Cael screamed out in joy, dropping to his knees. He continuously pumped his fists out in excitement. He had managed to just make it through.

All his work, all of his dedication. It amounted to something.

This form of success and achievement was something he was new to. On the combat side of things, even victories in spars were something he came by extremely rarely.

However, during his time as a mechanic. He had been given time to shine. He could really see himself for the successful person that he was.

Nevertheless, he basked in his success for a time before realising that he now had less than a day to get to Oseron.

The capital was on a totally different planet to Carlo City, and the planet was almost an urban agglomeration in itself.

Luckily, large planes were able to distort spacetime itself to gain access to faster-than-light travel.

This meant that it really wouldn’t take that long for Cael to reach the capital of the vast empire.

He was determined to perform at this upcoming event, but also felt eager to just see the vast capital. Just off pure population alone, the city was going to be 10X bigger than Carlo City and Cael looked out his window to see an extensive skyline that easily stretched across his expansive view.

The scale was hard for him to conceptualise in his mind, and he was greatly anticipating whatever was up next.

In half a day, Cael had already packed his things and bought a ticket to board the spaceship of the company, Cria Flights. This was a company servicing flights across the expansive area within and surrounding the Cria Star System.

This incorporated all the Soburg Empire, and covered its colonies found in other neighbouring star systems.

Arriving at the spaceport with his several pieces of luggage, he arrived at a large, resort-like spacecraft.

It was almost like a donut, with a central area that had straight walkways to connect the outer edge, and the inner dome. It was cloaked in an attractive silver gleam, with golden light appearing from the several windows located across it.

The craft was large enough to hold hundreds of people at once, and it made sense. Its maximum capacity was 1000, and wasn’t exactly meant to make people feel like they had large amounts of space and room.

However, the craft didn’t feel overcrowded either.

Still with well over 300,000 dollars to work with, his ticket of $11,000 really didn’t put a dent in his earnings. He even felt tempted to have a better experience over the flight but didn’t see a need to do so.

Utilising the power of immense speed, this craft could reach Oseron in about 10 hours. Oseron was within the same solar system as Saevis -the planet Carlo City was located- so it didn’t have to use FTL travel.

That was only for reaching the empire’s interstellar colonies.

Entering the ring-like aircraft through a wide flight of stairs, the massive vehicle slowly rolled out onto one of tens of space-pads that resembled helipads.

However, they were made of metal, and had to be much larger to accommodate the enormous spacefaring vehicles that existed.

Within, each person was designated a small room that was almost like a tiny prison cell. It was about 2.5 metres wide and tall, which was just enough to have a bed that people could sleep on.

These were rooms located in the ‘ring’ section of the spacecraft. In its centre, the ‘dome’, was the residential area.

This contained places like bars, restaurants, convenience stores, and the like. It spanned several floors and was the main cash cow for Cria Flights.

Each person was forced to remain within their own designated room, with a holographic individual instructing them on how to strap themselves in during take-off. The journey wasn’t especially rough during this part, and consisted of durable straps being tightly placed from one side of the bed to the other, to keep the passenger strapped in.

Their arms could be left to freely move, though, along with their head and neck.

VRRR!!!!

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Vibrations could be felt from all around Cael, and he looked out to the circular window beside him. This gave him a clear view of the overcast grey sky of Carlo City, along with the several spacecraft slowly lifting along with this one.

Soon, about a minute after this slow take-off, it started reaching extremely high altitudes.

Its speed was barely noticeable, but was now extremely high.

The sky darkened until it was a complete black, and the thin ring of blue girdled the image of Saevis from Cael’s view.

In a flash, the ship was off and left the planet far behind. Without air to act as resistance, it could move much faster and fuel wasn’t as much of an issue during this stage of the journey.

Now in this stage of the flight, the passengers were permitted to free themselves of their restraints and explore what was on offer for them in the spaceship.

Cael decided to spend little to keep as much for his business as possible. Here, he just went window shopping, buying items like clothes and a new projector that he liked the look of.

The power efficiency was now significantly greater than his own, and it came with a month free of the TechForge Simulation Lab. Its computational power was substantially greater than his previous device and resembled a cuboidal device like phones of ancient times.

