Li Qing’s destination required crossing the entire Low-Sec Zone, passing through the entire Low-Risk and Medium-Risk areas, and entering a High-Risk Zone to find a star system unoccupied by other teams and outside the sphere of influence of other factions, where he could establish his personal base.
It was dangerous, but he wouldn’t have to pay taxes.
Some major Legions would occupy large numbers of star systems, building outposts in them, sending fleets to patrol and clear out Wild Mobs, establishing one Low-Sec Zone after another.
Non-Legion Solo Players could mine in these Low-Sec star systems occupied by major Legions, but the ore they mined could only be sold to the Legion, and at suppressed prices—in other words, taxed.
While safe, the profits were much lower compared to mining in the wild.
If one lacked ambition, this wasn’t necessarily a bad path.
One could even directly join a Legion as an Industrial Build player.
Any Legion would warmly welcome such Industrial Build players—even more warmly than Combat Build players.
Every Legion is composed of a small number of Combat Build players and a large number of mining and Industrial Build players.
For example, a formal Legion with a total of ten thousand formal members would have almost all of them holding side jobs, each with their own mining ship fleets, establishing personal bases in Legion-controlled star systems and building industrial factories to produce and sell various goods.
Beyond that, any formal Legion would have at least ten times—or even dozens of times—more peripheral affiliate members than formal members, all of them miners or Industrial Build players, dedicated to earning money to supply the Legion’s consumption.
Here, maintaining a single Warship was extremely, extremely expensive.
Take an Escort Ship, for example.
Besides the 10 million buyout for the Clone Crew, each month required paying high-level crew salaries of 300,000 plus 500,000 for the captain, along with 200,000 in basic maintenance fees.
All told, maintaining this Escort Ship alone cost 1 million per month.
Beyond that, combat required ammunition consumption, and replenishing the Energy Shield required consuming Energy Blocks.
Crew members killed in action required death benefits.
If a battle was fierce and the Warship was damaged, repairs would cost another large sum.
And this didn’t include equipping the Warship with better weapons and equipment, or the costs of modifying and upgrading the Warship—that was the biggest expense.
Put simply, buying a ship outright wasn’t actually expensive; maintaining one was the real cost.
A bare Escort Ship cost 20 million, and fully equipping it with level-five weapons and components brought it to 30-40 million.
Modifying and upgrading it further cost another several tens of millions.
A fully-equipped Escort Ship could cost an estimated 100 million in total.
Then the annual salaries plus maintenance fees already came to 12 million, or 120 million over ten years of service.
If it wasn’t destroyed partway through, that is.
An Escort Ship that was never destroyed could serve for up to fifty or sixty years, with salaries alone amounting to 700-800 million.
Add in ten years of various repair costs, ammunition expenses from combat wear and tear, and so on.
And that was just one Escort Ship.
So, in the sea of stars, judging a team’s strength wasn’t about how many Combat Build players you had or how many Warships you possessed—it was about your economy and industry.
“When the cannons roar, gold pours in ten thousand taels at a time.” War is fought with money, and it has always been so, from ancient times to the present.
Li Qing’s plan was to first establish a personal base in some distant, suitable star system, and then bury his head in mining and earning money with single-minded focus.
He planned to use the same method he’d used to store the mining ship and Industrial Ship—opening a channel connected to the Palm Universe to collect the meteoroids one by one, then take them out and process all the raw ore into Refined Ore with that set of small-scale crushing, extraction, and refining equipment.
This would save space and fetch a higher price.
He would stockpile for a year or so, then make another trip back to the Jinmen Star System, or sell to nearby teams or Legions.
After a few rounds of this and saving up more money, he would consider increasing the number of Warships.
So in the early stage, the plan was to ignore everything else and quietly focus on development.
Time kept passing as the Escort Ship crossed one star system after another, heading deep into the starfield.
With nothing to do for long stretches, he tried entering the new channel the Yu Clan had opened, and found that while he could get in, it had only just been established and its settings were still incomplete—no sub-channels or sub-rooms could be created, so everyone was in one big channel, and not many people were chatting.
Li Qing watched for a while, then closed the channel without saying a word.
Those who could enter this channel were either sons of Warlord Clan families or descendants of major families from various regions—all of distinguished backgrounds and proud temperaments.
Unless they knew each other, or someone was clearly stronger than themselves, most wouldn’t take the initiative to strike up a conversation.
