What Does It Mean to Mine Stellar Resources?

"What did you say? The Spirit Domain? But they had never encountered a Spirit Venerable?"

The collectors buzzed with discussion over the life field channel. The matter involved something they needed to be extremely wary of—a potential enemy.

Orderly things were not frightening, because their patterns could be traced. But the Spirit Domain was different. It was too mysterious and bizarre. Even now, the collectors' understanding of the Spirit Domain remained superficial.

The collectors had always treated the Spirit Domain with the utmost seriousness.

Yet their probing of the prisoners confirmed that the other side knew nothing about the Spirit Venerables inhabiting the Spirit Domain. That was rather contradictory. If they had only entered it once or twice, it would have been understandable that they had not encountered one. But if they frequently traveled in and out of the Spirit Domain, there was no reason they would never come across a Spirit Venerable.

It could not be that the Spirit Venerables had deliberately been avoiding these aliens, could it?

"That's right."

The collector in charge of the interrogation answered with certainty.

"Could it be that we aren't talking about the same Spirit Domain?"

The collectors were utterly confused, unable to make sense of the connection.

The collector responsible for the interrogation offered its own view.

"Hard to say. It's too early to draw conclusions. If we use the Spirit Domain to explain technology like that teleportation, then it makes sense. According to the other prisoners, their 'jumps' really do involve entering some place and then coming back out. That is very similar to the Spirit Domain we know of. Will has also achieved spatial displacement through the Spirit Domain before. The leader of the Pilgrim organization once used the Spirit Domain to produce an effect similar to teleportation."

The interrogating