The starships "Tailing" and "Honglian" were rapidly "sowing seeds" within the asteroid belt.
Yes, sowing seeds. This was the first step in restoring the ambient spiritual energy environment beyond the heavens.
A strange fungal colony was being placed upon every small celestial body within the defensive belt. These special fungi had been artificially created. They possessed twice as many light-absorbing organelles as ordinary plants, yet they were an unusual kind of prokaryote—without nuclei, extremely cold-resistant, and extremely salt-loving.
Originally, this had been an ordinary spaceborne fungal colony. Given only a little light and inorganic salts, it could survive. After the Immortal Alliance discovered it, however, they forcibly inserted special chloroplasts from other worlds through tens of millions of trials. Once it gained the ability to harvest light energy, this special strain's reproductive rate rose exponentially.
Under natural conditions, such abnormal growth would only cause the colony to quickly fall into the predicament of lacking nutrients. But to the Immortal Alliance's cultivators, that did not matter. It could be regarded entirely as a "crop." So long as seeds were left behind, no one cared whether the "crop" could pass on its bloodline.
Meanwhile, countless cultivators flared with streaks of spiritual light as they steered their escape lights through the thin and chaotic spiritual energy of the vacuum, pushing the many small celestial bodies in the asteroid belt. Since the bodies in the asteroid belt were themselves slowly orbiting the sun, the force applied to those asteroids had to be precisely calculated. At the same time, the Immortal Alliance had to prevent other planetary systems with relatively rapid orbital velocities from crashing into their formation and disrupting the formation's macroscopic structure.
All of this was taking place across half a light-second.
This was a delicate task, and an immensely vast undertaking besides.