The miniature Celestial Orrery's first test appeared to have gone well.
Its effective range was also much greater than Kain had initially imagined.
At first, he had assumed it would need to be brought into the target star system. In reality, a star could still be remotely destroyed from as far as one hundred light-years outside its system.
The absolute limit was probably around one hundred and fifty light-years.
This roughly five-hundred-light-year region of space, which contained both star systems, was somewhat unusual.
If Kain had to compare it to one of the mysterious locations known to twenty-first-century humanity, it resembled Earth's Bermuda Triangle. The entire region was difficult to locate, almost as though it had been sealed behind glass.
The Astartes had only managed to enter and find him because he had transmitted a signal from within.
However, the difficulty of detecting this isolated region was not its strangest feature.
The space inside seemed to be covered by something similar to the Tyranids' Shadow in the Warp. Daemons appeared to be trapped within the Warp, unable to emerge or even sense what was happening in realspace.
There was another peculiarity.
The system that had just gone supernova and the system where Kain currently sat formed two opposite extremes, like the yin and yang of the same whole.
The positive side was the star system Kain currently occupied. The humans living here possessed exceptionally faint reflections in the Warp.
The special individuals whom the locals claimed could identify disguised xenos heretics were actually Untouchables.
This world appeared to produce Untouchables relatively easily.
If they had not been massacred, and if this world had never been invaded, there might have been more than one hundred thousand Untouchables living here.
Now, only a little over three thousand remained.
The reason Untouchables were born so frequently here was precisely because the connection between this star system and the Warp was unusually weak.
In other words, the barrier separating the Warp from realspace in this system was exceptionally thick.
The system that had just gone supernova represented the opposite extreme.
That was why the xenos were especially sensitive to the Untouchables here and found their presence so unbearable.
Whenever Kain activated his Untouchable field, those xenos reacted particularly violently.
Although they did not appear to meet the Imperium's standards for psykers, they still possessed a tiny amount of psychic power that made them slightly stronger.
Only slightly.
A normal psyker might conjure a fireball capable of burning someone to charcoal. These creatures could produce little more than the flame from a cigarette lighter.
Ultimately, their understanding and development of psychic power were extremely primitive.
The reason they had not attracted the attention of daemons was probably the Shadow in the Warp-like phenomenon covering this region.
Now that the heretical xenos civilization had been destroyed by the supernova, Kain did not know how severely the explosion would affect this area of space.
Hopefully, it would not dispel the Shadow in the Warp-like effect and destabilize the two opposing regions.
If the phenomenon remained intact, this would be an excellent location.
One star system could be used to cultivate Untouchables, while the other could be used to train psykers.
The supernova had destroyed the habitable planets in the other system, but that did not mean they could not be restored.
In fact, the technology required to repair a planet was sitting directly in front of Kain.
The greatest prize recovered from this archaeological expedition was the metal sphere before him, which measured more than fifty meters in diameter.
It was a Planetary Restoration Device!
More importantly, the object itself was a complete, fully functional STC!
It was nothing like the computer boards containing fragmentary data he had recovered in the past, which still needed to be connected to countless external components.
Once activated, this STC could independently manufacture Planetary Restoration Devices.
Of course, it could not repair every planet.
If a planet had been completely destroyed and shattered into pieces, there was obviously nothing left to restore.
When it was not engaged in planetary restoration, the device could be used to manufacture another Planetary Restoration Device.
It was essentially an egg capable of producing another egg.
However, manufacturing one required a tremendous amount of time.
Using the resources available within an ordinary star system, it would take approximately one hundred years to construct a new device.
That estimate assumed the machine had to build everything autonomously. If outside forces gathered resources from other star systems and delivered them here, the manufacturing process could be accelerated.
Kain was currently downloading the Planetary Restoration Device's technology into a general-purpose STC drive.
As the download continued, he browsed through the technical files.
There was far too much information for him to read in full.
It was like being handed a novel containing tens of millions of words. For now, he could only skim the table of contents.
Whenever he found an interesting heading, he opened the corresponding file and examined it more closely.
Hmm?
One entry made Kain frown slightly.
Manufacturing this device required one particularly important substance: G-Element.
As he continued browsing, another branch of technology caught his attention.
Nanotechnology.
The Imperium possessed nanotechnology. So did the SEED world and the Fleet of Fog world.
However, merely possessing nanotechnology meant very little. What mattered was what that technology could actually accomplish.
In the SEED world, nanomachines were primarily used to assist with adjustments to human genes.
In the Fleet of Fog world, microscopic nanomaterials appeared capable of assembling themselves into virtually any form of matter.
The nanomaterials from those two worlds differed enormously in both purpose and capability.
So what could the nanotechnology used by the Planetary Restoration Device accomplish?
The more Kain read, the more it appeared to rival or even surpass the nanotechnology of the Fleet of Fog world.
He had not finished examining the technical data, but the primary difference between the two systems seemed to be the strength of their nanomaterials.
Put simply, it was the difference between iron and steel.
The Fleet of Fog world's nanotechnology was iron.
The nanotechnology used by the Planetary Restoration Device was steel.
This was becoming troublesome.
The STC drive did not have enough storage capacity.
Kain would have to choose which technologies to download, and the nanomaterial technology was unquestionably one of them.
Suddenly remembering something, Kain sent his consciousness into the Transdimensional Channel.
After returning from Lacus's world, he had immediately departed for this location to excavate the STC.
He had destroyed the enemy warships in orbit, landed on the planet, and eliminated several hunting teams before remembering that he had forgotten to activate the livestream.
Even if none of the members were online, he still needed to broadcast everything so the footage would be recorded.
Kain checked his Energy Coin balance.
He had spent almost everything during his visit to Lacus's world. Nearly two thousand Energy Coins had drained his savings to fewer than one hundred.
Now, his balance had returned to four digits.
He currently possessed 2,981 Energy Coins.
Lacus had transferred 2,700 of them to him. The remaining two hundred or so appeared to be livestream earnings accumulated over this short period.
They probably had not come from the stream he had just started. Kain initially assumed they were delayed earnings settled by Kuroneko.
When he traveled to Lacus's world, time in his own world had paused, so the earnings generated on Kuroneko's side had stopped being distributed to him. Once he returned, Kuroneko would have needed to come online and manually confirm the settlement.
No, that was wrong.
These earnings had not been settled by Kuroneko.
The settlements had come from two members named Whispered and Martian.
Kain turned his attention to the livestream comments.
It appeared that two more members had joined while he was broadcasting.
The first used the ID My Sister Is the Cutest.
The name alone offered almost no clue to the person's identity.
This person had flooded the chat with so many messages that she seemed to be using the comment section as a personal blackboard.
Among that vast amount of text, however, Kain quickly noticed a crucial phrase.
[District 13]
With that clue, he could roughly guess the identity of the person behind the username My Sister Is the Cutest.
The other new member had not posted a single message.
Their ID was The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter.
(End of Chapter)
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