Mid Sector 100, Planet Originos-
Behind doors that had remained sealed and heavily fortified for nearly a full century, Jabba gently placed one blood sample aside. Then, paf, he pulled another jar closer and set it before him, his face carrying an eager smile and a burning curiosity, like a child opening one holiday present after another without patience to rest.
Jabba occupied an entire floor of the building by himself. The place was enormous, a vast living space large enough to comfortably house ten separate families if it were divided into apartnts.
Yet at this mont, the place felt suffocatingly cramped.
Walking across the room had beco a challenge. Every step required careful movent, as the floor was crowded with countless jars of blood and sealed sample vials stacked in rows, piles, and careless clusters. So were arranged neatly on tables, others piled against walls, while many simply occupied any empty patch of ground.
No... these were not the collections that the army and the Shadow Swords had gathered for him across the past century.
Every ten years, Jabba allowed a small group of guards to enter his chamber for a single task. They would gather all the accumulated samples after he had finished analyzing them with ticulous care. Once removed, they were free to deal with them however they pleased. Jabba did not care what happened to those old samples afterward.
Soon after, a new wave of specins would arrive.
And the cycle would begin again.
Even so...
After examining thousands upon thousands of samples-no, hundreds of thousands over the decades-
His face still broke into an involuntary smile every ti he opened a new jar. The excitent never faded.
"Hm... what do we have here?" Jabba murmured as he read the label attached to the glass container. "Flood Centipede... Planet Ghtab-4... attacked a battalion of golden soldiers during the planetary invasion and caused massive destruction?"
His smile deepened with interest.
Carefully, with delicate fingers, he opened the jar while making sure the seal broke smoothly and no unexpected reaction would occur.
"Show your secrets, Mr. Centipede."
Inside the jar, a thick dark liquid slowly shifted and rolled with the movent of the container. Its color constantly wavered between black and deep oceanic blue, as if the blood itself could not decide which shade it belonged to.
Jabba imdiately activated the Eye of Truth.
But nothing shone.
The green Eye of Truth was no longer radiant like it once had been. In the past, activating it caused a clear glow and visible fluctuations of energy.
Now... almost nothing changed.
Yet anyone looking closely into Jabba's eyes would notice that the pupils alone had transford into a dark green shade that leaned dangerously toward black.
Those Eyes of Truth resembled a dying star in its final monts before collapse.
"...Amazing" Jabba whispered quietly, his voice filled with fascination.
"The density of the stable energy particles isn't particularly high... nor is it especially low."
He leaned forward, bringing the jar closer to his face.
"But the way they behave... that's strange."
His pupils shifted slightly as he followed the movent of the microscopic structures within the blood.
"Each cluster of particles forms its own independent energy path... completely separate from the others. It's as if each path exists in isolation."
He paused briefly.
"...Almost like braided strands."
His fingers tapped lightly on the glass.
"Like braids tying together completely different systems."
Then his attention moved deeper into the structure.
"The mutable particles..." he murmured.
"They're supporting this entire formation."
His brow slowly furrowed.
"Their main function seems to be transferring energy between the braids when needed. They act like bridges that redirect energy from one path to another."
He tilted his head slightly.
"But why build such a complicated system?"
Jabba's expression turned thoughtful.
This structure was far too elaborate for a simple biological creature.
He began searching through the cluttered room, stepping carefully between stacks of containers until he located a small light disk that had arrived together with the jar. Picking it up, he brushed away a thin layer of dust and activated it.
A projection imdiately appeared.
(Aaaah!!)
(Cut those cursed legs off!!)
Jabba's brows tightened instantly as he watched.
The Flood Centipede had been nearly one hundred ters long while alive. Its elongated body twisted violently as it moved, while dozens upon dozens of legs
extended from its sides.
Each leg looked like a sharpened blade.
Long, curved, and deadly.
But that was not the strange part.
Creatures in the universe ca in countless bizarre forms. Jabba had studied
enough of them to no longer be surprised by unusual anatomy.
The truly strange part...
...was what those legs were doing.
Each individual leg was fighting on its own.
One leg was clashing with a golden officer. Another leg was battling two soldiers simultaneously. A third leg was intercepting attacks while striking back
with terrifying precision.
Every leg attacked.
Every leg defended.
Every leg maneuvered and exchanged blows with its own rhythm.
It was as if each limb possessed its own awareness and combat instincts.
As if every leg was a separate creature fighting independently from the rest of
the body.
"Now it's no wonder the battalion suffered such massive destruction," Jabba
said quietly as he set the projection disk aside and leaned closer toward the jar again, returning his full attention to the dark blood swirling slowly within the glass container. "So this unique energy-transfer system exists to feed each leg
independently?"
