A galactic nucleus was the densely massed region at the center of a galaxy, composed of vast numbers of stars, plasma, high-energy particles, and more. Most of its stars were aging supergiants over ten billion years old. It was the region with the highest density of celestial mass in the entire galaxy, spanning tens of thousands of light-years in diameter.
This was a forbidden zone for life. Terrifying energy filled every inch of space here, while gravity warped space-time to an extreme degree. Luminous bands extended from the core, matter ejected from the galactic nucleus to form powerful jets of material. Traveling at hundreds of thousands of kilometers per second and stretching for nearly ten million light-years, the energy released on such a scale was more than ten million times that of a Sun-like yellow dwarf star after a supernova explosion.
Even words such as "magnificent" and "spectacular" could not convey even a ten-thousandth of its scale and grandeur!
Now, intruders had entered this forbidden zone of life.
"Bringing large quantities of solid helium was the right choice. The interstellar matter here is far too hot. Without prior preparations, we would certainly have died upon arriving here."
"But even with those preparations, we cannot continue deeper. The average temperature here is already fixed at several thousand degrees. If we go any farther in, the temperature will continue rising, and we do not have enough solid helium."
"It is practically like descending into a star."
Against the vast backdrop of the universe was a storage megastructure organism comparable in volume to a mothership organism, carrying enormous quantities of solid helium within it.
Multiple solid-state brains were housed inside, with several Collectors sharing a single body.
These were Amoeba's prewar scouts, dispatched to investigate and gather battlefield intelligence from the galactic nucleus.