Chapter 448: Deployment
Edres and his team ended up waiting for twenty years. Perhaps it was because the masterminds behind the scenes believed the Swarm still needed time, or perhaps there were other reasons. Regardless, the result was that the Ji Council of Elders made some compromises.
Thus, Edres’ construction team remained stationed at the outer edge of the Genesis System for two decades. Fortunately, the Ji warships were massive and had been fully stocked before departure. Midway through, another supply shipment was sent from the Riken. Additionally, most of the crew chose to enter cryogenic sleep to avoid wasting their lives unnecessarily. As a result, those twenty years passed relatively quickly.
In truth, Edres’ team could have returned to the Riken Star System for rest and resupply. Although a neighboring star system separated the two, the direct distance was only about nine light-years—a journey that would take the Ji just three years for a round trip.
However, the Ji leadership insisted that Edres remain on site to have a legitimate excuse to closely monitor the Swarm’s activities. As it turned out, during this time, Edres did manage to gather some intelligence.
For example, he observed that most of the Swarm forces in the Genesis System had been redeployed to the Neighboring Star System.
When this information was analyzed by Ji strategists, they concluded that the Neighboring Star System must be where the Swarm’s royal court was located. To the north of this system was the Riken Star System, to the west lay the Sandstorm Star System, a hub for trade, and to the south was the Genesis System, which was in the process of being vacated. These three directions were open and could not be fully secured.
It made sense that the Swarm would strengthen the defenses of their royal court.
Another piece of intelligence Edres gathered was that the Swarm had been systematically destroying six megastructures located in the stellar orbit of the Genesis System. Although the process involved self-detonation followed by ejection into the star, making it seem repetitive and overly complex, it did not attract much attention due to the precedent set in the Riken Star System.
If the Ji had combined this with earlier intelligence, they might have uncovered something significant. Initially, the Swarm had only two megastructures in the stellar orbit of the Genesis System. The other four had been constructed just a few decades earlier.