Military Integration Department

Ever since I had run into Laura in the Totem Area and she had confided in me about the awkward predicament of being the leader of a weak civilization, I had kept the matter on my mind.

The Empire's affiliated worlds varied wildly in strength. Their various Minion Armies fought in completely different ways, and their combat quality followed no discernible pattern. How could such armies be sent onto the battlefield as true warriors instead of being treated as cannon fodder driven into position by bayonets at their backs, like in the Old Empire era?

Clearly, if things remained as they were, with every Minion Army retaining its own organization and relying only on limited knowledge exchanges to improve its equipment—while some overly weak civilizations could only fall further behind in this arms race—then in the end, more than half of the affiliated civilizations now gathered around the Empire would still be unable to escape the fate of cannon-fodder armies from the Old Empire era.

For a fledgling civilization to break free of its own world and step onto the boundless stage of the multiverse, the challenges and hardships it faced were beyond description. More than ninety percent of civilizations fell at this hurdle. Some were destroyed by hostile contact with other powerful civilizations; some destroyed themselves by taking the wrong path in an entirely new stage of civilization; some, through ignorance, triggered deadly dangers in the void and had their entire worlds swallowed up by it—more than half of all worlds met their end this way. The void was absolutely no friendly place for those challenging it for the first time. They might even encounter the Abyss.

The affiliated civilizations gathered around the Empire naturally avoided countless dangers like these. One could even say that, with the Empire as