Resurrection Empire

Chapter 1326 - 503: Luring the Snake Out of Its Hole

From the perspective of Viscount Nan Jiu, the Source Star Fleet was completely caught in a predicament without a solution.

For the entire seven days, the Source Star Fleet hadn’t dispatched a single ship for landing, but instead kept conducting high-altitude reconnaissance like a bunch of headless flies.

The fact that the Source Star Fleet wasn’t landing was one thing, but they had already begun dismantling armed ships, seemingly intending to build stronger ships by patching things up chaotically.

Viscount Nan Jiu once thought Ren Zhong’s plan was to try to reinforce the ships’ structure for a forced landing.

At that time, he chuckled to himself, waiting to see a good show.

He was particularly eager to see Ren Zhong’s expression of realization when he discovered that despite his carefully prepared landing ships, no matter how solid the structure was, it couldn’t possibly withstand the Star Annihilation Ants.

But Sosgate felt puzzled shortly afterward.

The Source Star Marquis must be a smart person; having discovered the Star Annihilation Ants, he’d certainly find ways to test the characteristics of this peculiar life form and should have realized that no matter how solid the ships were, they’d only become a tastier meal for the Star Annihilation Ants.

Feeling puzzled for a while, Sosgate stopped dwelling on this matter.

He recalled, five days ago, when he used his authority as the head of the Southern Nine Star System’s Military and Political Department to forcefully deny Ren Zhong’s application to excessively exploit South Nine Star Energy and Constant Star Wind Material.

Thinking back to Ren Zhong’s feigned profundity finally giving way to an angry, foul-mouthed outburst in impotent rage, Sosgate burst into laughter, feeling immensely satisfied.

According to Empire law, since Ren Zhong owned a planet in the Southern Nine Star System, he had certain stellar energy mining rights.

But adhering strictly to the Empire’s designated mining rights would mean Ren Zhong had to wait at least forty years to acquire sufficient fusion energy.

Sosgate felt everything was under control.

Of course, due to the failure to successfully place spies, he didn’t know that in all the ships of the Source Star Fleet, industrial and research machines were operating at full capacity.

That must be something he’d never seen before, the true explosive power that human civilization should possess.

After arranging everything, Ren Zhong once again entered cryogenic sleep.

Time flew by, and he slept for five years, intermittently waking several times for important matters, but never spending more than a month in total.

But most others didn’t enjoy this, as there was too much work to be done by the fleet.

Commerce Company General Manager Chen Yinghua had been striving here for many years, running various trade lines in the Nanxiang Star Cluster, thus establishing numerous connections and becoming familiar with the commercial environment of the Nanxiang Star Cluster.

Unfortunately, of the nearly eight thousand Annulus Ships in the fleet, most were packed with people serving more as living quarters, making it impossible to take on transport tasks.

For the time being, Commerce Company only had a thousand Annulus Ships available and couldn’t expand.

The enhancement of the fleet to Commerce Company mainly involved equipping each Annulus Ship with small specialized ships like Eye Ships and Shuttle Ships, which could improve the fleet’s armed strength to take on logistical transport tasks with certain risks previously unable to be undertaken.

But oddly, just as Chen Yinghua was gearing up to go big, he found himself in an awkward situation as many long-term cooperating clients unilaterally decided to cease cooperation.

Clearly, the complete blockade initiated by Nanxiang’s Earldom and Viscount Nan Jiu began to take effect, aiming to cut off the economic sources of the Source Star Fleet from the root.

The full blockade indeed dealt a heavy blow to the Source Star Fleet, and worse was that due to the delay in fully developing South Nine C, the Source Star Fleet almost had no specialties to sell externally.

For many return fleets from traced colonies, one particularly common large business was population trade.

With the average professional level, knowledge level, and genetic level of the Source Star Fleet crew, they certainly counted as high-quality population in the Nanxiang Star Cluster, absolutely not worrying about sales.

In fact, many families of Viscounts and Barons in the Nanxiang Star Cluster had already tried contacting Ren Zhong, expressing willingness to pay high prices to purchase some high-quality populations from the Source Star Fleet to enhance family diversity and perform genetic optimization.

This so-called "optimization," to put it bluntly, was because the humans from the Source Star had developed over thousands of years and dozens of generations, no longer subjected to the invasion of inferior genes injected by Nanxiang Marquis, making them a pure and promising genetic line, in essence, the finest "purebred stallions."