Chapter 1772: Chapter 1008: The Prize Pool Is Dry
In recent times, Gu Hang has been in quite a good mood.
Despite still having a lot of things to deal with, especially after becoming the Imperial Prime Minister—a position of centralized power—the breadth of his responsibilities has expanded even further. However, thanks to the increasingly mature Alliance Government and New Empire Government, everything has been running fairly smoothly.
What makes him happiest is the weakening of the Scarlet Scar.
What is the most impactful factor currently affecting the Empire?
Without a doubt, it is this Scarlet Scar.
Both communication and transportation, which are crucial for governance, are deeply negatively affected by the Scarlet Scar.
If the Scarlet Scar were to be repaired, the difficulty of the Empire’s ongoing expeditions would be greatly reduced!
In some ways, the expeditions might even transform into rapid armed parades.
Many worlds today are not actually corrupted by Chaos or overrun by rebels or aliens, but rather have simply started embarking on independence due to decades or even centuries of lost contact with the Imperial Central Government.
This is perfectly normal.
Counting by a century, that’s five generations. Unless someone has undergone life extension surgery, no living person on the planet would have heard the Empire’s voice. To them, the so-called Human Empire is merely a page in the history books, seen only by their grandparents, or even their grandparents’ grandparents.
Moreover, the Empire’s image in these oral histories and records may not be anything positive at all; it could very likely be seen as a regime that continuously exploits the locals. If the local planetary corruption issues aren’t severe and the alien threats aren’t significant, with no craving for military protection from the Empire, then strong separatist tendencies naturally emerge.
But if the Scarlet Scar disappears, the Empire’s voice could be clearly transmitted to every world; voyages to these worlds would not be obstructed by the waves of Subspace, and we wouldn’t have to install Thunder Torch Towers one world at a time, allowing many places to be placated through mere decrees.
Even if many worlds face considerable problems, as long as there are survivors, the Expeditionary Force could use information from locals to determine the specific situation in that region and thus decide the necessary military force to address the issue, greatly increasing efficiency.
Moreover, the weakening of the Scarlet Scar would reduce the impact of Subspace waves on the real universe. Consequently, Chaos corruption would struggle to easily infiltrate reality, not only raising the difficulty for demons to appear but also making it harder for people to hear whispers they shouldn’t. Some normal individuals’ occasional dark thoughts would revert back to just thoughts, not easily captured by an Evil God and catalyzed into soul corruption, reducing the probability of cults breeding.
In summary, the weakening of the Scarlet Scar is a great boon, signaling the end of calamity.
However, currently, there are only signs of weakening, and the extent of weakening is far from being significant enough to effect change.
Gu Hang wishes the Scarlet Scar would improve by tomorrow, but unfortunately, he can’t do much to help in this matter.
The only thing he can do is let the old Emperor be busy.
Regarding the weakening of the Scarlet Scar, the main effort still relies on the old man.
Gu Hang’s main focus is still on the real universe.
Part of it is, of course, to govern the nation and reduce Subspace’s erosion of the real universe—commonly known as ’prison sitting.’
The other part involves his duties as the de facto governor of the New Empire, where Gu Hang has a great deal of work to do.
Even though the New Empire Government can handle a considerable portion of the work for him, there are some things that can’t be delegated and must be done by him personally.
For instance, major, strategic matters must be decided by Gu Hang as the leader of the Empire Government; Osenia, as the Alliance Premier and Premier of the Imperial Executive Yuan, certainly holds high office, but even she can’t decide some of the biggest matters on her own.
Another aspect is the spending of Gift Points.
No one can help him with this.
For a long time, the bulk of Gu Hang’s expenditure of Gift Points was on lotteries in the technology pool. Expenditure on technology requires little thought—just anticipation.
After all, whether you get something useful or not depends not on thought but on luck.
The most crucial thinking, however, happens after the technology lottery draws.
How to use the technology rewards obtained, how to layout new industries—these are the tasks that require brainpower.
But over recent decades, Gu Hang has increasingly refrained from spending Gift Points on technology pool lotteries.
It’s too wasteful.
The main reason is that the technology pool has been drawn dry, offering very low returns.
At this stage, Gu Hang has a general understanding of the nature of the whole system. The technology and black boxes extracted from the system are not created out of thin air; they are essentially techniques that have appeared in the Empire’s history.
And even when Gu Hang’s spending on Gift Points reached the highest level, it was only at the billion Gift Points tier, with no higher tier available. But even drawing at the billion Gift Points tier, there isn’t much good to draw out now.
It mostly draws out elite-level and normal-level technologies, most of which are things already possessed and just exist in different models.
The value of these drawn items is rather limited, especially considering the cost of drawing exorbitantly high Gift Points.
Certainly, there are still some high-level rewards in the prize pool, but the probability has become too low, and drawing them is already exceedingly difficult.
Hence, over the recent decades, Gu Hang has mainly spent his Gift Points on other areas.
Employee enlightenment, military construction, building exchanges... these things have directly brought significant improvement to the Alliance’s strength, far surpassing the drawing of that exhausted prize pool.
And these require a lot of Gu Hang’s attention.
The relevant data is provided by the government. However, this is just a portion of the reliance. In the Gift Points settlement interface, Gu Hang can also see a lot of data.
These two sets of data each have their advantages and disadvantages.
The data submitted by government departments are rich and varied; if Gu Hang wants specific data, he can request it, and the government departments will certainly provide it.
The problem, however, is that the data may be distorted or even erroneous.
Whereas the system’s data is entirely accurate but very limited in content.
Combining the two, they provide Gu Hang the information needed for decision-making, regarding where to spend the Gift Points.