"Move faster! Don't slack off!"
"We're short on time! Short on time! Don't block the way!"
"Solid helium resources are insufficient! Hurry and send more over!"
"Antimatter! We urgently need antimatter! The reactors need power! Power!"
A colossal artificial construct was being built. From its framework, one could vaguely make out that it was a ring-shaped pipeline.
This construct was enormous. Just how enormous? Setting aside the ring's diameter for the moment, the radius of the pipeline alone was 1.4 × 10^6 km, slightly more than twice the Sun's radius.
This was a supergiant-scale gravity ring built by the Successors. Its construction was more difficult than that of any gravity ring before it. The difficulties were not complicated—only the various problems caused by attaining supergiant mass—but that alone was enough to make the Successors rack their brains for solutions.
Once the gravity ring entered the compression phase, the pipeline's radius would shrink by half. The final gravity ring pipeline would have a diameter only slightly larger than the Sun's diameter, with a circumference of 5 × 10^11 km—just under three times the circumference of Uranus's orbit.
This was the largest object Amoeba had ever constructed, but it was far from the only one. Across the entire galaxy, there were several thousand similar structures.
Material resources were all obtained from nebulae. By now, it was difficult to find any intact planets in the galaxy, including stars. Only high-density celestial bodies such as black holes and neutron stars, or those fortunate enough to have escaped the fighting, had survived.
To acquire matter efficiently, the Successors responsible for material extraction had to keep moving, sweeping up the nebular matter drifting through space as they went.
Thanks to the compression environment created by the spacetime pillar field, nebular matter could be condensed to an