Chapter 1267: Chapter 482: Escort Mission, Black Mist Zone (Part 3)

After leaving the Tenglong Nebula, there will be a vast desolate belt ahead, like a flat open plain, where we can accelerate in a straight line.

The straight-line distance from the boundary of the Tenglong Nebula to the outer boundary of the Black Mist Zone is 1.2 light years, and it will take 12 years to reach it.

After that, the total length of the route inside the Black Mist Zone is 0.25 light years, and the estimated traversal time is 5 years.

All in all, the Source Star Fleet will need 20 years to reach the inner boundary of the Black Mist Zone and rendezvous with the Special Service Fleet.

He muttered to himself in his heart, "This Nanxiang Marquis Liu An is not exactly acting in good faith. Since the mission is to pick us up and escort us, they should be the ones coming through the Black Mist Zone to meet us. How does it make sense to wait on the other side for ten years? Something’s off."

He opened the files again and focused on studying the intel regarding the Black Mist Zone.

According to intelligence provided by explorers from the Royal Academy of Sciences, the Black Mist Zone is filled with a large number of discrete Dark Energy clusters. These Dark Energy clusters are vast in number and vary greatly in size, from satellites as small as a moon to bodies vastly exceeding the largest stars.

For the vast majority of the time, the Dark Energy clusters move along their respective orbits, revolving with stable regularity around the massive Black Hole at the center of the Black Mist Zone.

However, once two Dark Energy clusters whose volume and mass exceed the critical threshold collide and trigger a violent explosion, releasing unstable energy tides and gravitational shocks, they may trigger a chaotic, large-scale Dark Energy cluster eruption that sweeps across the entire Black Mist Zone.

An eruption of that magnitude can shred and annihilate all matter that strays into it.

According to the explorers’ notes, the Black Mist Zone undergoes such an eruption on average once every hundred million years.

The last eruption took place more than six million years ago, when the Mechanical Empire was facing off against the army of the Ascendants in the nearby region.

The Mechanical Empire had deployed only a small fleet on the frontal battlefield, with total strength roughly half that of the Ascendants’ forces, and they were at a clear disadvantage and besieged on the front.

But at the same time, the Mechanical Empire secretly dispatched its true main force from the other side, slipping in from the far side of the Black Mist Zone and rapidly closing in on the battlefield, preparing to execute a surprise pincer attack from inside and out and annihilate this Ascendant army.

At that time, the Mechanical Empire had just completed development of a new stealth coating. Large numbers of ships could silently approach the main battlefield, and once they pounced, they would inevitably catch the Ascendant army completely off guard.

The Empire’s plan could be called flawless; if everything went smoothly, it was bound to result in a major victory.

Unfortunately, just two months before the main fleet was scheduled to exit the Black Mist Zone, the great eruption occurred without any warning.

In the end, only a few exceptionally lucky fleets managed to escape, but by then the frontal battlefield outside had already collapsed in total defeat, and these few escaping ships were also hunted down and intercepted by the Ascendants.

The Empire not only suffered heavy losses, but its new stealth coating was exposed. The Ascendants recorded the data and quickly evolved targeted detection methods. The research of tens of billions of Imperial scientists over thousands of years was all rendered useless.

The impact of this event spread far and wide, causing the Mechanical Empire to lose control of the Nanxiang Star Cluster for a time. The Empire later paid a huge price to retake it, but due to the heavy concentration of forces in the Nanxiang Star Cluster, other war zones repeatedly suffered setbacks.

The domino effect triggered by this incident continued to affect the Empire for nearly a million years, until it was finally overshadowed by another great rout.

After reading all of this material, Ren Zhong pondered, "Since an eruption just occurred six million years ago, the Dark Energy clusters inside the Black Mist Zone have already restructured themselves and established a new spatial-gravity balance. There shouldn’t be any chance of another large-scale eruption in the short term. The few scout stars the Empire has embedded inside the Black Mist Zone haven’t issued any warning either, which proves that the Black Mist Zone is still in a stable, quiescent phase. In that case, the Nanxiang Marquis’s decision to forbid the Special Service Fleet from passing through the Black Mist Zone is open to question."

Ren Zhong’s gaze fell again on the Star Map, on that olive-shaped black fog region tilted at a thirty-degree angle to the ecliptic plane of the Ancient Disk Star System, and he sank into thought.

A moment later, a derisive laugh sounded in his office.

"Pointless."

...

Time flew by; in the blink of an eye, another eleven years had passed, and Ren Zhong once again awoke from cryosleep.

But this time, the alarm in his personal Frozen Storage did not go off.

He had preset the wake-up program eleven years in advance.

After stepping out of the Frozen Storage and returning to his office, ten minutes later, the newly appointed Acting Governor of the Source Star Fleet, Isu Rock, appeared in Ren Zhong’s office.

At this point, Ren Zhong had just finished quickly browsing through the personnel changes in the fleet over the past eleven years.

He saw that six years ago, Zhuo Yihang had collapsed at his post and passed away of old age.

Subsequently, according to the rules Ren Zhong had established, several people competed for the position, including Liang Qifa, former general manager of Chromium Carbon Resources in Chromium Carbon Town; Zheng Dafa, a former slave under the Wang family of Chongyi; Tang Youyun, Steering Man of Tanggu Group; Gao Ya, Steering Man of Purple Crystal Mining; and Isu Rock, the newly appointed Steering Man of Rock Group.

In the end, after layers of screening and comparison, as well as fair evaluations, consultations, and nominations by representatives from various industries and fields, it was actually Isu Rock—who had been only eight years old when he boarded the fleet and who was now a thirty-year-old middle-aged man—who stood out and became the new Acting Governor.

Isu Rock had once been one of the vested interests within the Business Association, but that did not mean Ren Zhong’s power had slipped from his grasp.

Back then, Isu Rock had also passed the examinations of the upright Governor Ju Qingmeng, and Legal Officer Xiao Xingyue had allocated dozens of Telekinesis Masters to conduct a comprehensive psychological review of him.

Before he even reached adulthood, he had already received the new type of education established single-handedly by Ren Zhong, and he possessed an entirely new set of values, quite different from those of the traditional heirs of the Nine Great Corporations.