Chapter 40: The Sword of Damocles

A cosmic starship, its shadow vast enough to obscure half of North Pole City, glided across the sky like a ceiling of dark clouds, naturally startling nearly all the city's residents.

In less than half an hour, everyone received a text message on their mobile phones:

"To all citizens: The Terracrystal Group has invited a mining vessel from the Bachert Group to conduct mineral resource development in this sector. The mining vessel will arrive above North Pole City today at 2:42 PM. Please do not panic unduly."

Consequently, online discussions quickly shifted to "what the mining vessel is actually here for."

Of course, anyone outside the bureaucratic system would have no conception of what "texting the entire city" implied... which was that the authorities had learned about the mining vessel's arrival no earlier than the average citizen.

Leveraging his network of contacts within the Security Department, Chen Zi'ang quickly verified that the behemoth overhead was indeed a mining vessel and had indeed been summoned by the Terracrystal Group. The only problem was that no advance notice had been given to the authorities.

While filing a report was one thing, and registering it as a mining vessel was another—since when did a mining vessel come in this scale? You must be joking!

Regarding the incident, the Terracrystal Group, as the local mining giant, claimed utter innocence, stating they had previously been unaware of "a mining vessel of this tonnage."

The origin of the matter was quite simple: around June of this year, the Terracrystal Group and the Bachert Group, acting as commercial allies, conducted their mid-year financial reconciliation and discovered that mineral trading volume for the first half of the year was exceptionally low.

This came as no surprise. After decades of prolonged extraction, the mineral resources on the surface of the planet Takamagahara were mostly nearing exhaustion, while the extraction costs for deep-crust minerals had surged dramatically. The Bachert Group was unwilling to accept acquisition price hikes, and the Terracrystal Group was unwilling to mine at a loss. Consequently, both remained deadlocked over shallow surface sources, which inevitably impacted trade volumes.

The two sides had negotiated on this matter for several years without either side willing to make concessions. However, the report for the first half of this year looked far too dismal, prompting the Bachert Group to propose a new solution—deploying their newly developed mining vessel.

What is a mining vessel? It refers to a cosmic starship specifically designed to extract resources from asteroids. They forcefully bore holes into asteroids, insert massive professional mining equipment deep into the surface to pulverize the terrain, and then use conveyor belts to haul out mountains of rubble to filter the minerals... Since this mining technology could be applied to asteroids, it could naturally be applied to colonial planets, effectively solving the problem of excessively deep mineral deposits.

The reason it had not been widely applied was due to the devastating impact such extraction inflicted upon planetary surfaces. It mattered little if no one lived on an asteroid, but if such methods were employed on a colonial planet, the noise, dust, and other environmental pollution would severely impact nearby colonies.

Takamagahara, however, presented a unique case. Due to its extreme distance from its star, the vast majority of the planet's surface was an uninhabited, bitterly cold wasteland. Only the North and South Poles, blessed with abundant geothermal resources, housed colonial cities.

Following calculations, the Bachert Group concluded that as long as the mining operations were restricted to the equatorial region between 27.6 degrees north and south latitude, the environmental damage from deep-crust extraction would have zero impact on North Pole City and Zhongnan City.

As for the nearby remote villages and towns, considering that the majority of mining families were employees of the Terracrystal Group, the corporation could step in to collectively relocate the workers, thereby carving out an experimental prospecting environment for the Bachert Group's mining vessel ahead of time.

Things stood roughly as described above, and originally, this should have been nothing more than an ordinary commercial joint development venture.

However, it was not until Bachert's mining vessel arrived above North Pole City that everyone realized this contraption was by no means a conventional mining vessel—the ship was simply too damn big!

Compared against warships from the Human Empire, its volume actually surpassed most battleships, making it difficult not to suspect some underlying military purpose.

Rumor had it that the military had already lodged solemn representations, demanding that the mining vessel immediately exit the atmosphere and dock in outer space, allowing the military to dispatch specialists aboard for inspection to confirm that it carried no equipment with suspicious intentions.

This demand was rejected by the Bachert Group, and the two sides remained at an impasse. Meanwhile, the Terracrystal Group was actively mediating, and was reportedly on the verge of successfully persuading the other party to move the mining vessel outside the atmosphere and station it in the planet's outer orbit... because the ship was simply too massive, and the spaceport lacked any berths capable of accommodating it, forcing it to "find its own parking space."

By 9:00 AM the next morning, the Bachert mining vessel had left Takamagahara's atmosphere and entered orbital hover.

Upon arriving at his office, Chen Zi'ang looked out the window and saw a white, circular object suspended in the distant sky, resembling a miniature moon.

This contraption... reminded him of the legendary "Sword of Damocles."

According to lore, an ancient lord had a flattering courtier named Damocles, who praised the lord, saying, "How fortunate you are to possess such power!" In response, the lord offered to swap identities with him for a single day.

Damocles thoroughly relished the sensation of becoming a lord, but during the evening banquet, he abruptly noticed a sharp sword suspended directly above his head by a single horsehair, startling him out of his wits.

With an unidentified entity of unknown purpose hanging over everyone's heads, it felt precisely like standing beneath the Sword of Damocles, making it exceedingly difficult for anyone to set their mind at ease.

One could only hope the military would investigate the matter thoroughly and swiftly.

He returned to his workstation, glanced toward Tsukimiya Suzuna's vacant chair, drew a deep breath to steady his emotions, and began processing his backlog of work.

With the year drawing to a close, every major department was compiling materials required for year-end reports. Although Xia Qingyu was the sort of leader who detested trivialities and did not normally demand daily, weekly, or monthly reports, the Fifth Division ultimately belonged to the Intelligence Agency's network; lacking even a year-end report altogether would be utterly absurd.

Consequently, she quickly made the decision that any leader would make: she ordered the supervisors to write their respective year-end reports and submit them, after which she would pick, choose, and piece them together.

Thus, the pressure fell upon Chen Zi'ang. As everyone knew, the crux of a year-end report did not lie in "what I did," but rather in "how brilliantly I did it."

Fortunately, the fallout from the Nishikawa Mie incident had been completely quelled, with no ghoul mutation incidents occurring for two consecutive weeks, leaving him with a solid foundation for the report.

After a brief moment of reflection, Chen Zi'ang quickly decided to structure the Field Operations Section's year-end report around four distinct directions. Just as he was about to draft the outline, another message arrived from Xia Qingyu:

"Come here."

Having spent considerable time in the company of this beautiful-serpent-like leader, Chen Zi'ang had managed to discern a few of her habits. For instance, when summoning subordinates to her office, the fewer characters she used, the more urgent the situation.

"Come to my office" denoted routine cases; "Come here" signified an urgent case; "Come" meant an emergency of the highest order.

Therefore, seeing that Xia Qingyu had sent only two words, Chen Zi'ang felt a trace of tension, wondering if St. Takahashi had resumed her maneuvers.

Their previous agreement had been "no operations during the mid-term elections." Now that the mid-term elections had concluded, the enemy would naturally resume her pursuit... or more accurately, her hunt.

After knocking on the office door, Chen Zi'ang pushed it open and stepped inside, only to find Xia Qingyu standing before a large blackboard with her hands clasped behind her back.

The blackboard was covered in numerous symbols and markings, seemingly representing some sort of logical network or social relations—the kind of incomprehensible jargon that made no sense without explanation.

"Chen Zi'ang." Xia Qingyu did not turn around, continuing to fixate on the blackboard as she spoke:

"Have you ever heard of a hermeticist?"