Chapter 246 | Swarm: I Became a Cataclysmic Disaster

“Knowledge about the warp engine?”

Adian was shocked to hear Celia's words.

“Do you think that makes any sense? A warp engine is not something that can be manufactured so easily. It is the pinnacle of ether engineering, a complete secret. That is why people like us could only barely get our hands on decommissioned, old warp engines and patch them up to use!”

“Whether it can be done is not for you to calculate. Nor is it my task.”

Celia scoffed at Adian's reaction, unbound him, and led him out of the nest.

Near the nest, their spaceship lay scattered on the ground in a miserable state.

Countless worker ants were inspecting every corner of the spaceship, storing its structure and information piece by piece into the hive mind.

“What do we do?”

“Look around. This area—no, the entire planet is crawling with monsters.”

Adian bit his lip tightly as he looked at the crew members he was reuniting with after several days.

“If we want to live, we have no choice but to do as they say.”

Adian and the surviving crew members had to find a way to deliver the information the Great Devourers wanted.

“First, let's see if the system still works!”

“No use. The Rum's main system is completely dead.”

They walked into the spaceship and began searching for anything useful.

Those who possessed relevant knowledge, such as the maintenance crew and navigators, had to do everything they could to tell Celia everything they knew.

“Ah, this is...!”

Just then, Adian discovered a file within the Rum's main system, which had barely recovered thanks to emergency power.

This massive file was a blueprint stored from back when the Rum was still a military vessel. It contained not only basic ether mechanism information but also the blueprint for the Rum's warp engine, which was now considered obsolete.

“But how are we supposed to... with something so difficult and complex?”

Vice Captain Ryan looked at the file, then at the worker ant beside him whose antennae were constantly twitching.

Even experts in their respective fields could not decipher and analyze such highly complex technology without the assistance of a sophisticated artificial intelligence.

They doubted whether the Great Devourers could understand it even if they saw it.

“Since they seem so confident, let's just give it to them.”

But Adian, unlike the other crew members, had conversed deeply with Celia for a long time. He put the file away with a serious expression.

In truth, if the Great Devourers' power were only as they had predicted, none of this would have happened in the first place.

Adian thought to himself that the Great Devourers, who had been completely helpless against them not long ago, had ultimately chased them into space and defeated them. At this point, all assumptions and predictions had become utterly meaningless.

Of course, even with that in mind, he still could not believe that the Great Devourers could actually achieve anything significant with just these fragmented technologies.

“This is the new knowledge.”

A massive wave surged into the hive mind.

It was a torrent of knowledge.

Of course, at this point in time, the hive mind had already grown to a colossal scale shared by billions of individuals, so it could easily withstand the massive torrent currently rushing in.

As a result, Elise replicated the information within the massive file in an extremely short period of time and stored it in the hive mind.

However, merely memorizing and storing was the least efficient way to utilize knowledge.

Having obtained what she wanted, Elise was highly satisfied and began to parse and analyze the knowledge.

This was undoubtedly an extremely difficult task.

It was like trying to translate a thick book in a foreign language using only a very thin vocabulary booklet.

Putting aside how much of a headache it was, it was, above all, an extremely time-consuming endeavor.

However, Elise mobilized every part of the colony that could be considered a brain to perform this task, including her own auxiliary brain, which looked as large as a soccer ball to Lin Miao, and Gaia's massive body, which was composed of brain cells.

“Using psionic energy, conduct ether synthesis experiments.”

If there was anything they did not understand, they would find out directly through experimentation.

Upon realizing that ether engineering emphasized energy resonance, the Great Devourers immediately used Gaia as the center to conduct hundreds of experiments simultaneously on three planets, attempting to find the most efficient resonance point.

“There is a compatibility formula for ether. It is speculated that the content of this formula is similar to psionic energy in structure and flow.”

They made full use of their existing information to make inferences and immediately verified the results.

“What on earth is this concept of ether phase maintenance?”

“That's actually quite famous...”

If they really could not resolve a problem, Celia would step in personally to interrogate the prisoners, squeezing out all the information they knew.

