Chapter 404 — The Fairy Plan
Battle Will Across the Vast Sky · Page 2 of 7
Preliminary preparations for the Furnace Constellation campaign, funding for the Heavenly Martial Wolf Academy, the upgrading of Xuanshu City, the budgets of the two great laboratories, the building of Wolf Fort…
In the blink of an eye, those twenty billion star coins ran through his fingers like water.
Such a terrifying rate of spending left him marveling—and yet filled him with anticipation and curiosity too. Once those twenty billion had been sunk in and the day came for them to blossom and bear fruit, it would surely astonish everyone.
Wu Xia's hysterical roaring echoed through the room, with not a trace of his usual refinement. An Ruina's Fairy Plan had thrown all his own plans into disarray.
"What is An Ruina thinking? Has the woman gone mad? Does she not want any of the other star gates? What on earth is she trying to do!"
His subordinates were all mute as cicadas in winter, not daring even to breathe.
"Investigate!" Wu Xia ground his teeth. "Who put this idea into her head? A plan of this magnitude is absolutely not something a slip of a girl like her could have concocted on her own!"
"Yes, sir!"
A Xiu and Liu Zhongguang both looked grim. The Fairy Plan was on every tongue, and they grasped at once that the news was bad. The star gate leading from Orion to Andromeda was not at Yaohua City.
By pushing the Fairy Plan, An Ruina had made plain that she had decided to abandon the Andromeda–Orion star gate.
For Orion, this was no good news at all. The Radiant Inkstone, already looking for trouble with Orion, would surely come lunging in like a shark that has smelled blood.
If they did not wish to see the star gate fall, that meant they must dispatch a legion to garrison it. The same held for the constellations where the other star gates lay; the contest over star gates would inevitably plunge all those regions into utter chaos.
Adrian gave a somewhat bitter smile. "The expert behind that girl is truly formidable. With one stroke, the whole situation in Andromeda has become impossible to read."
"Can we not simply shut the star gate?" Liu Zhongguang could not help asking.
A Xiu said heavily, "No. The Andromeda–Orion star gate is a twin-born gate. It cannot be shut."
At that, Liu Zhongguang had no answer either.
Star gates fall broadly into two kinds. The first is the twin-born gate, born where the star force of two constellations intermingles; the star force around such a gate has already undergone a change of nature and answers to neither constellation. Hence a twin-born gate cannot be closed.
The second kind is the single-born gate, formed when the star force of one constellation projects into another. A single-born gate can be closed by adjusting the star force—the gate from Cetus to the Jackal, for instance, is a single-born gate. For a single-born gate to form at all, the constellation projecting it must be stronger than the constellation receiving it.
Apart from star gates, the Sky Roads have many shipping lanes besides. Each constellation radiates its star force, and between certain constellations those forces interweave into distinctive ribbon-like bands; when such a band is fixed in place by human art, it becomes a shipping lane—the Jisong Pass is a case in point.
Because the star force a constellation radiates is not constant but runs in cycles, these bands are not fixed either; they drift imperceptibly with the passage of time. A shipping lane is generally used for several centuries, then gradually fades, and after several hundred years more it reappears.
Star gates are the nodes of the Sky Roads, and so the struggle over star gates is forever the cruelest of struggles.
For An Ruina to contract her holdings across the entire constellation all at once and hand over so many star gates was a disposition of forces utterly contrary to reason. Yet turning it over carefully in his mind, Adrian perceived the brilliance of the move.