Chapter Ten: A Beauty! (Part One) [Unsealed]

Curiosity can kill even the wariest cat.

And this sort of curiosity was exactly the kind that defined Kuang Chi: the sort of person with a fierce appetite for danger.

In the end, curiosity overpowered reason, and with a single leap he landed at the opening.

From there, he could make out the situation inside much more clearly. The interior was in a state of frantic activity, with countless repair robots hard at work throughout the warship.

Kuang Chi had spent a few years as a thoroughly unfit captain, yet he still knew enough about warships to understand what he was seeing. Once he took it all in, he headed straight for the central section of the starship. On a vessel this large, the finest escape pods and refuge cabins were generally located there, and that area was also the safest part of the entire ship, especially on a ship like this one.

This starship had come crashing in from outer space and plunged directly into the Forgotten Star. Kuang Chi did not even need to think to know that the front section of the ship had been utterly destroyed. There was no need at all to check the escape and refuge cabins at the bow. There could not possibly be a single survivor.

The dense atmosphere and formidable gravity of the Forgotten Star were not things to be dismissed lightly. Even without those, the impact between the lake below and the ship as it struck the planet would have been enough to crush to death everyone in the bow’s escape and refuge systems.

Walking slowly through the corridors, Kuang Chi found the ghastly sight before him enough to make even his battle-hardened, bloodthirsty nature darken his brow.

Clearly, this was no ordinary warship. Its interior had been designed with far too much attention to outward beauty. It was excessively luxurious, a style of decoration no proper military vessel would ever adopt. Iron-blooded soldiers cared only for the ship’s structural strength and safety; they would never hang flammable ornaments along the passage walls.

Now and then, robots dragged away corpses that had been mangled beyond all recognition. Among the dead were even some very young and beautiful girls. Though their beauty was gone now, one could still see what they had once been.

This was also a strange sight. Women had long since ceased to be mere spectators in modern war; many had become direct participants. Yet the female corpses the robots kept hauling away were, for the most part, clearly women who had never trained in martial arts, or whose cultivation had been shallow at best.

A ship with so many women aboard, decorated in such opulence, and then—while Kuang Chi was thinking this through—he suddenly noticed, at a bend in the corridor, a rather indistinct emblem stained over with bright red blood. He was not unfamiliar with it. Years ago, when he had returned from the drifting Sea of Death and passed through the empire of Drifting Wind, he had often seen that very mark.

That emblem stood for a nation, for its royal house. It was the unique insignia of the imperial family of Drifting Wind, and it was said that only legitimate members of that house were permitted to place this seal of the ancient and sacred imperial line upon their residence or their personal belongings.

Seeing the crest of the Drifting Wind royal family, Kuang Chi let out a long sigh. Even an idiot could guess what had happened. As a private royal vessel, this ship should never have been in battle, much less in a dangerous region. There was only one explanation: it had been attacked. And as for the motive, Kuang Chi, who had firsthand experience, understood immediately.

At that thought, he quickened his search. He was now deeply curious about the one who had brought about this ship’s ruin, and he also felt a strange fellow-feeling, as though they were two wretched souls sharing the same fate. Looking at everything before him, he could not help thinking of the space pirate he had not seen in a very long time.

What struck Kuang Chi as most peculiar was that no robots or defensive weapons in the corridors attacked him. In some sections of the ship, the automated defense systems were clearly still functioning normally, yet they did not strike at him when he appeared. There could only be one reason: the systems had already been disabled.

With another long sigh, he thought: betrayed from within again, yet another poor soul undone by a traitor.

Then a thought suddenly occurred to him.

Before he came here, the man sent by the Kuang family to report on the state of the Abandoned Star Domain had told Kuang Chi that within the regions currently controlled by humanity, there were no large wormholes capable of safely connecting to the Abandoned Star Domain. The largest would allow passage for no more than a medium-sized landing craft.

So how had this colossal thing gotten here? In the past, because of the instability of the Abandoned Star Domain’s space and its ruinous living conditions, humanity had been unable to develop this region at all, and thus had no choice but to abandon it.

But if there were a wormhole large enough for a star warship to pass through, then this abandoned domain could be developed in the shortest possible time, for it already possessed a considerable population base. All that was needed was to bring in some essential facilities.

He could well imagine what would happen if magnetic shield generators, gravity regulators, and giant city-building robots were brought into this domain.

Then cities and spaceports would rise from the ground at astonishing speed.

And by then, the planets within the Abandoned Star Domain—those still untouched by humanity’s ravenous plundering of resources—would become true mountains of treasure, inexhaustible fountains of wealth.

