The Mech Touch novel Chapter 4427

Before the assault commenced, Ves and many others received a surprising piece of news.

Calabast had only recently left the office after she was done with giving Ves an update, but she returned right afterwards after receiving an important update!

"The Santana Group's covert operations unit has managed to capture an alien scouting vessel that strayed closer to our fleet's position." She succinctly reported even though Ves already received the same message through his comm.

Ves already had a lot of new questions in his mind. "Do you think this is a routine patrol or do you think the groups in control of the Palace of Shame have figured out that there is an approaching threat?"

"We can't say." The black-clad woman shrugged her shoulders. "All I know is that we can gather a lot of useful information from the captured ship, though the vessel's capture may also give our opponents a greater understanding of our capabilities. This is why the Santanas are making sure to keep the captured alien hull away from our main fleets."

It took a bit of time for the Larkinsons to receive more information about the captured ship. Calabast had already instructed the closest Black Cats in the field to suspend their current assignments and move to the alien scouting vessel as soon as possible so that they could provide more detailed information.

Soon enough, the Larkinson Clan received a transmission that finally granted Ves a good view of the alien ship in question.

"That's... an orven-style starship." Ves noted. "The all-black coating along with the wide and relatively flat hull shape is a dead giveaway of that. No other indigenous alien race has a history of designing such an atypical scouting vessel. The materials used to construct her interior also matches what the orven race has historically made use of. I can see that the orven ship is still relatively new and fresh, but her tech isn't anything to be impressed about."

The orven race was known to be strong, but that only applied to its best. There were many other orvens who were not as wealthy and powerful. The large orven underclass had to make do with cheaper and more inferior tech.

That sounded awfully familiar now that Ves thought about it, and he wasn't the only one to recognize this similarity.

It turned out that many exobiologists viewed the orvens as the aliens that most closely resembled humans!

The orvens were bipedal, furred mammals that closely resembled upright apes but without a nose.

For some reason, the orvens and many other native creatures on the same planet never developed the sense of smell.

They all made up for it by strengthening their other senses. The orven race stood out for their four eyes.

The powerful eyesight of the orvens caused them to develop a preference of operating in low light environments.

As they originally evolved on a planet with 0.81 g, the orvens were also taller than humans on average. A typical orven adult could reach a height of 3 meters, though the tallest individuals of this race were known to surpass a natural height of 4 meters.

The orvens also lived significantly longer than humans. They aged slower to the point where a typical healthy orven individual was able to live up to 320 years without relying on any treatments.

The downside was that the orvens did not excel that much at learning. It took decades for them to raise qualified scientists, engineers, doctors and other professionals.

It was due to this that the orven race maintained an extremely high respect towards elders.

Over time, the orvens built up a society where many of its people were born into castes.

Though there was still a limited degree of upward and downward mobility, the vast majority of orvens tended to learn from their parents and pursue the same careers.

The orven caste system was quite stable for the most part. The orven society existed for a long time and had reached a high level of stability.

If not for the fact that humanity upended the entire Red Ocean by launching a massive invasion, the Orven Star Nation or whatever it was called would have been able to maintain its current form for many more years!

Another important aspect about orven society was that those at the top were extremely smart and powerful.

An important reason for that was because the orvens at the top were functionally immortal. They had access to advanced biotech treatments that completely broke the physical and non-physical limitations that successfully allowed them to escape the fate of a natural death!

No one knew how many years the oldest orvens had experienced, but the intelligence that the MTA had gathered from many sources suggested that there were numerous ancient visionaries that had first come into prominence over 10,000 years ago and still remained active to this day!

The orvens looked up to these living fossils so much that they even revered their highest leaders as literal gods!

All of this sounded extremely silly to Ves, but religion was hardly exclusive to the human race. The orvens developed their own traditions of worship. A surprisingly high proportion of the orven population were devout believers in the members of the highest caste.

Many humans who first learned about the orvens couldn't decide whether these aliens were strong or weak.

On the one hand, the orvens built up a stable interstellar society and steadily advanced their technological mastery over time. They weren't particularly brilliant or spontaneous, but they excelled in long-term thinking and planning, enabling them to avoid many mistakes that more impulsive races tended to make from time to time.

On the other hand, most orvens were dull and incapable of exhibiting much independent thought. Many of them were no different from slaves who solely existed to serve their higher caste masters.

The upper echelon of orven society were generally smarter and more talented, and heavy augmentation further made up for their genetic and physical shortcomings.

The difference between a lower caste member and upper caste member of this race was so high that it was not that much of a surprise that the latter could moonlight as a god!

Though the Big Two managed to collect a lot of information about the orvan race and orvan society, Ves only learned how these aliens worked on a general basis.

He did not possess any specific information about the orvens that chose to settle in a pirate base that was far removed from their own star nation.

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