A week later, Xia Qi watched Li Qing arrive with just a single, solitary Escort Ship and asked, puzzled:
“You’re going like this? Don’t you need to sell some stuff?”
In the channel, Zhang Yunbo laughed:
“He’s only been here a short while, with just one Mining Ship. He can’t have stockpiled much ore. This time he’s just going with you to learn the route and get familiar—otherwise, going alone in the future, he’d definitely get lowballed.”
“That works too. Just follow me, then.”
Xia Qi didn’t think much of it and began directing Transport Ships to dock and form a convoy.
Li Qing rubbed his head and said in the channel:
“Um, I actually brought a lot of ore.”
Zhang Yuanbo instinctively checked the radar scan, but detected no additional ships nearby, and asked:
“You brought a lot? Where? Why can’t I see it?”
“Right here.”
A ring of blackness rapidly expanded to a diameter of ten kilometers, and a massive Ore Sphere slowly drifted out, appearing out of thin air beside the asteroid.
The channel fell silent.
Everyone stared slack-jawed at the enormous passage and the giant Ore Sphere.
After a long moment, Ning Xi’s shocked voice rang out:
“Holy crap, is that a Legacy Relic of yours?”
“A space-type Legacy Relic?”
“How big is the space? What other functions does it have?”
The others stared wide-eyed, firing off shocked questions in a jumble.
Li Qing answered, having long prepared his story:
“It’s a Legacy Relic I was born with—my mother prepared it for me before I was born. It’s a space-type relic with a vast interior that can hold an entire planet, but the opening can’t exceed ten kilometers, so nothing larger than that diameter can fit inside.”
He paused, then added:
“It’s a pure space-type relic with no other functions, and it’s already bonded to me as its master.”
“Good heavens, a space that big—how much ore could it hold at once!”
True to their nature as veteran miners, their first reaction was exactly what he’d predicted: how much ore it could carry.
The group chattered excitedly, all thoroughly envious.
Only envious, though—nothing more.
The fact that it was already bonded to a master dispelled any schemes most players might have.
Besides, they were all just ordinary individual players and wouldn’t harbor such dangerous ideas anyway.
They lingered there for two hours, mainly because they were so curious—they had him demonstrate by using the Palm Universe to store Xia Qi’s entire Transport Ship convoy.
As Xia Qi put it, the journey ahead spanned forty to fifty star systems and wasn’t entirely safe.
Besides Wild Mobs along the way, they might occasionally run into robbing pirate players.
If the Transport Ship convoy were stored inside the Palm Universe, there’d be nothing to fear even if they did encounter such pirates.
By the time they officially set out, the group had grown to include Ning Xi and Zhang Weiqi.
The two of them hadn’t yet stockpiled enough ore to sell, but this time there was no need to bring Transport Ships at all—one less burden—so they decided to travel together and buy some supplies along the way.
A small fleet consisting of one Cruiser, two Destroyers, and six Escort Ships departed the JM-N-348 star system.
They passed through a Wormhole, and the ships’ radars immediately flashed red, indicating enemies within detection range.
Looking closer, Li Qing spotted six points of light in the void over a thousand kilometers from the wormhole.
He immediately checked the scan feedback data and breathed a sigh of relief:
“It’s fine—six pirate gunboats.”
The six pirate gunboats had also spotted them and were giving chase.
Li Qing asked Xia Qi, who was leading the team:
“Do we fight or shake them off?”
Xia Qi said:
“Let’s take them out. Otherwise they might interfere with the hyperspace engine.”
“Alright.”
The fleet quickly formed a triangle formation, with the cruiser at the front, the two destroyers on the left and right, and the escort ships behind.
Li Qing’s single escort ship took up the rear.
The moment the two sides closed in, the broadside cruiser and the two destroyers opened fire simultaneously.
Ten large railguns spat fire, ten thick trajectories tearing through space, along with over eight missiles and more than twenty smaller medium railguns, all converging on the pirate gunboats, which had split into two groups attacking from the left and right.
Beyond the transparent floor-to-ceiling glass of the bridge, two massive fireballs erupted in the cold starfield.
Two pirate gunboats were blown apart on the spot, slowly breaking in half amid the flames.
The remaining four pirate gunboats passed through the burning wreckage, then banked mid-flight and turned to flee.
Pirates had simple AI too—once it registered the ferocity of their firepower, it bolted.
Unfortunately, the AI was limited.
It hadn’t fled right away, instead taking a full salvo to the face and losing two ships before deciding to run.
A cruiser actually already counted as a large warship.
