The peace in Qi lasted only a few hibernation cycles till a starship was observed speeding through the system at relativistic speeds till disengaging curvature propulsion:
However, to much surprise, before Conglomerate Defense fleet could intercept it, it disappeared within warped space once again. However, not too long after this incident, another ship popped up in the system. This time Lensias successfully slowed it down in an artificial gravity well untill Syzygies could catch up to it and destroy them with kinetic fire:
One part of the ship remained intact after the encounter was over. From it, a few bodies could have been recovered. The ship was marked with the same symbol as the invaders of Qusmont have worn, so it was very surprising when the bodies discovered were something totally different than the aliens classified so far. They were of a slim, seven-legged figure that was very nimble and gave an impression of being fragile, however stress tests conducted by the destruction of their ship itself showed that ripping their bodies apart was a tough task - one could stretch, rotate and warp them around, but they just insisted on staying in one piece. Later in the laboratories detailed experiments have determined their environmental tolerances:
No planet meeting all these criteria has been detected so far. Besides, even if such planet has been spotted, how would this help in determining what these aliens were? But one thing stood out: it was a different species fighting under the same banner as the previously encountered enemy. What if these two races somehow figured out how to not kill each other in a Dark Forest and signed an alliance? Even if they were hostile to every other life form, that was still a start. More enthusiastic citizens started dreaming of this discovery serving as a path towards peace. Scientists remained more cautious, pointing out there is no solid evidence than this species were sentient, maybe they were just some animals from the homeworld of current enemy, but at the same time the entire wreck didn't contain any trace of biological matter from the previously discovered species. However, these two aliens did not have separate resource pools - namely they both were breathing oxygen. Maybe there were other workarounds for the ugly nature of the universe? Soulseekers just got more work to do to fine-tune their theories and proposed solutions.
As Qi system was being monitored carefully, astronomers detected a previously omitted detail: all the space warped with Curvature Drives stayed like that. More experiments confirmed that it could easily be "flattened" again after another relativistic flight, but that was it. This clashed with Humanity's theories once again - according to them, such way of travel should warp space only temporarily and flatten it behind the ship. At the same time this observation inspired scientists to try to develop permanent rifts in space that would serve as travel points between various stars: the idea was to bend space hardly enough so that it could create a tunnel linking different systems. Maybe that was even the possible way to deal with the speed of light - while first flight still required its limit to be respected, following fleets could take a shortcut and arrive at destination instantly via rift that was built along the way at the speed of light, but now is already there. On top of that such journey wouldn't require the ship to have Curvature Drive installed. Physicists were surprised when they noticed the first stub of a mathematical model describing such rifts looked oddly similar to a previously unclassified section of the monolith. Rifts were named strangely, possibly it was a reference to some kind of organisms living on a homeworld of Humanity and the way they carved tunnels in their food, but apart from that the theory looked similar enough.
The problem is, even after many attempts the theory just refused to work in practice. Black Wall reminded about itself in the worst manner possible once again. Why did Humanity tried to contain Groaxians within a few nearest stars while not wiping them out instead? However, this time the situation was looking different: the idea of using interstellar rifts was an independent Groaxian research project that had nothing to do with Humanity until another section of the monolith has been understood. This helped to restore faith in Humanity among some sceptics that gained some popularity ever since first supposedly superluminal objects engineered failed to cross the speed of light, at least, but the troubles with interstellar travel persisted.
It took only a few hibernation cycles for the enemy to appear once again, bringing a squadron of three ships that seemed like they wanted to take over Yatune once again. Defense fleet, having mastered this manoeuvre already, plotted an interception course:
The combined kinetic fire and curvature disruption gave the enemy no chance. Trapped within artificial gravity well, struggling to reach escape velocity while dodging missiles that only accelerated further as they entered the gravitational sphere of influence themselves, two of them were quickly reduced to ashes. However, as Qi Defenders prepared the final volley, something very unusual occurred. Onboard cybersoul mainframes picked up an unintelligible signal originating from the third spacecraft. Initial analysis determined it was of an artificial origin and bore marks of sentient communication attempts.
