Ten Years of Leaps and Bounds

The vast will of civilization washed over Chen Yu's individual will.

His personal perspective had been elevated to a height no citizen of the Federation could ever reach.

Those ten years, which had flashed by in an instant, free from any outside interference, had been a miraculous leap forward for civilization as a whole.

But for him, the one who governed the will of civilization, they had been a painful ordeal and a long, harrowing trial.

He had clearly seen every child born during those ten years on every inhabited world within the Federation's territory.

Every second of their lives, every stage of their growth, every cry and every laugh had been like starlight shining into the depths of his consciousness...

He had also seen every piece of alloy on the Forge Worlds, from its transformation from raw material into precision machinery to its final assembly into warships and all manner of equipment, rolling off the production lines...

Across the Federation's territory, one miraculous megastructure after another rose among the stars. Any other civilization that witnessed their existence would have been left in awe.

"Guixu"—a colossal spherical celestial megastructure enclosing an entire black hole. It could make extraordinarily efficient use of the black hole's resources to rapidly extract Dark Matter.

The construction of "Guixu" greatly expanded the Federation's means of acquiring Dark Matter. It no longer had to rely solely on the Sky Burning Divine Weapon to destroy Star Systems and violently extract Dark Matter.

The Federation had now established a standardized process for mining Dark Matter: build the Sky Burning Divine Weapon → destroy a star → build "Guixu."

During those accelerated ten years, a total of 5,468 "Guixu" megastructures were built within Federation territory!

Near-astronomical quantities of Dark Matter were mined, and these resources greatly accelerated the construction of Aether Phase Engines.

Aside from "Guixu," the Federation had naturally built other, even more impressive celestial megastructures, such as the "Stellar Gravity Shipyard."

This was a super shipyard that occupied the gravitational well of an entire Star System, allowing it to produce even larger warships.

Its remarkable efficiency in outfitting ships had brought the Federation's overall shipbuilding technology forward by leaps and bounds.

Countless new superwarships could now be built as a result.

The Sky Burning Divine Weapon was powerful. It could destroy a Star System, and it had the combat capability to sweep away ten thousand warships single-handedly. But its original purpose meant that it was, at its core, an armed engineering vessel.

The Federation would clearly be unable to handle the even harsher battlefields of the future with the Sky Burning Divine Weapon alone. Building superwarships had therefore become an essential undertaking.

The Moon of War was a super-heavy warship with immense firepower. Its hull was assembled from satellites, with a standard diameter of 7,000 kilometers—far larger than the Federation's largest warships of the past, the Afang Palace Class Titan Battleships!

A single Moon of War possessed the terrifying combat capability of an entire Federation Titan Fleet.

The Behemoth Planet Battleship was a superwarship whose hull was an entire planet. Its standard diameter exceeded 15,000 kilometers. Even the mighty Moon of War could only serve as a supporting combat unit beside it.

A Behemoth Planet Battleship paired with several Moons of War had enough power to sweep aside anything in its path.

Yet beyond the Moon of War and the Behemoth Planet Battleship, the Federation had gone even further, building the still more terrifying Star System Battleships!

The Moons of War and Behemoth Planet Battleships served as components, while the star at the heart of a surrounding Dyson Sphere megastructure served as the core...

Built around celestial bodies that together made up an entire Star System, these Star System Battleships had enough combat power to crush any enemy of the Federation!

After ten years of rapid development, the Federation had assembled one hundred main battle fleets with the following composition:

One Star System Battleship, five Behemoth Planet Battleships, and twelve Moons of War!

In the face of a hundred fleets this terrifying, even the Federation's once-vast Titan Fleets, which had blotted out the sky, looked as childish as children. They could no longer serve as regular fleets and had been relegated to auxiliary combat duties.

More main battle fleets centered on Star System Battleships were being built as quickly as possible.

At the same time, the Federation's old standardized Titan Fleets retained their place in the fleet structure.

It wasn't that the Federation couldn't bear to part with these Titan Fleets, which were clearly becoming outdated and obsolete.

Rather, the Federation's production lines were so busy that there was no time to dismantle the old warships and use the salvaged resources to build new ones. For the time being, keeping the Titan Fleets in service let them make use of their remaining value.

Apart from the Star System Battleships, the Federation had also planned to produce several other new types of warships. Their production targets had been incorporated into the "Galactic Cluster Planning Adjustment System," overseen by Xidra.

Chen Yu took in the full picture of the Federation's rapid development over the past ten years at a glance.

But for him personally, taking in the impact of the civilization's collective will over ten years all at once had consumed an immeasurable amount of his energy.

The resistance caused by his insistence on constructing the Aether Phase Engine still weighed on him. That unknown sense of dread hadn't eased with the sudden passage of ten years; if anything, it had grown even more intense.

Part of the Aether Phase Engine's main framework had already been completed.

As those ten years vanished in an instant, the intense sense of dread had gradually, without his noticing, transformed into a feeling of destiny within Chen Yu—

A sense of destiny shared by an entire people!

This feeling of destiny even seemed to take Chen Yu as its core, spreading through the bonds of Psionics to every Federal Citizen.

Even Gray Wind and Xidra, both aggregates of nanomachines, had been affected to some degree. The Federation's will of civilization seemed to have fully accepted them as members of its vast collective.

At first, everyone—including Chen Yu, the Grand Marshal of the Human Federation—had assumed this feeling of destiny was merely a vague notion at work...

The Milky Way, the Orion Arm.

Within a Star System on an arm near the central region of the Milky Way.

A Moon of War was carrying out a mission there.

Boom!

A terrifying beam of cannon fire erupted from the ship. In an instant, it crossed several light-years and destroyed one strange native vessel after another.

These native vessels were covered in biological matter. Their forms looked like dolphins that had mutated.

But they were tiny as grains of sand, utterly insignificant before the Moon of War. A few faster-than-light cannon blasts easily destroyed them.

In the main command room of this Great Crimson Sky Class Moon of War, a message came through one of the communications channels:

"These Triangle Body aliens, who call themselves the 'Mottled Blue Galactic Empire,' possess some kind of mental attack. Based on information gathered from some of their decoded language channels—"

"They appear to have discovered a weak ring in the dimensional membrane at the center of the Milky Way, and possess a secret route that allows them to enter the central region without difficulty..."

"New mission: capture some of these native Triangle Body life forms immediately to obtain vital intelligence!"

"A settlement planet inhabited by Triangle Body life forms has been detected in a Star System approximately 359 light-years away."

"Begin the assault!"