Resurrection Empire

At the dean’s order, the hidden piece in the Nanxiang secondary branch—Frozen Storage Inspection Group—was activated at once, launching a thorough investigation from beginning to end.

There was no way that could stand up to scrutiny.

Nobody expected that, aside from Nanxiang Marquis, who voluntarily ceded profits because of his "deep friendship" with Earl Red Blade, several other academic-type earl families would all get yanked out like radishes with mud, and hit with heavy penalties.

Their titles were barely preserved, but a large chunk of their battle honors was stripped, and a significant number of sovereign feudal star systems were forcibly confiscated.

On this side, the Red Blade Clan, sitting on massive cash flow, immediately picked up the scent and pounced, waving wads of money, and with special authorization from Chief Officer Wen Zaiyin, bought nearly a hundred already quite prosperous star systems on the spot at only half market price, making them Ren Zhong’s new fiefs.

All of this happened in a flash, taking less than a week from start to finish.

From then on, Ren Zhong’s position as director of this long-and-secondary branch became practically unshakable.

Riding the momentum of this major victory, Ren Zhong could finally move his big hands. A little over two years later, he personally pulled together several major projects in military-related branches, and forcibly assigned tasks within the Star Cluster to integrate more than ten research consortia, steering the Nanxiang Star Cluster’s scientific track toward a forty-year war-preparation plan.

Just as Ren Zhong finished dealing with this pile of miscellaneous affairs, ready to head back satisfied to his place on the Third Ring of Source City and continue playing the "tech nerd" pretending to be in frozen hibernation, another uninvited guest appeared near the Southern Nine Star System, accompanied by Liu An.

The visitor was none other than Countess Sena Romanov, with whom he’d once crossed paths.

At this moment, the ship carrying Sena and Liu An was already at the end of the Fold Jump Subspace Channel, and would arrive at most within two weeks.

Ren Zhong originally had no desire to meet Sena Romanov.

But his "good brother" Liu An was all earnest words and blazing enthusiasm, insisting that no matter what he wanted to play the middleman and help Ren Zhong and Duke Wenle turn swords into plowshares.

Ren Zhong really couldn’t bring himself to slap this "good brother" in the face.

After all, ever since the two families reached an understanding, Nanxiang’s Earldom had quickly become the biggest client of the Red Blade Trade Group inside the Star Cluster.

Nanxiang’s Earldom not only placed invisible coating orders larger than those from the Nanxiang Military and Political Center, but also purchased heaps of other products from the Red Blade Clan.

The second biological gene research institute set up by scholars provided by Liu An had also gradually started producing results.

This bunch were indeed formidable, and they held vast amounts of human experiment data.

Dating back to Liu An’s ancestors, the Liu Family had never stopped their brutal, inhuman human experiments, stretching over tens of thousands of years; the richness of their database was downright terrifying.

None of this existed on the Red Blade Gene Research Institute’s side.

Although someone had proposed it, Ren Zhong rejected the idea.

Ren Zhong only approved death-row felons sentenced to extreme punishment as lab rats, but law and order under the Red Blade Clan’s rule was absurdly good. The bottom-layer pirates of the Shattered Star Ring, once treated as non-human, had now become fellow citizens, so the biological researchers under the Red Blade Clan had to get in line just to secure lab rat samples. In the beginning, queues were months long at best, years at worst.

Most of the time they could only rely on cloned organs to grind forward.

The work could still be done, but the progress was never pretty.

So much so that the Red Blade Science Academy sometimes had to put out advertisements, offering extremely generous rewards to recruit volunteers from the most destitute bottom-tier civilians in other regions of the Nanxiang Star Cluster, who simply couldn’t keep going anymore.

Of course, the Red Blade Science Academy would do its best to reduce these volunteers’ pain and preserve their lives, and the promised immigration for their families would definitely be honored.

Thanks to these methods, the Academy’s progress barely managed to keep pace.

Now things were looking up: the blood-soaked Butchers under Liu An had brought tens of thousands of years of accumulated data, just enough to make up for the current shortfall at the Red Blade Gene Research Institute.

In addition, with Liu An’s assurances, the Red Blade Clan’s business within the Star Cluster was thriving and flowing smoothly.

As for the concessions Liu An made over at the Science Management Office and the secondary branch, those went without saying.

So, after a brief consideration, Ren Zhong decided to publicly delay his hibernation and wait an extra two weeks for Liu An and Sena.

Saying two weeks meant two weeks.

When Nanxiang Marquis’s flagship reached orbit above Red Blade Star, Liu An and Sena Romanov woke up in adjacent Static Level frozen hibernation chambers, their waking times separated by barely five seconds.

Sena, standing there naked, didn’t care in the slightest that someone else was nearby. She stood straight, arms spread, letting the cleaning unit rinse off the Freezing Fluid on her body, then turned her head to Liu An and said, quite openly, "Nanxiang Marquis, you really are a meticulous schemer. You obviously could have agreed on a time with him before departure, but instead you had people notify him only two weeks before arrival, just enough to disrupt his frozen hibernation plan. It’s neither long nor short. If he sleeps, it’s no good; if he stays awake, he has nothing to do. One way or another, you shave off two weeks of his lifespan. You really do use every trick in the book."

Liu An smiled faintly. "You flatter me, Lady Sena. Facing an opponent like that, of course I have to work from the details. It’s almost laughable—just two weeks of biological lifespan already counts as a rare major victory for me in quite some time."

After the gel-like Freezing Fluid on her body was mostly washed away, Sena shrugged, stepped out of the Frozen Storage, and slowly walked toward Liu An.

As she walked, the floating robot over her head began to drape the countess’s purple robe over her in time with her movements, covering her figure.

Sena chuckled again. "I understand how you feel. But compared to our plan, this is child’s play."

She deliberately lowered her voice as she spoke.

Liu An’s expression grew serious. "You can tell me now?"

Sena nodded. "I just finished checking. The technicians I brought have temporarily tampered with the Super Network monitoring system on your flagship. I really should feed you a calming pill now."

"I’m all ears."