76: Unknown probe

"What? An unidentified object flew into the interior of our homeworld system before we discovered it?"

The emergency report brought by the head of the Deep Space Monitoring Station was like a boulder thrown into a calm lake, causing the atmosphere in the Central Council, which had just been filled with joy and excitement, to instantly become tense again.

"How is this possible? What about our deep space early warning system? What about those monitoring outposts deployed on the periphery of the star system? Are they just for show?" A council member, who was replacing Talon in charge of military defense, immediately slammed the table and stood up, his face full of disbelief.

For a powerful civilization that had once brought the entire galaxy under its control, having an unidentified object silently sneak into the very heart of the civilization—its own homeworld system—before being detected was...

This was tantamount to a nation's capital air defense system sluggishly sounding the alarm only after enemy planes had already flown overhead and dropped bombs.

This was a profound humiliation, and even more so, a severe security loophole.

The meeting room immediately erupted in discussion.

"Has our detection technology fallen behind?"

"Or does the other party possess some kind of stealth technology that we cannot comprehend?"

"Where did this unidentified object come from? What is its purpose? Is it benevolent or malicious?"

Facing the chatter of the crowd, Consul Price remained as calm and steady as a mountain.

He slowly raised his hand, signaling everyone to quiet down.

Then he cast his gaze toward the sweating head of the Deep Space Monitoring Station.

"Tell me," his voice was not loud, but it was full of seriousness, "why did our faster-than-light monitoring system fail? Can we improve it to ensure that similar things do not happen again?"

"Archon," the researcher wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and hurriedly explained, "our monitoring system itself did not fail. Its problem lies in… its design philosophy is still stuck in the framework of our old universe."

"All of our long-range early warning systems are based on detecting the channel ripple signals generated during hyperspace travel, and the unidentified object just now clearly used another faster-than-light travel method that we are not very familiar with. The faster-than-light detection means targeting hyperspace channels failed, so…"

"Then are there any technical difficulties in improving it?" Price went straight to the core.

"No!" The researcher immediately straightened his back. "Whether it is hyperspace travel, Warp Drive, or other faster-than-light travel methods we currently know of, their underlying logic is still within our existing framework of physical theory. We only need to conduct a comprehensive upgrade and algorithm update on the existing sensor array, and add a monitoring module for Warp Drive fluctuation characteristics or other means."

"But this will take time, and it will also require massive resources," he added.

"Cridel." Price immediately cast his gaze toward a council member sitting not far away, who looked a bit chubby but had exceptionally shrewd eyes.

Cridel was the Industrial Engineering Council Member of the Faleim Civilization, in charge of the entire civilization's industrial production and engineering construction.

"I need you to complete a comprehensive upgrade of the entire homeworld system's defense and early warning system in the shortest possible time," Price issued the order. "Resources and manpower are not an issue. I have only one requirement—next time, I hope to know about anything before it gets within 10 light-years of us."

"Guarantee to complete the mission, Archon!" Cridel immediately stood up and gave a standard salute.

After resolving the issue with the early warning system, everyone's attention focused on the uninvited guest that had caused this false alarm.

After being successfully captured by the deep space monitoring station's reinforced gravity net, the unidentified object was quickly and carefully transported by a high-speed transport ship to the heavily guarded highest experimental hub located in the synchronous orbit of the Falem Homeworld—the Ring of Truth Space Station.

When Price, Zeral, and a large group of Faleim's top scientists saw the true appearance of this object via holographic projection, their faces all showed a slightly strange expression—a complex look mixed with curiosity, contempt, and a touch of archaeological interest.

It was a perfect sphere with a diameter of about 300 meters.

Its surface was exceptionally smooth, presenting a dull metallic black, with no seams, hatches, portholes, or thrusters.

It was like a huge, seamless black pearl, silently floating in the center of the experimental chamber.

After initial scans confirmed that the metal sphere itself did not possess any energy reactions or threats, Faleim scientists began their "dissection" research on it.

This process was less of research and more of a public teaching demonstration by a higher civilization on the creation of a lower civilization.

"Hylar," Price asked the chief expert in charge of materials science, a female scientist named Hylar, "do you have any initial judgment on its shell material? It looks... very sturdy."

Hylar's face revealed a slight smile, the kind of expression a university professor has when looking at an elementary student who has just learned that 1+1=2.

"Yes, Archon, it 'looks' indeed very sturdy." She deliberately emphasized the word "looks".

"According to our high-dimensional spectral analysis," she called up a molecular structure simulation diagram, which was a perfect crystal lattice structure composed of countless tightly arranged light points, "I have to admit that the civilization that created this sphere does have some skills in the fundamental physics of the four-dimensional universe. They found a way to directly 'lock' every atomic nucleus that constitutes the matter together using strong interaction forces."

