ca-book Chapter 22: Branch Situation
Chapter 22: Branch Situation
On the other end of the secret communication channel, Saint Sophia looked at the few words on the terminal, her eyes slightly darkening.
The Skyward Leader, a scheming individual, is dangerous... but also very useful.
She had to admit that Zhang Qiming's statement had indeed hit the nail on the head.
If she truly wanted to pry open a breach in the College of Cardinals' control and establish a Truth Investigation Committee, she could cleverly use this pretext to legitimately undermine the College of Cardinals' power.
With that in mind, she quickly set up the framework in her mind, and then new information was transmitted from the other end of the link to Zhang Qiming.
Following Zhang Qiming's train of thought, Saint Sophia began to explain her own ideas.
"I know what to do next. If the committee can really be established, I will break it into three groups and use them to gradually divide the power of the College of Cardinals."
"The first group is dedicated to investigating loopholes in military affairs and security, through which they slowly gain control of the General Affairs Department's military deployment authority; the second group is responsible for technical security, using the investigation of Skydrive and assassination cases as a pretext to control military networks; the third group is responsible for loyalty assessments, ostensibly to investigate dereliction of duty and malfeasance, but in reality to control personnel transfers."
She paused for a moment, then typed the rest of the words even faster.
"The core objective of these three groups is to work around the three lists I will be compiling—the infiltration list, the elimination list, and the recruitment list."
She added a paragraph after that sentence.
"I will focus my efforts on the Guards Fleet; they are the real core of the problem."
As Zhang Qiming read the entire message, he felt a sense of relief, like a mountain spring finding a kindred spirit.
As expected of an old rebel... oh no, an old revolutionary. There's enough to say about many things here; she'll figure out the rest on her own, and she'll do it faster than anyone else.
Saint Sophia didn't waste any more words, and finally just said one sentence.
"I will start taking action now. Once the Truth Investigation Committee is established, I will send the three subsequent lists to Skydrive simultaneously."
"Only at that time will our cooperation truly begin."
After sending the message, she promptly and decisively ended the communication.
After she hung up abruptly, Zhang Qiming's Gaia panel suddenly trembled slightly.
The next second, the screen that was originally displaying the overall situation began to refresh automatically, and streams of light blue data spread outwards along the border, causing the current overall situation on Mars to change accordingly.
[Current Situation]
[Mars Mechanical Age Phase 1 Progress: 47% → 55%]
[Current Situation: Mechanical Religion/Structural Upheaval – Technological Monopoly Under Threat, Unilateral Military and Political Control of the College of Cardinals Begins to Loosen]
Eight percentage points!
This shows that Saint Sophia hasn't really set up the committee yet. The fact that she and Skydrive have formed a cooperative intention, plus the removal of Makarov as a thorn in their side, has already caused cracks to appear in the entire mechanical religion system, indirectly proving the correctness of Skydrive's course of action.
At this moment, as the situation progressed, a new notification appeared.
[Branch situation generating—]
Completing side missions advances the overall situation progress; the higher the completion rate of side missions, the greater the progress in the overall situation.
[Current Spin-off Situation: The Truth Investigation Committee]
[Branch Description: Hagia Sophia is attempting to establish a new legitimate power structure under the guise of "investigating the assassination of the Cardinal," thereby interfering in military, political, security, and censorship systems. This branch is not yet stable and will subsequently generate key mission nodes such as infiltration lists, elimination lists, and recruitment lists.]
[Branch Decision: Incomplete]
[Hint: Once the Truth Investigation Committee branch is completed, the overall progress of the Mechanical Age will receive a huge boost!]
Immediately afterwards, another new notification popped up.
You have acquired a new custom situation mission slot.
[Note: You can generate a situational mission based on the current situation. Upon completion of the mission, the progress of the situation will be calculated based on the scope of impact, number of participants, real-world feedback, and structural changes.]
Zhang Qiming looked at the new branch of the situation and smiled; this was the result he wanted.
He can trigger new branching situations, thereby driving the overall situation forward. He can also use the progress of the situation given by Gaia to determine when to launch a coup.
A coup d'état is neither better the faster it happens, nor is it more stable the longer it drags on. The real opportune moment is when the old order has been stripped down to its bare shell, and the new order has just begun to take shape.
