Resurrection Empire

Chapter 1306 - 496: Poisoning, Ant Colony

Besides the aforementioned legitimate operations, Liu An naturally had another plan in place.

So far, he had never directly contacted Ren Zhong even once, and even reached a tacit compromise with this newly appointed Earl regarding the dark energy burst in the Black Mist Zone without face-to-face interaction.

Yet, as an Imperial Earl, he could have completely applied for a serious investigation into this potentially life-threatening incident through Viscount Wen Yuanbo of the Royal Family.

Liu An decided to bury the entire special service fleet and dealt with many members related to the Tuya Pirates precisely to conclude this matter.

In the end, Ren Zhong didn’t even mention it, as if he truly considered it a mere coincidence.

On the surface, it seemed as if Ren Zhong had taken the initiative to back down, not chasing the matter further and appearing quite sensible.

However, Liu An was very aware that someone who could withstand the onslaught of a Divine Level Spirit Demon, be intercepted halfway by a Fourth Level Mother Empress, and then quietly reach South Nine Star while evading his spies in the Shattered Star Ring, only to immediately connect upon arrival and obtain the protective talisman of an official Earl, could not be ordinary.

It should be known that during the Source Star Fleet’s passage through the Black Mist Zone, some professional agents from the Nanxiang’s Earldom never stopped using the Empire Super Network to track and monitor the fleet, yet they found no clues, leading the intelligence personnel in the Military and Political Center to firmly believe the Source Star Fleet was still within the Black Mist Zone.

The answer was evident: long before they decided to detour, Ren Zhong and the Source Star Fleet had made meticulous arrangements, completely blinding the intelligence system of the Nanxiang Military and Political Center.

Therefore, it was absolutely impossible for Ren Zhong to be unaware of Liu An’s conspiracy.

After arranging the legitimate operations through the adjutant, Liu An summoned a trusted insider from the Earl Mansion, giving detailed instructions, and emphasized that this matter must be communicated in person and verbally in a highly confidential environment with Viscount Sosgate Augustus of South Nine, ensuring the Empire Super Network’s information monitoring could not intercept it.

"Even though I am not worried about being severely affected by the incident due to my power, there is still the restless Royal Viscount Wen Yuanbo within the Nanxiang Star Cluster, so I cannot leave any evidence behind, which would, to some extent, become a stain and affect my promotion to Marquis,"

Before his trusted aide left, Liu An instructed with such caution and prudence.

...

Ninety-six days later, an unpowered meteor crossed a distance of nearly two billion kilometers, following a winding multi-loop figure-eight path, silently breaking through the atmosphere of South Nine C, and then rapidly advanced through the dense atmosphere of South Nine C with sparks and flames along its path.

As the heat continued to build up, the temperature on the meteor’s surface steadily rose until it reached a critical point.

Suddenly, with a blast like a bomb exploding, the initially fist-sized meteor burst open like a fragmentation grenade, shattering completely and dispersing into countless micron-level dust particles, spreading out in all directions in the high-altitude sky.

This meteor had shattered completely.

But the lightweight particles also brought a benefit as they gained the buoyancy and resistance effect of the atmosphere, abruptly slowing down and avoiding the fate of burning up in the atmosphere during descent.

Over high altitudes, winds exceeding the fourteenth level roared, and chaotic violent currents tore apart these excessively light nano-dusts, spreading them laterally at high speed towards the low-temperature focal point on the dark side of South Nine C.

During this process, an exploratory spacecraft dispatched by the Source Star commercial fleet, which had arrived near South Nine C earlier, was actively conducting scanning and analysis work, orbiting South Nine C with different satellite trajectories under the support of active propulsion.

People from the commercial operations of Source Star had been waiting for the arrival of Source Star humans to the Empire for over a century, preparing to return.

Although they experienced several setbacks, leading this unfortunate enterprise to change ownership multiple times, after several generations of iteration, these outstanding crew members, who regarded Source Star as their root, had developed a certain sense of belonging to Source Star.

Now that everything had finally settled, and upon hearing that the steering man of Source Star civilization had become an Imperial Earl, they found a glimmer of new light amidst their dim lives of forced labor.

The more than two million people in the commercial fleet, having struggled in the Mechanical Empire for hundreds of years, most crew members were multigenerational inheritors with a deep understanding of the political landscape of the Empire, fully realizing what an Earl’s title signified.