"This means that trying to destroy its structure using conventional physical means of our dimension is very difficult to achieve, and its strength has indeed reached the theoretical limit that our four-dimensional universe's material form can achieve in a single dimension."

"Sounds impressive?" A young council member couldn't help but interject.

"Yes, for a civilization that can only think in four-dimensional space, this is indeed their limit." Hylar's tone was filled with undisguised superiority.

"It's just like a primitive man who exhausts his life's work to find a way to perfectly glue countless hardest stones together, building a stone wall he thinks is indestructible."

"But to us, this stone wall," she changed the subject, her face revealing a hint of disdain, "is just a slightly thicker mud wall."

She extended her slender fingers and tapped lightly on the holographic operating interface.

Inside the experimental chamber, a grayish-white beam, finer than a strand of hair and almost invisible, shot out from a device on the ceiling, precisely striking the huge black metal sphere.

Just see, that solid shell, which Hylar had evaluated as "reaching the strength limit of four-dimensional universe matter," was quickly cut with a circular opening about ten meters in diameter under the irradiation of that grayish-white beam, like snow melting under sunlight.

The edge of the gap was as smooth as a mirror, as if it had never existed in the first place.

"Dimensional cutting beam," Hylar explained indifferently. "A very basic tool. Its principle is simple: it projects a higher-dimensional plane into four-dimensional space and uses the dimensional difference to cut the atomic links of three-dimensional matter. It's like if you want to split a painting in two, you just need to cut the paper carrying the painting in half."

"The civilization that created this sphere worked very hard to build their 'wall' to the limit height of the four-dimensional space, but we just climbed over the wall from outside the four-dimensional space."

Hylar's explanation, which was like a dimension-reduction strike, made everyone present nod involuntarily.

This also caused their last shred of awe toward that unknown civilization to completely disappear.

A civilization that was still complacent about how to make three-dimensional matter as hard as possible was indeed like a toddler to the Faleim People, who could already play with dimensions at will.

After easily opening this "nut," Faleim scientists began their research on the interior.

It was an unmanned probe filled with precision instruments and complex circuits that, in their view, were thousands of years behind.

After three days of intense research, Faleim scientists, like a group of experienced archaeologists studying an unearthed antique, completely figured out the origin and purpose of this thing.

"Archon," Zeral made the final summary report, "we can confirm that this is a faster-than-light unmanned probe used for deep space exploration. There are some highlights in the design concept, but the engineering implementation is full of compromises and flaws. Overall score... passing, I guess."

"It is equipped with many sensors for collecting various cosmic information, as well as a faster-than-light communication device based on the principle of quantum entanglement. The design of this communication device is quite clever; while ensuring communication distance, it minimizes energy consumption to the greatest extent."

"However," he pointed to several obviously burnt components, a hint of regret on his face, "most of the precision instruments inside were damaged due to violent spatial tremors. It is a great pity."

"Our speculation is that it did not shut down the Warp Drive in time when approaching our stellar gravity well, which led to the collapse of the warp bubble. This caused it to exit the faster-than-light state and thus be captured by our gravity net. This is a very low-level mistake, but from another perspective, if our star system did not exist on its originally planned path, then everything makes sense. It just didn't have time to 'brake'."

"However, according to the record of the last signal sent by the communication device," Zeral's expression became slightly more serious, "before it was damaged, it should have successfully sent the basic coordinates of our star system, stellar type, and the number of planets, among other preliminary detection data, back to its civilization. And for a communication device based on the principle of quantum entanglement, its civilization should have received the information long ago."

This conclusion made Price's brows furrow again.

This meant that a faster-than-light civilization already knew of their existence and location.

Yet they knew nothing about the other party.

"Can we reverse-trace its origin?" Price asked.

Hylar shook her head.

"It's difficult, Archon. The characteristics of quantum entanglement communication are instantaneous and absolute secrecy. We cannot track the trajectory of its signals. It's like two people communicating using a pair of telepathic twins; we can only see one of them talking, but we don't know where the other one is."

"The only thing we can do is to roughly infer a star region direction from which it might have originated based on the heading vector when it entered our star system."

She projected a huge Star Map and drew a massive fan-shaped area covering tens of millions of star systems on it.

"It could have come from anywhere within this region."

Price looked at that vast, unknown star region and was silent for a moment.

"I understand."

He finally issued the order.

"Order Cridel to normalize the garrison fleet's patrol of the Faleimland periphery starting from today."

"Accelerate the construction speed of the stellar bases in the other few resource-producing star systems."