He let out a long breath as his thoughts began organizing themselves. "With this thod, the centipede distributes exactly the amount of power required to each limb," he murmured thoughtfully. "The legs that aren't actively fighting receive no energy at all. anwhile, a leg preparing to attack draws a larger portion... and when the attack finishes, the energy shifts again." His eyes followed the invisible pathways his mind was imagining.
"And so on..."
Jabba slowly nodded to himself.
"...like a self-contained army." He tapped lightly on the table.
"Each limb acts as an independent combat unit, yet they all share the sa energy reserve. Efficiency without waste... coordination without central
overload."
Then his eyebrows rose slowly, as if a distant thought had suddenly surfaced
from the depths of his mory.
"The Warlords!!"
He leaned back slightly and rested his chin on his palm.
"The use of Warlords was abandoned because transferring the imnse energy
of a World Cataclysm and a Nexus State-and controlling it-beca impossible within the primary array designed by the Master."
His fingers began tapping rhythmically against his chin. "The original array simply couldn't distribute that much energy without
collapsing under the strain."
He exhaled slowly.
"And because the Master had far more important matters occupying his
attention, he never returned to redesign the War Lords afterward."
Jabba's eyes slowly brightened with interest.
"But if..."
He leaned forward again.
"If the braid structure were applied to the new array..."
His tapping quickened slightly.
"...and perhaps several World Cataclysms were placed as multiple cores within
the array... with the braids flowing between them while the mutable particle
system controlled the flow..."
His gaze sharpened.
"...then energy could transfer freely between the cores."
He sat up straighter.
"The pressure on any single core would be reduced."
A long silence filled the room.
"...Could that actually work?"
"...Heh~"
Jabba released a slow breath that blended into a quiet, amused laugh.
"Is it possible... that the problem which stumped three Sky Opening Cities..."
He looked back at the jar with growing fascination.
"...the problem that halted the advancent of War Sovereignty Arrays across
the entire universe below the level of a World Cataclysm..."
His eyes narrowed slightly.
"...will be solved by a creature called the Flood Centipede?"
He shook his head in disbelief.
"...What an extraordinary design."
His gaze then drifted slowly around the crowded room.
Everywhere he looked, there were jars.
Hundreds of them.
Perhaps thousands.
And beyond those... the countless other samples that had already been
removed and discarded over the decades.
Every single one of them ca from the sa source.
The sa primordial chaos.
Yet none of them resembled the others.
Each creature.
Each cell. Each drop of blood.
Contained a completely different structure.
A different pattern.
A different design.
Each one stood as proof of the brilliance of its creator.
Design...
Design...
Design...
The small smile on Jabba's lips slowly faded away.
Everything shared the sa origin.
Everything shared the sa creator.
Everything shared the sa designer. Only the design itself changed.
What made the centipede a monstrous beast...
And what made him, at this very mont, a thinking being sitting safely in this
room studying its blood with advanced intelligence...
...was design.
Nothing else.
If the design changed...
Then what would happen if-
Paah
Jabba suddenly slapped his own forehead.
"There I go again," he muttered with a small embarrassed laugh. "Drifting into
ridiculous fantasies."
He shook his head.
"Better return to work."
A playful grin appeared on his face.
"If I manage to contribute to improving the War Lords, the Master might forget
about forcing to submit an application regarding Sovereign Laws every thousand years."
He chuckled softly.
"Hehe... heh?"
But when Jabba lowered his gaze back toward the jar-
His expression abruptly froze.
Shock.
Confusion.
Disbelief.
The particles were gone.
He could no longer see them.
"What's happening?!" Jabba imdiately rubbed his eye forcefully, as if trying
to clear so invisible obstruction. Then he gathered a surge of energy and
pushed it into his eye, activating the focused Eye of Truth the way he had done
countless tis across the last several hundred years. Nothing happened.
The familiar microscopic universe never appeared. "What is this? What's happening?!" Jabba suddenly stood up from his seat, the
chair scraping harshly against the floor as he leaned forward, staring intensely
at the jar before him.
As if his will alone could force reality to obey.
For the first ti in centuries, panic crept into his mind.
At that mont he felt as if sothing had been torn away from him.
Like losing a limb.
No...
Sothing far worse.
"...Huh?"
Then suddenly...
He stopped moving.
His breathing slowed.
"What... is... this...?"
His vision had changed again.
But he was no longer seeing particles.
He was no longer seeing cells.
The microscopic structures had vanished completely.
Instead...
He was seeing sothing else.
User Comments
0 comments from readers