Chapter 99: Battle at the Interstellar Dock (I)

Chapter 99: Battle at the Interstellar Dock (I)

Picking up where the last chapter left off — I had wiped out the raiders myself and taken seven of their fighter craft. I wanted to transfer credit for all of it to the sheep-like mother and daughter. The gesture only frightened them badly. Clearly, no one had ever treated them with this kind of regard before; they were so nervous their sheep horns showed through again.

I had no idea how much reward that merit would actually bring, and it meant nothing to me anyway. Better to give it to the mother and daughter who’d just been scared half to death.

The garrison captain confirmed that merit could indeed be transferred. He took down the mother and daughter’s identities, recorded their ID numbers, and told them to return to Bixian Star or HD Star to claim their reward.

I stopped concerning myself with what became of the pair after that and followed the captain to the garrison’s camp.

Yaomei Star’s garrison resembled something like Earth’s border-defense troops, and conditions were fairly bare-bones. It had a main command with several detachments, each responsible for its own sector.

Clearly, the garrison’s mission was defense first — not offense, and certainly not bandit suppression.

Which was exactly why the interstellar pirates felt bold enough to rob merchant ships in the open space beyond the planet.

What I hadn’t expected was that the garrison commander here had once served under Xuanze’s father, and he could actually sense a faint trace of Xuanze within me.

I told him I’d come to test my cosmic abilities and had no interest in ordinary combat. But if they ever ran into something truly hard to chew through, they were to call on me without hesitation. Besides, I was only a quantum projection from the Blue Planet — even dying in battle wouldn’t mean much. I’d simply wake up again back home.

The commander, a pure military man with little familiarity with the Blue Planet, seemed to take it as something more advanced even than HD Star. I didn’t bother correcting him. I only wanted him to remember to call me in when a real fight came along.

And so I spent a full seven days on Yaomei Star without a single battle to show for it.

On the morning of the eighth day, bored out of my mind, I went alone to the transfer dock for interstellar merchant ships.

Being so close to HD Star, Yaomei Star did brisk business as a transit hub. From what I’d heard, the raiders here mostly robbed for money and rarely made off with an entire ship’s cargo — so while merchant vessels took the occasional small loss, traffic through the dock had never really suffered for it.

The dock itself stunned me with its scale. The architecture alone was grand enough, but what really struck me were the sheer size of the ships coming and going — colossal things that pressed down on the senses just by existing. Next to this, Bixian Star’s own spacecraft dock looked like a toy.

Calling it a “dock” almost undersold it — a thriving marketplace had grown up around the place, full of people coming and going, with commercial towns, warehouses, and office towers ringing it on every side. Skyscrapers rose one after another, lending the whole district a buzzing energy.

I’d never seen HD Star itself, so I couldn’t say how it compared. But set against Bixian Star’s eerie quiet and sprawling biodiversity, Yaomei Star felt like a different world entirely — far livelier, far busier.

The locals here were almost all humanoid. Only the interstellar merchants passing through showed any of the stranger native forms — though even among them, taking human shape was clearly still fashionable. Most communication happened through force of consciousness rather than spoken word, which spared everyone the usual translation headaches.

I stopped into a restaurant and took a window seat on the second floor, watching the street below. It could have passed for a city on Earth.

Then, almost by accident, my force of consciousness brushed…