The Martial Unity

While the immortal sages began working on the Gaian Seed technology to terraform other planets into Gaian offspring, the rest of the world rapidly accelerated their investment into space technologies. The reality was that even though Gaia was extremely advanced in its technologies, they had yet to be applied to space travel to the extent that they could be because space was still largely a state venture controlled by superpower civilizations rather than the private sector.

Once Rui’s desire to conquer ten thousand stars in ten years led him to unshackling human civilization and all the creativity and innovation that existed for it, the technological innovations came rushing. Especially since the legislation that the Gaian Alliance adopted made intellectual property a fundamental right, driving entrepreneurs, innovators, and inventors absolutely crazy.

New IPOs were launched gallore.

New technological expositions, conventions, and conferences sprang across the entire world at a rate that left everybody struggling to keep up.

“Terrestria is excited to show off its new terrestrial nano-development technological product: the Cosmobuilders!” An older, distinguished man announced with an excited expression as the screen behind him illuminated, featuring a well-produced animation of tiny nanobots that were portrayed to be released upon an asteroid field, or a moon, or a planet, rushing over its surface as it began extracting and consuming material resources that were available to it.

“This is a technology that Terrestria has slowly invested years into building ever since the return of the Lost Continent, in anticipation of a race to space and an era of interstellar expansion,” the man continued with an enthusiastic tone of voice before a large audience. “In the past four months, we have diverted all our resources and manpower into completing this technology, and we are proud to present the first affordable terrestrial development system in existence. This technology…”

He gestured to the animation of the voracious nanobots consuming material substances. “…allows colonial enterprises to rapidly develop a terrestrial planet within a certain range of environmental parameters. The package comes in the form of a giant pillar comprised of these highly intelligent nanobots and the artificial intelligence programmed into their network. All an interstellar pioneer will need to do is create a blueprint based on pre-existing design elements in our designer interface and detailed surveillance data from the target planet, and upload it to the nanotechnological network. Then you need only drop the pillar towards the planet from outer space and—viola!”

The animation featured an accelerated depiction of what the nanobots would do upon the planet. It showed them developing terrestrial worlds at a truly remarkable speed, considering the fact that there was no human involvement at any stage of the process.

A wave of amazed murmurs washed over the crowd of excited onlookers as they watched the little nanobots develop the surface of the world without any direct aid. “The nanobots begin by creating a mining and refining apparatus that can extract resources from the ground and process them,” the CEO of Terrestria continued, pointing to a diagram that featured makeshift mining extractors and makeshift refineries. “Then, once they have the materials needed, they begin the construction process. This allows even enterprises that don’t have large amounts of capital to participate in a colonial enterprise at a very affordable rate, relatively speaking!”

Immediately, the eyes of many individuals who had considered commencing their own private ventures into space lit up with eager excitement, but had been put off by the unfathomable costs of any kind of colonial enterprise.

That was exactly the market segment that Terrestria was targeting. They did have more premium terrestrial development technological systems and even services, but they recognized that there was a huge untapped market of somewhat wealthy and powerful individuals that were in an awkward spot where they could consider a humble interstellar colonial enterprise, but were still very put off by the astronomical costs of even a humble venture.

This system radically reduced the cost of such a project. Even though each Cosmobuilder package builder cost a whopping ten million Kandrian Ruels, it was still much, much cheaper than what a sincere terrestrial production project would cost if done with more premium services and products.

Of course, this came with its own shortcomings, of course. The quality of the workmanship was not going to be great, making its integrity not ideal. It would also take more time than a dedicated automated manufacturing system that would cost an order of magnitude more to transport and set up. It also took more time than the proper premium products and services that corporations like Terrestria offered in their catalogue.

And yet, it was still deeply attractive.

Who cared if it was shoddy?

Who cared if it was left wanting?

One could own and develop their own planet however they wanted!

This alone was such a seductive dream to countless pioneers that the stocks of Terrestria exploded as countless orders for Cosmobuilder packages were made the very day the corporation unveiled the new product, forcing the corporation to triple its expansion plan in order to keep up with demand in the long run.

It wasn’t just Terrestria that benefited wildly from such value-generation. Countless other companies deployed technological means to make interstellar travel, exploration, colonialism, and conquest much more affordable and viable. Warp drives grew more efficient, negatron matter grew more available from the Gaian Alliance, Dyson Sphere technologies grew more cost-effective and affordable, allowing even small-time pioneers to carry their own units of a very limited and small version of Dyson spheres to fuel their energy expenditures while far away from Gaia in an entirely different star sector.

Pathwalkers, especially Martial Artists and organizations relating Martial Art began focusing on exo-Martial Art, as it had come to be called, as an absolute necessity, creating a whole new field of Martial Art that allowed Martial Artists to be more relevant in outer space.

In just a matter of months, Gaian Civilization rapidly re-oriented and adaptively evolved itself for an era of expansion in the stars as ships began leaving Gaia, traveling through space at speeds faster than light as they surged towards distant stars.