I Am The Swarm

The inspection process for over 100,000 researchers and their belongings was incredibly time-consuming. With the Ji race’s limited staff and constrained facilities, the entire process took nearly a year to complete.

Fortunately, none of the boarding personnel were found to have any abnormalities. All were in good health, and no strange pathogens were detected. As for the luggage, while a few hazardous items were discovered, further investigation revealed no intentional wrongdoing by the owners, so these were deemed minor issues.

Once cleared, the researchers began entering their cryosleep pods, while their luggage was stored separately. With all preparations complete, two Ji transport ships, escorted by eighteen warships, slowly departed the starport and began accelerating.

The light from the ships’ engines gradually dimmed, eventually disappearing into the vast sea of stars.

The Ji race’s warp drive technology was highly advanced. Their warp bubbles were incredibly stable and compact, eliminating the need to avoid large gravitational sources like planets.

Unlike Troi warships, which had to exit their star systems before activating warp, the Ji fleet initiated their warp drives just 5 million kilometers beyond the Twin Star Defensive Zone under the watchful gaze of the Swarm’s Observer Bugs. Moments later, their forms blurred, and optical radar could no longer track their precise coordinates.

However, warp bubbles, being a special kind of gravitational field, could still be detected using gravitational-wave radars.

Hundreds of intelligent entities were on high alert, constantly tracking the ships’ coordinates and calculating their speed: twice the speed of light, three times, four times… The ships accelerated rapidly, stabilizing at eight times the speed of light and maintaining that velocity.

Luo Wen’s expression grew serious. The Ji race’s technological sophistication exceeded even his most pessimistic expectations. Back when the Troi diplomats had been negotiating, there was speculation about the origin of the five-member Ji delegation and an attempt to estimate their ship’s speed. The resulting calculations were terrifying. Learning that they had traveled aboard Troi warships to the negotiation site had brought some relief at the time.

But now, reality proved even worse than Luo Wen had feared. Eight times the speed of light—this with large transport ships in tow. The Ji warships were likely even faster.

And this might not even represent their cutting-edge technology. After all, this was merely a fleet for transporting foreign researchers, a peripheral operation. Their main battle fleets could be far more formidable.

Suddenly, Luo Wen’s brow furrowed. Something felt off. While the situation was dire, it might not be as catastrophic as it seemed.

If the Swarm were just an ordinary foreign civilization, his earlier concerns would have been valid. However, the Swarm was now an essential piece on the interstellar chessboard. Given the prolonged delays during the negotiations, it was clear the mastermind behind the scenes needed the Swarm to fit a specific mold.

To achieve this, they would undoubtedly employ various methods to reshape and influence the current state of the Swarm.

Yet, due to time constraints, the Swarm lacked significant allies or enemies and had no critical stakes in the larger interstellar network. As things stood, there were limited means by which the mastermind could exert influence over the Swarm.

This made the Ji race’s current mission—a rare point of contact for the Swarm with the outside world—highly significant. If the Swarm failed to meet the mastermind’s expectations during this encounter, they would not let such an opportunity go to waste.

Considering how smoothly the Ji ships had left without any conflict with the Swarm, it was highly likely that their actions during departure were a subtle display of military strength. This display, conducted at maximum capacity, suggested that eight times the speed of light might be the current technological limit of the Ji race.

But what exactly were they trying to accomplish? Was this military pressure intended to heighten the Swarm’s sense of crisis? Were they trying to accelerate the Swarm’s growth under external threats? The Swarm’s rapid mass-production capabilities had already been acknowledged, so were they now pushing the Swarm to improve not just in quantity but also in quality?

This situation…?

It felt suspiciously like a contrived plot, where a divine mandate was being thrust upon the Swarm. The mastermind seemed to have set up a hypothetical enemy for the Swarm to stimulate its development—almost as if they were racing against time.

Could it be that the mastermind pulling the strings was actually a hidden rebel organization within the Interstellar Technological Confederation?

If they were opposing the Ji race, they would need a powerful ally. The Swarm, with its potential, its lack of desire for life-bearing planets, and its relatively non-violent tendencies—judging from how it treated the Riken and Rat folk—appeared to be a trustworthy candidate for such an alliance.

Most importantly, the Swarm’s rapid unit production made it an excellent source of cannon fodder.

Perhaps, once the Swarm reached a certain level of development, an organization might suddenly reveal itself, claiming they had secretly cultivated the Swarm all along and now needed it to spearhead the charge against the “evil” Ji race?

Luo Wen raised an eyebrow. This was amusing speculation, but speculation nonetheless. What if the opposing faction had deliberately set up this scenario, allowing Luo Wen to arrive at this conclusion, just to achieve their actual goals?

Was this the legendary case of “I predicted your prediction of my prediction”?

The kind of convoluted strategy where they seemed to be on the fifth layer of complexity but were actually operating on an entirely different plane?

This was becoming increasingly difficult to unravel—real and fake, truth and deception. Who could tell which layer they were operating on? The only viable strategy was to respond to each move as it came. R̃ἈɴȯʙÊs̩

However, there was one fundamental question: how could they be certain that the Swarm would be able to observe the Ji ships at all? This was the premise of everything. If they couldn’t guarantee that the Swarm could detect them, then wasn’t all this theater for nothing? An act performed for blind spectators?

The Swarm’s technological level had always been carefully concealed. Based on its outwardly displayed capabilities, it shouldn’t have been able to detect the Ji fleet within its warp bubble. Even if the Swarm suspected something, they would lack evidence.

And truly, without some external help, it would have been impossible for the Swarm to achieve in mere centuries what had taken other civilizations tens of thousands of years.

Even with millions of intelligent entities working tirelessly without complaint, normal technological research would never have been able to produce such breakthroughs in such a short time—especially in an entirely different field like biotechnology.

When Luo Wen had first captured Godzilla, it had taken him months to decode the creature’s biological controlled fusion technology, resulting in the development of the Atomic Furnace. But there had also been a hidden genetic fragment, which took Luo Wen over a year to fully analyze.

Godzilla was a truly legendary organism. Its evolutionary achievements were almost beyond comprehension. Even with Luo Wen’s abilities, replicating Godzilla’s state of evolution would take an unimaginable amount of time.

Nevertheless, Godzilla had provided Luo Wen with tremendous benefits, instantly elevating the Swarm’s combat power by several tiers and solving numerous technological bottlenecks—such as the endurance issues of the Space Octopuses.

Its contributions extended not only to the past but also to the present, continuing to aid the Swarm.

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