(It's the start of the month, time to ask for votes. I didn't forget this month.{""} Also, can someone please subscribe to the first VIP chapter already...)
"This is seriously incredible. A year ago, it was still a big red ball of dirt, wasn't it?"
Qian Qian pressed herself against the porthole and stared at the Martian surface drawing ever closer, speaking in amazement.
Because the fleet was simply too large, landing every ship on Mars would probably damage the ecosystem that had been so painstakingly established here. So we parked the massive warships in Mars's synchronous orbit. Only the twenty-two transport ships, the shuttle we were riding in, and several light escort ships landed directly. This was already the Empire's "interior," after all. The entire world lay within the Macro World's surveillance network and military perimeter, so there was no danger to worry about. The escort ships accompanying us were merely following standard procedure.
The twenty-two transport ships did not land in the same location. Instead, they headed directly for twenty-two sites across the Northern Hemisphere according to the previous plans. After all, we were settling a full 450 million refugees, not a few thousand relocated residents. The largest settlement project in history could not be handled according to the procedures for renovating an old city. How to efficiently disperse 450 million people throughout an entire new Colonial Star was an extremely complicated mathematical problem—of course, I left that to the experts.
Besides those twenty-two transport ships, some of the refugees—well, they probably could no longer be called refugees. They should be called immigrants now. Some immigrants also landed alongside the Empire Fleet. They were residents from the original large cities, as well as people selected from elsewhere, numbering roughly a hundred thousand. One-tenth of them were high-ranking monks.