Kuang Chi felt as though this splendid future was already waving to him. All that remained was to discover the star coordinates of the wormhole this giant ship had used. There were only two ways to find the planet connected to it.

One was to locate the ship’s navigational records. That information was usually stored in the main computer near the bridge. But the bridge was now completely submerged beneath the surface of the Weakwater Lake, and having taken the full brunt of the Forgotten Star’s affectionate kiss, it was hard to imagine the main computer had fared any better.

The second was to find a living person. As long as he could ask for the approximate location, then at worst it would only take some time to search it out.

With this settled in his mind, Kuang Chi hurried toward what he judged to be the location of the escape and refuge cabins aboard the ship.

As he moved, he was astonished not only by the ship’s luxury, but also by its extraordinary sturdiness. The decking here was certainly not the standard alloy plating used in ordinary warships. It was very likely some new material that had not yet become widespread.

After such a collision, the ship as a whole had suffered severe damage only on its outer shell. The core sections, astonishingly, remained intact. The corpses scattered through the corridor appeared to have been crushed to death by the pressure of wormhole transit, or else killed by the violent shock when the ship struck the Forgotten Star.

In this section, Kuang Chi did not find the escape and refuge cabins that should have been there, but he did find a hall arranged like a palace. He could tell at once that this was a layout unique to the Drifting Wind Empire.

It seemed the area originally intended for escape and refuge cabins had been converted into living quarters. This, too, he could understand very well. This was the safest and most solid part of the entire ship. No matter from what direction an attack came, the surrounding hull would shield it tightly. It was also far from the power and engine rooms, while being the ship’s center of gravity, so the strongest defensive armor, with the highest density and mass, could be installed here without affecting the ship’s balance.

Given enough money and the right materials, one could easily design living quarters here according to the principles used in escape and refuge cabins.

Passing through the wide-open door at the back of the hall, he found nine chambers within. After searching eight of them, Kuang Chi had found nothing but bodies—men and women, old and young alike. From their clothing and bearing, they did not look like ordinary nobles.

Judging from how they died, the time between the ship being attacked and passing through the wormhole must have been extremely short—so short that they had not even had time to leave this place, which was clearly being used for a banquet, and reach the nearby escape and refuge cabins that should have existed.

Many of the ornaments worn by the dead stirred even Kuang Chi’s indifference toward wealth, for his standards were very high. He almost wanted to rush up and strip every last one of them away.

When he opened the door to the ninth chamber, Kuang Chi knew he had finally found what he was looking for.

There, a golden life-support pod lay quietly, occupying nearly the entire chamber. Judging from the various instruments on it, the pod was operating perfectly normally. Yet the setting on its timer made Kuang Chi frown.

A life-support pod was a very expensive independent miniature refuge cabin, like the one Kuang Chi had used the last time he was attacked.

Its defensive limit had to exceed, by at least a wide margin, the destructive force produced when the ship’s own power systems exploded. When danger arose, this pod could not only launch clear of the vessel and flee at high speed, but also, in the event of some abnormality in the ship that might lead to detonation, ensure the safety of the person inside.

Looking at the corpse of the man in captain’s uniform beside it, Kuang Chi let out another sigh. It was plain to see what had happened: when the incident occurred, this life-support pod had not even had time to launch.

Apparently, the captain’s thumb had been locked over the small release button on the controller, still clenched in his left hand, which had been twisted slightly out of shape by the impact. Even at the moment of death, he had not abandoned the duty that was his. His thumb had remained pressed tightly on the button. He simply never had the chance to let go. The pod had not been able to eject in time.

Kuang Chi knew that the true action of such a button was not the pressing itself, but the instant it was pressed and then released. That was the critical moment. It was a very humane design. Once the button had been pressed, letting go was far less troublesome, time-consuming, and exhausting than having to keep pressing it. In some sudden emergencies, that half-second might decide everything.

The controller’s holder could press the button in advance, and as soon as the life-support pod’s hatch closed, he could release it at any time; the moment his finger lifted, the pod would launch. In terms of time, that was not only faster than pressing and holding, but also several times safer.

But the ship’s sudden crisis clearly gave this conscientious captain neither the time nor the chance to release his thumb. He could only die with lingering regret.

Perhaps this was fate. At the very least, the person in the life-support pod was safe now. At the very least, Kuang Chi knew that even if the pod had managed to eject from the ship, it might not have been safe. Given the other side’s meticulous arrangements, he could well imagine that this pod would surely have become the target of a fatal strike, just as had happened to him before, falling victim to the main cannon’s fire. Whether the other side would be as lucky as he had been remained to be seen.