Mr. Bernard Wood really hadn't lied. The very first regional administrator of New Shenzhou, who had only just taken office, was none other than Mr. Qi Bingwen, renowned as a literary giant on a cosmic scale. He really was inspecting the security along the Shanhai Route.
As everyone knew, New Shenzhou was a vast star region. Yet more than two hundred years after its discovery, there was still only one route connecting it to the neighboring Far Shore Star Region.
Traveling from New Shenzhou's capital, White Jade Capital, to the Far Shore Star Region's capital, New Shengjing, took at least a month and a half at the average speed of an ordinary passenger-and-cargo ship. From New Shengjing to Gibraltar took another month. And if you wanted to make the whole journey to Earth, stopping along the way, it would probably take the better part of half a year.
Those travel conditions were undeniably isolating.
The region's own colonial prospects weren't particularly favorable, either. So far, people had discovered more than two hundred young, stable star systems suitable for reliable routes and semi-permanent space facilities. But there was only one naturally habitable planet fit for carbon-based mammals: White Jade Capital.
Of course, there were also a few Earth-like planets that could be developed for colonization after terraforming. But most had extreme climates and hostile environments, making them prohibitively expensive to colonize. Take Baichuan, where massive construction was underway: even at midday, the average surface temperature remained below zero. With current technology, people wouldn't freeze to death there, but the living conditions were hardly comfortable. To provide ordinary people with a reasonably stable place to live, not to mention meet their basic food needs, some degree of environmental modification was obviously necessary.
But as we knew, New Shenzhou's early pioneers had always