Six Months of Development

Minerals were abundant and ubiquitous, but the extraction efficiency was too low. This meant all current investments were long-term; it would take a significant amount of time to generate the kind of energy Xia Jin would find worthwhile.

However, the Zerg civilization was naturally geared toward long-term development.

Moreover, the small amount of high-energy crystals produced by the minerals themselves was actually the minor part. The primary benefit lay in the elements within, which could eventually be used as materials for new Zerg units.

The final conclusion was that if a steady supply of minerals could be maintained, the Swarm could ultimately save about five percent of its production resources.

This was quite an impressive figure.

In terms of mineral utilization efficiency, technological civilizations had always crushed civilizations like the Zerg.

The Zerg excelled at utilizing organic matter; the former Overlord had even looked down on the meager income from minerals.

But the current Xia Jin was different. She wanted everything. Even though she had become a wealthy mogul, she still treated every single cent with importance, earning whatever she could. She knew that wealth was accumulated bit by bit; wasting a little every day would, over a vast stretch of time, likely equate to the resources needed to build another small-scale Swarm.

Following Brain Bug No. 1's suggestion, the Zerg immediately went into action.

A new Hive was dropped onto this orbital plane.

The viscous, eerie creep began to grow slowly toward both sides, eventually latching onto the meteoroids encountered along the way and fixing itself firmly to them.

Several queens crawled along the creep, occasionally dropping creep tumors to accelerate the coverage speed.

Of course, the creep itself was produced by consuming resources, so the creep in most areas was very thin, with a width of about twenty meters.

After a day's work, a ribbon over a hundred kilometers long appeared in space.

Due to its structural nature, the ribbon would suffer damage or even break when struck by high-speed meteoroids. However, since the creep grew automatically, it would quickly reconnect even if severed. Instead, many meteoroids were captured this way, eventually being slowly absorbed and digested into nutrients.

Xia Jin modified the creep here, adding biological cells to the edges that could generate energy through chemical reactions to push the creep slowly through space.

Since there was little gravity in space, a speed of even a few centimeters per hour was enough for the creep to move from one meteoroid to another.

Some drones worked around these rings, mostly in energy-saving mode. Once they caught a stone, they would provide a slight thrust, drifting slowly toward the creep at a speed of a few millimeters per second.

Such frugality meant that after a day of work, the resources harvested were many times the amount consumed.

After all, one unit of high-energy crystals was already enough to produce a lifeform like a Tier 1 drone, which was not an insignificant amount.

Using this approach, the Zerg slowly branched out across the rings and moons of Border Planet.

Of course, compared to the entire planet, this was just a negligible speck, and the expansion speed was very slow.

But Xia Jin had high expectations for this.

“Let’s build a few more Small Leviathans this time and head toward other star systems.”

Within a radius of twenty light-years, there were seven star systems.

Among them were two triple-star systems and one quadruple-star system; the rest were single-star systems.

Observations confirmed that multi-star systems were very common.

For the Zerg, multi-star environments were highly valuable sites for laying creep, provided the conditions weren't exceptionally harsh.

First, she upgraded the current Small Leviathans.

Based on current resources, upgrading two ships would consume twelve days' worth of resources.

Since one of them was very far from the home planet, its energy decay was more severe. Xia Jin decided not to upgrade it and instead only modified the one above the home planet into a new state.

Then, she began construction of the third and fourth ships.

The cost of six billion units of high-energy crystals gave her a headache.

But the combat power would certainly be substantial.

Over the next month or so, more transport ships were hatched next to the Hive Carrier “shipyard” and took to the sky one after another.

They transported insects, primarily drones and queens, to more distant parts of the Insecta Solar System.

First was the asteroid belt outside Demon Planet. Low-level Hives were dropped in about two asteroid clusters, and creep was extended.

Beyond that, the focus was on several asteroids and two dwarf planets with diameters close to 1,000 kilometers.

These celestial bodies were rich in minerals. By simply dropping Hives, drones, and queens at a low cost, it would only take a matter of time before they achieved a steady net gain.