Chapter 107: Unknown Effect

The moment the supply pipeline reopened, the elemental tree flared with an eager resonance, devouring the incoming wood energy as if declaring that its appetite would remain bottomless no matter how much was provided.

In short order, another forty million crystals were consumed, pushing the tree's height up to one hundred and five meters. Keon watched intently as the remaining sixty million wood crystals were fed into the domain. A violent surge of emerald light washed across the trunk, and with a deep, resonant rumble, the tree shattered the hundred and twenty meter threshold and halted at one hundred and twenty six meters.

Three new main branches ruptured from the upper section of the trunk, bringing the total to twelve primary main branches, with each main branch now bearing twelve fully formed sub-branches.

‘It still hasn't reached its advanced final growth stage,’ Keon concluded, evaluating the tree's structural density and energy throughput. ‘Though it has definitely reached its full potential. Probably, the wood crystal has an unknown effect on plants, which I haven’t yet explored.’

His gaze shifted downward, penetrating beneath the surface as a subterranean seismic map rendered through his visual HUD. The root system of the elemental tree underground was staggering: it had now expanded across a radius of ten thousand meters, forming a vast, interconnected network that tapped into and fused with every single native plant species within ten kilometers.

Simultaneously, Keon registered an extraordinary shift in the environmental telemetry. As the elemental tree reached this pivotal growth milestone, the local Ether concentration spiked to an unimaginable degree.

‘This magic energy concentration is a thousand... or even ten thousand times higher than the specialized greenhouses I constructed for temporary Ether-generating plants,’ Keon calculated, his processors momentarily spiking at the sheer scale.

A holographic projection materialized before him, displaying real-time visual feeds from the storage warehouses situated nearby. Keon's gaze settled on the stacks of magic energy crystals held inside. Rows of yellow, green, and blue magic crystals were shimmering with an intense, reactive brilliance. Most strikingly, in warehouses where no Tier 4 orange magic crystals had previously existed, several orange crystals had appeared... just a single hour after the elemental tree began its accelerated growth cycle.

Keon’s green pupils narrowed, his expression growing profoundly deep. Although raw Ether particles were invisible to standard visual spectrums, he could easily infer and measure their overwhelming environmental effects. Standing on the rooftop, He felt a cold, calculating awe at the terrifying, horror-filled Ether generation speed of the Elemental Tree at this stage of its evolution.

‘This ether generation speed is really terrifying, I have to do something to contain it in the planet's atmosphere and avoid it from spilling out into space. Anyway, for now that the wood element crystal stock is exhausted, I should focus on something else,’ Keon thought, tearing his gaze away from the monumental, hundred-meter canopy of the Elemental Tree.

He ignored the surging, luminescent waves of raw Ether saturating the atmosphere around the tree and pivoted his attention toward another priority task. While he had been engrossed in tracking the growth curves and biological domain expansion of the tree, a quiet chime from the Neural Nexus notified him of a breakthrough on UHS2.

His subterranean drilling drones, having successfully navigated through thousands of kilometers of crushing iron-silicate crust and dense post-perovskite mantle, had finally breached the core-mantle boundary and reached the four-percent unknown active material. The swarms of micrometer nano-mainframes had completed a full, atomic-scale analysis of its structural grid and fundamental properties.

A detailed holographic projection materialized before his visual sensors, displaying a cascading schematic of atomic structures... a precise, complex arrangement of protons, neutrons, and electrons dancing across the quantum interface.

Keon scrutinized the subatomic telemetry, his optical lenses adjusting to parse the lattice matrix. ‘A Tier 2 material?’ he noted, a faint ripple of disappointment passing through his analytical core.

The physical characteristics and bonding energies closely mirrored the Tier 2 synthetic alloys he had already mass-produced during earlier expansion phases.

‘Although it is useless to me at this current stage of development, it can easily be synthesized later if the need arises,’

Keon reasoned, dismissing the holographic overlay with a swift thought. His ambitions were already set far higher. ‘I am already planning to research next-generation materials... a Tier 5 or even Tier 6 hyper-dense alloy capable of housing higher-order elemental cascades.’

Clearing his visual interface, Keon turned his gaze upward toward the void. His consciousness expanded into orbit, issuing an immediate, high-priority command to the fleet ships currently stationed in high orbit around UHS2. It was time to upgrade the existing fleet, transforming the dormant vessels into advanced elemental recon and transit ships modeled after the revolutionary architecture of the NARS-Probe.

