"O Savior!"
After the ship crossed the harbor barrier, the first thing the captain and the others saw was the great Savior.
It was a golden colossus spanning outer space, many times larger than an asteroid.
So magnificent, so holy, so majestic—the transport ship was little more than an ant before it.
Even from a vast distance, when the captain and the others faced that sacred statue, they could feel an invisible pressure. Even their breathing grew sluggish.
It was the majesty of a great existence made manifest, and also the pinnacle of the Imperium's industrial system.
The people of the Voss Forge World had spent more than a century and countless resources forging this Savior Statue.
With it, they expressed their loyalty.
This had become an old tradition of the New Imperium, and also a kind of competition between regions: whenever there were surplus resources, they built Savior-related wonders.
If it was not grand enough, they would be too embarrassed to show their faces outside, and it would be even harder to display the strength of their own star system.
If you could not even build a wonder, did that mean you had not done your job properly? Did it mean your economy was not doing too well?
These were all subtle standards for judging latent strength and political achievement.
Of course, constructing a wonder required approval from the Royal Court. No region was allowed to secretly tighten its belt and do it on its own, lest it affect that region's normal development.
In other words, the relevant region had to truly have surplus resources before it was qualified to forge a wonder belonging to its own region.
That way, any imperial region capable of producing a wonder was bound to be extremely prosperous and affluent.
One relatively affluent