Francis Underwood had served as Prime Minister of the Duchy of Dawn for over twenty years. Even when Tang Xiao had first awakened him and his title had not been prime minister, he had effectively carried out a prime minister's duties.
But lately, he had begun to feel overwhelmed.
It was not an issue of age. Though he was now over seventy, cutting-edge medical care had kept his energy remarkably high.
Francis's greatest problem was that he was finding it increasingly difficult to handle the Duchy of Dawn's ever more complicated internal affairs.
The Duchy of Dawn now governed several thousand habitable planets and over a thousand intelligent species. What made matters even more complicated was the presence of unusual and often unruly races such as the Protoss, Vasari, and Geth.
Yet what truly drove Francis Underwood to the brink of collapse were two matters.
The first was the relocation of Rendili Planet. Moving six hundred billion people was not the same as moving six hundred billion containers or six hundred billion pigs.
First, they had to ensure that the massive population reduction would not cause Rendili Planet's social development to stagnate or even regress. They absolutely could not simply pick a group of people and tell them to start moving. That was impossible. The workings of modern society—especially on a developed planet like Rendili—were extraordinarily intricate. A worker in City A might have a job that affected the operations of City B dozens of kilometers away.
They therefore had to formulate plans and divide the migration into batches: who would move first, and who would move next. This was not a matter of one or two batches, but hundreds of thousands of them! Even working at full capacity, they had only managed to organize a little over thirty thousand