Chapter 1155
Despite the amount of time he had spent there, Anton felt that his explorations of Klar were rather incomplete. He’d landed on a single planet and associated with the plant cultivators living upon it. While the development of a language spoken purely with energy was certainly valuable, there was a lot more to the systems. Other planets, certainly, but most relevant was the large variety of things living in the vacuum of space.
For the most part, Anton had avoided those. They seemed to act with the instincts of beasts, and even those that seemed more intelligent were just clever hunters. Anton hadn’t yet pinned down anything of sapience in the spacefaring individuals, but he might yet. It required closely watching a number of individuals for an extended period of time- unless he simply got lucky with certain forms of displays that would tip him off.
Reaching Unity allowed Anton to return to the system more quickly, though it was still isolated in various ways. The first was the distance from the Lower Realms Alliance as a whole, with the second being Anton not having a nearby bound star.
But he had some thoughts about that. In the past, Anton had come to the decision that he should gain permission from the locals before binding a star- and he stuck to that. But he thought he actually had a better method now.
What he was doing would reveal him to the whole system, if they hadn’t yet noticed him moving about, but Anton didn’t find that particularly concerning. Merely knowing he was around might make some beasts seek him out, but he hoped sapient individuals would recognize he wasn’t a threat.
Blue supergiant stars burned bright and fast, at least by stellar standards. Something around ten million years, though there hadn’t been enough long term observation to confirm that fully, and especially not whether decay accelerated or decreased when a star possessed greater natural energy. Most likely, there were stable and unstable configurations.
Klar’s star was a highly potent blue supergiant. The life around it had likely been supercharged in its development, though the exact magnitude depended on whether there had been any outside influence. That didn’t necessarily mean life seeding, but even simple bacteria ending up in the system by coincidence could have skipped a large part of the process.
Anton reached out to the star, infusing it with his power- but not with any intention to form a bond. Not yet, at least. Even so, he was infusing it with the power of Unity. If Anton’s experience hadn’t failed him, he should be able to achieve his desired results with that.
The power of Unity resonated with the residents of the system, and Anton felt pulses of responses. Nothing conscious, exactly, but responses nonetheless. Klar wasn’t ready to accept a bonded star, and the main resonance came from the one planet Anton had already surveyed, plus one more- and then a very weak response from space itself. Something of sufficient sapience might be hiding there, or perhaps sufficient cultivation strength or quantities of lesser thinking ability could produce the same response.