238: They're from the same place, how come there's such a big difference?

Unknowingly, ten-odd days passed.

During these days, things remained calm at Tianjin Seat V89; the chaos one might have imagined existed only in the imagination.

Regarding the response Xi Hai had given, The Empire only stated that they would "send a commissioner later to discuss Warship trade matters."

As for the matter of meddling in the Military Alliance, they acted as if they were mute, not uttering another word.

Consequently, Xi Hai still had no idea what kind of trouble The Empire was cooking up.

Thus, to prepare for potential crises, Xi Hai could only accelerate the pace of military construction and divert a portion of resources toward Warship production and stargate construction.

However, something unexpected happened along the way:

Norma, who was far away in Ursa Major V12.22, sent him a message.

To be honest, because Xi Hai had been so busy lately that his head was spinning, he almost didn't remember who Norma was when he first received the communication.

Fortunately, thanks to the prank name he had personally given him, after a brief brainstorm, he recalled the "cheap son" he had taken in at the space station.

However, the beginning of that communication left Xi Hai feeling bewildered once again—

It started with: "Father, I understand! I understand your painstaking efforts! I have not failed the heavy responsibility you entrusted to me!"

It immediately gave him the "old man on the subway looking at his phone" meme face.

Wait... back then, hadn't he just wanted to leave someone there as a symbol of his cooperation with The Empire?

What exactly did he understand?

Why don't I even understand it myself?

Nevertheless, regarding the cooperation with The Empire, Norma's communication provided a specific explanation:

Originally, Ursa Major V12.22 was built as a frontline base for the confrontation with The Consortium, intended to drive a nail between The Consortium's strategic regions.

That was precisely where the problem lay.

Since The Consortium had managed to dismantle itself through its own actions, this frontline base lost its original purpose before it was even completed.

Overnight—well, perhaps not literally one night, but in an instant—the entirety of Ursa Major V12.22 transformed from a strategic stronghold into a useless white elephant.

Its location wasn't important for transportation, it had no high-value local products, and after being bombed once, it had been licked clean from head to toe by the bugs.

To say it was "awaiting reconstruction" would be an overstatement.

Perhaps out of respect for Xi Hai, or perhaps because they felt a single star system was inconsequential,

The Empire did not directly incorporate this small "enclave" into its territory. Instead, they continued to send construction aid under the guise of "humanitarian assistance."

But in reality, the intensity of the aid had dropped by several orders of magnitude.

The previous "aid" consisted of genuine heavy construction equipment, professional engineers, and vast amounts of high-value resources.

Now... all that remained were meager resources, some retired or nearly scrapped construction equipment, and a massive number of Slave Laborers—most of whom were former citizens of The Consortium.

However, in a sense, The Empire's level of attention toward that area had also dropped to the absolute minimum, reaching a point where they basically washed their hands of it.

Perhaps to them, the cost of occupying that system would be hundreds of times greater than the benefits—this was what Xi Hai thought after reading the communication.

But the highlight of the report wasn't there. If the first part was the "background introduction," then what followed was the big move Norma had pulled off for Xi Hai—

It was only after finishing it that Xi Hai realized just how capable this "cheap son" he had taken in really was.

As mentioned before, since The Empire began "aiding" Ursa Major V12.22, they had sent countless slaves there, both before and after the war.

Norma was quite the actor; on the surface, he presented himself to The Empire as a completely hands-off manager who didn't care about or interfere with anything.

In secret, however, he had been performing ideological work on those Slave Laborers—that's right, the spirit Xi Hai had instilled in the people there back then was now being injected into those Slave Laborers by Norma.

As for the theory used, Norma had recorded every one of Xi Hai's previous speeches, compiled them into a volume, and added the unedited version of "struggle of humanity" sent to him by Gunnar.

This resulted in the path he was taking being strikingly similar to Xi Hai's ideal state.

After The Empire withdrew its influence from Ursa Major V12.22, those remaining Slave Laborers had also completed their preliminary screening, and most of them had directly become their own people.

Furthermore, he didn't limit his dissemination to the confines of Ursa Major V12.22.

Taking advantage of certain opportunities, he extended his reach into the interiors of multiple Secondary Regimes—

This opportunity arose after the conclusion of the Order Grand Ceremony, which mandated that Secondary Regimes bear more of the burden for providing resources to aid the Military Alliance.

Those Secondary Regimes, upon receiving those incredibly heavy quotas, were filled with complaints,

But they didn't have the courage to unite and challenge those Top Regimes.

Consequently, those heavy burdens were blatantly pressed onto the shoulders of the common people at the bottom.

To provide the required mineral resources, industrial goods, labor, and other war resources, every regime chose to raise taxes.

Furthermore, they even dug up something called "Corvée Labor" from some unknown history books, rebranded it as "Devotional Mandatory Labor," and began implementing it nationwide.

Thus, at this stage, the common people at the bottom of the Secondary Regimes, outside of the Top Regimes, were living like this:

First, they would earn income to pay taxes through their regular jobs, and then, in their spare time when they weren't working, they were assigned to work for free on assembly lines set up by those regimes.

Ultimately, because they spent too much time working for free, they lacked sufficient hours for their paid jobs and couldn't afford to pay their taxes; then, under the pretext of tax evasion, they could be directly turned into slaves.

For those politicians, this was a perfect deal that killed three birds with one stone:

The collected tax funds could be used to purchase resources from large corporations; the task of processing industrial goods was handed over to the "Devotional Mandatory Labor" assembly lines; and the Slave Laborers who were finally rounded up could be handed over directly as a workforce.

After all, even if some of the Six Great Regimes (former) acknowledged it and others didn't,

An undeniable fact was that among current humanity, the vast majority of war machines still required "humans" to keep them running.

It was just that in some places they were called "Amnesty Soldiers," in others "Slave Auxiliary," and in others "Atonement Army"... the names differed, but they were all the same inside.

The predecessor of the Guardian Angel Legion of Tianjin Seat was an exception among exceptions.

However, when this treatment fell upon the heads of those commoners, they suffered—

Endless work, inexhaustible taxes, and from time to time, people around them were directly branded as slaves for some minor reason.

So, living so miserably, did those people ever resist?

Of course they did, but the resulting "wetware" exports could provide a large amount of foreign exchange for their respective regimes—there was no other way; without organization or equipment, so-called "riots" were as laughable as primitive men with wooden sticks facing fifth-generation fighters when up against regular troops with Warships.

Norma and his people seized this opportunity, sending out a large number of their own people who had undergone basic training; under the guise of establishing external trade relations, they planted seeds within most of the Secondary Regimes.

And now, they had completed all the integration, organization, and investigation work, and had formulated a clear plan—

In three days, they would coordinate with each other to launch a large-scale, synchronized uprising.

Reading this document made Xi Hai's eyelids twitch; was this a case of an unintentional act yielding unexpected results?

Then he thought about Gunnar, whom he had brought over, who only knew how to WAAAAAAGH.

They all came from the same place, so why was the gap between them so huge?

...