The moment the directive registered across the Neural Nexus, the autonomous industrial network on the surface of UHS2 sprang into coordinated action. Swarms of square logistical drones reconfigured into high-speed mining arrays, descending rapidly upon the vast quartz dunes and iron-silicate deposits scattered across the golden-brown continents.

Huge quantities of raw quartz were extracted in continuous streams, processed on site, and rapidly synthesized into dedicated elemental crystals of light, flame, wind, and lightning.

The physical refitting of the ships required no external shipyard; Keon’s micrometer nano-mainframe swarms could manipulate and restructure physical matter down to the atomic level in moments. The primary bottleneck had been the raw crystal catalysts, and with bulk quartz processing underway, that limitation vanished.

High-capacity transport drones shuttled the newly synthesized elemental crystals into high planetary orbit, transferring massive stockpiles into the hulls of the orbital vessels.

In a matter of moments, the orbital silhouette of UHS2 transformed.

Where a fragmented cluster of older spaceships once orbited, three colossal vessels now hovered quietly in the vacuum of space. Each ship was a gargantuan, thousand-kilometer elongated spheroid... a scaled-up, terrifyingly powerful evolution of the sleek NARS-Probe. Every internal system, sensor array, and elemental reactor matrix had been expanded to megastructure proportions.

As raw starlight struck the polished, shifting hulls of these mammoth vessels, their internal Siphon Flame-Lightning Pulse Reactors hummed to life in perfect unison. A massive toroidal electromagnetic field ignited around each vessel, expanding instantly to blanket a radius of over a million kilometers.

Simultaneously, the bow and stern of each ship shifted. Precision nano-mainframes parted the frontal and rear armor plates, exposing a massive, cavernous intake channel running directly through the heart of the ship from front to back.

The bow's magnetic ram-funnel activated, drawing in ambient interstellar gas, unrefined cosmic hydrogen, and space dust scattered across the orbital sector.

Driven by electromagnetic induction, these raw cosmic elements spiraled into the frontal siphon intake at hyper-velocity, where the internal Flame and Wind Crystal matrices instantly compressed and flash-melted them into super-heated plasma. Fired in continuous, violent streams from the stern propulsion nodes, the plasma thrusters propelled the thousand-kilometer behemoths forward into three distinct direction.

Fully loaded with massive reserves of elemental crystals, the three titan vessels accelerated smoothly into deep space.

Their primary directive: intercept Keon's previously deployed fleets crawling through the star system at less than a thousand kilometers per second, forcibly upgrade and transform those older ships into NARS-style elemental vessels, and launch them onward to survey, analyze, and secure the remaining planets of the star system at unprecedented relativistic speeds.

In under an hour, the three titan vessels reached their maximum output, locking into a staggering velocity of 250,000 kilometers per second. Leaving shimmering, white-hot trails of plasma across the void, they traversed millions of kilometers of deep space, effortlessly catching up to the older, slow-moving fleets crawling through the system.

Upon interception, swarms of micrometer nano-mainframes flooded out from the titan ships in dense, shimmering clouds. Working with sub-atomic precision, the nanites dismantled and reconfigured the hulls of the older vessels, integrating the newly synthesized elemental crystal cores and expanding their intake cascades.

In a matter of minutes, each intercepted fleet was upgraded and multiplied into three distinct sets of NARS-style elemental ships. Their reactors ignited in unison, and the newly retrofitted formations scattered across calculated vectors, sweeping out toward every corner of the star system.

Keon, observing and directing the entire complex operation through the Neural Nexus, felt the satisfaction of total logistical control. Once the ships locked onto their assigned planetary targets, he calmly retracted his consciousness from the orbital feed, returning to his primary exoshell on UHS1.

His optical sensors adjusted as he stood atop the high observation terrace of his Eastern Base, gazing up into the vast, open sky.

‘Looks like development has accelerated,’ Keon mused, his internal logic loops computing the exponential decrease in surveying time. ‘Once I analyze all the planets in this star system and ascertain their exact resource profiles, I will begin my next phase... the Great Merging Plan.’

He slowly lowered his gaze, his optical lenses focusing on the horizon where the colossal, hundred-meter canopy of the Elemental Tree dominated the landscape, radiating luminescent waves of pure Ether into the atmosphere.

‘In order to successfully evolve it into a World Tree, I have come up with such a plan,’ Keon thought, a sharp, cold determination flickering deep within his pupil. ‘I hope it works.’

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