It had to be said that the same words, when spoken by different people, carried vastly different weights. The sentence currently falling from Lei Ting’s lips was so provocative that for a fleeting moment, Undale found himself wishing for a time machine.
Unfortunately, he could not rewind time to the moment before he answered the call. He could only remain silent for a beat, rapidly scanning the current situation in his mind, before realizing with a sense of dread that he had no choice but to tell the truth.
“…Yes, that is indeed the case,” Undale replied, bowing his head. “As you have always known, the internal situation of the Federation is… complicated.”
“How complicated must it be for people to forget where their roots lie?” Lei Ting lowered his gaze, installing a miniature shaping-field generator into the gold base in his hands. His tone wasn't heavy; instead, it carried a strange, eerie gentleness.
In that instant, a bead of sweat broke out on Undale’s forehead.
The last time he had heard Lei Ting use such a tone for official business was in the days following the man’s coronation with that golden crown. At the time, Lei Ting had requested a massive amount of personal data on officials involved in internal information management. Not long after, Undale heard that people had started dying.
Yes, dead. One after another.
Those deaths were so abrupt, yet they felt like the culmination of seeds planted ten or twenty years prior.
From that moment on, Undale realized that an era he had never even imagined in his hundred-plus years of life had arrived. Most people believed the ‘Sun Star’ would only bring warmth, but Undale knew better. In the vastness of the universe, simple warmth cannot reach far. The light that truly graces all living things is, upon closer inspection, forever marked by brutality and harshness.
Well, in that case, he couldn't exactly say he was unprepared.
After all, since that day, he had been waiting for the moment Lei Ting would truly begin to interfere in the Federation’s internal administration—even if, aside from purging a large number of corrupt officials while investigating a certain past incident, the man hadn't acted like someone who would do so.
Because Undale understood perfectly well… the current Federation, once fully exposed to Lei Ting’s gaze, would inevitably be set ablaze.
Like sewage dried up by the sun.
Forget about standard statutes of limitations—those didn't apply to a ‘Double-S’ ranker. Rules were only useful when he chose to let them be effective. Was Lei Ting the type of person to let those dark, unspoken conventions persist?
In the places he watched, bypassing was impossible, hiding was a waste of effort, and concealment was the most useless act of all. No means of resistance would work. Even the methods of corruption people usually employed had long since proven meaningless against the ‘Sun Star.’
Undale had always known that as long as an event occurred, it left a trace. As long as people cried out, there would be an echo. A stone thrown into the sea is not without effect; the strength of the masses gathered into a mountain will cause even the sea level to rise. And now, the lives once buried beneath public discourse had found their echo. The hour of reckoning had arrived.
The ‘Sun Star’ had decided to flip through the Human Federation’s ledgers of the past millennium to see who had tampered with the recent expenditures.
And Undale—even though he knew very well that few councilors in the current Federation were clean—chose to bow his head in support and agreement. Because this wasn't a multiple-choice question.
But…
“Your Eminence, the reason some things persist despite being clearly wrong is that within this set of rules, everyone maintains them through a tacit understanding.”
Before speaking further, Undale offered a reminder, though it was unclear how much of it was born of genuine goodwill.
“If you wish to change it, you will inevitably face obstacles from all sides… Hardly anyone in the entire Federation is clean. If you were to summarily uproot the corrupt, the Federation’s support system would collapse instantly.”
“I understand.”
Lei Ting looked up, facing the light screen with his deep black visor. Even though he had currently sealed his visual system with the blindfold, he still habitually performed the actions of a ‘normal person.’
“Tell me about this so-called ‘complexity.’” On a muted screen beside him, a space encounter had begun. Lei Ting watched it, his voice soft. “Tell me everything that has persisted here, from the very beginning until now.”
…
After sending out alert messages to others, Undale pulled up several documents and displayed them within the communication link, explaining the issues: “To put it simply, the Federation’s system of ‘decentralized autonomy’—born of physical distance—led to the fragmentation of power and its self-sustained growth.
“As you know, the Federation is currently a pile of loose sand. In the early years, when various planets were still allowed to possess large-scale heavy weaponry, civil wars even broke out between star sectors. At that time, they even brought out Star Destroyers, complete with matching tactics…”
*Good heavens,* Lei Ting thought, genuinely stunned for a moment. *Star Destroyers in a civil war?*
The sheer absurdity of the topic dazed him briefly. He pondered for a moment, finding he could only offer a silent praise: *Truly, as expected of humans.*
And so, the conversation continued from that wild starting point.
After that civil war, the Federation ordered all planets to surrender their heavy weaponry, placing all security matters under the jurisdiction of the various Legions. It was for this reason that the military had to massively expand its legionary structure over the years.
Furthermore, in reality, most people in the Human Federation did not want to join the military. Compared to enlisting, entering the Star Net’s free commercial system or the entertainment sector was more in line with the ideals of modern youth.