After heading south past the 226th star system, having traveled for over three months, once he crossed the southernmost boundary of the Sky Surveyor Legion’s territory, he stopped traveling slowly and instead activated the Hyperspace Engine, beginning to Jump his way along. Read the latest chapters at novelping.com.
A Tier 3 Jump Drive had a maximum Jump range of 30 light-years per jump, which, given the distances between star systems in the Tianjin Sector, meant it could leap over five or six star systems in one go, saving a great deal of time.
After hopping along for another hundred-plus star systems, the Escort Ship stopped Jumping and stopped traveling at Sub-light Speed too.
Every time it entered a star system, it would dive in and make a circuit, looking for a suitable place to establish a personal base.
A single Escort Ship was very agile.
This region was full of all kinds of Wild Mob Warships, but by spotting them early he could avoid them in advance, and if avoidance wasn’t possible, he’d simply turn back and take another route.
Since he had no fixed destination anyway, the journey was relatively uneventful.
This place was three hundred fifty to sixty jumps away from the Jinmen Star System, over a thousand light-years distant.
He had already left Jinmen Province and entered unknown territory, though there were still traces of players here—just very few.
Along the way he only occasionally saw some player Warships escorting a few armed transport ships, presumably carrying ore or their own manufactured industrial products to sell.
Every time he saw one, he greeted them from a distance and opened communications to ask about local conditions.
He soon obtained several coordinates they believed matched his requirements, and the Escort Ship turned toward one of the star systems.
Star system jm-n-348.
Its Main Sequence Star was a Class K star—theoretically the type of Main Sequence Star most suitable for the birth of a Life Planet.
But unfortunately, no Life Planet had formed in this star system.
Instead, in what should have been its optimal Habitable Zone, there was no planet as one might imagine—rather, there was a massive shattered Asteroid Belt.
Additionally, near the edge of the star system’s Gravity Well, there was an even more enormous Asteroid Belt—meaning this star system had two Asteroid Belts.
As everyone knows, an Asteroid Belt is composed of countless meteoroids and shattered asteroid debris, and generally speaking, it is rich in all kinds of ore, occasionally even containing extremely valuable rare minerals.
This star system’s coordinates came from a player named Yang Yunbo—the player from that transport fleet he had encountered earlier—whose personal base was located in this very system.
According to Yang Yunbo, because this system had two asteroid belts and abundant mineral resources, a full six players had settled here and established personal bases.
They were all solo players, the kind who kept their heads down and made money just like him.
The system was so vast, with asteroid belts circling the star, that even a hundred players couldn’t exhaust it—there was no competition at all.
If anything, having more people meant more company.
After all, this place was far from Jinmen Province, and players rarely came by.
Having a few more around meant someone to chat with, and they could even get together for meals now and then.
Li Qing piloted his Escort Ship to the inner asteroid belt first, spending two days making a full circuit.
Using skills like space geology and mineral analysis, he roughly determined that the belt’s ores were mainly Five-Metal Ore, with a small amount of Crystal Ore and large quantities of Rock-type Ore.
Five-Metal Ore referred to the common metals—gold, silver, copper, iron, and tin—with prices varying.
Under normal circumstances, the most common were various iron-like or copper-like ores.
In raw ore, iron-like ore was priced at 15 Star Credits per cubic meter, and copper-like ore at 31 Star Credits per cubic meter.
Of course, that was the current price; it wouldn’t necessarily stay that way for long.
Although everything in the new universe was Datafied and the world’s rules resembled a game, this was not a real game—it was a real universe.
Prices were determined by supply and demand, constantly fluctuating, with no fixed prices.
Even for the same raw iron ore, prices differed from place to place.
Iron ore in Jinmen Province and iron ore in the heartland of the United Empire of Humanity were certainly priced differently.
Moreover, “iron-like ore” was a general term, further subdivided into different types of iron—magnetite, hematite, siderite, pyrite, and so on—with slight but not significant price differences.
In the end, Li Qing did not choose to site his base inside the asteroid belt, but rather on a moon of a large planet over seventy million kilometers beyond the belt.
The main reason he didn’t place it in the asteroid belt was that in the future, he could set up some collection devices on this large planet to gather Planetary Matter, and also check whether the planet had any major ore veins.
The asteroid belt had plenty of minerals, but planets had them too—it was just that the belt’s meteors were easier to harvest.
On a planet, you would need to build a mining base and dig mine shafts, which was far too much effort.
But if high-value Planetary Matter could be found on the planet, that little investment would be nothing.
Planetary Matter was the collective term for all minerals that could only be produced on planets.
