chapter 206
“What? The sun is doing what?” I asked in utter disbelief.
“It somehow has repulsive gravity, so getting near it is literally impossible without getting torn apart by the gravitational forces. Neither can you leave, because the gravity eventually flips at the edges of the star system. There is no escape here using regular space,” FH explained to me once again.
Eventually, I got my voice back as my brain finally managed to accept this weird behaviour the sun was displaying. “Has there been anything else similar to this phenomenon?”
“Actually, yes, plenty of examples. Only a few in the Milky Way, but in the rest of the universe, thousands. Even planets that act similarly.”
“Oh, well, I didn’t expect that. But I am assuming those were the only anomalies most of those stars had?”
“Not all of them, but most only have that as an anomaly, yes. I haven’t done too much research into anomalies. Those happen when celestial bodies like planets and stars are saturated with mana. Weird things start to happen when that’s the case.”
“Anything else we should know? This star seems to have quite a few anomalies.”
“Yes. Even though most of them are detrimental anomalies, I believe this place would still be considered a holy site,” FH said, and I could hear some reverence in her voice. There was a bit of silence between the two of us before she spoke up again.
“How do you not know what that is? What’s the most dangerous thing in this universe?” FH’s sudden question caught me by surprise.
“A mana-tech battleship?” I answered, truly not being confident I got it right.
What I felt next was the equivalent of a shoulder slap. “It’s raw mana.”
Of course, that made sense. Not only did it cause portals to appear, it basically destroyed any technology and started to mutate the environment you were in. Most of the time into a more hostile one.
“Now, as to the holy sites. Strong enough individuals can stop the effects of raw mana in an area, as you do with helping Forward Horizon survive before we got souls. There are instances of celestial bodies getting anomalies that have a similar effect.”
“So there is no raw mana here?” A smile crept onto my face.
“No, Captain, but why the smile?”
“Because we have quite a lot of raw mana stored for absorption purposes to increase our rank. That is quite useless for us right now, but it should be one of the most valuable commodities in this place, as you could use it to help people go through mana rebirth.” The entire ship's processing load increased tremendously for a brief instant.
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“How did I miss that? This means that there are basically no adventurers here, and the ones that are will all be quite influential. Danger calculations need to be redone.” She continued like that, muttering to herself, not knowing that I could still hear her.
She was right in the implications. This changed a lot. Bob had done an excellent job inventorying everything, so it was easy enough to find the numbers for how much raw mana we had. We had enough for 31 or 32 people to go through mana rebirth.
That should be worth an incredible amount. Then there were the skills that we had on board. Create Water was a pretty basic skill, and while it didn’t fit into every affinity, it had quite a wide range of uses. That skill here would be worth a king’s ransom.
It seemed that I underestimated how wealthy we actually were. This might also be quite troublesome. We couldn’t simply display this wealth. It was too valuable, and if we later couldn’t agree on a price, it would mean a fight for our survival.
I informed Bob of my revelations. At first, he was quite happy, but then he got serious as he understood the same implications as I did.
“What’s the plan then? It seems that if we had only ten possible choices on what to do, then nine seemed to lead us to disaster.” Bob was rarely this serious unless he was dealing with storing cargo.
“I honestly don’t know, Bob. The station’s overseer seems to be in full control. If I understand it correctly, perhaps the best course of action is to gift him enough raw mana for a single rebirth and a skill stone for Create Water?”
“That’s a mighty big gift… it would show a lot of goodwill. The question is, what would they have to give us in return for everything else we have? We simply don’t have the space to store too much material wealth.”
“Perhaps data?” I said out loud, not specifically to anyone.
“Data on what?” Sam asked, and honestly I didn’t know the answer.
“Isn’t this basically a graveyard for millenniums of different types of ship design? Isn’t one of your goals in going to Earth to get as much data on ships as possible?” Dean spoke up, my head snapping to him immediately as he was completely right.
“If they stored that type of data- but if they do, it should certainly help.” Bob was absolutely correct about that. Let’s just hope that they would be willing to trade for that.
“But we should still concentrate on material wealth first. They should have some good stuff here, even if it’s not in large quantities,” Bob clarified, looking straight at me so I wouldn’t get any stupid ideas.
“Yes, yes, we will get the ship filled out first. But now we need to prepare. We will reach the station in a few days.”
Time went by quite fast. While the station’s guns weren’t exactly aiming at us, they were definitely tracking us so they could act at a moment’s notice. We had just finished our last deceleration burn and were now moving towards one of the docking areas.
The station itself seemed to be mainly made up of two different battleships joined together, and then a lot of other ships added to that. It was a pretty big station, and a lot of it seemed to be covered in farming areas, which made sense as there were a lot of mouths to be fed.
As we got close, the gravity of the station kicked in, helping us descend into the right location. Where we were landing looked like a helicopter airport, with ground crews moving around, dealing with the ships coming and going.
It made sense that scavenging would be a main profession here, and this being the only station in the system, it meant that most of the trade would flow through this place. Bob was already salivating, thinking of all the great deals he was going to be making.
Of course, none of this meant anything if we couldn’t escape this system, but I already had some plans in that regard. We simply needed more data.
As we touched down, a ground crew surrounded us but didn’t approach. They seemed to be a bit nervous, which made sense as we were newcomers. We lowered the ramp, with our combat teams walking out first and securing our surroundings.
Not too far away, we saw a group of people approaching who were heavily armoured and seemed to be protecting an inner circle of a few individuals.
“What a weird-looking ship.” Those words came from the one who seemed to be in charge of the ground crew. They were a short species with fur all over them. “I hope you got this at a discount.” They now said directly to me.
I hadn’t even gotten off the ramp, and already my ship had been insulted. FH seemed amused. “I designed and built it myself,” I answered back, having to raise my voice a bit as they were almost twenty metres away from me.
That sent a ripple of shock through the rest of the crowd, and everyone took a step away from the boss, who seemed too shocked to speak. Eventually, he did start to mutter out something, but was cut off when the Overseer reached us.
His voice was clear and confident as he addressed me. “Greetings, Remi Graves. I am the Overseer of this station. As promised, you made it here safely. We have set up a welcoming party for you.”
I immediately raised my hand. “No parties, at least not yet. But I would like a private word with you.”
He processed that for a few moments before agreeing. “That is easily arranged. We have a neutral space for that, not far from here, where you can bring your own escort as well.”
“Bob, you stay with the ship. Dean, Sam, with me. Bring your own teams and two additional combat teams.”
“Yes, Captain,” they snapped out.