Life Everlasting

A supernova's explosion expanded at the speed of light, and stellar matter, propelled by the supernova blast, was hurled outward at tremendous speeds in quantities measured by the ton.

The scattered stellar matter formed nebulae that spread through the empty reaches of space. They appeared harmless and dazzlingly beautiful, but they remained highly dangerous. The heat produced by a supernova explosion was not so easily dispersed.

If Earth entered a region permeated by plasma nebulae, the likely outcome would be the entire planet turning into roast suckling pigs.

During Amoeba's sublight travel era, nebulae were among the things Collectors hated encountering most during sublight voyages. Running into a nebula at sublight speed was like slamming headfirst into a wall of matter. Without an antimatter shield, and if the nebula covered a wide enough area, a sublight Collector would simply be 'rammed' to death.

Even in the current era of faster-than-light travel, nebulae still affected navigation. However, that effect did not directly slow faster-than-light travel itself.

During faster-than-light travel, nebular matter accumulated along the outer layer of distorted spacetime, only to be released all at once once faster-than-light travel ended.

That release of energy was indiscriminate, making it extremely dangerous even to the faster-than-light individual itself.

Amoeba's solution was to guide the negative matter from expanding spacetime forward. This both released the negative matter and created a short-lived negative-matter barrier that could resist the violent energy unleashed after faster-than-light travel ended.

However, this method had a drawback: they could not travel too far. Otherwise, the accumulated energy would exceed the amount the negative matter could offset, and the faster-than-light individual would have to endure the excess energy.

Therefore, after traveling a certain distance at faster-than-light speed each time, Ming had to exit faster-than-light travel, release the energy, and then reenter faster-than-light