The messenger organism returned from the star system, bringing environmental information about that star system back to the supergiant-mass organism.
"This is the 3.26 millionth star system. Civilization exists within it. We can leave."
Star systems inhabited by civilizations could not be mined for material resources. This was a concealment policy established before the Successors entered this galaxy.
So, after retrieving the messenger organism, the supergiant-mass organism immediately entered faster-than-light travel and vanished into the boundless void.
The star system's information would be entered into the star chart and marked for future use.
Yet these statistics made many easily overlooked problems apparent.
"A total of over a million star systems bearing traces of civilization have been found. That density is somewhat abnormal. If this were an interstellar civilization with colonies spanning star systems, why would it not even possess faster-than-light or sublight technology?"
The Successor handling the statistics voiced a question it had been pondering for quite some time.
Out of three million star systems, over a million showed traces of civilization. Clearly, there were far too many civilized star systems.
However, this was not impossible to explain. For example, there could be a civilization whose territory spanned multiple stars.
These star systems had no stargates, and the civilizations within them had not mastered sublight or faster-than-light technology. Otherwise, the messenger organism's reconnaissance would inevitably have encountered considerable obstruction.
Whether good or bad, anomalies were worth the Successors' attention. They were also something the Successors did not wish to see, because they might affect the race's overall plan.
The Successors put forward all kinds of bold hypotheses.
"Perhaps they are like our race and can guarantee absolute loyalty. Thus, even if their civilization has expanded across the territories of more than a million stars, it has not fractured. So long