458: Tool Man Aha 2.0

Four months after the Battle of Osha ended, the landscape of New Eden had settled. But beneath the dust, the undercurrents never ceased to surge.

In countless star Systems far from the Kyushu control zones and the core regions of the Six Great Powers, the Old Order had vanished without a trace.

Pirates, smugglers, mercenary groups, bankrupt corporate privateers, rising colonists, and warlords claiming to inherit this or that legacy... powers of all sizes were sprouting like poisonous fungi on the decaying corpse of the old hegemony.

Smuggling routes ran parallel to official channels, and black market space stations became even busier.

Plundering, ambushes, backstabbing, brief Alliances, and even swifter betrayals—these constituted the daily life of the middle Star Domains.

Technical equipment, scarce resources, population, and even intelligence became hard currency.

Many shipwrecks damaged but not completely scrapped in the "Osha Battle" were towed back by these powers. Repaired with pieced-together parts and crude technology, and repainted with a variety of liveries, they became the backbone of their territorial disputes.

War scrap gave rise to a deformed prosperity; chaos itself became a new ecology.

Against this backdrop, the Sisterhood—an organization with the tenets of "Exploration, Knowledge, Understanding, and Peace" that had always maintained a relatively detached and mysterious presence in New Eden—saw its situation undergo subtle and massive changes.

Their tenets might have seemed idealistic or even pedantic in times of peace. However, in a chaotic world where war raged everywhere, knowledge was trampled, scholars were displaced, and the people yearned for a glimmer of the light of reason, they radiated an unprecedented attraction.

More and more professionals from all walks of life—those who had lost their homes in the war, whose laboratories were destroyed, or who were simply desperate in the face of endless violence—began to find ways to seek out and join the Sisterhood's strongholds or scientific research stations.

They brought not only their minds but also precious data and technical blueprints salvaged or privately copied during the chaos.

The Sisterhood did not openly recruit; they were even caught off guard by the surging tide of people, leading to significant internal debate. But ultimately, their core dogma of "Sheltering the Seekers of Knowledge" prevailed.

Thus, while the Six Great Powers faced research stagnation or even regression due to internal strife, and the major military-industrial complexes focused only on repairing and manufacturing killing machines, the Sisterhood's strength—especially its research potential and reserve of high-intelligence talent—expanded at an astonishing speed.

More importantly, the chaos brought "resources."

This refers not only to manpower but also to research materials and information.

Certain sensitive star Systems that were strictly controlled in the past, areas like ancient ruins and anomalous spatial phenomena, now presented opportunities due to the collapse of defensive forces.

Interstellar pirates and warlords were only interested in visible wealth and munitions, while those fragments of useless knowledge buried deep within ancient planets, drifting in eerie nebulae, or recorded in logs were quietly collected and studied by the Sisterhood's exploration fleets.

Among these, a long-term research project named "Echo" received an unprecedented allocation of resources.

The project originated from one of the Sisterhood's oldest and most core beliefs.

To explore their own origins and seek clues to the legendary "Ancestors" or "Lost Homeland" that shaped them.

This point was related to certain physiological characteristics of the Sisterhood's founders, or rather, the founding group.

They possessed extremely keen senses and a special affinity for certain energies and frequency bands. Some of them even possessed supernatural abilities.

For instance, an ability to obtain hazy prophetic dreams was referred to by them as the "Call of the Ancestors" and the "Echo in the Bloodline."

In their dreams, they would often encounter a mysterious existence composed of various smiling masks. This existence would allow them to perceive some extremely blurred images.

There was a deep blue planet, a modest star System, and a powerful civilization already capable of traversing the sea of stars.

Because of this, they firmly believed they had a history far older than the records stating they originated from Genoq Star.

This research named "Echo" had progressed slowly for years, serving more as a spiritual sustenance.

Until recently, a scientist named Dr. Elia Thern—a Sisterhood researcher who enjoyed high prestige in the Domain of string theory and field topology but possessed a stubborn personality—proposed a radical theory.

She believed that the so-called "Call of the Ancestors" or "Echo in the Bloodline" was not a biological disease or ability, but rather a mark within a cross-dimensional information network imprinted upon their ethereal "Souls."

The Star Tracks (also known as Silver Tracks) that widely existed in New Eden and were used for jumping might not just be physical channels, but also ports or receiving antennas for that potential network.

This theory was initially dismissed as nonsense.

However, as the Sisterhood exploration teams brought back unprecedentedly complex fluctuation data from several newly controlled anomalous Star Tracks, Dr. Elia Thern's theory began to receive serious attention.

More resources—especially young scientists who had recently joined the Sisterhood and whose minds were not shackled by old frameworks—were assigned to her team.

The research site was established in a remote and hidden star System under the Sisterhood's control.

Here lay the ruins of an ancient, grand interstellar observatory (I don't care, Aha did it), which, after being repaired and reinforced, became the main base for the "Echo" project.

The core of the observatory was connected to an extremely stable natural Star Track anchor that radiated strange harmonics.

Dr. Elia Thern and her team spent four months building a massive device called the "Resonator."

It was an incredibly complex piece of equipment, a device composed of energy crystals and phase arrays.

Its sole purpose was to produce deep resonance with specific fields of the Star Track and attempt to analyze and interpret the deeper structures and information that might exist behind them.

The experiment was conducted one hundred and seventeen times.

During the first one hundred and sixteen times, they recorded a vast amount of cluttered background noise that seemed to have repeating patterns. There were also several intense but unresolvable feedbacks that nearly burned out the Resonator.

Criticism began to rise, suggesting this was a waste of precious resources and might even trigger uncontrollable spatial disasters.

Dr. Elia Thern braved the pressure and insisted on performing the one hundred and seventeenth experiment.

She adjusted the parameters, locking the resonance frequency onto a special harmonic combination derived from the earlier noise. In her words, this was an attempt to use the most common rhythm to knock on a door that absolutely exists.

“All Systems in place, energy output stable at threshold, resonance locked, complete.” The assistant's voice was trembling.

Inside the observation center, massive amounts of data flowed across the giant ring-shaped screens, with a holographic projection of the Star Track's local energy topology map in the center.

Dr. Elia Thern stood before the console, her face somewhat pale, but her eyes terrifyingly focused. The surrounding researchers also held their breath, waiting for the test to begin.

“Resonator starting, Deep Intervention Mode, 3... 2... 1... Intervene.”