Although he planned to send his "Alsace" identity back to the Twin Stars to continue making himself useful, Nie Yun intended to pull one more job before leaving, as his own little way of saying, "I was here"...
Ryan Star.
It was an utterly unremarkable, remote planet tucked away in a corner of the Titan System cluster under the Locke Conglomerate's control.
Deserts covered the planet. Resources were scarce, and vicious subterranean creatures abounded. Under the Wulf classification system, it did not even qualify as a habitable planet.
Originally, it had housed only one large Mining Base belonging to the Locke Conglomerate. After Kinlock bought the Ryan Race, however, he forcibly relocated every Lyonian to the planet and renamed the formerly numbered world Ryan Star.
The Lyonians had been enslaved by the Wulf Empire for nearly a century. Their previous owner had lost a political struggle, leading to the collapse of his family. They had then been sold off as "assets" and ultimately purchased by Kinlock.
After changing masters, the Ryan Race's circumstances had not improved. Instead, they had grown even worse.
Kinlock used the Ryan Race to clear out vicious beasts and guard the mines, while tightening their supplies to weed out suitable warriors through brutal natural selection.
The planet was a cage that trapped the entire Ryan Race within it. In orbit, ten interstellar warships belonging to the Fifth Fleet served as the "jailers" responsible for surveillance and suppression.
Hundreds of Lyonian villages of various sizes were scattered across the several-million-kilometer region surrounding the planet's sole large Mining Base.
With such harsh living conditions and so many subterranean creatures roaming about, they had to fight not only their hostile environment and terrifying beasts, but also other villages over limited resources.
The Ryan Race now numbered just over five