Elder Cultivator

Chapter 1195

Chapter 1195

Chief Engineer Uzun was peacefully working in his lab when Catarina came up to him. He figured he was about to receive a fantastic revelation of some sort.

“How much work would it take to create a black hole?”

As it turned out, it was the other scenario where she casually suggested an impossibility. On the other hand, they’d been successful with a number of those impossibilities throughout the ages so... it wasn’t a waste to hear her out.

“What would you do with a black hole?”

“Dump our enemies into it,” Catarina said with great seriousness.

“That’s...” Uzun didn’t know quite what to say. A massive waste of resources? Dangerous? Both were certainly true. “A bit extreme.”

“How so?” Catarina said. “They wanted to utterly annihilate us. We should do the same to anyone who comes here. If they dare to move again.”

Uzun thought very seriously. “Assuming we could form one, a black hole would destabilize the energy flow of the entire spatial distortion.”

Catarina moved to look at what he was working on- the next generation of pure tech ships. “No more than adding or removing a single star,” she countered. “And we’re going to keep doing that. Actually, I think we’ve already done too much.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re too... centralized. We had to be,” Catarina said. “We couldn’t have defended two or three fronts. But in the future... we need options.”

“I’m not quite sure where you’re going,” Uzun admitted.

“Teleportation is great,” Catarina commented. “But our current methods don’t work for anything beyond a certain size.”

Uzun shrugged. “Even if the platforms were bigger, the energy costs would strain the stars.”

“That’s why we need black holes.”

“I thought they were to dump enemies into? Also, you never mentioned multiple black holes.”

“We’ll need more, if we’re splitting up into different sectors.”

Uzun sighed. “I feel like you’ve skipped a number of steps. Such as the part where anyone knows what your ideas are or agrees to them.”

Catarina rolled her eyes. “Obviously I wasn’t just going to implement things on my own. Anyway... we need to split up the spatial distortion. The border planets are... too isolated. Having the option to constrain invading groups into different areas might be optimal as well. Though I’m not sure if this time, we would have done anything different since the clashing of various groups was all that allowed us to slip by.”

Uzun nodded slowly. “Explain to me like you would the whole council. Not the technical details.”

“We split things up into regions. Each has their own spatial distortions and rules about where people end up. Adjustable. Combinable.”

“We don’t have the ability.”

The briar patch was angry, hungry, and extremely energetic. And also, maybe, a bit curious. A bit foreign to the concept of words, though. Anton got the feeling it was trying to say something, but didn’t realize that there were set forms for things. Though... perhaps if they needed some curse words they could adopt some of the mannerisms involved.

Bear Hug was more than chill enough for both of them. Even as they introduced themselves. “You are a briar patch. Sharp and poky plant with cutty bits. I am Bear Hug.”

The name Bear Hug was also the action bear hug. While it did not conform to the human body structure, Bear Hug managed to wrap around a lot of the briar patch in an outwardly aggressive but inwardly very friendly manner. Anton had said it was better to be conservative in approach, but Bear Hug wasn’t that sort.

The briar patch tried to split Bear Hug from the inside out. Slowly, it was allowed to wriggle out... but the message might have ultimately been transmitted. It wasn’t actually an attack, or something more would have happened to the briar patch. It hesitated for a moment, then ran.

Bear Hug had the good sense to not immediately chase. Instead, they wandered over to Anton. “They’re not very good at being friends.”

“Yeah. Seems so,” Anton agreed. “I’ll help you catch up later, after there’s been some time to think.”

“Was I scary?”

“A little,” Anton said. “You’re strong now. Strong is scary.”

“You’re not scary.”

“But I probably was, when you didn’t know me. That’s why you didn’t do anything for the whole time I was sitting around.”

“I forgot. You were scary.” Bear Hug stared off into the distance. “We will be friends. I’m certain. They didn’t even remember to eat those trees.”

-----

Velvet had all sorts of plans. Or at least, parts of plans. None of them were exactly going on a diplomatic mission to the Chaotic Conglomeration, but it wasn’t against her plans. She’d certainly wanted to visit.

There were rumors- by which she meant random plans from Catarina that may or may not become something in the future- that they wouldn’t always need to go around through the lower realms. Currently, however, it was safer and nearly as quick. The Scarlet Alliance wasn’t interested in stirring up more hornet’s nests of political friction right now, so circumventing the Exalted Quadrant entirely was best.

The strangest part of the journey was the in between. Neither the upper nor lower realms. A place without energy, or at least extremely low. It seemed upper and lower energy decayed rapidly around each other, or at least that was one explanation why the area wasn’t simply a mix of both.

The first time, on her way to the lower realms, Velvet didn’t think about it too much. It was a weird thing she’d experienced a few times, and that was all. But she had a period of weeks on the way back to the upper realms where it was either think about that or her actual mission.

So of course her mind drifted to nothingness. It was strange to focus so much on a lack of anything, but it wouldn’t be the first time. She was a stealth specialist, after all. Not being seen or sensed. It made it difficult to come up with an anchor. Ratna had one, though. Presumably. She hadn’t looked too hard because that would certainly seem like an official indicator that the Scarlet Alliance wanted to kill Ratna, which wouldn’t have been a great move with their one future ally in the Trigold Cluster.

It seemed to Velvet that the best thing to turn into her anchor was nothing at all. There were just a million small problems with that. Like the fact that if she actually succeeded, her anchor might just not exist. Or that it would be accessible from everywhere. Could people destroy nothing? Certainly, if it was an anchor she should expect to be attacked through it.

Maybe she should just bond to that black hole Catarina was going to make. That woman was talking a lot about how certain stars weren’t really ‘necessary’ anymore. Black holes were supposed to be a lot like nothing, right? However, aside from theoretical knowledge, Velvet didn’t actually know much about them. She hadn’t visited one. She didn’t know any cultivators that had, actually. There weren’t a ton of them strewn about inside the galaxy.

She thought there was one somewhere in Chaotic Conglomeration territory. A few hundred lightyears deep, at minimum. The twins could confirm that. The next closest one should be in the lower realms, which was not very close at all. Thousands of lightyears.

Black holes weren’t nothing though. They were in fact a whole lot of something, and despite the fact that they didn’t let anything leave, they also weren’t exactly secretive. Maybe not good for stealth after all.