161: Chapter 165 Stealing Oil on Your Highway

The lights in the cockpit flickered.

Half of the originally stable cool blue light faded, replaced by the faint yellow glow emitted after the base's emergency power supply kicked in.

Li Cang took his hands off the holographic console.

It was quiet all around. The deafening mechanical roar from the lower deck had stopped, and the Astartes Recruits slowed their movements as they wiped their Chainswords.

The core of Mining Planet No. 3 had just stopped boiling.

The red glow of the massive forging trench encircling the equator was dimming at a speed visible to the naked eye.

"Warning: Energy reserves below threshold. The Forge World has entered forced hibernation mode."

These three abandoned dead stars didn't have much to offer to begin with. Being able to forcibly restart the core to defeat the Scavengers was entirely due to Li Cang pouring in points and scrap metal.

Now, the plug had been pulled.

The Eternal Star Crown Federation's blockade order was like an invisible iron curtain, cutting off all navigational beacons within three hundred light-years of this star system.

No merchant ships could enter, and no supplies could leave.

Li Cang was physically placed in solitary confinement.

He pulled up a chair and sat down, his hand resting on the cold control console.

Those three blueprints "stolen" from the Mars deduction—[Standard Mass Production Logistics Coordination Array], [Basic Servitor Mass Production Array Core], and [Secondary Deep Space Gravity Mining Barge]—lay quietly in his inventory.

No matter how good the blueprints were, without startup energy, they were just scraps of paper.

If no external energy supplement was found within seven days, these newly online Astartes would suffer genetic collapse due to the cutoff of inhibitors, and the Servitor embryos in the incubation tanks would turn into a pile of rotten meat.

Li Cang's gaze swept across the screen, finally landing on the last item.

That [Dark Technology Fragment], grabbed from the deepest level of the deduction, its edges burning with dark green flames.

This thing couldn't be used as a power source. It didn't output energy; it only knew how to plunder.

"Since I can't buy any, I'll just open a blood-sucking hole at your doorstep."

He dragged the [Secondary Deep Space Gravity Mining Barge (Scrap Version)] directly into the civilization forge.

He didn't put in any high-grade alloys, because there weren't any.

"Number One, take some men to the base station ruins. Cut off all those shell plates, pipes, and even the exhaust pipes left from the Scavenger fleet that weren't completely blown up, and stuff them into the furnace." Li Cang's voice reached the trenches through the backup line.

This wasn't shipbuilding at all; it was molding a pile of trash.

Half an hour later.

The crucible's hatch slid open with difficulty.

Two thousand square black iron boxes, their surfaces covered in various welds and rough patches, were pushed out by the conveyor belt.

There was no streamlined bridge, no conventional Energy Shield generator, and not even a weapon interface.

The only function of this thing was to drift in the vacuum, relying on the low-quality gravity engine at its base.

This was the budget replacement mining ship Mars used for scavenging during the civil war.

Li Cang took the Dark Technology Fragment and walked up to one of the iron boxes.

The system immediately popped up a blood-red warning box:

[Warning! Unknown Dark Tide logic fragment detected.]

[Forcibly connecting it to a low-level confidential Control Center will trigger extremely severe cognitive distortion of The Machine.]

[This unit will transform from mining to a morbid parasitic plundering tendency.]

Li Cang didn't even look at the warning.

Using an ion cutter he picked up randomly, he scraped off a tiny bit of powder from the fragment.

Then, he forcibly smeared the powder onto the collection probe at the top of the iron box used for absorbing cosmic dust.

Hum—

A strange, muffled sound that didn't belong to the operation of The Machine came from inside the iron box.

Its outer iron shell contracted unnaturally.

It was breathing.

Li Cang quickly repeated the process with the remaining powder, smearing it onto the probes of all two thousand iron boxes.

"Eject all this junk along the counter-thrust orbit into the asteroid belt on the outskirts of the Eternal Star Crown Federation's busiest K-40 commercial trade route."

"Remember, turn off all active radar and lighting; just let them drift like dead asteroids."

One hundred light-years away from the dead star system.

Eternal Star Crown Federation, Core Sector.

On the big screen of the Star Crown Palace, the values for the area representing coordinates 409X were slowly dropping.

The Chess Player watched the energy curve gradually approach zero.

The blockade order was working even better than he had expected. Under such absolute resource deprivation, even the most capable beast would starve to death into a desiccated corpse due to lack of calories and basic minerals.

He didn't intend to send a fleet to finish things off. Wasting expensive purification warheads on a dead planet didn't fit his data model.

"Shut down level four surveillance of that area. Redirect the computing power to the upcoming Star Sector Joint Assembly."

