For a full six months, the Zerg had been continuously adding new mining sites.
Many mining areas had developed to the point where, from a distance, dense networks of creep were visible.
In some regions where meteoroids had been completely depleted, the Hives themselves would spend dozens of days relocating along with their creep networks to new locations to continue harvesting.
From an initial tens of millions of tons per day, the output grew to hundreds of millions.
Now, the volume of interstellar ore mined in a single day had reached a staggering eight billion tons.
Checking the reserves, one trillion tons of minerals had been successfully stockpiled.
These ores were converted into reserve resources for upgrades.
Newly harvested ore could be converted into approximately 800,000 units of high-energy crystals daily. After accounting for the energy consumed in the process, the net yield was 600,000 units.
It seemed wasteful, but in reality, it wasn't; there were so many minerals that the Swarm could afford to mine however they pleased.
Over these six months, the energy required for Hive upgrades had also been fully accumulated.
All that was missing were the Stellar Azure Crystals and Zero Point Nuclei.
Considering that harvesting such energy would cost trillions of units of high-energy crystals later on, the Zerg still didn't dare to overproduce units, maintaining a steady production rate of one Small Leviathan at a time.
After half a year, the number of Small Leviathans had reached eight (one of which, an older model, was already nearing a neighboring planetary system).
Meanwhile, Xia Jin had also upgraded a second Hive Carrier to Level 14 in one go.
This meant the Zerg had formed a main fleet consisting of two Hive Carriers and eight Small Leviathans.
The escort arrangement was simple: ten Floating Escorts for every Small Leviathan, totaling eighty ships.
In contrast, the production of Floating Transport Ships was high, with an estimated count of 200.
They were built in such numbers because they were primarily used for logistics; they were cheap, efficient, and unlikely to be phased out even as the Hives upgraded.
As for the main Swarm, their numbers had quietly grown to 380 million over the last six months.
Approximately 360 million of those were zerglings.
The number of drones had reached nearly ten billion.
Since these were all high-tier insects, the combat quality of the Swarm was perfectly guaranteed.
During this time, through a slow and steady underwater offensive, the Sea Race on Planet Insecta had been ground down to nothing.
To the Zerg, the energy invested in this effort was negligible.
The Zerg still hadn't launched a final battle against the Demon God, continuing their slow grind at a pace of one city per day.
However, over 60 million main combat insects had already been concentrated in the Abyss.
At this scale, massive swarms of dark insects could be seen patrolling everywhere along the border between the two sides.
An offensive of this magnitude would be catastrophic for the demons.
The Demon God had already given up.
He was Tier 14, the strongest in the Abyss.
But the Zerg—they started at Tier 10.
Most lethally, he had recorded seeing nearly tens of thousands of ultralisks alone.
Every single one of them was Tier 13.
How was he supposed to compete? He wasn't even going to try; he just gave up.
Most absurdly, the Zerg were consistently producing monsters that carried the Abyss aura.
Recently, elite individuals had begun to emerge among every Zerg species.
For instance, while Tier 13 was normally the peak for an ultralisk, there were now over twenty such beings in the Abyss alone—roughly one for every ten thousand ultralisks.
He didn't even know that over the past six months, Xia Jin's true body and her two projections had successively broken through to Tier 15.
Although the difficulty of further advancement rose sharply, her current combat power made her undeniably the strongest existence in the Abyss.
How could anyone fight such a Swarm?
While the Zerg were slowly gaining control over the demons, their primary focus remained on space. The leviathan sent out six months ago had finally arrived at its target star system.
It was also a single-star system.
The environment was relatively stable.
A quick scan revealed no signs of life.
There were planets relatively close to the habitable zone, but upon closer observation, their environments were far inferior to Planet Insecta.
Upon reaching its destination, the Small Leviathan immediately deployed several overseers into space.
As usual, observation came first.
The process was quick, eventually identifying four potentially useful planets.
The only disappointment was that the closest planet was further from its star than Planet Flame was from the Insecta Sun.
One of the planets was geologically hyperactive, with volcanic eruptions occurring everywhere.
With atmospheric temperatures in the hundreds of degrees and magma surging across the surface, any insects dropped onto it perished almost instantly.
Thus, this planet was ruled out.
In the end, three planets were deemed suitable.
Without much hesitation, she deployed the insects.
The first alien star system to be brought under Zerg control was a complete success.
“The universe really is quite empty,” she mused.
It had taken six months of high-speed travel just to reach the nearest system, and throughout the journey, they hadn't intercepted any signals from spacefaring civilizations.
There were plenty of other messy signals, but analysis showed they mostly originated from distant celestial bodies, some even billions of light-years away.
A fledgling civilization would likely feel lost at this point.
But Xia Jin knew how bustling the universe truly was and how brutal interstellar wars could be.
Most of the powerful civilizations of today had developed slowly over immense stretches of time.
Just as Xia Jin was considering where to explore next, an overseer scanning deep space sent back a report.
“A planet has been discovered with potential Zero Point Energy Tides. Distance: 12 light-years.”
Clap! Xia Jin clapped her hands. “Excellent. That's our next destination.”
Rate on N.U.
