The Martial Unity

Chapter 4337: Extracting Information

While Ria patiently awaited the Stellarch to complete its scan of the target infected world, her father found himself growing more and more immersed in the frozen mind of Divine Mother o-o-o-o.

He sat on the ground in the secret laboratory, with the crystal containing the Divine Mother’s body lying flat on the ground on his lap. His fingers were pressed against the side of her head outside the crystal while his ethereal eyes gazed straight down at her six eyes, frozen in time.

He had lost track of time, for there wasn’t a single window that let sunlight into the lab, with the bland artificial ceiling lights illuminating the room statically. He poured all of his senses and his attention towards the crystal, trying to gather as much information as he could from the temporarily frozen Divine Mother nearly every waking moment of his time.

Over the past three months, Rui had spent most of his time on the Divine Mother. It was the best that he could do for his civilization with his power and time, more than anything else. The rest of his time was spent on the most crucial parts of his duties that couldn’t be delegated away and on ensuring the crushing defeat of the Blood Cult in its revolt against human civilization.

What should have been a pyrrhic victory was turned into a smooth, domineering win that ended in a week. The Gaian Alliance utterly dominated the Blood Cult with such ease that it sent a chilling effect across every single organization in the world that had regarded it as unable to enforce its laws, however liberal they were, if push came to shove.

Organizations that routinely operated in the black market and the criminal froze like rats trying to stay as still so as to avoid being detected by passing serpents. While organizations that operated in the gray immediately moved back to the white in terror. Even states and organizations that had done nothing wrong aggressively checked their legal liability against Interstellar Law as established by the Gaian Alliance.

Of course, for Rui, it had been a chore. He did what was needed to stabilize human civilization with his power and then immediately returned to more productive applications of his time.

Namely, extracting precious and priceless intelligence from the neural web of the Divine Mother and documenting it.

”And the territory of the Hellion Clans ends here...” he muttered, marking three-dimensional territory on a hologram star map that featured the Orion Star Strand. ”And with that...”

His ethereal eyes turned towards Orion Star Strand with a glance of satisfaction. ”...I have gotten a good picture of the Orion Star Strand and the territories of advanced civilizations within it.”

It was one of the highest priorities after gathering intelligence on the Homoarachnoid Web Civilization and the threat that it posed to human civilization. What he had learned was more concerning than he had initially estimated from a preliminary scan of the Divine Mother’s head.

It wasn’t easy digging up memories from the Divine Mother’s mind, even for him. Because she was of a different species and a highly divergent member of her own species, he couldn’t just randomly start decoding her mind.

It was like trying to learn an unknown language.

Without some kind of cipher or translation base to begin decrypting what all of it means, there was no way to get started.

Thankfully, in this case, he did have a base of comparison to begin decrypting her mind.

And that was, of course, his SOUL model of the Divine Mother that he had constructed during their battle. Having sensed her web mind in action and seeing what actions it correlated with gave him the equivalent of a Rosetta Stone to deconstruct the vast web of her mind, even if very slowly.

What he had learned of the Homoarachnoids was both optimistic and highly concerning.

And of course, highly exciting.

”The Homoarachnoids are not a uniform or a united civilization.”

That was the good news that made him convinced that there would be opportunities to have a favorable asymmetric battle. The structure of their civilization was as the apt name of their civilization suggested.

It was a web.

A nominally decentralized web of political and state power that is generally concentrated across numerous nexuses and nodes, the most prominent nexuses being that of the Divine Mothers.

They gave birth to most of the population, and thus had a tremendous amount of influence over them; it was not an exaggeration to say that they were united only by external forces.

The Dessandrite Ocean Civilization is the number one force that binds them together beyond their own internal webbing. War was the only decision that the Divine Mothers handled together in a loose council setting, for it was a matter that was too important with too much at stake.

The Homoarachnoid Web Civilization had countless factions within its civilization, but only five among them could be considered major factions accounting for more than half of the civilization collectively.

The war faction was the largest among them. Rui wasn’t surprised to learn of such a faction, given that he had learned much earlier that the Homoarachnoid Web Civilization had been at war with the Dessandrites for more than ten years. Such things did not happen if there wasn’t a major faction advocating for it.

However, it wasn’t the only faction that advocated for the war. Another faction that was just as supportive of the war was the Virus Faction, which advocated for a deeper and more integrated relationship with the cosmic virus.

This was the faction that the Divine Mother before him was.

”It would explain why she was so far from home in the middle of nowhere in an infected world,” Rui realized. ”She wanted to bring more political power by having more infected worlds and more esoteric matter to engorge.”

Though it was also undoubtedly a thankless job, the fact that she had undertaken it shows how committed she was to her ideology. The thought of people wanting to develop a deep relationship and integration with a virus that clearly had hostile intentions with the universe was utterly disgusting to him.

”I should send this data to the laminars. I’m sure that they will have a field day with these assholes,” Rui remarked knowingly. ”It would also mitigate the risks human civilization faces.”