Chapter 465: Ch
He would have crumbled instantly, much like how a low-level Golden Core cultivator cannot even dream of wielding an Immortal Weapon, even if the weapon is sitting right in front of them.
Because of this, he finally understood that the current Obliterator was but a fraction of its true, unsealed self. He would only get to witness its absolute, unfettered cosmic power when his own cultivation reached at least the level of a Chaos Supreme Emperor—a legendary realm far, far away from where he currently stood.
The Obliterator was truly a ship of extreme destruction. Born out of the creation of a mighty being, it still retained its trait of absolute indestructibility—though that trait was strictly limited to the current level it was unsealed to, which directly correlated to Kallus’s own cultivation.
Anyway, this new cultivation or evolution system wasn’t something currently in place for all of his subordinates. As of yet, only the 8th, 9th, and 10th Grand Battle Fleets and their respective crew members practiced this path. Even among them, about ninety-eight percent had not completely shifted to this new form of evolution.
After all, this path was something that ideally had to be walked from the very beginning, just like traditional cultivation. Joining the system midway was extremely difficult. Even Kallus had to pay a steep price for it, struggling for a full thousand years and going through numerous near-death encounters just to secure the rare treasures capable of facilitating this biological and mechanical merger without harming the current foundation of his subordinates.
But while there were many profound pros to this system of evolution, it also came with a few severe cons. To advance, a practitioner couldn’t just cultivate to the peak of their current level and break through. For instance, if a traditional cultivator was at the peak of the 1st level of the World Building Realm, they could wish to advance and transition to the 2nd level relatively easily if no bottleneck existed.
In the evolution system, however, reaching the peak of your cultivation level was only half the battle. To advance to the next level, the practitioner also needed to sublimate their ship and evolve it to the next tier as well. Each ship class possessed nine distinct levels of its own, and only after maxing out those levels could the vessel truly evolve and reach the next major class, mirroring the cultivation hierarchy itself.
Furthermore, this technological evolution was not something a starship pilot could achieve by themselves. They required an Evolutionist to guide the process—a brand-new profession born exactly for this specific cultivation system.
If a star pilot was a destroyer possessing extreme, destructive might, then an Evolutionist was a creator capable of helping these pilots and their starships safely ascend. This process wasn’t as simple as merely replacing old parts with new ones. Evolution ships, or True Ships, were entirely unique entities.
One couldn’t just swap out an engine or a hull plate and expect it to magically evolve. If you changed every single mechanical component by force, would the True Ship even maintain its core essence? It was that very essence, after all, that had to flawlessly resonate with its star pilot to achieve cosmic power.
No, doing it that way would completely destroy the resonance between the ship and its pilot, and it might even harm the pilot severely.
This was a critical detail Kallus had learned through the ruins of the ancient human civilization and other ancient races he had uncovered during the two thousand years he spent directly within the Universal Domain. It made him realize to an extreme degree just how vast this new cultivation system truly was, along with the sheer scale of its pros and cons.
Furthermore, not just any Evolutionist could evolve any ship; they had their own strict limitations and tier rankings. A Tier 1 Evolutionist, for example, could only help evolve a Corvette up to a Frigate-class vessel.
Even then, they could typically only manage a lower-quality refinement, far from the absolute peak potential that a Corvette or Frigate-class True Ship could reach.
(Indeed, much like the weapons found in the cultivation novels of Earth, each ship had its own specific quality grading, starting from Bronze, moving to White, Green, Blue, Red, and beyond. A Corvette or Frigate could at most reach the Blue ’Rare’ quality, and even that was a feat very few within the ranks of Tier 1 Evolutionists could ever achieve).
A Tier 2 Evolutionist could assist in the evolution of ships up to a Destroyer-class at most, typically capping out at Green quality, with only a select few capable of pushing a vessel into the Blue Rare quality. A Tier 3 Evolutionist could handle up to a Battlecruiser, with a higher chance of achieving Blue Rare quality, though it still remained an extremely rare outcome even at that level.
Moving higher, a Tier 4 Evolutionist was considered a supreme figure in the evolutionary world, with only a handful existing within an entire universal sector; they possessed the capability to evolve a vessel up to the Super Battleship class. Then there were the legendary Tier 5 individuals, who could evolve a ship all the way up to a Super Star Destroyer level, and so on and so forth.
However, cultivating these Evolutionists was an astronomically costly and time-consuming process. Each one needed to be an absolute master of their respective Tier and completely master the corresponding technological trees of that level. This made the challenges of walking this evolutionary path incredibly high.
But the rewards of this system were equally staggering. After all, the raw strength boost it provided to a practitioner ranged from one hundred percent to an astronomical one thousand percent—if not more—at the absolute extreme of the higher levels.
The raw stat boosts and cosmic enhancements that the different qualities of True Ships provided to their star pilots, paired alongside their own personal cultivation, created a terrifying synergy that Kallus simply could not bear to pass up.
This realization even made Kallus consider that this path might not actually be absent from the wider universe. It was highly likely that the Milky Way simply existed in one of the most extreme, desolate corners of the cosmic expanse—a place so barren that no major cosmic entity could bear to look at it, as it possessed practically nothing to scream for or attract the attention of the universe’s supreme powers.
That was exactly why this sector was mostly cut off from the gaze of the truly powerful empires, leaving only a few local factions within this universal rim with the drive to take over the galaxy.
And this was exactly why such a system was completely unknown and practically unheard of in this region of space. Instead of walking the path of evolutionary resonance, everyone else in the galaxy was stuck playing a tedious game of trying to integrate hyper-resources.
These Tier 4 and above materials were considered hyper-resources because they possessed the unique ability to absorb environmental mana to strengthen themselves.
However, this process had severe limits, and any noticeable enhancements were incredibly difficult to see over short periods, making it a grueling, slow-burning method of development.
Even Kallus’s own imperial Research & Development department had been no different at the start.
They possessed the highest level of technological expertise throughout this entire galaxy, and hopefully across many other galaxies within this desolate universal rim where the Milky Way was located.
The R&D team had been trying their absolute best to integrate the aspects of mana into pure technology, hoping to use it as a direct enhancement to their existing systems and achieve a higher level of technological breakthrough.
But actually achieving that was a brutal, uphill battle.
One shouldn’t look at the rapid advancement of new technological tiers and the brand-new classes of ships achieved by the Void Fleet and think it was easy just because it seemed to happen in a mere few months of reality.
When counting the actual time spent within the time-dilation zones of the universal domain, more than two to three thousand years had passed to perfect those technologies! And mind you, that agonizingly slow progress occurred despite the R&D department already possessing massive technological databases and blueprints up to Tier 8 from their previous universe.
The bottleneck wasn’t a lack of capability to re-engineer the tech or replicate the ships they had blueprints for. The real problem lay in the fundamental rules of this universe and galaxy. The laws of physics and mysticism here were completely different from what they had experienced before, severely and ruthlessly limiting the capabilities of their technology.
The primary culprit was mana itself. The energy interfered with almost every single piece of advanced technology they produced. It constantly disrupted the power outputs of their reactors, or worse, outright caused chaos within the structural systems by triggering massive internal surges that fried delicate circuitry.
Countless problems popped up with every configuration they tested. Despite thousands of attempts, they consistently failed to make any meaningful progress.