In his judgment, only when the overall progress of the mechanical age truly approaches 95% or more will the lines of technology, military and politics, public opinion, players, reformers and the Skywards on Mars truly come together.
Only then will it be time for Saint Sophia and Sky Drive to overturn the table together.
As Zhang Qiming pondered, his gaze slowly fell upon the newly popped-up custom situation mission slot. This thing came at just the right time.
He has just completed his first job advancement and needs to collect a large amount of player experience to help him level up.
The new task must have two objectives.
First, players need to be able to infiltrate the area surrounding the ground military system in a logical and natural way.
Secondly, the total amount of this task needs to be increased, so that the more the player earns, the more experience he can harvest.
He quickly glanced at his daily limit again: 35000.
If we still follow the initial recruitment task, a new player gets 100 experience points for completing the contact, and the person who leads the way gets an additional 100 experience points, which is similar to the Pinduoduo recruitment and reward system.
However, the player base for SkyDrive has already grown significantly.
The earliest recruitment missions were originally intended to spread the seeds, ensuring that there were enough active players and faction bases on Mars, thereby attracting more new players to join the Skyward faction.
Now that the external network has been established, more and more players know about the Sky Drive entrance. Even without setting up recruitment tasks, they will still recommend it to each other, drag each other in, and lead each other into the entrance.
The mission of "pulling someone to slash them" has completed its historical mission.
Although you can still use it to reach your daily quota by leaving it running, the earnings are definitely starting to decrease.
Zhang Qiming thought for a moment and decided it was about time to stop the recruitment task.
He has already made his faction's voice heard and established a base of support. Now, if he just loosens the limit on the number of players in the Sky Drive faction a little, the number of Sky Drive players will immediately surge, exponentially.
What's lacking now is actually some big content; he needs to come up with something exciting for the players.
The fourth calamity, having no life left, said they were bored. They either chatted on the forums, ran quests in the main city, or started to get abstract, such as dismantling streetlights, trying to exploit terrain, or researching how to make NPCs so angry they had a stroke.
Zhang Qiming began to rack his brains, thinking about what kind of work would be appropriate for his dear player next.
In the early stages of Stellaris, especially in the Homeworld timeline, quest rewards are notoriously stingy. After creating your card, the jobs you can get are mostly low-level, piecemeal tasks that will give you a few hundred experience points after a lot of running around, along with some junk parts and low-level consumables.
Because they are so stingy, players often complain in the game's official comment section that the developers' horses are about to take off every now and then.
Currently, most mainstream players are still stuck at around LV6. Even with a little more effort and a bit of recklessness, they can barely reach LV12.
Besides their rank, their job search is also a whole host of problems.
In the Homeworld timeline, changing your main class isn't easy either. You still have to be a slave to the Terran commoners and the Martian Lord, slowly getting through a bunch of miscellaneous prerequisites.
What Mars can usually offer them are just some odd jobs: running errands, delivering goods, delivering prosthetic parts to grey clinics, collecting debts for mining brokers, finding chips for middlemen on the black market, cleaning up a few scavenging gangs that have crossed the line for cyborg thugs, or taking on those back-and-forth, but incredibly stingy, transit jobs between Mariner Valley, Tharsis, and the polar ice cap.
Slightly better, it's the kind of work you do as a cyberpunk commissioner.
For example, delivering illegal drugs for underground cyborg doctors, testing guns for military contractors, chasing away runaway workers for mine owners, finding missing film editors for shady plastic surgery dealers, recovering an "accidentally damaged" machine servant for a minor priest, or disposing of an out-of-control cyborg, a missing technician, contaminated samples, and mechanical debris all at once in abandoned areas that churches are unwilling to publicly acknowledge.
The reason these people are still aware that Stellaris, this lousy game, actually has a main storyline within the Homeworld universe, is purely because Zhang Lao Zhang forcibly created it for them.
With Mars and Terra acting like this, how dare they shamelessly slap the word "Homeland" on their faces? What do they take us players for?!
Therefore, he could no longer stand by and watch his beloved players suffer like this.
If players from other civilizations saw this, they would think that their homeworld is just like this, always delivering goods or collecting debts, running errands for the grey clinic or catching deserters for the mine boss, without even a decent quest chain.
