So far, more than eighty percent of the stars in the galaxy had been charted. Some powerful nations and organizations had mapped even more. Yet based on the number of stars discovered so far, their masses, and the absolute distances between them, cosmologists had indeed made a deduction: they believed the number of jump routes suitable for faster-than-light travel should be five to ten times greater than what was currently known.
Of course, we all knew that centuries could pass between a scientific theory and its practical application. And the cosmologists' theory hadn't exactly won widespread acceptance in the academic community.
Still, new routes were discovered every year by scientists and explorers, sustaining a massive exploration industry. Perhaps that, in its own way, lent support to the "ten percent" theory.
There was no helping it. Gravity wells weren't visible to the naked eye, and the spatial constants of most gravity wells were highly deceptive, making them easy for electronic equipment to overlook. Finding a new gravity well in a star system really was like searching for a needle in a haystack—not as a figure of speech, but literally.
Agnès blushed. She'd only finished public high school, so she really hadn't known that.
"Are you saying your new khan has obtained some of the new star charts of the Abyss Nebula?" Fifi asked.
The long-whiskered demonkin second officer named Haeta hurriedly replied, "That's not something a lowly underling like me would know. Anyway, the generals and captains on our side have complained to me more than once that the Great Khan's strategy is too outlandish... too aggressive."
He glanced again at General Graycollapse, who was standing nearby like a walking corpse. The tendrils at the corners of his mouth twitched unnaturally, perhaps in a moment of sorrowful kinship. In a pleading