The standard Ranger-class Cruiser had 8 L-sized large weapon slots, 6 G-class missile slots, and 16 M-sized medium weapon slots—firepower enough to instantly obliterate a poorly configured escort ship.
In the star sea, battleships were high-tier warships, serving as mainline warships even among the Warlord Clans.
These vessels were enormous in size and specifications, with ferociously powerful armament.
Their main gun was an X-slot super-large weapon, whose destructive power could easily one-shot a standard destroyer.
As for escort ships, no matter the configuration, one shot meant certain destruction—no exceptions.
Such mainline warships were extremely difficult to build, demanding much of shipyards and shipbuilding engineers.
Ordinary shipyards simply couldn’t construct them; only the shipyards of the great powers could.
But these mainline warships were in short supply everywhere.
The great powers couldn’t even build enough for themselves, so selling them was out of the question.
As a result, out in the wider world, many factions without connections used cruisers as their mainline warships, keeping battleships as their trump cards.
The dock array inside the High-Dimensional Fortress within Li Qing’s Palm Universe was not only qualified to build battleships—it could even build a Titan Super-Flagship.
The problem was he had no blueprints, no capital, and most critically, no team of shipbuilding engineers qualified to construct a Titan Super-Flagship.
Ordinary shipbuilding engineers were easy enough to find—not rare at all; he could simply hire them from academies or guilds.
But the crucial high-level engineers were another matter entirely, especially high-level shipbuilding engineers qualified to build mainline warships of battleship class and above.
They were treasures wherever they went.
High wages weren’t the issue—the problem was simply finding such engineers.
This was exactly what gave Li Qing a headache.
If he could find high-level shipbuilding engineers, why bother mining?
He could just build ships and sell them—that was a far faster way to make money than mining.
Unfortunately, his strength was insufficient right now—he couldn’t cooperate with others.
Without strength, he had no qualification to cooperate with anyone.
A super dock array capable of building a Titan Super-Flagship—many Warlord Clans didn’t even have the qualification to build a Titan Super-Flagship.
This was absolutely enough to make those big shots pay a huge price to move against him.
With a Cruiser at his command, he wouldn’t need to hide from pirate groups of fewer than ten Pirate Gunboats—he could just sweep straight through them.
Most of what roamed wild star systems were Pirate Gunboats.
Powerful pirate Cruisers mostly roamed in large fleets, moving slowly, so as long as you spotted them early, you could usually escape.
Xia Qi and the others had traveled this route many times and were very familiar with it.
In less than a week, they crossed over a dozen star systems and stopped in a system just outside the claimed territory of the Burning Ghost Squad.
Zhang Weiqi said over the channel:
“I got a Data Chip earlier. When I extracted it with a decoder, it turned out to be a Signal Coordinate, not far from here. Want to go dig it up while we’re at it?”
Xia Qi, the temporary team leader, thought for a moment and asked:
“What level Signal Chip?”
“Level two.”
“Hmm, let’s go take a look then.”
Signal Chip digging was also called “grave digging.” Using a decoder to extract the data from a Signal Chip would yield a coordinate, like a treasure map.
You’d travel to the coordinate location and dig up the treasure.
Since the coordinates often led to treasures left behind by ancients and predecessors, players jokingly called it grave digging.
Graves were divided into five standard levels.
Level one was the lowest and basically never contained anything good—total value under a million.
Level five was the highest, capable of yielding Battleship construction Blueprints, and some rare graves had a chance of digging up an ancient finished Battleship.
Beyond that, above level five graves there were super graves that transcended the standard—rare items with a chance of yielding Flagship-tier goodies.
A level two grave wouldn’t be worth too much.
At best, you might dig up a sunken ship, some Warship Blueprints, or valuables worth no more than fifty million in total.
The party of four followed the coordinates across two star systems, and after passing through a Wormhole, entered a dim star system.
Li Qing saw at a glance that the Main Sequence Star at the center of the system had collapsed from a red star into a Red Dwarf with extremely low luminosity.
Apart from some light near the Main Sequence Star, everything farther out was pitch black.
Following Zhang Weiqi’s coordinate guidance, the fleet flew toward the edge of the Gravity Well on the other side of the system, dodging several powerful Wild Mob fleets along the way, and stopped near a gas planet.
“Why is someone here?”
Xia Qi’s Cruiser had the longest radar detection range, and he quickly transmitted a radar scan map to everyone.
Li Qing received one as well.
The image showed a sizable fleet parked in orbit above the gas giant.
