"There were still six-tenths of the stars left. Once we dealt with the remainder, all that would be left were the star systems occupied by the Joya. Then the material harvesting plan for the entire region would be completely finished. We should be among the first batch to complete the plan."
The supergiant-mass organism looked over the progress of their expansion, wondering whether they would be the first group to finish the region assigned to them.
Yet just as it had that thought, one of its kin poured cold water over it.
"I think I need to remind you that kin from other regions sent messenger organisms with news earlier. Some of our kin completed the expansion of their entire regions decades ago, so we won't be the fastest."
"What? How is that possible? We seized every second we could. Why are we so far behind?"
The supergiant-mass organism did not believe it. It had not slacked off, nor had its operations encountered any particularly time-consuming obstacles. Even if there was a gap, there was no way the kin in other regions could have surpassed them by so much.
"The main issue is methodology. The kin over there didn't operate like us, sending supergiant-mass organisms near every star system."
As it spoke, the Successor passed the information delivered by the messenger organism to the supergiant-mass organism.
"They subdivided their assigned regions into many smaller sections. Whenever a supergiant-mass organism entered one, it used observation methods to learn the approximate conditions of the star systems within."
"If there were enough planets, they sent out only faster-than-light organisms. If there weren't enough planets, they also deployed material megastructures and cooling megastructures. The supergiant-mass organisms did not need to conduct high-precision scans of every star system."
"After every faster-than-light jump, they could use