Having even gained control of three worlds, all the knowledge and information acquired during the process could be immediately accessed. The entire colony had only a single goal and poured all its efforts into it, without a single trace of inefficiency.

“This is insane... It's simply impossible.”

With disbelief written all over his face, Adian approached the massive, wriggling biological tissue at the center of the nest.

It was by no means a machine.

The thing looked like a massive black sporangium, beating like a living heart, with countless tentacle-like antennae searching the surrounding air and senses.

Only the residual heat generated by the psionic energy echoed through the space, flowing in a form similar to ether, and occasionally capturing some harmonics.

This biological organ, named the Phase Resonance Core, was a new type of engine they had created for themselves.

“Just what is your true identity?”

Adian muttered blankly to himself as he slumped to the ground, realizing that those regular harmonic traces were something only a true ether engine could emit.

He had personally experienced, if only a fraction of it, the overwhelming drive and capacity for learning hidden beneath the dense, terrifying, and primitive monstrous forms around them.

“We are the Great Devourers, servants who serve the Great One,” Celia said calmly, looking down at Adian with her back to the organ.

Adian instinctively felt that this name was already a detestable group of monsters to certain factions.

And now, it would spread even further using the technology extracted from them.

Ether, a new energy.

Lin Miao judged that the most valuable part of the technology obtained this time was this new type of energy.

At first, he had set his sights on warp engines and space navigation technology, but the source of these technologies ultimately lay in another form of energy.

To acquire the desired technology, they first had to master the concept of this new energy.

“I believe it is completely different from magic power or holy power, yet its root is a similar force,” Celia remarked after learning a portion of the knowledge regarding ether.

It was similar to magic power or how other civilizations processed and utilized source energy.

However, compared to other forces, ether relied more on mechanical power rather than biological power, which was why it was widely used in mechanical civilizations.

“When psionic energy combines with source energy, we can make an even greater leap.”

Elise's eyes gleamed.

When they could embrace and harness the energy extractable from existing physical systems, as well as the source energy represented by metaphysics.

Only then could the colony's civilization cross the dimensional barriers and step into a higher stage of ruling multiple worlds.

That is correct.

Lin Miao nodded. Elise's speculation aligned perfectly with the evaluation criteria established by the gods on the Divine Net forum, even though he had not explicitly informed her.

Factions commonly referred to as higher civilizations were entities capable of combining two types of energy and developing them to their limits.

Yet, even such higher civilizations might possess some technology regarding source energy, but they could usually only harness one type of energy.

Generally speaking, different types of energy could not be fused with one another.

A priest wielding holy power could not imitate the magic of a mage wielding magic power.

However, it was Lin Miao's Great Devourers that broke this law.

Since their time as microscopic organisms, they had preyed upon their opponents' energy regardless of its type, developing this instinctive ability into their unique power—psionic energy—which could replicate and mimic any form of energy.

“That is your unique power. I believe our destiny depends on how and to what extent we can harness it.”

Lin Miao handed down an oracle, emphasizing that this was the key.

From awakening to growth, all of their processes were extraordinarily abnormal, and they would undoubtedly become another danger threatening the order maintained by the Divine Net, entirely distinct from the Outer Gods.

Thus, Lin Miao decided to view this power as a form of compensation, bestowed to combat the numerous gods who would inevitably be hostile toward those who disrupted the order.

“Consider how we assimilated the surviving humans as servants of the colony and extracted holy power from them to utilize.

If not for the holy cores created by mimicking holy power, the Hive Motherships and Brood Lords would never have been born.

Every time we convert a new source energy into our own power, we can harness it with an efficiency several times higher than others.”

Celia was deeply moved upon receiving Lin Miao's oracle and emphasized that Elise should invest more resources into organizing and strengthening the colony's energy system.

Elise did not deny her words either.

They were indeed the weaker party.

The Great Devourers were a newly born, rising faction and race, whereas those who wished to oppose them were powerhouses that had grown strong by ruling numerous worlds and mining massive amounts of resources over countless years.