This won't do! The neighboring civilization has quests, and our home world needs them too, with one quest per person and better benefits than theirs!!
With this in mind, Zhang Qiming removed the initial user recruitment task from the personal posting system.
He planned to reserve the empty personal task posting slots for those Skydrive players he had his eye on, to cultivate elites, key personnel, and people who could truly accomplish great things for him in the future.
What's more important right now is to formulate the new situation and tasks.
Players need to have something to do; we can't let them be idle!
Zhang Qiming thought quietly for a moment, then placed his hand on the light screen and typed out a new task title.
—【For the Skywards, become the glorious Covenant Army!】
When he saw this line, even he couldn't help but laugh. It was just right; even he felt a bit like he was in Bengbu.
He created this task not to send them to genuinely serve the church, but to make them live off the church's resources and become "church parasites."
Imagine players wearing Covenant uniforms, eating Covenant food, receiving Covenant salaries, and ultimately working for the Skywards...
Lao Zhang became increasingly pleased with himself. He began inputting task information line by line, and as the task information was input, Gaia automatically completed the task modularization and automatically allocated experience.
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[Custom Situation Mission: For the Skywards, become a glorious Covenant soldier!]
[Mission Issuer: Skyward Organization]
[Task Type: Situational Infiltration/Long-Term Infiltration/Secondary Profession Acquisition/Main Profession Activation]
[Task Level: Starts at Rank E, can spawn Rank D series of tasks]
[Access Requirements]:
[1. Already joined the Skyward faction's peripheral network.]
[2. Skyward Faction reputation reaches "Accessible"]
[3. Overall grade ≥ 5]
[4. Not publicly wanted by the main city of Mars or any of the three major regions]
[5. It is strictly forbidden to disclose any connection between oneself and the Skydrive in any form.]
[Core Mission Objective: To infiltrate the Martian Covenant ground forces system through legal or semi-legal means, acquire a soldier secondary profession, and gradually gain access to military camps, garrisons, supply depots, logistics facilities, military dependent areas, and local garrison systems without revealing one's Skywarder identity.]
[Mission Description: Skywalkers, the time has come for the organization to test you.]
Today on Mars, knowledge is monopolized, technology is blocked, the army guards the gates for the College of Cardinals, and workers bleed for the oligarchs; countless people live, yet live like cogs in a machine, countless people hold guns, yet do not know what they are fighting for.
Now, the organization needs you to go inside that machine. You need to join the Covenant ground forces and let this armed force, which should belong to the Martian people, know to return to its rightful place!
Go, join the army, survive, gain a foothold, and wait for the real storm to come, to face the true—the Skyward Drive.
[Basic Task Flow]
[Phase 1: Complete peripheral contact with the military and obtain access to enlistment, conscription, local garrison support, engineering replenishment, logistics support, or reserve training.]
[Phase Two: Formal entry into the Covenant Ground Forces system, obtaining the secondary profession—Soldier.]
[Phase Three: Based on the individual's location, position, and scope of contact, subsequent branch missions within the military will be automatically generated.]
[Basic Rewards:]
[1. Experience Reward: 1500 points! (Experience reward is adaptively allocated by the Gaia system)]
[2. Obtain military secondary occupation qualification!]
[3. Skyward Faction Reputation Increased!]
[4. Unlock the follow-up quest chain for "Covenant Infiltration"!]
[Bonus Reward]:
[1. The first batch of finishers will receive an additional 800 experience points! (Same as above)]
[2. Those who enter through special positions such as logistics, engineering, garrison, and military police support will receive an additional exclusive mission pool for their respective positions.]
[3. Completing the military secondary profession without revealing your identity will unlock the hidden achievement – Quiet Nail.]
[Failure Penalty]:
[1. There is no penalty of death for mission failure]
[2. If your Skydrive identity is revealed, your Skydrive faction reputation will be immediately deducted, and your character's subsequent infiltration mission privileges will be revoked!]
[3. If the Skyward Expedition's external network is exposed due to individual actions, additional accountability will be triggered!]
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Looking at this task, Zhang Qiming couldn't help but laugh again.
What he needs to do next is use Saint Sophia to lure all the players to the Martian Covenant Army, and then usher in the Martian era of universal Gin!