The threshold of the Inner Genesis Cathedral opened onto a realm of huge, nightmarish scale.
Spanning four hundred meters from portal to altar, the cathedral was an underground tiered arena hollowed out from the fiery core of the Bermuda atoll at negative five thousand meters. Overhead, the ceiling vaulted eighty meters into the darkness, supported by stone-hard giant beast ribs that came together like gothic arches. Suspended at the center of the dome hung the work-yard’s main power source. An heavy-duty cold-fusion reactor wrapped in a ball-shaped invisible bubble thirty meters wide, pulsing with an angry, blinding violet bright glare that cast harsh, swaying shadows across the black flat stone slabs.
The surrounding heat hovered at a boiling hot one hundred and eighty-five degrees, thick with the stench of boiling transformer coolant, ozone, and rotting living decay. Heavy water drops dripped from the ceiling beams, sizzling wildly as it struck the glowing metal channels that snaked across the floor like tangled black serpents. Every channel came together toward the far end of the safe hall—toward the High Altar of Genesis.
The sheer spatial scale of the Inner Genesis Cathedral was breathtaking in its stone-built depravity. Carved out during the height of the Order’s underground spreading seventy years ago, the dome spanned over three hundred meters of unsupported dark rock bedrock, held in place only by massive silver-steel tie-rods and the stone-hard skeletal arches of deep-sea monsters.
