Star-Devouring Megastructure

The Collectors had miscalculated the cluster's construction speed.

Due to the interference of the Great Destruction, the Collectors' attempt to build a star-devouring megastructure did not go smoothly. After the second Great Destruction supernova strike destroyed the unfinished megastructure's remnants in the supernova explosion...

After much deliberation, the Collectors decided to build the components separately and ensure that every component of each star-devouring megastructure, constructed with concentrated effort, possessed faster-than-light capability. That way, when the Great Destruction struck, the components could leave at faster-than-light speed along with the cluster, and the Collectors would not have to manufacture them again.

The star-devouring megastructure was enormous. Naturally, such a structure could not be a single whole like ordinary megastructure organisms.

It was closer to a ripple megastructure, assembled from multiple large-scale megastructures.

According to the Collectors' original design, this megastructure had to be able to swiftly devour every planet. It needed to swallow not only solid planets, but even "bloated" gas giants in a single bite.

To achieve this, the star-devouring megastructure could not be smaller than a celestial body with a mass of 1.5912 × 10^29 kg. This mass was a dividing line: above it were stars, while below it were all types of planets and massive gaseous bodies incapable of nuclear fusion—"brown dwarfs."

So, how large was a non-stellar celestial body with a mass of 1.5912 × 10^29 kg? Roughly eighty-four times Jupiter's volume.

Using this as the standard, the star-devouring megastructure's stellar capacity had to exceed eighty-four times Jupiter's volume. Accounting for margins of error, its preliminary capacity was set at ninety times Jupiter's volume.

The Collectors first constructed a planetary-scale gravitational ring with a diameter equal to twice Earth's diameter, then built a ring-shaped conduit for storing negative matter along a section extending behind it.

This gave the