After receiving the intelligence sent back by the drones, Hao Ren led his people to the Crystal Core Research Station.
By now, this Space Station was no longer merely a research center. Its powerful central main unit and crystal resonance antennas allowed it to integrate and process all information from the Dream Plane. Planet Tanagrus, an important "pilot site," was under the surveillance of the Crystal Core Research Station, and the testing of the Firstborn's living samples and various experiments were also conducted here. It was also the largest Starport Hao Ren had established in the Dream Plane. The two ancient ships, Patian and Asuman, were both docked here. Combined with the Space Station's formidable offensive and defensive capabilities, it had plainly become Hao Ren's most important base in this universe.
To make it easier to control the ever-expanding Drone Empire, Hao Ren had recently ordered the largest "Lair Thought Core" installed in one of the Space Station's auxiliary towers. The immense streams of thought surging among the hundreds of millions of drones were all relayed through this Lair Thought Core. Thus, in a sense, the Crystal Core Research Station was now also the "highest governing center" of the drone swarm. Of course, structurally speaking, the drone swarm had no supreme ruler, since it used a distributed thought network. The Crystal Core Research Station merely possessed the highest-authority monitoring access to that network.
Hao Ren did not go to the crystal hall where the Space Station main unit was located. Instead, he came before the drone swarm's Lair Thought Core. The device, "piled" together from a mass of glowing veins and strange metallic cysts, resembled a metal brain enlarged several thousand times. All the pipes and cables extending from the ceiling and floor converged on the metal brain, making the