Chapter 352: Impersonator

Flanders set his course exactly as Shi Huajing’s navigation map plotted because they were heading to Sector A, the place where the political power of the entire galaxy was concentrated. GAL was pretty unstable right now, so the political organizations residing there made sure to dial up their personal protection to eleven. It wasn’t weak in the first place, but now it was as airtight as it could be.

It was the same reason why Shi Huajing had sent his men to receive them. Without an escort, the group wouldn’t be able to take a step in Sector A without being watched, hailed, scanned, and ID-ed by the patrols again, and again, and again. As if that wasn’t bad enough, one misstep was all it took to be labeled a terrorist because the sector was practicing a policy that was best described as, “kill a hundred innocents if it meant catching one who is guilty.”

Long story short, they might have been able to loiter around certain places in Flander’s spaceplane before the chaos, but to do that now was just asking for trouble. That was why they boarded their escort’s starship upon reaching their initial destination.

Jiu Xun attracted most of the escorts’ attention because the old man stood out, and because they thought that Cillin, Czedow and Shusag were Flanders’ “bodyguards”. A while after they boarded the starship, someone contacted Cillin and passed him Shi Huajing’s message.

“The fourth young master said that he’s about done with the preparation,” the man said. What it meant was that Shi Huajing had found a way into Sector C for Cillin, so Cillin could save the energy for something else. Indirectly, it also confirmed that Shi Huajing had laid his hands on the military.

In hindsight, it wasn’t surprising that Shi Huajing would have the courage and skill to pull off such a feat at all. He could not have become the respected “fourth young master” in just a couple of years otherwise.

The reason Shi Huajing hadn’t just called Cillin’s communicator directly was because it was unsafe, and because the signal was bad. The electromagnetic interference at this particular section of space was stronger than normal due to stellar activity, so Shi Huajing had a messenger carry his message and a video regarding a certain person instead.

Sward was a lieutenant colonel serving under the Fifth Army. There were a lot of ranked officers in the army as a matter of course, but Sward wasn’t an ordinary man. More specifically, he used to be imprisoned in Sector S for the killing of innocent civilians and even his own comrade-in-arms.

Normally, the repercussions for the killing of civilians weren’t too bad if they were caused by the military. The higher-ups certainly couldn’t be bothered to even look at them most of the time. However, it was a different story when the death toll reached a certain level, and the murderer himself didn’t even bother to hide them. Sward was one such person.

Sward was described to be aloof, arrogant, cold-blooded, tyrannical, and bloodthirsty and more. He was a mass murderer with a string of massacres—not kills, but massacres—under his belt, and his last massacre had a death toll of over ten thousand. They were all civilians, and he didn’t stop until he was fully satisfied even after the local government had stepped out to stop him.

The lieutenant colonel was eventually thrown into a jail cell for his crimes, but the chaos happened, and the GAL army splintered into eight great armies just a couple of years after his imprisonment. As a result, Sector S was dismantled, and many of its prisoners including Sward were absorbed into various forces. For a time, he was able to return to his killing ways and fought many battles for the army.

Sward was now dead, however. Cillin didn’t know how Shi Huajing had managed to kill the lieutenant colonel, only that Sward must be connected to the place he was going. He also guessed that Shi Huajing hadn’t killed Sward out of altruistic reasons. Most likely the lieutenant colonel had crossed the young master in some way, so he had the former quietly removed from this plane of existence. If Cillin didn’t happen to be heading to Sector C at this time, no one—at least no one who wasn’t involved from the start—would even know that he had died. In the unlikely case where someone discovered the Sward’s assassination, Shi Huajing already made sure that it couldn’t be linked to him no matter what. After all, he was the current representative of the Shi Family, and it wasn’t wise to butt heads with the military right now. Of course, the fact he threw this caution to the wind before Cillin showed how much he trusted him.

It was clear that Shi Huajing had made many plans to infiltrate the military long before Cillin had made the request. Sward was but the tip of the iceberg.

Back to the present. The video was a compilation of Sward’s behavior. He was a silent man who exuded a chilling aura. It was so dominant that it seemed to seep out of the recording itself and into reality. His eyes were pits of littl