The offensive against the Kingdom of Stefano was an action guided by this thought.
The conventional troops adopted blitzkrieg tactics, concentrating firepower and continually puncturing the enemy’s line of defense with each Armored Brigade as the spearhead of their assault. The main force followed suit, and then another breakthrough would form…
Whenever there was a chance, they would encircle and annihilate the enemy; if not, they would aim for a comprehensive rout, always prioritizing speed and marching towards the royal city.
As the main force progressed to a certain extent, Gu Hang also played his trump card.
His “Storm Mage Corps”.
<>According to the general experience of the Imperial Psychic Association, they could, on average, discover one individual with spiritual energy talent among every ten million people.
But this was not the limit. Based on the judgement of the Psychic Cultivator’s Association, they believed that one person with genuine spiritual energy talent would be born per million people in a normal world. However, due to various reasons such as the local government policies, customs, traditions, and many Empire Worlds having the custom of witch-hunting, this has led to the execution of many individuals with spiritual energy talent as soon as they showed any signs of it.
In addition, because of these issues, many individuals with spiritual energy talent also attempt to conceal their uniqueness. When they grow older and their talent fades or becomes controllable, they blend into the populace – or fail to hide it, go completely insane, and become a dangerous presence, in which case they are beyond help and must be dealt with.
Even in places without such customs or traditions, identifying individuals with spiritual energy talent among ordinary people is difficult; the flow of information is a big issue. Without a developed media industry, spreading anything across a crowd of a million becomes exceedingly tough. It’s not possible for the Psychic Cultivator’s Association to find them like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Especially for those with mediocre talent, who show no special traits other than occasionally experiencing unique hallucinations, they are even harder to find.
And even when they are found, the Psychic Cultivator’s Association sometimes faces competition. For instance, the Tribunal is quite fond of snatching away the talented individuals. A significant number of Tribunal members adamantly believe that spiritual energy users pose a great danger; paradoxically, they also like to capture some and train them into witch-hunters and Judges.
All these reasons combined make the theoretical situation of one spiritual energy gifted individual per million turn into the actual situation of the Psychic Cultivator’s Association finding only one potential individual per ten million.
In reality, half of the spiritual energy users trained by the Psychic Cultivator’s Association are sourced from the search for individuals with spiritual energy talent, and the other half are artificially cultivated through certain extremely costly secret techniques.
This approach is utterly cost-ineffective and can only be afforded by some elite individuals, mainly aimed at granting themselves or their relatives and descendants an extra bit of special power.
As long as the elites are willing to pay, the Psychic Cultivator’s Association would provide the method and then recruit them; it’s an opportunity to develop their membership and foster connections, so why not?
The spiritual energy talent that Gu Hang’s predecessor possessed came about in this way.
Going by the standard ratio, the theoretical maximum for Rage Owl Star’s population of 55 million would be finding only about fifty spiritual energy users.
But obviously, this problem did not apply to Gu Hang.
He hadn’t even resorted to forcibly reforming people in the Divine Realm yet; by just exploiting the training functions provided by the Army Badge System and conducting selections among a large pool of candidates, he identified over a hundred individuals, which was more than double the theoretical ratio.
This could be attributed to two possible reasons.
Firstly, the initial theoretical research of the Psychic Cultivator’s Association itself was not perfect, and this figure was a probability event of a large sample size. When applied to specific cases, every person could potentially manifest spiritual energy talent.
Secondly, the unique environment of Rage Owl Star naturally thins the veil of reality, leading to a higher incidence of individuals with spiritual energy talent than normal.
But all in all, this was a positive development.
Gu Hang didn’t choose to train all one hundred individuals who possessed spiritual energy talent.
Training a single spiritual energy user cost a hundred points of Grace. Training one hundred would cost ten thousand points, which was too expensive. Although he had accrued twenty-six thousand points over half a year due to Korolya’s continuous warfare and monthly Grace point rewards, Gu Hang was unwilling to spend them all at once.
Excluding twenty or thirty individuals who were unsuitable due to age or physical issues, he only trained fifty; another twenty were placed in the Mage Academy to learn at their own pace, without hurry.
He wanted to first see the actual effect the Spiritual Energy group could achieve, then decide whether to keep it as it was or to expand its scale in the future.
Speaking of the Psychic Cultivator’s Association, the combination of these two had given Gu Hang another surprise.
He was now an official member of the Psychic Cultivator’s Association, and his status was quite decent. Therefore, within the scope of his access, he found something of great interest among some documents: Spiritual Energy teleportation.
This was a “spell”, or rather a training method, that enabled Spiritual Energy users to master this ability, teleporting themselves or others over uncertain distances with variable precision. Moreover, it was possible to inscribe the corresponding arrays, combining the powers of multiple Spiritual Energy users for group teleportation.
Usually, training a Spiritual Energy user to master this technique was very time-consuming.
But among the Spiritual Energy talents found on Rage Owl Star, there were two individuals with space-related Spiritual Energy talents.
They naturally met the requirements for using this ability, and Gu Hang selected Dannie Dress, the one with better talent. After completing the training, there were only three individuals who possessed C-level Spiritual Energy abilities, while all the rest were at D-level, and Dress was one of them.
The former was equivalent to the Spiritual Energy intensity Gu Hang had at level 3, while the latter only had the strength he possessed at level 1.
Worth additional mention was that Gu Hang also found a person with Spiritual Energy talent within the Phoenix, namely Henrik Larson. His talent was actually average, but becoming an Interstellar Warrior seemed to stimulate his talent, as if it made him one of the three who possessed C-level Spiritual Energy strength, and also enabled the Phoenix Battle Group to have the capacity to establish a ‘think tank’.
Some Starfighter Battle Groups have the position of think tank, representing the Spiritual Energy force within the group. Phoenix had it before, but it wasn’t valued nor strong.
Setting aside the think tank of a Battle Group with only one member for now, at least Gu Hang’s Storm Mage Corps was thus established.
And at the moment, using the Spiritual Energy teleportation array, they had a critical effect.
The anti-air system of Stefano’s royal city wasn’t something Wind Falcon could directly break through, and airborne drops were unreliable, but teleportation posed no problem.
Wind Falcon landed with them tens of kilometers outside Stefano’s capital, and they approached the city on foot, followed by a teleportation spell that sent the Interstellar Warriors and Spiritual Energy users together into the fortress castle, after which the massacre began.
The entire kingdom was decapitated, greatly advancing the progress of the war.
Not only did the other kingdoms of the Heijian Star not react in time, but even the Kingdom of Stefano itself was caught off guard.
While the King’s Council was still discussing how many reinforcements to assemble and the proportion of ‘contributions’ from each family, when Stefano’s own army of over a million had not completed their mobilization and assembly, the war was essentially over.
The alliance forces didn’t attempt to occupy the entire territory of the Kingdom of Stefano.
The area was too vast and populated, and the alliance couldn’t possibly disperse their precious forces.
They merely spent about half a month striking in various places, wiping out several stubborn resistance forces.
As long as they could leave the Kingdom of Stefano headless, that was enough.
The alliance didn’t immediately pursue establishing a reliable control here, only needing to ensure that no other ruling powers existed in this place.
This was actually hard to maintain for the long term, as something always fills a power vacuum.
But temporary control was sufficient for now.
As for the remaining million-strong army of the Kingdom of Stefano, it had already collapsed.