The radiance of the teleportation to the Three Leaves Star System slowly faded beneath Benjamin's feet.
When he opened his eyes, the first thing that filled his vision was an ocher arc that occupied nearly half the sky.
It was a gas giant.
Because the teleportation coordinates had been extremely close, Benjamin could clearly feel its immensity and oppressive presence the moment he arrived—far larger than Jupiter.
Simply hanging there was enough to make one instinctively feel small, as though standing before a natural catastrophe.
By comparison, the main colony planet in the neighboring orbit looked like an inconspicuous marble.
Near the gas giant's equator, the Ammonia Crystal Storm Belt churned without cease.
Countless ocher-red and ash-white clouds tore at one another, forming enormous vortices that stretched for tens of thousands of kilometers.
Toward the poles floated pale-blue upper-atmosphere glows, like cold flames burning through a polar night.
The planet itself had not been transformed into a colony. After all, gas giants had no solid surface fit for habitation.
Yet the Tentacle Tree Civilization had still built three enormous research space stations around it.
Each space station was even larger than the Level Six flagship they had seized before.
But these stations had been hidden with extraordinary ingenuity within the gas giant's atmosphere. They would rather expend vast amounts of energy resisting the terrifying storms inside the planet than allow themselves to be exposed.
Recalling the intelligence reports, Benjamin narrowed his eyes slightly.
He was not the first to arrive. More than a dozen Black Giant Priests had reached this place ahead of him, dispersing to guard different orbital regions. Several Level Five Black Giants who had first discovered the anomaly were hovering outside the research facility.
When they saw Benjamin appear, the vertical slits in their chests closed in