21: Chapter 22 Chaos Psychic

The battle for the Mining City lasted for two days and one night. The main force advanced from three sides simultaneously, while Locke used the firepower of flintlock muskets to suppress the counterattacks of the Chaos defenders from the front. The situation was smoother than expected—not because the Chaos defenders were weak, but because Lin Mo constantly fine-tuned the formation during the frontal advance to reduce attrition at the contact points. He was fighting a "war of attrition"—not competing over who had more men, but rather who had a higher unit firepower exchange ratio. The sound of artillery echoed through the buildings of the Mining City for two days and one night; the smoke from the flintlock muskets mixed with the dust kicked up from the ruins, staining the sky into a grayish-yellow curtain. Locke had suffered a gash on his shoulder from shrapnel during the first day of fighting, but he simply tore off a piece of cloth to bandage it and did not leave the front line.

The Chaos Psyker was hiding in a tower at the center of the Mining City. When Lin Mo led the decapitation squad to infiltrate near the tower, it felt a physical sense of oppression—as if the air had suddenly thickened. The Chaos guards at the tower entrance noticed them but did not attack immediately—they were waiting for something. At the edge of Lin Mo's vision, golden light began to flicker frequently, and the warning signal pulsed steadily like a heartbeat. On the steps leading to the tower, several corpses of Chaos guards lay scattered about—not killed by the decapitation squad, but dead for a long time before they had arrived. The bodies had not been disposed of; they were just piled there, beginning to rot. Chaos did not care about those who died, even if they were its own people.

When he rushed into the tower, the Chaos Psyker was already waiting for him. It was a middle-aged man wearing tattered Imperial Psyker robes, wrapped in iron chains, with Chaos runes carved all over its exposed skin.

When it saw Lin Mo, it did not attack immediately. It spoke, its voice sounding like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing against each other: "You came from the outside. You carry things on you that do not belong to this world."

The way time passed on this planet was not quite the same as on Earth. There were no mobile phones to remind him of meetings, no calendars to tell him what day of the week it was. There were only sunrises and sunsets, only battle and calm, only living and dying. He used vertical lines in a notebook to record the days, drawing a horizontal line across every five. This primitive counting method made him feel secure—at least he still knew what day he was on.

"That thing," it pointed to Lin Mo's forehead, "—it wants to protect you. But it also attracts us. The more you use it, the more people will come looking for you. It's not because I hate you—it's because you are interesting."

It grinned, revealing teeth eroded to a gray color by Chaos energy. "You think you are protecting something. But do you know what the most ironic thing in this world is? The Lords of Chaos never lie. Khorne gives you courage, Tzeentch gives you wisdom, Nurgle gives you resilience, Slaanesh gives you passion—what they give is real. On the contrary, that dried-up corpse of an Emperor of yours, sitting on the Golden Toilet, gives you nothing but lets you kneel and wait for death."

Lin Mo fired. The bullet slowed down significantly as it passed through the energy barrier around the Chaos Psyker—but Alice acted at that very instant. She had raised her hand before Lin Mo even pulled the trigger; she didn't attack, but instead did something more precise: she tore a tiny fissure in the psychic barrier. The bullet passed through that fissure and struck the Chaos Psyker in the thigh.

The Chaos Psyker took a step back, looked down at the wound, then looked up at Alice, and suddenly grinned. It pointed in Alice's direction: "Your suppression ring is about to give out."

The moment Lin Mo fired the second shot, the suppression ring on Alice's wrist made a shattering sound. Silver cracks spread across the surface of the ring—not shattered by external force, but unable to withstand the energy surging from within her. The instant the fragments of the suppression ring hit the ground, a pale golden light rippled out from Alice, sweeping across the entire tower.

The Chaos Psyker's smile froze. Its body began to carbonize from the edges toward the center—not burned by flames, but decomposed at a molecular level by a purer form of energy. Before it vanished, it uttered its last few syllables: "Your soul—is so pure—unlike anyone from this era—"

It did not finish its sentence. It turned into a pile of ashes.

The chaos attention level jumped from fifty-two to fifty-eight. Lin Mo watched as the Chaos Psyker's corpse turned to ash before him. The tower suddenly went quiet—the sound of gunfire in the distance continued, but inside the tower, there was no sound other than the faint breathing of the two people. He looked back at Alice—her hair had returned to silver-white, but the tips still retained a faint, almost invisible golden hue. The fragments of the suppression ring were scattered at her feet. She looked down at her wrist—a wrist without a suppression ring for the first time—and remained silent for a long time.

The golden light at the edge of his vision flickered imperceptibly.

It was not data, not parameters—it was a line of poetry. It was as if someone had crumpled up a piece of paper covered in writing and stuffed it into his brain; he didn't have time to unfold it, only catching one line:

[ Do you not see the head of Qinghai, where ancient bones lie uncollected? ]

—Du Fu, "Song of the War-Chariots." He was stunned—why would there be Earth poetry in the Emperor's memories?

"Can you still put it on?" Lin Mo asked.

"There are spares in the warehouse," she said. But she didn't say whether she wanted to wear one or not.

The fragments of the suppression ring were scattered on the floor of the tower,

like the remains of shackles that had been broken free.

Reconnaissance on the outskirts of the Mining City went smoother than expected. At dusk, Locke climbed up a pile of abandoned slag and observed the full view of the Mining City using a captured Imperial telescope. The Chaos stronghold was larger than described in the intelligence—but Locke noticed a key detail: they had no perimeter guards. This was not negligence; it was confidence. They felt they were safe enough in this position.

[What is this thing?] Someone poked the metal fragments on the ground with a gun barrel.

[Don't touch it.] Lin Mo stopped him, [It might be a Chaos mark.]

Locke slid down from the slag pile and brushed the dust off his hands. He re-planned the attack route in his mind. The original plan for a frontal assault was crossed out—replaced by a feint on the east side and a breakthrough on the west. He drew the new plan in the mud with a twig, then looked up at Lin Mo. "What do you think?" He crouched down to look at the line, using the twig to add an arrowhead to the end of the line—pointing to the tower in the center of the Mining City. Locke looked at it for a few seconds and nodded.

When the walls of the Mining City appeared in his field of vision, Lin Mo observed them through the telescope for a long time. The damage to the wall was more severe than reported—there was a collapse of about a dozen meters in the eastern section, temporarily filled with abandoned mine carts and sandbags. That gap was an obvious attack point, but it could also be a trap. The Chaos defenders were waiting for the attacking force to break through there, having set up crossfire on the other side of the gap.

Locke crouched behind a rock, listened to Lin Mo's analysis, remained silent for a few seconds, then said: "You mean, going in through the gap will get people killed, but we have to go through the gap?" Lin Mo nodded. "Then we'll go in with fewer deaths." After saying this, Locke began to redeploy the attack sequence. He organized the ten most elite men into an assault group to lead the way, with the rest divided into two groups to support from the flanks. If Chaos had set up crossfire behind the gap, the elite group could take the brunt of the first wave of attacks, buying time for the flanks to flank them. This was the first time Blackstone Village had used "cannon fodder tactics" in an attack—but there was no cannon fodder in Locke's elite group.

After the battle, Locke stood in the ruins of the Mining City. After taking inventory of the captured supplies, he discovered a detail—several pieces of the Chaos guards' equipment were not standard issue, but were extremely well-maintained, as if they had just been taken out of a warehouse. They were not old goods captured from the battlefield, but new goods sent by someone specifically. He crouched down to examine one of the weapons; the serial number on the barrel had been filed off, but the foundry mark on the bottom remained.

Locke placed the weapon on his knees and traced the foundry mark with his finger—the Imperial mark, he recognized it. He did not tell Lin Mo about this, instead recording the characteristics of the equipment's serial numbers in that day's combat log, then locking the log into the transport ship's file box. Some information didn't need to be spoken of in a rush; let it sit first, and wait for it to surface on its own.

After the battle for the Mining City, Lin Mo found a miner's roster in the ruins that had not been burned. The cover was stained with ash and dried blood, but most of the inner pages were intact. He turned to the last page and saw the last attendance record before the Mining City was captured—the attendance was far below full capacity. Most of the miners had already left before Chaos arrived. Those who stayed behind had done so voluntarily. Lin Mo handed the roster to Wang Defu. The old man said nothing, but when he took the roster, his hands were steady. He flipped through a few pages, recognizing some familiar names—all people he had mined ore with underground during the years he worked at the mine. He did not cry; he simply closed the roster, tucked it into his coat, and turned to check the supplies cleared from the ruins.

* But she did not say—whether she wanted to wear it.

The curve of the chaos attention level rose slowly in the night,

like a warning signal that no one had yet understood.

—Lin Mo · Chaos Arc Initial Assessment

Another day had ended. The number of days he had spent on this planet was slowly becoming a number he dared not think about too closely. But every day he was still alive—that was enough.

The night wind blew again. This gust was cooler than the last, carrying a scent of mixed metal and soil. He wrapped himself tighter in the coarse cloth coat that had already worn frayed at the edges—it was given to him by the villagers, and it was much warmer than the T-shirt he had been wearing when he transmigrated.