Against the Current

At T101 Military Base north of City No. 10, the massive Qingshan Aerial Fortress was undergoing a full overhaul.

The black city sat quietly docked on the ground, surrounded by towering maintenance platforms like the dense scaffolding erected around the exterior walls of a building under construction.

Thousands of engineering troops worked busily atop the platforms, operating enormous mechanical arms to remove Qingshan Hao's scrapped components and replace them with new ones.

Several hundred engineers were also inspecting Qingshan Hao's systems and code, attempting to extract future improvement plans for the Aerial Fortress from the data of its last battle.

The battle in Forbidden Zone No. 002 had left Qingshan Hao comprehensively damaged.

The antigravity systems and reactor both required maintenance after operating under overload. The larger and more sophisticated a machine was, the more carefully it had to be handled.

At this point, repairing its outer armor alone would cost an astronomical sum.

In a war between evenly matched forces, victory came down to who had more money.

Although Li Changqing had crippled the Chen Clan Fleet so badly in this operation that it would take them a year to recover, the Li Clan had paid a corresponding price.

At this moment, Li Changqing sat in the military base command center, dressed in uniform and wearing the insignia of a lieutenant general.

She silently reviewed the intelligence delivered by Red Sparrow. Two items caught her attention.

The first was that foreigners had been spotted within Kamishiro territory in the north, but the aircraft they had used to cross the Forbidden Sea had yet to be found.

The Forbidden Sea could be crossed. Ships could not pass through it, but the air above it presented no obstacle whatsoever.

Even in the Outer World, a direct flight across an ocean took