Gu Jiaqi stared blankly at the planet before her, completely stunned.
Why had her perfectly good planet turned into a garbage planet… and such a huge garbage planet at that?!
Why hadn’t the staff told her when they came to deliver the information?
Gu Jiaqi was filled with questions!
She turned around and watched the departing starship, even feeling an urge to get into her mecha and chase after it to demand an explanation.
But she couldn’t. Gu Jiaqi knew that she had probably been set up by Sois.
Or rather, Sois was trying to silence her. How ridiculous.
She opened her StarNet communicator, a ring, and sure enough, there was an email from the Relationship Affairs Committee.
After investigation, your ex-boyfriend Sois Lahr does indeed have a three-month-old child. We have submitted the information to the Imperial Department of Marriage, and he will receive the Empire’s most severe punishment for infidelity.
The most severe punishment for infidelity… Gu Jiaqi thought about it for a moment, then laughed out loud.
“Scumbag. Serves you right!” This was far from the only “surprise” she had left for him.
Gu Jiaqi was a recently retired Imperial frontier soldier. She had received multiple First-Class Merits and earned another First-Class Merit just before her retirement, for which she was awarded a planet.
However, Gu Jiaqi gritted her teeth as she stared at the small red Zerg beneath her feet. It was waving its enormous pincers and preparing to attack her.
She lifted one foot, sending the Zerg flying.
Gu Jiaqi turned around and looked at the planet covered in garbage, letting out a deep sigh. She summoned her mecha and planned to circle the planet to see if there was anywhere she could settle down. Even if it was a garbage planet, the buildable area awarded to a soldier for a First-Class Merit could not be less than 1,000 square meters. Planets that were too small would not even appear on the list.
Gu Jiaqi’s mecha was as fast as a medium-sized warship. Sitting inside it, she quickly flew around the planet. Aside from the blackened steel forest that occupied most of the planet, the entire place was actually covered in garbage. There was only a patch of open ground beside a small river.
“Should I be grateful there isn’t any highly radioactive garbage?” Gu Jiaqi muttered.
There were all kinds of discarded mining waste, abandoned old mechas, breeding pools for some harmless small Zerg, plastic garbage that had probably been dumped here who knew how many years ago, and even a pile of enormous shipping containers on the other side of the planet. She had no idea what kind of garbage they contained.
The reason Gu Jiaqi could determine that there was no radioactive garbage was because radioactive waste was marked with specific warning signs to prevent people from approaching it. Gu Jiaqi had flown over the entire planet without finding a single such marker.
She vaguely heard the roar of a star beast underground and sighed. What a terrible environment.
It had taken nearly three days for the starship to travel here from the capital star. She had originally thought that this place was so remote that she could take advantage of the distance from the authorities and work as a bounty hunter to make some quick money. Who could have expected it to be this remote? Even the cosmic energy available for extraction in this godforsaken place was extremely sparse. She had no idea how many times her mecha’s energy supply would last.
Gu Jiaqi checked the belongings stored in her spatial chip. The only consumable supplies she had were one box of fruit-flavored nutrient solutions. Everything else consisted of her weapons, furniture, daily necessities, and so on.
Fortunately, one box of nutrient solutions would be enough to keep her going for a month. She could take this opportunity to capture a few interstellar criminals and earn some bounty money.
She had long yearned for a life this free. Her good friend Guan Wan had always said that she had no great ambitions and only wanted to become a laid-back interstellar traveler, going wherever she wanted and living without anyone telling her what to do.
“You should at least become an Imperial general or something, shouldn’t you?”
Thinking of Guan Wan’s words, Gu Jiaqi couldn’t help laughing. A general, huh? In the current Empire, unless you were a noble, how could you ever become a general?
It was just that she would never see Guan Wan again.
That was also why she was determined to send Sois to his death. That bastard had caused Guan Wan’s death.
Gu Jiaqi shook her head. There was no use thinking about this now. What she needed to do was work hard to earn more opportunities to turn the tables and send Sois before the Empire’s highest court.
After her momentary sadness passed, Gu Jiaqi looked around. A day on this planet seemed to be no different from one on the capital. It was also twenty-four hours. She had spent three days traveling aboard the starship, and it was already dark.
Gu Jiaqi took out her lightsaber and chopped down several trees at the edge of the forest. These steel trees were actually very brittle. They were only suitable for building ordinary houses. If she wanted to turn them into weapons, they would probably need to undergo multiple tempering processes.
“Not very useful,” she muttered to herself.
After crazily chopping down seventeen or eighteen steel trees, Gu Jiaqi climbed back into her mecha and activated intelligent mode.
“Master, Master! You haven’t called me in so long!”
The artificial intelligence Xiao Hong in her mecha was as lively as ever.
“Good girl. Help Big Sis build a shelter. I’ve already chopped down all the steel trees.”
Xiao Hong had the personality of an obedient little girl. Through the positioning system, she also knew where Gu Jiaqi was currently located and obediently began using the mecha’s tools to process the steel trees, gradually putting together a shelter.
In fact, over the years of fighting the Zerg, Gu Jiaqi had experienced her fair share of sleeping rough. She always carried a tent with her. But this was her planet, after all. If she was going to live here permanently, of course she needed a house, or at least a shelter.
The mecha busied itself with grinding and working for quite a while before finally putting together a neat, square shelter. Gu Jiaqi’s green tent fabric, which she had used for years, was also spread over the roof.
“Uh…” Although the shelter was actually quite sturdy, Gu Jiaqi couldn’t shake the feeling that she had seen this shape somewhere before.
It wasn’t until she lay inside the shelter and was about to fall asleep that she finally remembered.
Wasn’t this the shape of an “urn” from the history books?