Soon, Cael could see the destination planet, named the Capital Planet. For short, people referred to it as TCP, since the capital planet was a little long-winded.

Surrounded by midnight black, the sea blue planet ahead of him was littered with several small islands and archipelagos, along with a major green-yellow landmass near its centre.

The glistening white stars surrounding the growing planet left Cael awestruck. All he could do was look out this rounded window in the halls of the spaceship with a smile.

“Oseron, here I come!”

For his stay in Oseron, he stayed at a standard 3-star hotel. Features within hotels became much cheaper and allowed people with more humble origins to still bask in the enjoyment of going to different planets and nations.

3-star hotels were still very accommodating, and services like included breakfast became a standard for almost all hotels. Extra features of hotelling had become standard too, so 3-stars no longer exuded a sense of mediocrity at all.

Before they landed, he was sure that he had noted over 150 helipads and several tens of runways.

Cael was luckily able to transport his luggage right to his hotel through the use of his teleporter. This then allowed to walk around Oseron’s massive spaceport more spaciously.

The best way to describe the place was that it was like a collection of stadiums that had been connected through gigantic pathways for people to walk across.

The area was filled with the chaotic din. Thousands of people surrounded Cael and were chatting and clattering away, minding their business as they traversed this massive spaceport.

This was surprisingly one of the less busy spaceports. The main spaceports near the centre of the city were complete mayhem. Cael didn’t have the patience nor desire to even put up with any of that, as this havoc was already enough for him.

The spaceport was large enough to be labelled a city on its own and had over 50,000 people working there.

Security was a hassle with so many passengers but was made slightly quicker simply due to the sheer size of the place.

In about 2 hours, Cael was free and ready to proceed. Leaving through a wall of automatic doors to open onto a main street, Cael was met by the massive skyline of Oseron.

Almost every single glass skyscraper that he noticed was tall enough to pierce the clouds.

They displayed animation advertisements along their glass walls, which were of vibrant, alluring colours. Just ahead of him, several aircars and airbuses whizzed past in the 8-lane road that remained ahead of him.

He could barely see it due to the volume of parked cars, and it looked to stretch on forever as he looked left and right.

Cael simply boarded the next airbus that took him to his hotel, and he was off soon after.

With not too much time before the next event, Cael had to be ready to go rather quickly. He made sure to sleep on the spaceship so that he didn’t need to now, even if he knew that his jetlag would still mess him up.

Crossing planets was easy to deal with, because of time zones. However, crossing solar systems and galaxies always made this far more troubling.

The event was going to begin in the centre of the city, but it started at the early morning for times on this planet. This stopped competitors getting stuck up in severe congestion before arriving.

Cael managed to get an airbus that swiftly took him to the arena, and he was astounded by the city that he was drawing closer to.

The towers were not only tall, but exceptionally wide. The roads, even in the city centre, were five lines on each side, and the motorways surrounding the planet sometimes had as much as 10 lines on each side to make sure traffic never got too bad.

Even with so many people living on the planet, 10 lanes was enough since the road system of the planet was so dense. They made sure to have alternative routes to alternative routes, just so that roads wouldn’t get congested when there was a common destination in mind for drivers.

Cael eventually arrived at the arena that stretched from one side of his view to the other. Not only that, but it was tall enough to eclipse some skyscrapers within Carlo City.

The stadium had a massive capacity of about 1 million people.

Of course, stadiums didn’t grow much past this, because those at the back were usually just people with mana. Those without it would struggle to see so far into the main arena ring with unenhanced vision and perception.

Here, he was swiftly asked for identification before entering.

“Identification please.” A man at a counter monotonously replied.

He had several holographic panels in front of him and didn’t show a shed of interest in Cael’s presence.

Cael displayed his ID card in the form of a hologram, throwing the panel toward the man at the counter.

He then grabbed it himself, enlarging it to get a clearer view of the displayed information. Looking at the face displayed, he looked back to Cael and then revealed a camera drone that flew over the glass barricade between them.

The camera sent a thin line of laser light across the boy’s face. It went from his head to his neck, then shone with a green light before returning to the counter.

“You’re free to go. Enjoy your event.” The man said, without even lifting his eyes to meet Cael’s.