And so, we tentatively settled on our course of action against the Fallen Apostles for the time being. The specific details still needed to be worked out by the expert teams at headquarters—something this important could not be decided casually. In any case, Sandora and I no longer needed to personally involve ourselves in those minor details.
But everyone knew that an operation built on deliberate misdirection could only achieve limited results: we could not treat our enemies as idiots.
All the false impressions we created were meant to make the Fallen Apostles believe that the Mystic System knowledge they had suddenly acquired was an "oversight" by the New Empire rather than something deliberate. Only then would they think they could surpass us as usual by staying home and developing their tech tree. But as long as they had anyone cautious and observant enough to notice that their faction was being "guided" by the Empire Army, they would immediately become suspicious. At that point, there was no way they would keep sitting at home.
So we had to accelerate the conversion of that Mystic System data with all our strength, turning the knowledge in the Database into soldiers armed to the toenails in the shortest possible time.
First came the consensus shared by everyone: restore all of Heavenly City's production capacity as quickly as possible. This should be another advantage besides our "preparedness"—we had an Old Empire production base that might not be complete, but was at least still usable. Although the capital of the Fifteenth Celestial Region had been reduced to a fragment just over one light-year across after the catastrophe, fortunately, it had retained a great many Imperial facilities. For the New Empire, which was rebuilding everything from scratch, the production bases left behind there were still an