Thus, Lei Ting knew that some legions were severely understaffed. Humans primarily handled management, while the vast majority of other tasks were executed by shipboard AI.
Currently, some within the Federation had proposed a plan to equalize legion numbers and use only AI and drones for frontline combat. But this idea was currently unfeasible because the cosmic environment was too complex. There were too many places where signals could not reach; soldiers would never be enough…
Therefore, even though training a human soldier was more troublesome than mass-producing ten thousand war machines, the Federation could not stop the process.
The Human Federation as a collective had always been forced forward by various crises.
“It is so for soldier training, and so for internal development,” Undale said. “Bound by bloodlines and interests, the power monsters entrenched throughout the Capital System have long since taken shape. They wear the guise of corporate conglomerates, holding vast resources and wielding influence in every field…”
“I know of them.” Lei Ting nodded. He did indeed know, though he hadn't had much time to look into them before. “To be honest, I think people who try to run internal factions based on patriarchal clan systems in an interstellar society have something wrong with their heads.”
“Indeed.”
Undale had no desire to disagree; he didn't practice that himself—even his own son was just one of his split personalities. “But it is biological nature.”
To enhance their chances of survival, organisms naturally congregate for various reasons. Whether the collective is large or small, the duration long or short, and despite the cycle of unity and division… it is undeniable that grouping is the nature of most creatures, especially within ‘clans’ maintained by natural bloodlines.
And if this ‘clan’ already possessed a certain level of power, the process would accelerate further.
During this process, the thoughts of the members within the group would undergo changes and a mostly negative unification, until they and more new members joined together to become that most terrifying power monster: a ‘class.’ From then on, they would believe that not only were they a different kind of person from the masses outside their class, but that anyone outside their class wasn't even human.
Those outside the class racked their brains to get in; those inside spontaneously protected the class’s interests. Those with families naturally placed the family before the greater collective, and those without families would establish one over a few generations…
It was almost like a religion.
And now, the Federation was already rooted in this terrifying ‘religion.’ Its tentacles extended everywhere, eventually becoming an intertwined mess within the Federation, sucking the blood of the people through commerce and shielded criminal acts. Moreover, they always managed to be the biggest beneficiaries in every conflict.
“Today, this class has become the skeleton of the Federation’s various affairs. If you were to pull it out, the Federation would quickly lose most of its functional capacity,” Undale said. “As for the corruption of the dispatched officials you mentioned… to establish that kind of completely self-centered and limitlessly extravagant consumption habit, they couldn't possibly be ordinary people to begin with…
“But within that class, most of them own more than one private vacation planet. The luxury of their lives and the inhumanity of their behavior on those planets actually exceed the imagination of most current Star Net literature.”
The corner of Lei Ting’s eye twitched.
At this moment, he felt a deeper resonance with Evanheiler’s words. Faced with such a situation, if he did not possess power like his own, he would likely be helpless.
On one hand, lacking the ability to decide everything; on the other, potentially being collectively deceived by the controllers of all sectors of society… The predicament Evanheiler faced back then exceeded his own current situation, especially since the Kang family was a leader in the pharmaceutical industry and one of the cores of that class…
Seen this way, the heavy, irrefutable sense of guilt in Evanheiler’s heart, as well as the phrases ‘complete injustice’ and ‘permanent inequality,’ took on new meanings.
—He had indeed grown up in a world defined by those two phrases and had benefited greatly from them. In the heart of a man like Evanheiler, a share of that sin belonged to him.
He believed he had once aided a tyrant, and for the rest of his life—long or short—besides fighting for an ideal world, he inevitably carried the mindset of ‘atonement.’
“Sigh…” Lei Ting let out a long sigh.
That sigh made Undale’s skin crawl. But he had to continue: “Furthermore, these people are very shrewd. They know how to suck blood while ensuring they can keep doing so smoothly—
“Controlling public opinion, ‘moe-ifying’ the image of certain class members, turning the lifestyles of class members into entertainment, stirring up the public’s longing for their luxurious lives on the Star Net… while satisfying their own desire to show off and control, they diminish the severity of the fact that their original capital accumulation was soaked in blood. They fragment the populace, making one group debate another on their behalf, and slowly modify labor-related laws within the individual statutes of different planets…”
“Which laws did they modify?” Lei Ting asked suddenly.
“Many,” Undale said. “To give a basic example, your hometown—the fourth planet of the New Solar System—was recently on the verge of starting a pilot program for two clauses: ‘Basic wages may be reduced at discretion for certain industries’ and ‘The employer is, in a legal sense, the protector of the employee’…
“If it weren't for your rising fame and place of origin causing them to halt the advancement of these laws, perhaps on this return, as you passed the fourth planet, you would have seen sprawling, prosperous metropolises, and beneath them, a living hell.”
***
Glossary:
