16: Chapter 16 Two races considered mortal enemies by the Empire signed an alliance right under Terra's nose.

At the lowest level of the Hive City Ruins, the black stone door opened completely three seconds after the Drone made contact.

Behind the door was not a tomb, not a mausoleum, nor any burial chamber piled with grave goods and murals such as a carbon-based civilization would build. Behind the door was a functioning hall of machines.

The floor was black living metal, the walls were black living metal, and the light source on the ceiling was not a lamp, but a cold green fluorescence emitted by the metal itself—each ray of light seemed to seep from within the metal, carrying a chill that had not extinguished in sixty million years.

Necrons architecture does not require decoration. The entire hall itself was a machine; every floor tile was a circuit, and every pillar was a data bus.

The flowing green light was not for illumination; it was a byproduct of information leaking as it was transmitted through a physical medium.

In the darkness deep within the hall, a sphere with a diameter of three meters was suspended. The surface of the sphere was composed of countless hexagonal micro-panels spliced together, each panel slowly rotating and adjusting its angle, emitting an extremely faint mechanical hum.

This was that Necron Node which had slumbered for sixty-two million years. It was not a corpse, not a wraith, not a wreck worn down of consciousness by time. It was an engineering node still executing its final directive.

Its core consciousness was intact, its logic clear, and its purpose definite. The reason it had remained here was not because it was broken, nor because of a malfunction, but simply because—the communication array was severed.

"New variables. You have arrived earlier than estimated." The voice of the Necron Node was written directly into the Brood Queen's Hive Mind terminal, clear, neat, and carrying a mechanical precision bordering on politeness, "Detected a large amount of newly added biomass units. Your engagement with the Imperium in orbit has concluded. The results—evaluated by carbon-based biological standards—are significant. Congratulations."

The Brood Queen marked this "congratulations" as "pending analysis"—a Necron AI congratulating a bug was a behavioral pattern worth studying in itself.

"Your antenna." The Brood Queen asked according to the will of the Overlord, getting straight to the point, "Location. Degree of damage. Repair capabilities required."

"The antenna is not on this planet where I reside," the Necron Node said.

"It is in the synchronous orbit of the fourth planet in your star system, specifically positioned at the L4 Lagrange point of that planet. This planet was named 'Silent Tomb-7' by my creators before I existed. The main structure of the antenna is intact, but its quantum entanglement communication core was pierced by a Warp storm during a jump sixty-two million years ago—accurately speaking, one of the entangled particles was swallowed by the Warp, while the other remains in the transmitter. Communication was severed as a result. I have been trapped on this planet, unable to synchronize data with the master control matrix. I have waited for sixty-two million years."

"You need a new entangled particle."

"Yes. To be precise, I need a quantum entanglement source with sufficient Warp penetration. Your biotechnology—forgive my frankness—is unlikely to directly manufacture such particles. But the energy weapon explosions you demonstrated in orbit just now naturally generate short-lived entangled state particles. If you can collect enough samples, and through screening and purification, you will have a non-traditional alternative path. The probability of repairing the antenna will reach 72 percent."

The Necron added that it could provide precise collection coordinates, quantum state stability conditions, and the docking protocols for the antenna. In exchange, it was willing to hand over the complete analysis of Imperial psychic powers from its database—including anatomical charts of human Psykers, the operational mechanism of the Astronomican, and the hypothesis regarding the essence of the Emperor—to The Swarm.

"Show the data first. Exchange after verification."

The sphere in the center of the hall suddenly lit up. Green light shot out from every hexagonal panel, projecting a holographic image into the air in front of the Brood Queen. It was not a three-dimensional image, but four-dimensional—a four-dimensional data stream with a timeline; every data point could be dragged forward or backward along the timeline to view its evolutionary trajectory across different historical periods.

The Brood Queen spent a few minutes browsing the catalog of this data. It saw the records of humanity's first discovery of the Warp, saw the genetic map of Psykers, a nearly complete comparative index.

The Imperium used soul-binding rituals and the holy power of the Emperor to protect its Psykers, while the Emperor himself—the database described him as a "Warp will aggregate" formed by the collective sacrifice of ancient shamans, but the Necrons preferred to call him a deliberately artificial, meticulously precise engineering product. He was a permanent anchor point forged by humanity in prehistoric times, casting all their faith in order and immortality into it, used to resist the older and uncontrollable Chaos entities in the Warp.

After receiving the data forwarded by the Brood Queen, the Overlord focused all its computing resources on this document. The Necrons' data was extremely detailed, in some places even exceeding the Imperium's own understanding, but the most critical information was deliberately left in the encrypted layer—the Necron Node had only opened the first and second layers of data; deeper content required the antenna repair to be completed before it could be decrypted.

Making a deal with an old machine that had lived for sixty million years was not without risk, but the opportunity to directly understand the essence of Imperial psychic powers was something The Swarm could not obtain through other channels.

"Transaction accepted. The Drone collection team has already departed. The research and development of the Brood Lord embryo will proceed simultaneously—Necron orbital technology will serve as a design reference."

At the lowest level of the Hive City Ruins, the Drones began digging deep toward the fourth level according to the coordinate map provided by the Necron Node. The signal of an adamantium-rich vein flickered with enticing density readings at a depth of four hundred meters underground.

In orbit, the corpses of vacuum Drones attached to the wreckage of the Imperium continued to provide negative pressure circulation data for the brood nest incubation system. In the underground hive, the Drones were expanding the Brood Lord incubation chamber, and the antenna docking protocol provided by the Necron Node had already begun to be imported into the embryo's design template.

The Necron Node watched The Swarm's Drones crawl across the floor of its hall and remained silent for a few seconds. Then it proactively sent a brief follow-up message:

"You are the first entity in sixty-two million years to respond to my signal. New variables, I do not know what you will eventually become, but I hope it is not an enemy. I will faithfully record your entire evolutionary process."

This statement did not sound like diplomatic rhetoric; it was more like a statement of fact—crisp, clear, without added emotional judgment, yet without concealing expectation.

The Brood Queen forwarded the original words of the Necron Node to the Overlord. The Overlord stored this sentence in its analysis sequence and did not delete it.