in the end the opponent team is all wiped out, but it will not take long for the Star Alliance to realize the existence of the expedition, if that happens, their disguise will not last, and there will inevitably be a large-scale conflict with the Star Alliance.

"All the methods that can be used have been used, time is tight, and you can only do it yourself." Hargrave shook his head and said to Shen Chao after looking at the latest excavation schedule. What he said meant by letting Shen Chao do it meant letting Shen Chao use the space-time gate's spatial fracture ability to forcibly disassemble the armor layer that hindered them to another plane.

The indestructible nature of the space-time gate was something they had known for a long time. Any item, except Shen Chao's own body, would be torn apart if it touched the edge on the way when it passed through the space-time gate, as if it had been cut off by an incomparably neat knife accurate to Planck's length.

This property of the space-time gate makes it also able to be used as a mining device, of course, since it must be operated by Shen Chao himself, so before, they really haven't used the space-time gate in a mission.

After making it clear that there was no other way, Shen Chao finally decided to go into battle in person, open a space-time door, and then carefully manipulate it to dig down. The armor that was "swallowed" by the space-time gate was in the form of a cylinder, and after being cut by the space-time gate, it eventually ended up in a research center in another dimension. If you look at the exit of the space-time gate of that plane, one will see cylindrical metal blocks falling out of the sky, smashing the ground and trembling.

Although the space-time gate can be said to be indestructible, Shenchao's personal "energy" is limited, and he can only dig down one by one, recovering the energy needed to open the space-time gate during the rest time. It took almost 8 hours to finally dig up the original number jù library they were looking for.

Similar to the Precursor relic on Zhiyuan, the core of the number jù library on the ring is also a large ball of light with numerous number of jù chains. Theoretically, this is a forerunner supercomputer.

For a long time, the Forerunners relied on the "Wisdom Domain" of their Creator Pioneer Zào as a tool for learning and large-scale computing, but after they turned against their Creator, the Wisdom gradually became unwelcome to them, and even deliberately provided false and useless information to the Pioneers who went to study.

After the outbreak of the war with the Flood Demons, the pioneers who lacked advanced computing power could only develop their own supercomputers for large-scale calculations.

The only advantage of this new computer over the intelligent domain is that it is not a product of neurotechnology, so it will not be extinguished by the rings after startup. The target of the HALO superweapon is a product of neurotechnology, so the database also uses this supercomputer. (To be continued......)