Chapter 229: Warp Wars and Power Plays

Three thousand warship carriers could each transport multiple warships at once.

So, aside from deploying one of its own fleets, the Federation also used the Subordinate Civilization Platform to post missions, summoning sixty thousand warships from its subordinate civilizations.

Even the weakest participant sent Seawolf A-class warships, while many others fielded Federation-retired Seawolf B-types, modified by removing their jump engines.

All told, the total didn’t even reach over seventy thousand warships.

Still, with the jump-capable warship carriers at their disposal, they could pull off large-scale fleet jumps among lower-level civilizations—just like any tier-four civilization would—giving them a crushing advantage.

This approach left the old guard of the Milky Way’s tier-four civilizations thoroughly amazed.

Who came up with the design for these warship carriers? It’s pure genius!

With this, they could just send a few warship carriers to support their subordinate civilizations during conflicts, giving them jump capability without having to hand over advanced tech.

Why didn’t their own civilizations think of this over all their thousands of years of history?

Naturally, every one of them immediately ordered their people to start designing this kind of special vessel.

As for the Federation reminding all the other tier-four civilizations, they couldn’t care less.

On the one hand, the Federation was already selling jump engines to its subordinate civilizations. On the other, it still had two things no other tier-four civilization possessed…

Jump Disruption Devices—also called Subspace Oscillators—and Jump Disruption Countermeasures.

With both of these in hand, the Federation wasn’t worried at all about other civilizations jump-enabling their subordinates.

In fact, the more civilizations gained jump capabilities, the better it was for the Federation.

The reason was simple—

The Federation was the newcomer among civilizations.

What did that mean?

It meant all the open interests and resources had long since been carved up.

It was just like Earth’s Age of Discovery.

The first powers to set sail grabbed all the unclaimed territories.

Years later, when other nations finally caught up and gained the strength to compete, they discovered—

The whole planet had already been divvied up. There was nowhere left for new arrivals.

Naturally, those with existing interests had no intention of giving them up, while newcomers…

Refused to accept being left with nothing.

That’s a conflict with no easy solution, and war is always what finally sets things off—

A chance to redistribute the spoils.

So unless chaos erupts in the galaxy, unless a major war breaks out, the Federation will never have a way forward.

Right now, the Milky Way is just like Earth back then: all the gains have long been claimed, and a ruling council protects everyone’s interests from being threatened. There’s simply no room for humanity to rise.

That’s why the Federation needs the Milky Way to descend into chaos—ideally, an all-out galactic war, so the pieces can be thrown in the air and come down in new hands.

But how to make that happen?

The best way: spread jump technology far and wide.

Even if the tech itself can’t be leaked, at least spread the finished devices.

Of course, this is only the first step, not the decisive one. More plans will be needed down the line.

When that galactic war finally ignites, the Federation—with its jump disruption tech—will be the only safe haven in the stars.

They could sit back while others fought each other to the death, then swoop in when the time was right to claim victory.

——

Year 270 of the Federation.

After three years of the Federation’s relentless assault—

Two tier-three civilizations, over a hundred tier-two civilizations—these were the ones leading the charge against the Federation with support from the Drac Empire. They were quickly uprooted entirely.

Honestly, it all happened incredibly fast—just three years from start to finish.

And the only ones involved were several of the Federation’s subordinate civilizations, which left the tier-four powers sorely disappointed.

After all, they’d hoped to use this chance to see what the Federation was really made of.

But in truth, the power of the Federation Fleet had already been revealed completely, aside from concealing the jump engines and Quantum Foam Bombs.

Everything else was right there for all to see.

The only difference was, it was all done under the guise of a subordinate civilization.

This so-called subordinate, the tier-three civilization known as Kuisa, never had its identity exposed, but it attracted the attention of many others.

Because—

This civilization was strong, among the very best of all tier-three civilizations.

Which made sense.

After all, Federation warships now ran on Zero-Point Modules, meaning they could fire energy weapons without restraint.

To put it simply, given two warships using the same energy weapon tech—

Other tier-three civilizations could fit a few dozen cannons with ranges of 500,000 kilometers and ten-second recharge times.

But Federation warships could fit over a hundred cannons, with one-million-kilometer ranges and recharge in just five seconds.

Naturally, their firepower dwarfed anything a normal tier-three civilization could muster.

Kuisa quickly became a focus of the tier-four civilizations, and they filed detailed profiles into their databases.

Different factions evaluated it in their own ways, but even the lowest rating put it as a level 3.7 civilization, with most labeling it 3.8.

The Federation had no issue with this.

In fact, they saw it as a good thing.

It meant the Federation could use this identity to handle things it didn’t want to step into directly.

Meanwhile, as the Federation was resolving matters in the Viayas Star Region—

Lin Yun, working in the Earth Sphere, finally made a breakthrough in her research on degenerate matter.

Until now, humanity had only managed to produce materials approaching electronic-degenerate matter.

By using intense laser compression or magnetic compression, they could create degenerate states, but the best results only came close to electronic-degenerate matter—still a hundredfold shy of what’s needed to build a hyperspace engine core.

And even if they closed that gap, all they’d achieve was the bare minimum material necessary for basic hyperspace technology.

That would only let them manufacture hyperspace engines capable of five hundred times the speed of light.

But that wasn’t enough for Lin Yun.

She needed to create engines tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of times faster—

Only then could true intergalactic travel become a reality.

That’s why, all these years, she never stopped searching for a way to produce even stronger degenerate matter.

She tried all sorts of approaches.

Like exploring higher energy states of matter via ultra-high-energy proton collisions.

Or trying laser-driven miniature neutron star simulations.

And then there was—

Antimatter-catalyzed compression.

Finally, with help from Lin Shuying’s data avatar, she used the local extremes of pressure created by antimatter annihilation—

To forge a material with a density tens of thousands of times greater than electronic-degenerate matter.