chapter 68 maybe this federation isn't so peacefull (work in progress)

Daniel was finally back at the cloudtrain, both his and Tickle's innate abilities were still charging, having nothing new to study and being unable to send more explorer's out, he decided to personally check the progress of the experiments that require a long waiting time

the first he went to check was his seafood farm, or better the 4 sections of the cloudtrain that contain the liveboxes, and to Daniel's surprise the giant lobster female was full of eggs, the mating was finished, and what was left was to wait for them to hatch

the micro squids on the other end were already at the second generation, the originals had already been swapped with the first generation and the second was growing, with the right environment and excellent food they were multiplicating at an astonishing speed

sadly it wasn't the same for the electric eels, even in the right environment, they didn't seem to get down to business, and the wait continued, luckily they were still young and in perfect health so there wasn't a need to seek a way to help them procreate yet

at the same time, the first-generation little saltwater carps in their loud shade of pink were still growing, too little yet to procreate again and so stuck at the first generation

than what Daniel was most interested in, the spidercrabs or hive creatures, they were still in the hatching process, but some tiny movement could be seen through the eggs' opaque membrane, a sign that everything was going well and it wouldn't be long before they were born, he was curious to seek information about their reproductive cycle, but after thinking about it, Daniel decided to wait and see, the family knew he was trying to hatch them, and they would have already warned him if they were dangerous

happy with the progress Daniel went to check on the last long-term semi-autonomous project in the lab, the cultivation of the biomechanical technology cells harvested from the heart, as Almony said he was able to gather a few live ones, and he was now testing various neutral organic fluid to culture more of them

this was surprisingly easy as 13 out of the 20 different fluids yielded results, so he selected the best 3 and set them up to keep these cells alive and multiplicating for when he found a diagram or had the time to experiment more

with these things settled it was time again to decide on what project to tackle next, the project satellite was still missing 2 key elements, a powerful antenna, and a different flight system

but with the completion of the first version of project shroud, aka the cloaking device that would make things invisible to scanners or spiritual sense but not the naked eye, many of the abandoned projects could enter a new phase, but Daniel's old enemy was still the biggest problem

the batteries, those accursed things seemed to be his nemesis, the only success recorded so far wasn't a fruit of daniel's knowledge and research but an accident, a blunder, basically blind luck, this had left a shadow over him

as a person who hardly failed, or had any hardships, any stain was enough to drive him to madness, he would often lose himself in thoughts about how to progress the battery he created by accident

in the following week Daniel disappeared once again, he was so absorbed by his thoughts about batteries that no one managed to get a word through to him, he was simply too focused, but even after building three different batteries from scratch, none of them was better than the ones he was already using, instead, he felt mocked as all three were 10 to 20 % below the originals both in capacity and output

but at the same time, his time was up, the next day at 9:00 am all the eyes of the sun federation and more will be pointed toward the same stage Phoebe used for her breakthrough, as this place was always used for press conferences since it was full of security measure that could be used against interference, scanning, and even if it didn't happen in a very long time even assassinations

in short words, it was simply the most suitable place for the weak daniel to appear publicly for the first time

a couple of days before while Daniel was struggling, vincent had a reunion with three of his friends from the fishing buddies group, Jeanne, Liu, and Amir originally Jeanne was going to go on her own, but after talking in the group they ended up meeting together at the underground lake to investigate the presence of the unusually rare wild spiritual beast

since they weren't there to go fishing and didn't seal their senses they soon found a bizarre spectacle at the bottom of the deep lake

with a maximum depth of 35mt in the far east corner of the lake, which was slightly oval-shaped, many little spatial gates flickered in and out of existence, all over it, with a simple sweep of their senses, they realized that many species that shouldn't be present in this lake were ripping apart the local population of spiritual beasts

Liu shocked exclaimed "that's a dark deep dragon horse" flying directly into the water to catch the rare specimen

Jeanne said "that's not the problem, how the hell did these gates form, it totally ruined the local ecosystem"

Amir nodded and said "the space element expert is vincent, while he checks this out, we should catch all the foreign species, we can free them in their habitat later, do you need any hazard cages?"

