Three Great Conglomerates

Tu Ran didn't know much about the Xie family as a whole. All she'd gleaned from the original body's memories was that Xie Zhao and Xie Xu were brothers—nothing beyond that.

The original body had been lovesick, hanging on Xie Xu's every word without ever prying into his private affairs.

Since arriving in this world, she'd learned from some old, tattered paper publications on the female lead's bookshelf that the entire Federation was carved up among three great families.

These three families were the Pang family, the Xie family, and the Wells family.

The Pang family held the dominant position in the Federation's mechanical prosthetic manufacturing industry, standing unchallenged for decades. According to statistics, since the founding of their prosthetic company, their sales alone were enough to allocate two prosthetics to each of the Federation's ten billion people.

The profits involved were unimaginable.

Additionally, the Pang family held considerable standing in gene-cultivated pet manufacturing and artificial plant cultivation.

For instance, Natural Source Company belonged to the Pang family. Known throughout the Federation for producing green, all-natural food, it also served as the dividing line between ordinary citizens and the federal elite.

An ordinary person would have to spend an entire year's salary to afford just one of their chickens for a taste, while the Federation's wealthy enjoyed all-natural green food at every single meal.

The Wells family, meanwhile, dominated a massive share of the pharmaceutical industry. Their thousands upon thousands of hospitals were scattered across every corner of the Federation's forty-two states, and they maintained a very close partnership with the Pang family's prosthetic company.

The Pang family supplied the mechanical prosthetics, and the hospitals under the Wells family sold them to their customers, helping them replace their limbs with brand-new, sturdy ones.

Moreover, the Wells family had a near-monopoly on the Federation's entire entertainment industry. The dazzling stars on the flashy billboards between the high-rises all came from Wells Entertainment.

Every time the Pang family invented the latest high-tech prosthetic, they'd hand it to the Wells family for a massive publicity push. Driven by entertainment celebrities, they'd stir up consumer desire among ordinary people, and crowds would flock to Wells-affiliated hospitals to swap in the newest model—both families profiting handsomely.

Compared to those two, the Xie family kept a much lower profile, but their presence was not to be underestimated.

The Xie family's main battlefield was the political arena.

The Federal Government governed a population of over ten billion across forty-two states. Its management framework was enormous, and correspondingly, the number of government officials within that system was staggering.

And the Xie family alone accounted for one-tenth of all federal government officials, with the overwhelming majority occupying the upper management class.

The upper management class differed from the middle management, which handled communications, and the lower class, which handled the fighting and killing.

The upper echelon consisted of people like Xie Xu, senior members of the Research Institute; Xie Zhao, commander of the Pioneer Team; or at the very least, deputy commanders like Li Wenchuan.

People like Tu Ran, pioneers who dealt with aliens on a daily basis, and the Executive Department guards who waded through bullets every day, all belonged to the lower class.

So what did one-tenth actually mean?

Keep in mind that the upper management class made up only one-fifth of all government personnel. If the Xie family alone held one-tenth, that meant half of the Federal Government's key officials came from the Xie family.

The remaining one-tenth was split into three portions: one for the Pang family, one for the Wells family, and the last tiny sliver for ordinary citizens who'd clawed their way up from the bottom with everything they had.

So it could be said that the Federal Government was almost entirely under the Xie family's control—the Xie family was the boss of the three great conglomerates.

Of course, if the Xie family hadn't been convincing in other areas, would the Pang and Wells families have allowed them to be the boss?

The industries propping up the Xie family's unshakable standing were weapons manufacturing and the artificial intelligence sector.

Weapons manufacturing went without saying. In a world where firearms were freely owned, riots broke out constantly, and the demand for weapons was enormous. Various private research institutes and black-market labs were all developing new weapons; new-concept arms hit the market at breakneck speed and went through rapid iterations. With weapons manufacturing backing them, the Xie family had no reason to fear anyone's defiance.

As for artificial intelligence—

"Zero," the AI that covered all forty-two states of the Federation, could process information uploaded from forty-two states simultaneously, achieving a computing speed of four billion billion operations per second. It had been created with investment from the Xie family, and its mainframe was deeply hidden somewhere in one of the Xie family's estates.

Zero had infiltrated nearly every corner of the Federation. No one could escape Zero's surveillance. By possessing Zero, the Xie family essentially held the pulse of the entire Federation.

The Xie family, the Pang family, and the Wells family—these three were the true puppeteers of the Federal Government, bona fide conglomerates that stood above ordinary people, and could even place themselves above the law.

Tu Ran stared at Xie Zhao's flawless face and narrowed her eyes. He was almost certainly a member of the Xie family, and Xie Xu should be as well.

Since Xie Xu had the backing of the Xie family, why would he privately establish his own research institute?

And as a senior member of the Research Institute with access to all their first-hand data, what was he still researching in his shabby private lab?

She couldn't figure it out. Too little information—she really couldn't figure it out.

Perhaps she'd been staring at Xie Zhao for too long, too intently, because he finally turned his gaze toward this very rude woman.

His dark green eyes held confusion and curiosity.

He had some impression of Tu Ran. He remembered that she'd performed admirably during the five-year special training at the Pioneer Team's founding, but had faded into obscurity ever since.

Pioneers who'd once been on her level had already been promoted to mid-level or senior pioneers.

Tu Ran snapped back to reality, withdrawing her blatant stare and fixing her eyes on the black table before her.

Xie Zhao was still looking at her.

She sensed it but pretended not to notice. She raised her arm to check the time on her communicator.

Nine fifty-five.

In five minutes, the meeting would begin. She looked around—somehow, most of the seats around the tables were already occupied.

Had she really been spacing out that long? She couldn't believe it.

The conference room was very quiet. Despite the crowd, no one spoke. Everyone's face was etched with exhaustion; they looked like they'd kill for a chance to just collapse and sleep.

Truth be told, after being on high alert inside the Threshold for over half a month—not daring to eat, not daring to sleep—if they'd managed to make it back alive, the proper thing would've been to let everyone rest first and hold the meeting afterward.

That's what Tu Ran thought, anyway. Unfortunately, she wasn't the commander, so her opinion carried no weight. She could only keep it to herself.

With five minutes until the meeting started, pioneers trickled in one after another.

Tu Ran happened to glance toward the door and caught a flash of a shimmering light screen.

A light screen? A psychic power?

Tu Ran's eyes flew wide as she traced the source of that green light screen.

It was Zhao Yan.

The man who'd stood watch with her on the fourth floor of Building B in the Inpatient Building.

The one who'd praised her for being brave.

The two of them had rested together in a cramped break room.

Zhao Yan didn't notice her gaze. He walked over to an empty seat across from her, toward the back, and sat down.