Judging by their specifications, there were two Cruisers, five Destroyers, twenty-two Escort Ships, and three Industrial Ships—a force stronger than their own.
At the same time, Li Qing noticed something strange: the several moons in orbit around the gas giant had all been shattered, as if bombarded by weapons of enormous power. Follow the newest chapters on novelping . com.
Some had been blown in half, their planetary cores exposed, while others had only a small portion blasted away.
That fleet was currently parked above a massive vortex orbit on the gas giant, and a thick pillar of light was erupting from the center of the vortex, extending thousands of kilometers into space.
At this moment, Xia Qi sent them some bad news:
“It’s the Burning Ghost team.”
Just as they spotted the Burning Ghost’s people, the enemy—two Cruisers—had also spotted them and sent Xia Qi a transmission, which he forwarded directly to the channel:
“This is a Burning Ghost team mission. All unrelated personnel, leave this star system.”
“They’re that arrogant?!”
Li Qing scratched his head and looked at Xia Qi.
He chuckled:
“You’ll see even more arrogant scenes in the future.”
“So what do we do now?”
“Let’s try negotiating first.”
Xia Qi connected to the other side and sent a message.
A moment later, a young man in a leather jacket appeared in the channel.
He glanced expressionlessly at the four of them and said:
“Either come back next time, or wait until we finish the mission.”
Xia Qi quickly replied:
“You go ahead with your work. We can wait a while.”
“Don’t approach the gas giant. Wait where you are.”
The communication cut off abruptly.
Everyone exchanged glances, while Xia Qi, Ning Xi, and the others, who had probably seen this before, merely shrugged.
Li Qing rubbed his forehead and chuckled without a word.
So this was his first impression of the Burning Ghost team’s style of doing things.
In orbit above the gas giant, the two Cruisers split off to the left and right, while five Destroyers and twenty-two Escort Ships formed three small squads patrolling on either side.
Three Industrial Ships lined up side by side, each spewing a thick pillar of light from their bows down into the gas giant’s violent atmospheric vortex.
From a distance, it looked like a Tractor Beam, as if they were pulling something up from the depths of the gas giant.
Time passed minute by minute.
After who knew how long, the three Tractor Beams suddenly shook violently.
Li Yuan, captain of the Burning Ghost’s Seventh Independent Squadron, who was commanding from one of the Cruisers, saw the orb of light floating before him suddenly flare bright.
His Spirit jolted, and he shouted into the channel:
“Everyone, stay sharp! That thing is coming out!”
“Hum!”
Li Qing felt his brain sway slightly, and for a moment he felt dazed.
“Psychic Shock!”
Xia Qi shouted in the channel:
“Be careful, everyone. This thing’s effects stack. If there’s another shock, the power will be even—”
Before he could finish, another wave of dizziness hit.
Li Qing came to.
The channel was dead silent, and it was a good while before Xia Qi spoke again:
“No idea what they’re doing over there. It’s a bit dangerous. Let’s pull back a bit, just in case—”
“Hum!”
Li Qing could see a tangible ripple sweep through the space before his eyes, and he instantly lost consciousness.
When he came to again, the Vice Captain and staff adjutant behind him had all collapsed in their seats, unconscious.
“Damn it!”
He quickly switched the Warship to automatic mode and prepared to turn around.
At that very moment, the pillar of light at the center of the gas giant’s violent atmospheric vortex suddenly flared, and a chaotic, indistinct orb of light shot out from within.
The three Tractor Beams strained against the chaotic orb as it thrashed violently.
Li Yuan, having regained consciousness, took out a capsule-sized crystal, held it to his nostril, and inhaled sharply.
The crystal dissolved into a clear mist that he breathed in, and instantly his eyes gleamed with light, his whole Spirit surging.
Calmly, he issued his orders in the channel:
“Maximize the tractor beam output on all three Industrial Ships. Cruiser One, activate the Interception Field. Cruiser Two, activate the Interference Field. Destroyer One, prepare the Entangling Stasis Beam. Everyone else, take your positions and fill in as needed.”
The chaos orb was only a dozen or so meters in diameter, the chaotic light blooming across its surface trembling violently, grotesque faces constantly surfacing and tearing at one another, as if countless evil souls were locked in slaughter within.
Guided by the three tractor beams, the chaos orb soon broke free of the gas giant’s raging atmosphere and entered orbit around the planet.
The encirclement formed by the Burning Ghost Fleet was also steadily tightening.
A sheet of clear light burst from one of the cruisers, and a second burst followed a second later, as an even thicker beam struck the chaos orb, transforming into a web of countless light threads that wrapped it inside.