Jeanne responded "I have six with me, if I need more I'll let you know"

it was at this moment that Liu came back smiling from ear to ear, he couldn't be happier with this windfall, normal dragon horses were already rare enough that even with the money the few that had the luck to own one wouldn't sell them, a dark deep dragon horse was even rarer something that could be encountered but not sought and it was a male, and finally, the female dragon horse he had back at home will have a mate, this could only make him happy as a renowned breeder

landing back on the shore he realized that Vincent was not reacting at all, he kept looking into the lake with vacant eyes

Liu walked in front of vincent and waving his hand in front of his eyes said "Vincent are you there?"

Vincent cleared his throat and said "yes I am, what the heck, these gates seem natural at first, but looking at them they all bring to different sea biomes, a dozen or more gates all opened to different parts of the sea it's too much of a coincidence, there wasn't a commotion only because they are little and the strong ones don't fit trough"

Liu said "are you saying that someone did this on purpose?"

Vincent said "I'm not sure, what I'm saying is that it's possible, I'll go investigate closer, lend a hand to the others"

Liu said "sure we will catch them all soon"

in the meantime, vincent went closer, after attentively studying the various gates he realized that they were indeed natural, but someone built a "door" on them, it was probable that the "door" were here for a long time but closed, at some point, it must have been damaged making them open and close at close intervals, this place didn't have many visitors, and it could have gone undiscovered for a while now

after looking for a while he finally found the "door" mechanism, a spatial treasure, engraved with many sealing formations, for a moment he thought that nothing bad happened, but that was only until he looked at this treasure closer, it not only had the power to seal

a natural gate wouldn't last for too long, because it was caused by a spike of spatial energy, as the spike drops it closes, but this treasure was clearly made to keep these gates not only open but to generate more and keep those open too, overtime this would cause the space to collapse and everything in a couple of thousand kilometers would be destroyed as if it went through a wood chipper

in this range there was even the capital city, this is a terrorist attack, one sneaky that slowly accumulates power to not set off any alarms, if this treasure was working as intended even the protector Andrea would be fooled, if she didn't look here specifically she would never discover something was wrong until it was too late to repair the damage, luckily it was damaged and it kept opening and closing the gates revealing its existence

Vincent immediately warned Andrea and Obelix, before starting to repair the damage using his own energy, it was long and tedious work, but he was happy to have found it before a disaster occurred

in the meantime a clone of Andrea and the real Obelix arrived, while Vincent was the perfect man for the repairs, investigations weren't his forte, so he delivered the treasure to them who nodded and started making a sweep of the lake

that's when the fishing buddies realized something was wrong, the sudden appearance of these two big bosses was never a harbinger of good news, being trusted friends they were told what happened while being sworn to secrecy about today's events

in a couple of hours, all the foreign species were captured, but Vincent still had a lot of work ahead of him, he had to stitch the gate close and disperse the excesses of spatial energy, said like that it sounded simple but it really wasn't

it would take at least three days of working down there with no rest luckily apart from Alexander there were 2 other spatial cultivators on Verulus that were capable enough to help, while Joseph and Phoebe couldn't help in such a precision job in their current condition

thanks to the reinforcements, the three-day job became a 20 hours job, and when Vincent went up to Andrea's office, they had already finished a preliminary investigation

the treasure was now on the triangular table, Andrea looked at it and said "it seems that it was assembled here under our noses, when we tracked the owner of the treasure, he had already taken care of himself, not only was he dead, his soul was dispersed, a sixth stage used like this it's terrifying, but the real problem is that we can't find out who he worked for, there were no traces in his online activities, no communication tools at his home or place of work, just to be sure I scanned a range of 100km around his house but nothing"

Obelix punched the table and said "how the hell is it possible for something like this to happen, I thought that we were in a forced peace, with the numerous threats from the hive and other unreasonable parties, which civilization can find the time to run a terrorist operation near our capital and risk war?"

Vincent sighed and said "looking at it from another point of view, it's not worth it to attack anything but the capital, only here do important people that are pillars of the Sun federation gather closely, even if they attack a resource planet or a city planet, there are others to fill the void, but the people gathered in the capital are not replaceable, here they can do real damage"

Andrea nodded and said "I should do an in-depth scanning of Verulus and Cronosh as soon as possible, just to make sure there are no similar operations going on, for the rest, we can only put our best people on it and hope they can figure out something"

Obelix said "I agree, then we will give the job to the dark wind division"

Vincent nodded and said "I agree"