High Martial Arts: Slay enemies to become stronger, forge invincibility from billions of corpses.

Song Chen stood in the lobby of the investment department's administrative center, surrounded by all sorts of life forms coming and going.

A minute later, a spaceship stopped in front of him.

Calling it a "spaceship" isn't quite accurate. The ship's shape is more like a flattened dagger, with a flat hull, sharp lines, and no curves from end to end. Its sharp edges are like a piece of obsidian cut with a knife.

The ship is about thirty meters long, completely black, with no portholes or visible propeller nozzles on its surface, and hovers silently at a height of half a meter above the ground.

At the bow of the ship is a tiny emblem consisting of two nested rings, the inner ring being jet black and the outer ring being dark gold.

This is Lar's personal emblem. Song Chen had seen the flame-shaped mark on Lar's forehead in the signing hall, and the lines of this emblem were almost identical.

A door slid silently open on the side of the spaceship.

A voice came from inside the cabin, crisp and neither humble nor arrogant: "Mr. Song Chen, Lord Ral has arranged for me to take you to the Galaxy Headquarters of the Department of Punishment. Please board the ship."

Song Chen boarded the ship, and the hatch closed silently behind him. The interior of the spaceship was more simply furnished than the exterior.

There are no screens, no instrument panels, no buttons, only four rows of seats embedded in the black bulkhead, two seats per row, for a total of eight seats.

There was no partition between the cockpit and the passenger cabin, so he could see the bridge directly.

However, there were no levers or buttons on the dashboard, only a smooth black panel.

A slender, pale green humanoid creature sat in the driver's seat, its fingers gliding rapidly across the light patterns, each touch creating a tiny blue ripple on the panel.

He was wearing a dark gray, tight-fitting uniform with fitted cuffs, a crisp collar, and two silver stripes embroidered on the shoulders—the insignia of senior civil servants in the investment department.

"How far is it?" Song Chen sat down in the back seat of the driver's seat and fastened the seatbelt that popped out.

The seatbelt automatically adjusted its tightness, fitting snugly but not tight. It was made of a polymer fiber he had never seen before, with extremely fine textures on the surface, and felt like silk.

"The straight-line distance is about two million kilometers," the driver said without turning his head.

"Our destination is the Court of Judges, the terraformed planet where the Ministry of Punishment's galactic headquarters is located, also known as the Judgment Star."

"However, you don't need to worry about the travel time. There are dedicated short-distance jump channels within the Flowing Light Galaxy. From here to the Court of Judges, it's just a jump away."

"What is the Court of Judges?" Song Chen asked again.

"Naturally, it's the headquarters of the Department of Punishment in the Milky Way."

After saying that, the pilot drew a circle on the black panel with his finger, and the spaceship began to slowly rise, passing through the open skylight of the domed hall and entering the space channel on the outer edge of the Flowing Star.

"The Disciplinary Department is on the same level as the Investment Department in the overall alliance structure. The Investment Department is in charge of spending money, while the Disciplinary Department is in charge of collecting money."

"All disobedient subordinate civilizations in the Milky Way are dealt with by the Department of Punishment, and the Court of Judgments is the lair of all the Punishers."

"By the way, you might be quite conspicuous once you go inside, I hope you don't mind."

Song Chen knew what being conspicuous meant. With only a little over a million points of Qi and Blood, he was like a wolf cub that had just learned to walk being thrown into a pack of adult wolves in front of those veteran Punishers.

He didn't reply, but leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes to rest.

The spaceship shuddered slightly, a very slight shudder, like someone flicking a finger on a car window.

"Mr. Song, we've arrived." The driver turned to look at him, then stood up from the driver's seat, walked to the cabin door, and pressed the sensor area on the wall.

The hatch slid open, letting in the light from outside.

Song Chen stepped out of the cabin and found himself at a dock.

But unlike the spaceport he built on the outskirts of Flowing Star, which was constructed of metal and composite materials, this dock was built on the surface of a planet.

The planet's gravity is about 3.9 times that of Earth. Its air composition is extremely close to that of Earth, with slightly higher oxygen content, slightly lower nitrogen content, and trace amounts of aromatic gases.

The dock floor is made of some kind of light gray stone, polished to an extremely smooth finish.

The stone slab is engraved with dense patterns, which upon closer inspection reveal a huge star map that covers the entire dock floor, marking the location and name of thousands of star systems.

Each star system is marked with gems of different colors: red represents war star systems, blue represents peace star systems, gold represents resource star systems, and purple represents restricted areas.

Song Chen looked down for a few seconds and found a tiny silver-white dot of light at the very edge of the star map. Next to the dot of light, there was a line of small text in common language: Solar System.

In front of the dock was a row of low-rise buildings, the architectural style of which was unlike any civilization on Earth.

There are towering spires, low domes, large glass curtain walls, and columns carved from single blocks of stone.

At the highest point of the complex stands a clock tower, but instead of a bell, the top of the tower is a luminous sphere suspended in mid-air, emitting a soft, warm light.

The sunlight shone on the dock, casting a pale golden filter over the entire square.

Further away, you can see a continuous mountain range, its peaks covered with a layer of pale purple vegetation.

At the foot of the mountain lies a vast lake with clear blue water, turning the entire lake into a luminous sapphire.

The lake reflects the slowly moving clouds in the sky, whose shapes are constantly changing, like a painting that can never be finished.

Two suns hung in the sky, one large, radiating a warm golden light, its brightness roughly equivalent to 70% of that of Earth at noon, just warm but not dazzling.

One small one, leaning towards orange-red, looks like the setting sun forever frozen in mid-air.

The rays of the two suns intertwined, illuminating the entire planet with a bright and clear light. All colors became more vibrant under this dual illumination: the green of the leaves became richer, the red of the flowers deeper, and the blue of the lake clearer.

The most breathtaking sight is overhead.

A translucent, pale blue arc of light stretched across the entire sky, extending from the eastern horizon to the western horizon.

The inner side of the light arc flows with extremely fine silver-white light filaments, which intertwine to form complex geometric patterns, constantly changing shape. Sometimes it resembles a huge protective net, sometimes it transforms into a flowing aurora, and sometimes it condenses into a dense hexagonal array.

Through the arc of light, one can see the scene of outer space, with countless spaceships shuttling back and forth in orbit.

In the distance, you can see the neutron star radiation ring of the Streamer Star slowly rotating. The brilliant radiation light is softened after being filtered by the planetary shield and sprinkled on the surface of the planet, giving every leaf a faint halo of color.

This is a ninth-order true-star planetary shield; space was cut open from another dimension and then folded around this planet.

Any unauthorized object attempting to cross this barrier will be thrown directly into the interlayer of the folded space, never to emerge again.