In the core headquarters cities of the Nine Major Groups, such as Mengdu City, Military Industry City, and Shendu City, massive changes occurred. The High Rank Citizens took away the majority of the advanced equipment, leaving only debris behind.

Now, the most prosperous city on Source Star has become Starfire Town.

The internal structure of the ten-kilometer-long spindle-shaped Armed Battleship is much simpler. Apart from the cryogenic sleep area and training area, it's mostly composed of various combat modules and different combat departments. Each armed battleship can accommodate a maximum combat crew of only thirty thousand. The four thousand ships can collectively hold a total of 120 million combat members.

These two types of space ships are standard-designed, with highly unified shapes and functions.

In fact, Source Star Military Industry does not have the capability to design long-range deep space ships.

Traveling within a Planet System and leaving the Planet System for long-range deep space navigation are completely different concepts.

The ultra-long travel distance, ultra-long mission duration, the more complex cosmic environment, and potential war disturbances pose higher demands on the ships' performance.

In the 21st century, a single incorrectly tightened screw could destroy a plane carrying hundreds, causing an air disaster, which is a probability event.

But if you extend the flight time continuously, enlarge the aircraft size, increase the number of passengers, and place the flight environment into a seemingly simple but actually complex vacuum universe, then this probability magnifies infinitely. Just a piece of high-energy plasma with a temperature of hundreds of millions of degrees might destroy a critical system on the ship.

It's necessary to thoroughly consider all potential situations from the early design phase to create space ships capable of undertaking light-year-scale missions.

Source Star Military Industry does not have this capability.

On the Annulus Merchant Ships and spindle-shaped battleships, all high-precision core function-related parts also came from Stellar Trade and are Empire products.

In a sense, the Water Drop, designed and manufactured by Ren Zhong's team, represents the pinnacle of Source Star Civilization's aerospace technology.

...

Ren Zhong's secret operation lasted a total of three days.

With the powerful transport capabilities provided by the Anti-gravity Land-Air Ship and Space Elevator, Ren Zhong transported one hundred million Armored Soldiers and five hundred million Ruined Beasts into the Great Migration Fleet within these three days, with most going onto the Armed Battleships, and a smaller portion arranged in the transport ships.

As for the Starfire Corps, they also boarded a total force of five million, primarily on the Armed Battleships.

Besides the things in the open, Li Yang himself blended into the ranks of Armored Soldiers and boarded the ship.

Additionally, there were twelve thousand containers that even Li Yang didn't know about nor pay attention to, hidden across the storage holds of twelve thousand space ships, becoming the bottom cargo, tagged with labels requiring the Fleet Marshal's command to open.

These containers housed the efforts of over ten years from the Dragon Slayer Camp, compressed three-phase thermonuclear bombs, each with a yield equivalent to 200 million tons of TNT.

Everything happened right under the noses of Li Yang and the frozen Elders, but apart from Ren Zhong and the core executer of the Trojan strategy, Yujin, no one was aware, and no one became suspicious.

Li Yang was completely unguarded due to his trust in Ren Zhong.

As for the old ice popsicles, Ma Zhongfei had restored the core function of the "Net" — scanning and monitoring — on the second day after Ren Zhong left the Tracer, and reactivated the internal scanning devices located in both Lower Origin Capital City and all Land-Air Ships.

The old ice popsicles had the "Net" examine every container brought onto the battleships and transport ships but found nothing outside the plan. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

Once the transportation was completed, Ren Zhong began to act according to the plan. Using the pretext of inspecting resource development situations, he dispatched armed battleships equipped with Planet Scanners to various positions within the Star System.

...

In Starfire Town, inside the headquarters building, in Ren Zhong's office.

Key military personnel like Ma Xiaoling, Zheng Tian, Chen Hanyu, Hu Yang, Shi Lin, Wen Lei, Yuan Qinh, and Yu Chengde stood in front of Ren Zhong's desk, waiting for his orders.

"Everyone, a real star war is coming up, and I will appoint you as commanders of medium-sized fleets. But your mission isn't to serve as the main combat force. Your first duty is self-preservation, followed by strictly executing my orders."