Gu Jiaqi was speechless.
“Whatever. Time to sleep.”
By the time Gu Jiaqi woke up, it was already broad daylight. This planet was not particularly close to the sun, so dawn came late. From that, it was obvious how long she had slept.
Gu Jiaqi’s response to this was: Can’t a soldier sleep in once in a while? Ridiculous! Besides, she’d already retired!
But when she walked out of the shelter, she suddenly wondered if she was dreaming.
Could someone tell her why there was a raggedy-looking child sitting outside her door?
Yes, that’s right. Sitting at the entrance of Gu Jiaqi’s miserable green tent was a six- or seven-year-old child wearing a tattered “bedsheet.”
Gu Jiaqi couldn’t tell whether the child was a boy or a girl for the moment, because the child’s face was covered in grime and their hair was a tangled mess. Although it was quite long, she couldn’t rule out the possibility that some parents simply liked keeping their children’s hair long. She couldn’t understand why there would be such a filthy child in the Empire.
Children born in the Empire, regardless of their mental power aptitude, were provided with the best education. If a child was unkempt or went missing, the child’s guardian would be punished.
No matter how she looked at it, there was no way a child could have appeared on this barren planet!
Gu Jiaqi crouched down and tugged at the hemp-yellow “bedsheet” the child was wearing. “Hey! Wake up?”
The child wasn’t sleeping very deeply, so they woke as soon as Gu Jiaqi spoke. The child opened a pair of pitch-black eyes, like a startled fawn.
A dirty little fawn.
Seeing Gu Jiaqi crouching there and looking at them, the little dirty child nervously scooted backward. But they had already been leaning against the shelter, and there was nowhere left to retreat.
“Kid, what are you doing here?” Gu Jiaqi tried to make her expression as gentle as possible and asked softly.
Ten seconds passed, but the child continued hugging their knees and staring at her.
Half a minute passed. The child blinked innocently.
A minute passed, and the child still hadn’t answered her.
Was she being too intimidating?
“Why are you here?” She put on a smile.
The child lowered their head and thought for a moment, biting their lip with an extremely nervous expression.
“Don’t be afraid. Big Sister isn’t a bad person. This place you’re in is my home. How did you get here? Where’s your guardian? I can take you home.”
To be honest, from the time Gu Jiaqi was born until now, aside from when she herself was a child and interacted with others her age, she had never had any contact with children. So she had absolutely no idea what to do with this child who refused to speak.
Gu Jiaqi could tell that the timid child in front of her was extremely introverted and fearful. Although she had done her best to soften her manner when speaking to them, it had achieved very little. Then she heard the child’s stomach growl, and a turning point finally came.
“Are you hungry?” Gu Jiaqi asked again.
This time, the child didn’t merely look at her. Instead, they gently nodded.
Gu Jiaqi relaxed a little. At least the child wasn’t hearing-impaired. She smiled and, under the child’s astonished gaze, took a tube of nutrient solution “out of thin air” from her spatial chip. She had no choice. She didn’t have any other food on hand, and this nutrient solution was the only thing she had left.
Fortunately, drinking one tube was enough to sustain one’s physical strength and sense of fullness for one to two days. Gu Jiaqi had thirty bottles in this box, which, according to her plan, would be enough to keep her going alone for more than a month.
She handed the nutrient solution to the child and watched as they clumsily tried to unscrew the cap but couldn’t figure out how. Helpless, Gu Jiaqi took it back, unscrewed the cap for them, and watched as they drank the nutrient solution.
“Are you full?” After a while, Gu Jiaqi calculated that the nutrient solution should have taken effect and asked the child.
Sure enough, a satisfied expression appeared on the child’s face. They looked quite happy and even gave Gu Jiaqi a small smile, but still didn’t say anything.
How should she put it? Although Gu Jiaqi didn’t have much experience with children, she didn’t particularly dislike them. Especially pitiful children like this one could easily remind her of herself when she was young.
Both of Gu Jiaqi’s parents had been Imperial soldiers and had died in the line of duty many years ago, leaving Gu Jiaqi to be adopted by Teacher Casey. She only began living independently at the age of eighteen. Because of this, Teacher Casey was as important to her as her own mother. Before leaving the capital, she had also gone to visit Teacher Casey, only to find that her teacher had been unconscious for several years due to a mental power injury.
Now that she was looking at this pitiful child in front of her, Gu Jiaqi felt an indescribable tenderness toward them. But she knew that under her current circumstances, she couldn’t afford to support this child.
The Empire had extremely strict requirements for adopting orphans, with clear requirements for financial means, patience, and level of education. After all, the state paid for all of a child’s schooling, while the parents only needed to be responsible for the child’s education at home.
This child had no idea which planet they had come from, but no matter what, she had to figure it out.
Just as Gu Jiaqi fell into thought, the child in front of her suddenly stood up and timidly poked the back of her hand.
“Hmm?” Gu Jiaqi looked at them in confusion.
The child picked up their little bedsheet and walked step by step toward the steel forest. They even waved, signaling for Gu Jiaqi to follow.
Gu Jiaqi followed them. The two soon passed beyond the edge of the steel forest. At that point, Gu Jiaqi became somewhat wary. There could be star beasts, poisonous insects, or something else inside the steel forest. Going any farther would be dangerous.
Seeing the child ahead continue walking deeper with determination, Gu Jiaqi instinctively entered a combat-ready state. However, when the child stopped, Gu Jiaqi was stunned.
Wrapped slowly around the trunk of a gigantic steel tree was a black, oval-shaped hole. The hole was constantly moving, like a monster capable of swallowing people, making anyone who looked at it shrink back in fear.
Gu Jiaqi had no idea that there was actually a black hole on her planet!