January 22 Incident

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This will be the second chapter this month.

What will happen to the Yi Empire...

- Kazuhiro Kasami

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January 22, 1750 (2032 in Japan)

Yi Empire, Capital Nanjing, Underground Nanjing City

On this day, Yi Dehong, Emperor of the Yi Empire, was once again looking over the document demanding an apology from the Waspaniat Kingdom.

After all this time, many of the Yi Empire's facilities exist underground. Originally, it was one of the remains created by ancient humans, and the Yi Empire arbitrarily built a city there. Most of the crops are grown above ground, and despite a population of 200 million people, the Yi Empire is self-sufficient in food at an astonishing 112%. If pre-transference Japan were to learn of this food situation, it would shed tears of blood and envy. The first Yi Emperor's idea of 'the people must never be allowed to starve' still hold true to the present day.

Moreover, the Yi Empire has taken advantage of its overwhelming food self-sufficiency to export a small amount of food to the Yetisk Empire. In fact, this is one thing that made the Yetisk Empire difficult to be aggressive toward the weaker Yi Empire. It is not so difficult to conquer the Yi Empire if Yetisk uses all of its power. However, if they burn this country to the ground as a result, much of the necessary food will not be available.

The overwhelming production capacity of the Yi Empire cannot be underestimated, since Yetisk's territory is this world's equivalent of Russia (which in reality is one of the world's leading wheat-producing countries), where even some foodstuffs are hard to come by. This also means that the Yetisk Empire, which is supposed to have jet planes and super-dreadnought battleships, is only skirmishing with the Yi Empire, which would have a technology gap of 30 to 40 years or more.

Aside from that, Yi Dehong, who was looking over the apology demand document, was surprised at its rather reasonable content by calmly reading it, but also showed his understanding of it.

"I see, I see. Looking at it again, it all seems to be fine to accept except for the fact that it will tarnish a fraction of our country's reputation... They will also hand over all the survivors of the destroyers. As expected from the bee-people's pacifism."

He was currently having people gather information about the Waspaniat Kingdom and Japan, but since the Sindhvan Community has stopped disclosing most of the information, he hadn't been able to get much done. The Sindhvan Community had not long ago notified the other countries of its intention to break its neutrality and join the Japan-led "World Federation."

At present, the Sindhvan Community is building up its military equipment, taking advantage of the overwhelming financial power it originally had and the money from oil discovered by Japan. They purchased two types of armored vehicles from the Divine Kingdom of Anubisius, rifles from the Grand Lago Kingdom, various used guided missiles and anti-tank weapons from Japan, and aircraft (in this case, Hilund fighters and T-7 trainers), and invited instructors from the Self-Defense Forces to begin operational training.

Since not only Japan but also other countries that came to operate various weapons wanted oil concessions (as for Anubisius, it turned out that some of the oil was produced in the southern part of Africa, so it was less dependent on Sindhvan than other countries by importing mining technology from Japan), countries were investing more money than ever in Sindhvan.

"We should consider our war record and somehow go easy on them. Then, we need to hear from the crews of the returning destroyers, reassess their war potential, and investigate the changes in their national strength... If we are wrong in our assessment, our country could go down the road of destruction. We must avoid that at all costs. The problem is how to contain the runaway military..."

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