Groaxians serving on the warships did not expect this. They paid a horrible price for keeping their civilisation safe - after witnessing combat for quite a few times now and skipping many hibernation cycles in their service, they were different than other Groaxians. Psychological evaluation has shown that they had much more trouble focusing on meditation and sometimes even struggled with proper words when talking. None of them spawned offspring. Time spent in deep space has changed them, and it was for the worse since they didn't serve to observe the beauty of it, but to fight across the void. In fact, it was determined that the amount of negative emotions the experienced was so high that the gasses responsible for expressing them have accumulated inside their bodies to the toxic levels which in return damaged their digestive systems and obstructed breathing. They required higher methane concentration to survive than others and needed to wear a special apparatus when on the surface of Genesis. "Dark Forest Disease" was how medics described their condition.
And yet it was them that had to respond. With slowly degrading brain tissue it was hard for them to think as decently as they did when they started service. This didn't help with the obvious problem of them not understanding what the messages actually said. Meanwhile the third ship slowed down and turned off its engines. The commander of the fleet relieved, as this provided an easy opportunity to buy basically as much time as needed: a couple of accurate gravitational shots were enough to trap the ship in one place. If it wanted to escape, it'd take too much time accelerating so that Groaxians could simply set the trap once again or just outright destroy it.
First obvious thing to confirm was that their language was not a human one. After this formality being done, the actual translating work could begin. Soon it was decided that attempting to translate their messages directly to any Groaxian language is futile, because the way they express themselves is just too different for this to work out. Conglomerate agreed that human language should be used instead. This generated another issue, as Groaxians could barely understand the simplest parts of it, let alone build sentences of their own, but the way these sentences were phrased was more similar to the alien messages, even if not the actual meaning or word structure itself.
The stalemate would continue for solar watches to no end, until one, seemingly unrelated, discovery regarding Dark Forest Theory was made. A group of soulseekers studying Dark Forest-related materials on the monolith and meditating as often as possible has figured out the key difference between advanced and primitive civilisations in the context of dealing with others. Alien invasions like the one Groaxians experienced were a domain of a primitive one. Meanwhile the well-developed races upon detecting another intelligence would simply launch doomsday devices from remote locations across light hibernation cycles, destroying entire stars and all the bodies orbiting them at their leisure. They even discovered bits of human history when dealing with such monstrosities: these fragments talked about the need to stay quiet or be heard by a race that would launch such attack without hesitation and described worlds destroyed by such weapons: destabilised ecosystems, planets reduced to asteroid belts, entire stars going supernova... But that was not the worst part - one of the soulseekers working on the topic outright hibernated out of extreme fear upon realisation of it. Any civilisation capable of sending messages across the stars, even primitive one, could summon the advanced one and give it a target to annihilate: all that needed to be done was a broadcast of stellar coordinates pointing at a particular planet or star. Upon receiving it, the Dark Forest Lords, fully aware of its artificial origin, would do the dirty work. The key was to send this message in a way that would not reveal sender's position, though, otherwise the sender would meet same fate as the target.
For the next cosmic watch astronomers were desperately analysing received messages in the context of galactic coordinates of Qi or any planet orbiting it, later they also checked nearby systems, but the coordinates were either well-hidden and impossible to detect for Groaxians or summoning a Dark Forest Lord was not the case in this situation. At first the officers insisted on destroying the hostile ship, but Conglomerate rejected this suggestion, blaming it on Dark Forest Disease, claiming that if these are really the coordinates of Groaxian space, then it must be confirmed and thus full communication must be established no matter what. To achieve that, Groaxians tried to provoke a radically different reaction from the aliens: they responded to them with a set of coordinates pointing towards Blutgang system. The response was indeed different: barely any expression was repeated, but there were also some similarities left. Then another risky experiment has been approved: next message aliens received was a set of coordinates of Qi system. To much surprise, the response that came afterwards was almost identical.
A popular hypothesis claimed that if the aliens wanted to just destroy Groaxians, they could've informed Dark Forest Lords while steering clear from the risky mess themselves instead of sending their soldiers to fight and die. That would mean that they wanted something more than just extinction of the enemies. If that was true, then their reaction to the last two messages would be something along the lines of "please don't do this", aka they obviously didn't want to have their space destroyed, but neither wanted to just erase Qi out of stellar charts. Given they were already aware of this mechanism at all, they could've sent the doombringing signal quite some time ago, but they didn't for whatever reason. Obviously this required confirmation, but it was some progress, at least. With no significant breakthroughs afterwards, Conglomerate simply decided to keep one Lensia always watching over the captured ship while allowing others to continue their work on tackling communication issues.
