Chapter 1211
Building wasn’t really the strongest suit of Velvet. She was a powerful enough cultivator that she could accomplish pretty much anything if she set her mind to it, but that didn’t ever mean she would be the best choice for something like that. She did have a surprisingly large quantity of knowledge on farming, though. Mostly absorbed secondhand from Anton when she’d before her Ascension- and a little bit afterwards.
Even if she wasn’t great, she could still contribute. Considering that the sects of the Chaotic Conglomeration didn’t have much in the way of machinery set up- especially on newly settled planets- single individuals of sufficient agility could always be useful.
“You really need to come up with a name,” Velvet commented to Runa.
“Once we do,” she replied. “We have to be prepared for people to notice. Sects rarely combine under another banner. It would be seen as a sort of separation, along with our physical location.”
The two of them spoke easily, even as they practically sprinted down rows of fields, either tilling the soil or placing seeds precisely. This was one of the planets that already had a workable atmosphere, though without an established biosphere. Others were much harder to kickstart into a planet that could be occupied. The norm was to create isolated bubbles, but those were risky as any damage could make an entire city or more uninhabitable in an instant. Even those cultivators that could sustain themselves without air couldn’t do so indefinitely until they were somewhere around Integration.
The techniques required to implement atmospheres on planets that didn’t have them were quite complicated, involving the extraction of various elements from the planet itself, usually from solid compounds. Sometimes material was taken from a gas giant, since they wouldn’t miss much material, but taking an atmosphere from one planet to place on another just didn’t work. Even if it was implemented, there was no net gain.
Velvet didn’t know how to make rocks into air, but the twins did. Either through technology or formations, they were working on surrounding planets in the systems that had been claimed.
Along with the human workers from the various sects, there were void ants. They were critically useful, as they could monitor the smaller scale issues that might arise. A planet with only trees wouldn’t be as prosperous as it might seem. Trees could entirely devour the atmosphere until there was nothing left for them to use. When they died, they would simply take up space- because decay was a process that required other forms of life to progress to any significant extent. Solar radiation could break things down extremely slowly, but that wasn’t much good.
Other plants, animals, bacteria, and all sorts of fungus and things were needed to create even a basic form of functional biosphere. Fortunately, this wasn’t the first time the Alliance had settled new planets, and they had knowledge about the various pitfalls that might occur.