O43novel Chapter 732: Refining the Sun
Chapter 732: Refining the Sun
**Chapter 732: Refining the Sun**
Jie Ming noticed his confusion. With a casual wave, he pulled up a larger star map on the light screen and circled an area with his fingertip.
“I plan to incorporate some of the planets from the original Tentacle Tree Plane into the Infernal Sulfur Plane. I won’t merge everything though; a large number of worlds will remain.”
“It happens that I’ll be creating new stars soon. When the time comes, simply placing these planets onto suitable orbits at the right distance from the stars will create many worlds suitable for your people to live on.”
“So I’m just giving you advance notice, to prevent your clansmen from feeling too unsettled when the orbital adjustments happen.”
Furnace Fence subconsciously nodded.
Relocating an entire race was no small matter, yet in front of this wizard, it seemed as simple as moving house.
Still, he had long since witnessed the wizard’s mighty power and technological prowess, so he held no doubt that the other party could achieve such a feat.
His crystalline eyes swept across the star map several times before stopping on a crucial question.
“Your Excellency, since you intend to create new star systems, what about the original stars?” “The original stars will naturally serve as raw materials for creating the new ones,” Jie Ming replied. He seemed surprised by the question but offered a brief explanation anyway. “To put it simply, the new stars will be formed by aggregating and refining a large number of old stars.”
Furnace Fence’s tentacles stiffened.
He ran the statement through his centuries of accumulated knowledge to confirm its meaning, then asked cautiously, “Your Excellency, if that’s the case, the new star’s mass will increase dramatically. Maintaining it in a stable stellar state through external force—so it neither collapses from excessive mass nor enters the final stages of evolution prematurely due to gravitational imbalance—would likely require enormous effort. May I ask why you are doing this?”
“You misunderstand. The new star’s mass will not increase.”
Jie Ming shook his head and was about to continue when steady footsteps sounded from the side.
A black giant priest strode quickly to his side. The vertical mouth on its chest opened slightly as it reported in a low, vibrating voice, “Master, the refining formation has been fully installed.”
Jie Ming looked up.
Around the star overhead, the circular ring was missing only one final small segment before it would close completely.
As the black giant priest made its report, several sixth-level black giants carefully embedded the last section of the ring into its designated position.
The gap vanished.
A complete, dark-golden slender ring now fully encircled the entire star.
“Explaining it would be too troublesome.”
Jie Ming withdrew his gaze and looked back at Furnace Fence. His fingers swept rapidly across the light screen.
“Let me show you directly what I intend to do.”
His fingertip paused on a newly activated rune in the center of the screen and pressed down gently.
At the same moment, the entire ring surrounding the star lit up simultaneously.
Dark golden light flowed along the ring’s surface, then extended upward and downward. Layer upon layer of formation patterns projected outward from the ring, interlocking at their edges like an enormous flower made of runes slowly blooming across the star’s surface.
Within a few breaths, the entire star was enveloped in a semi-transparent dark-golden light membrane.
Then, under Jie Ming’s continued control, the refining process began.
Guided by the formation, the star’s volume began to shrink.
Starting from the outer atmosphere, the formation refined the star layer by layer. The instant each layer of stellar material was scanned, it was converted into a more special form of energy.
The excess energy that was “discarded” was absorbed by the formation and fed back into the next stage of the refining process.
Under the formation’s extremely high efficiency, the star’s diameter visibly contracted—from millions of kilometers down to mere tens of thousands of kilometers in moments. Yet the brightness in the sky did not diminish in the slightest. On the contrary, it grew even brighter.
Even though a massive amount of mass and energy had been lost, the released energy was actually increasing.
It was as if something had truly been extracted and purified from the plasma that composed the sun!
Furnace Fence stared dumbfounded at the star overhead rapidly shrinking within the formation.
The scene before him was unlike any advanced civilization technology he had ever seen.
It had completely transcended any category of “technology” he understood. One could even say it had entirely overturned his worldview. This was truly the extraction of a higher-energy-state substance from a sun that, in theory, contained nothing else.
Moreover, throughout the entire process, all physical laws had been precisely and orderly manipulated.
His knowledge system left him unable to even begin comprehending where to start.
While he was so shocked that he even forgot to curl his tentacles, the planetary surface beneath his feet suddenly shook violently.
Furnace Fence instinctively pulled his gaze away from the sky and looked around tensely.
He saw that, at some point, circles of pre-arranged stabilization formations had lit up across the planet’s surface.
These formations were automatically adjusting the planet’s orbital parameters, compensating for the drastic changes in the gravitational field caused by the star’s sudden mass reduction.
The ground tremors were quickly suppressed, and the planet stabilized once more on its new orbit, as if nothing had happened.
Jie Ming had also finished the refinement.
After confirming the final parameters on the light screen, he closed it and turned around.
The once enormous star overhead had now been reduced to a tiny pinpoint of light that was almost impossible to discern with the naked eye.
Yet the sky’s brightness had increased by several degrees compared to before.
“That’s how it works,” Jie Ming said casually. “With your vision, you probably can’t see it anymore. It has now been refined to roughly the size of a regular planet. In this state, its mass has been reduced considerably, while its volume has been compressed to one hundred-millionth of its original size—perfect as raw material for new stars.”
“To aggregate new stars, each one requires quite a few old stars as materials. So you don’t need to worry about the new stars having excessive mass.”
Furnace Fence remained silent for several seconds.
His crystalline eyes darted rapidly between Jie Ming and the nearly invisible pinpoint of light overhead. Then he lowered his canopy to the lowest position, pressed all his tentacles neatly and flatly against the ground, and performed a more solemn and slower obeisance than usual.
“Understood. I will return immediately to inform my clansmen of the relevant news. Thank you very much, Your Excellency, for explaining these matters to me.”
With that, he asked no further technical questions.
His experience had taught him that some knowledge was an honor to possess, but inquiring further would be presumptuous.
In his view, the fact that Jie Ming was willing to explain at all was already immense leniency. Even back when he had served as planetary governor, he had often disdained explaining the purpose of his orders to his subordinates.
Jie Ming nodded and turned to reactivate the light screen.
On the star map, the coordinates of more than five hundred billion stars were being marked one by one.