The wrecked spaceship in the Dream Plane had been lying at the bottom of the Blood Lake for several months, and more than a month had passed since Hao Ren issued the notice seeking its owner. Only now had the ship's owners finally appeared. As it turned out, they weren't affiliated with any civilization circle, but were instead a pioneering merchant consortium—a type of organization that didn't belong to any official power and usually hid away in remote corners with poor transportation and communications. Naturally, their response was a little slow.
Taking the opportunity, Hao Ren asked what exactly a pioneering merchant consortium was and learned that it was a phenomenon unique to the great interstellar expansion era.
The universe was vast and the stars were innumerable. With sufficient technological support, the colonization options and opportunities facing a species that had entered the stars were astonishing. Though such opportunities came with risks, those risks meant little to certain brave pioneers who pursued them. Pioneering merchant consortia were made up of just such people. They often came from different species, or even different civilization circles. Their members had once been merchants, mercenaries, exiled politicians, or even pirates. They possessed considerable wealth and influence of their own, as well as the ability to establish their own kingdoms in the endlessly vast universe. Some species supported their members in such pioneering efforts, forming a civilization structure resembling an alliance of city-states. More conservative species declared private colonization illegal. Regardless of the system, however, interstellar expansion had never stopped and would inevitably spread throughout the universe. The universe's extreme vastness and emptiness made it difficult for ordinary civilization circles to fully restrain such activities, so one colony after another, established by pioneering groups, developed in the interstitial star regions between the major civilization circles.