Its value wasn’t particularly high, but its advantage was that once collection shafts were established, harvesting was fully automated—you only needed to go collect at fixed points, without much effort.
By Star Sea standards, it was a Barren Planet of size 23 grids.
It was worth noting that old-universe Earth had a diameter of 12,756 kilometers, which by current Star Sea standards made it a Type-II Continental Planet of size 25 grids—every 500 kilometers of equatorial diameter counted as one grid.
The Escort Ship circled the planet once and discovered that this Barren Planet, slightly smaller than Earth, had a thin layer of atmosphere, but there was no trace of water vapor or life on its surface.
It was simply the most common kind of barren planet found in space.
This planet had three moons.
The largest had a diameter of 2,100 kilometers—not even as big as Earth’s Moon—while the smallest was only 530 kilometers across.
None of them had an atmosphere.
After a preliminary survey, he decided to place his base on the middle moon.
The Escort Ship parked in orbit above the second moon and reopened the Palm Universe passage, from which the Mining Ship and Industrial Ship emerged and parked around it.
He was quite lucky—there were no Wild Mobs near this planet, nor had any Anomaly Points spawned.
For now, it seemed fairly safe.
The second moon was only about 1,400 kilometers in diameter, with gravity even weaker than the Moon’s, so small warships like the Escort Ship could land directly on its surface.
Li Wei used the network system built into the warship’s radar to contact the Mining Ship and Industrial Ship, remotely directing the Industrial Ship to slowly descend to the bottom of a massive impact crater on the second moon.
As everyone knows, moons without atmospheres cannot withstand meteors from space.
Meteors strike almost daily, producing shockwaves.
A base built on the surface would easily be damaged by these shockwaves, but hiding inside a crater avoided this problem.
At the same time, hiding inside a crater also allowed the base to evade radar scans from warships in space.
Unless spotted directly, a normal rough radar sweep would not detect a base inside a crater.
The Industrial Ship settled into this crater, four to five kilometers in diameter and over two hundred meters deep, and opened its cargo bays, lowering down container after container of packed supplies.
Li Qing sat in the command room, rubbing his chin as he watched the enormous light screen before him, issuing commands from time to time.
Once all the containers were lowered, mining robots, each ten meters tall, descended one after another.
They opened the containers, extracted the Base Modules inside, and assembled them according to the pre-planned construction scheme.
By this stage of technological development, modular assembly had penetrated every aspect of life—not just these buildings, even warships were built through modular assembly.
A warship was divided into different sections based on standard modules, with different factories producing different modules, which were then transported to one location and pieced together into a complete ship.
However, such warships had a flaw: because they were assembled from modules rather than built as a single piece, they could never enter the gravity wells of planets with strong gravity.
Once inside, the modules would easily crack apart under the immense gravitational forces and break up as they fell.
So in the sea of stars, only small ship classes like Escort Ships could enter a planet’s gravity well.
Destroyers and above generally could not—they could only park in planetary orbit and carry out Orbital Bombardment.
Assembling the base’s Core Pod took half a month.
The Core Pod, measuring 100 meters by 100 meters by 100 meters, had an enormous interior space that could be subdivided into multiple levels.
Li Qing divided it into ten levels, one every ten meters, placing the main control room on the fifth level.
This structure was made of composite metal with various internal layers, capable of greatly cushioning impacts from small meteors in space and insulating against the vast majority of harsh environments and extreme conditions in space.
Its surface was also coated with an energy absorption layer that could absorb stellar light and various radiation rays from space as energy, allowing it to power the base even in extreme environments and maintain minimum energy requirements.
Then all sixteen fully automated Sentry Guns were moved to the top of the main Core Pod, placed in groups of four at each of the four corners.
After that, the four 30m×30m×30m Auxiliary Pods were all placed to the east of the Core Pod, arranged in two rows of two.
Meanwhile, the 30-meter height was divided into three levels, each level ten meters high.
Then, the small Ore Crushing, Screening, and Refining setup was placed outside the base.
Mainly, it simply wouldn’t fit inside.
Even though it was only a small-scale setup, crushing, extraction, and refining were actually three separate machines, each quite sizable.
Placing them in any one Auxiliary Pod would leave no room for anything else, and then there would be nowhere to stack the refined material after feeding the raw ore in.
It was better to just put it outside—raw ore collected later could be dumped directly into the craters around the base, and once refined, it could be stockpiled in the Auxiliary Pods, then transferred into the Palm Universe in one go once a sufficient quantity had accumulated.