Without realizing it, you shaped history—Shilin Emperor Chen Jun, July, Year 4 of the New Empire.
I stared dumbfoundedly at the black-haired, straight-haired woman before me. She was supposedly the Queen of the Feiyali Empire, yet the moment her empire first mastered interworld travel, she had immediately flown out to find people to trade with. She was the miraculous peddler who had rashly gone to a Fallen Apostle outpost to sell rocks from another world, then been chased and hacked at across more than half the empire's border. She was the miraculous peddler who apparently had no fear nerve whatsoever and was still agonizing over whether she could get her two crates of samples back from the Fallen Apostles... Could she possibly value her life any less?
Ever since the Fallen Apostles invaded the Empire's frontier, I had felt that this war had come out of nowhere. There had been absolutely no reason for them to travel so far just to invade a few godforsaken worlds. The brilliant officers in the general staff all believed the enemy must have discovered some strategic value in the Empire's distant borderlands that only they knew about, or that they had some even deeper battle plan, with this inexplicable invasion merely being the beginning. In any case, everyone interpreted the Fallen Apostles' actions as "meticulously planned and exhaustively calculated." No one had considered that the beginning of this invasion might actually have come from one goddamn misunderstanding:
They were merely chasing a bunch of crooked merchants.
Yeah, crooked merchants. The Feiyali Empire's three ships were all armed merchant vessels, their cargo holds piled with worthless rocks casually dug up from some random asteroid belt in some random world. And their Queen intended to trade those rocks in another world for two carrier battle groups.