Hello. Long-ish time wiki reader here.

[alexanderhamiltonalaska]

Dry empire
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/464f25d76bab7

this article is basically a stub that hasn't been updated in 21 years, so you're welcome to expand on it

there's *plenty* of ways for your idea to work though, however you end up fleshing it out.

if I'm understanding correctly, whether this polity is composed of biologically-based sophonts or AIoids (which would make the transition easier) if they're starting with a tribe-mind, they'll still need to add quite a bit of additional infrastructure+ processing power before they 'merge' and reach the third sephirotic... but it's definitely possible.

I was planning on concentrating more on what their society is like in the present day, but loosely my idea was that a group of explorers from the Dry Empire encountered and eventually formed an alliance with the inhabitants of what was left of a virch world apparently created by the the post-Jester civilization. https://orionsarm.com/eg-article/56a10e1f0ef58
The virch itself was apparently created by a faction whose name roughly translates to "the order of the redeemed" for the purpose of persevering various xenosophant and especially xenoprovolve cultures. The virch itself was apparently meant to be governed by a tribemind formed by the various uploaded polities from representatives selected based on local custom. Thanks to the extremly robust tribemind protocols and the construction expertise brought by a group of transavant defectors from the MPA, they eventually managed to salvage the virch (and many of its inhabitants) and get it working more or less according to specifications. The MPA-ites even managed help to expand the system in order to vastly increase the amount of processing power available to both the AIs and virchers. After a few centuries of increasing processing power, running (and in some cases, replicating) at vastly accelerated rates and generally ignoring and being ignored by their neighboring Periphery worlds they got attacked by an extremist Bioist sect lead by a S2 transapiant. The subsequent conflict made clear the disastrous consequences of thinking they could ignore what was going on around them, so after defeating the bioists they immediately set about working on ways of both working their way up to archai equivalency (mainly by focusing on developing the aiod portion of the population and creating aiod-based duplicates of the vircher portion of the population) and carving out their own empire in the outer volumes. By the 10400s they have succeeded in both these goals.