He flicked his finger lightly on the sand table.

The perspective on the big screen switched.

An extremely wide interstellar trade route, radiating dazzling brilliance, appeared in the center of the screen.

This was the economic lifeline of the Eternal Star Crown Federation—the [Eternal Route].

Tens of thousands of heavy transport ships, each over several kilometers in size, were arranged in perfectly precise formations, flowing incessantly along this highway forcibly stabilized by artificial curvature fields.

They were fully loaded with high-purity energy paste, rare metal marrow, and refined psionic crystals drawn from hundreds of surrounding subsidiary star systems.

This was a super blood-supply line that would make any great map player envious.

But no one dared to rob it.

Because fully automated phase-cutting defense lines were deployed every light-year along both sides of the route, any armed starship attempting to warp close would be torn to shreds by the defense system within 0.1 seconds.

A Federation main transport ship carrying 100,000 tons of high-frequency liquid energy had just passed the security check at the K-40 node.

The captain was drinking some expensive synthetic nutrient solution in the command tower.

On the holographic radar, there were no abnormal signals except for an ordinary asteroid belt a thousand kilometers away.

Indeed, there were no abnormal signals.

Because drifting in that asteroid belt was a pile of black iron boxes that the system had long since judged as "non-threatening space junk."

As the transport ship's massive hull passed near the asteroid belt, its main engine leaked a stream of extremely high-purity energy exhaust while maintaining curvature flight.

In normal times, this was just a negligible, reasonable loss, like a drop or two of oil leaking from a tanker truck bumping along the road.

But today.

The two thousand iron boxes hidden in the shadows of the asteroids simultaneously stopped their faint, breathing-like tremors.

The probes at the top, stained with the powder of the Dark Technology Fragment, suddenly stood upright.

They didn't activate any tractor beams.

The fragment had granted them an extremely eerie parasitic gravity that acted directly on the energy dimension.

That energy exhaust, which should have slowly dissipated in the vacuum, and even the slight shield overflow energy from the transport ship's exterior...

In an instant, they were forcibly sucked away by an invisible vortex.

Not just this one.

The hundreds of fully loaded transport ships that followed, upon passing this node, were similarly and silently stripped of a "layer of skin."

The transport ships' radars showed no reaction.

Because this loss fell perfectly within the 0.5% legal margin of error for "natural route frictional attenuation resistance" set by the Federation.

These iron boxes were like leeches, clinging to the Federation's thickest artery, swallowing frantically at an extremely greedy frequency.

After gorging themselves on high-purity advanced energy, the black iron shells even began to show a faint, unhealthy purplish-red flush.

There was no need for Li Cang to give an order.

Upon reaching their physical capacity limit, these parasitic mining ships, relying on their pre-set original return program, drifted extremely slowly back to that dead star system through the dark vacuum of space.

The lights in the cockpit all lit up at the same time.

Li Cang wasn't drinking coffee; he stood before the floor-to-ceiling window of the panoramic monitor.

Outside.

Those two thousand iron cubes, swollen almost to the point of deformation, rained down onto the surface of Mining Planet No. 3 like dumplings being dropped into a pot.

They didn't go through any refined unloading procedures; they simply split open a large hole at the bottom.

Pools of thick, blue-purple liquid paste—characteristic of high-level energy—mixed with rare particles sucked from the route's dust, were poured directly into the forging trench of the volcanic crater.

This was high-dimensional sustenance precisely refined by the Federation.

This was dozens of times purer than what Li Cang could get from mining this broken rock for a hundred years.

The equatorial ring forging trench, which had already gone out...

...emitted a world-shaking roar, like a giant beast awakening.

Under the injection of pure energy, the dark red magma mutated directly into a blazing bright white.

Not just the crater, but the entire core of Mining Planet No. 3, stimulated by this extremely high-spec external energy, erupted once more with industrial light bright enough to illuminate the surrounding space.

Li Cang turned around.

The red warning representing the blockade was still flashing futilely in the corner of the screen.

He walked back to the control console.

He pressed his palm onto the blueprint that represented his highest productivity.

[Standard Mass Production Logistics Coordination Array].

Not only had he survived, but he had also obtained top-tier nourishment stolen directly from his opponent's veins without the need for trade.

"Number One." Li Cang's gaze changed completely at this moment, filled with the greed and brutality of a pauper who had suddenly obtained the key to a vault.

"Push all two thousand Servitors to the front line for me."

"Since their oil can be sucked..."

"...then dismantle those three crappy cannons."

"From today on, we will build heavy Cruisers right under their noses."