Published at 26th of April 2026 7:53 am

Chapter 4074 A Thermal Heartbeat

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Rui's ethereal eyes lit up at that explanation. "How fascinating. A sentient, conscious planet generating energy for itself by consciously engaging in nuclear fusion at the very epicenter of its planet? How resourceful, I must say."

Now that he thought about it, he never considered where planets get energy for their strange metabolism. With Gaia, he knew that there were cycles of geophysics and geochemistry that comprised her metabolism. The energy generated by the sun appeared to be enough for her.

Then again, she also didn't do crazy things like shoot out lasers the size of moons

Garg appeared to need extra energy for extra processes that drained it of energy. The fact that the temperature cooled down immediately suggested to Rui that the energy was being rapidly absorbed by something.

Rui's eyes lit up as an idea emerged in his head. "Did Ceeran manage to get his hands on a sample from the ground?"

"Unfortunately not, Your Majesty. They were attacked by the planet before they could."

"You said…" Rui's expression hardened. "That several Martial Sages were killed by the planet and their bodies were left behind, right?"

"That's right, Your Majesty."

Rui had a bad feeling about that. He just hoped that his suspicions about the matter were wrong. "Back to the thermal heartbeat. If we assume that those pulses are nuclear fusion to generate energy. Then, any idea why it doesn't just continuously generate energy through nuclear fusion?"

"That's a good question, Your Majesty," Director Brenner continued with a thoughtful tone of voice. "We suspect that it doesn't continuously generate energy through nuclear fusion, if that's even what it is doing, because doing so would overheat the planet too much and perhaps make its life-sustaining geological metabolism untenable. All life is evolved and optimized for a certain temperature, after all."

"Thus, overheating could be a way to kill it, yes?" Lord Narsimha asked with a predatory glint in his eyes. "We could kill the planet by overheating it tremendously."

Rui threw a dubious glance at the therianthrope general. Of course, anything could be killed when overheated; that wasn't saying very much. "The goal is to capture it and study its reproductive methods. And then use those to replicate with Gaia. I don't want to destroy the planet, ideally."

"Destroying the planet is likely going to be extremely difficult, Your Majesty," Director Selvin took over with a serious expression. "The reality is that the planet does appear to have some kind of defensive energy absorptive method. Most likely, that is the same reason that the internal temperature of the planet falls so rapidly after the presumed nuclear fusion-related energy spikes."

"…In which case, attacking the planet might actually make it stronger," Rui thoughtfully remarked.

"Precisely, Your Majesty. Even with the information that we possess at the moment, it would not be advisable to simply try to incapacitate the planet with heavy impacts."

Rui was inclined to agree based on the information gathered. But the unfortunate thing about that was that their space force was built around weaponry that inflicted great impacts on their enemies by delivering energy in a destructive manner. How would they possibly destroy the planet if not for sieging it with great impacts? They didn't even have other methods of incapacitating a sentient planet. There wasn't an industry or sector for that kind of stuff. It had been just a little over a month since he confirmed that Gaia was sentient and conscious. "What if we try to disable its energy absorption?" Rui remarked with a thoughtful tone. "There must be some kind of mechanism that would allow it to absorb energy and use it for itself. That's what we must target and disable before bombarding the planet. I don't think there's any other kind of reasonable way to take down a planet of this size."

Director Selvin pondered the suggestion from the Emperor. "…In order to be able to precisely target its energy absorption mechanism, I think we would need to be able to develop an extremely thorough understanding of how its energy-absorptive methods work. Only after we have developed that understanding would we be able to precisely target their energy systems in the manner that you have suggested. That would require a lot of reconnaissance and ideally some kind of manned recon mission on the surface of the planet to gather some samples."

That was not easy, of course. New-gen Martial Sages were consumed in the blink of an eye, while even an older and more powerful Martial Sage wasn't able to withstand even a minute fraction of the power of the sentient planet. Rui had no doubt that there was much more power and many more abilities that the sentient planet had not revealed. After all, they hadn't seen it use most of its esoteric matter yet. "We need more information on the fighting methodologies of Garg," Rui remarked. "It would be irresponsible for us to go into battle with a powerful conscious planet and not know more than we don't, at the very least. For now, continue passive investigation. You can even send in more specialized surveillance and reconnaissance spaceships to Sirius, and have them gather every scrap of useful information that we can get our hands on."

"Will do, Your Majesty. There is the problem of the energy needed for the Intestellar Gate, though…"

Rui huffed. "I'll take care of that. But continue research on making it more energy efficient. I want the Panamic Space Organization to cut off all reliance on me for this particular matter."

He directed a pointed glance at Director Brenner, who nodded vigorously. "We would never take your power for granted, Your Majesty."

"Now then," he turned towards the two of them with a more serious expression. "I have transmitted all the information that the Laminar Civilization has shared with us regarding the alien presence across the Milky Way. Break it down for me in conjunction with all of the information that we have gathered on the Milky Way and share with me a holistic view of all the intelligence that we have on all alien life in the Milky Way."

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