Your Former Army

(As expected, tickets only come when you ask for them. Keep asking for votes today—no way I'm forgetting this month!!)

Mist God Star was the outermost planet in the Moblado Star System, and also the largest planet in the system. It was a non-solid planet, with an extremely massive core roughly the size of Earth, an ocean of liquid nitrogen, helium, and hydrogen stretching millions of kilometers, and an "atmosphere" nearly twenty thousand kilometers thick. It was the largest celestial body in the Star System aside from the Moblado sun, and also the last planet investigated by the Reconnaissance Unit the Empire had deployed into the system.

We had once assumed that Mist God Star would not contain many Ancient Relics. After all, a non-solid planet made up of nothing but gas and "ocean" lacked any necessary strategic value. Its vast helium and hydrogen resources were worthless to the Shilin Apostles, and its hurricanes, which reached three hundred and sixty kilometers per hour, would leave any Imperial Soldiers stationed there with dry skin and split ends—anyway, nobody wanted to build a base on such a useless planet.

Yet the agents had still made a major discovery on Mist God Star: a massive Ancient Relic.

In the transmitted images, we saw enormous interconnected mechanical structures, generally circular in shape. Their upper surfaces were covered in harsh-lined metal protrusions, making them resemble a metal city floating atop the dense ocean beneath Mist God Star's thick atmosphere. In reality, however, it was a colossal cylinder, suspended vertically in the nitrogen-helium-hydrogen ocean liquefied by immense pressure. The metal pillar had an average cross-sectional radius of around seventy kilometers and extended more than nine hundred kilometers into the ocean, like a slender chopstick driven vertically into the sea. The upper end of that "chopstick" was