25: Chapter 25 Iron Defense Line

On the morning of the first anniversary of his transmigration, Lin Mo was awakened by sunlight—not the dim, yellow light filtering through oiled paper, but light streaming in through the glass window of the Archon's office.

He sat on the edge of the bed and took a few seconds to realize that the oiled paper on the windows had been replaced by real flat glass.

This glass was produced by the town's newly commissioned glass workshop, located in a place he had never expected to be associated with glass manufacturing—the person in charge of the workshop was a female worker who had previously done quartz sorting in the Mining City; she had recognized that the discarded siliceous ore in the Mining City could be used to smelt glass.

When Lin Mo passed by the workshop and saw those waste slags turned into transparent sheets, he felt that the resource chain of this world was more flexible than he had imagined.

He stood at the entrance of the workshop for a while, watching the female worker use crude tools to flatten and thin the molten glass, her movements as precise as if she had done it ten thousand times.

She noticed Lin Mo at the door but merely nodded, not stopping the work in her hands.

He did not go in to disturb her, but he noted down her name—Su Min.

Later, on the material distribution list, he created a separate entry for the glass workshop with a note: Priority Supply.

One year ago today, he had been chased by an orc into Blackstone Village, nearly dying in the jungle.

One year later, he was working behind a real glass window.

The villagers called the bespectacled outsider "Lord Baron," although he never let anyone address him that way to his face.

Locke raised a flag in the square—Lin Mo had spent several days drawing a minimalist design on paper: a shattered star emitting its first ray of light.

Locke had made it using pieced-together fabric.

There was no flagpole, so Locke used a whittled tree trunk as a substitute, and the rope was a strap salvaged from an old tent.

When it was raised, the flag twisted in the wind, and Locke stood below adjusting it for a long time before it unfurled properly.

When hanging the flag, Locke said it was time to give it a name.

Lin Mo thought for a long time.

He spoke the four characters he had taken nearly a year to understand.

Shattered Dawn.

Locke asked what these four characters meant.

Lin Mo looked at the flag unfurling in the morning light and said something that sounded less like an explanation and more like talking to himself: "The core logic of the Empire is: for the continuation of civilization, sacrificing a minority is necessary. The answer of Chaos is: civilization is unnecessary, and people should live according to their own desires. I disagree with both of these paths. I believe that people can be neither sacrificed nor fall into madness—as long as you give them something worth protecting."

Locke did not speak.

He did not understand most of the vocabulary in the latter half of what Lin Mo said—but he understood a part of the first half: "So, your flag means—not sacrificing us?"

"Not sacrificing you," Lin Mo said.

Before anyone knew it, quite a few people were standing in the square.

They looked over from their respective door cracks, workshop windows, and field ridges, watching the flag unfurl in the morning breeze.

No one took the lead in applauding or cheering; instead, some people just stood at their own doorways, heads tilted back, looking at the flag, watching it for longer than they had watched anything else.

An elderly woman wiped her hands on her apron, stood on her threshold, squinted, and watched for a good while before turning back into the house—the expression on her face when she turned was not excitement, but a kind of reassurance.

It was as if she had finally seen someone take this group of drifters seriously.

The chaos attention level gradually fell back to fifty at the end of the volume.

The golden stream of light from the mirror of the emperor hung quietly at the edge of his vision, like a signal lamp that never went out.

Yang Shitou's shooting assessment excellence rate exceeded eighty percent; those recruits who could not even pull the trigger steadily when they first touched a gun were already capable of hitting scores close to the passing line on moving targets.

Old Tom's steam forging hammer forged new weapons and equipment for the garrison day and night—the sound of the hammer falling rang from dawn till late at night, like the heartbeat of the entire town.

Freshly forged gun barrels and blade blanks were piled at the entrance of the Arsenal, stacked neatly, waiting to be further processed and assembled.

Alice stood at the entrance of the medical station, the midday sun falling on her silver-white hair.

She watched the flag fluttering over the square—the shattered star, the blooming light—for a very, very long time.

A wounded soldier called out to her from behind; she did not respond immediately, taking two seconds before turning around.

She looked down at the suppression ring on her wrist.

The ring was still there, cold against her skin.

But when her gaze shifted away from the flag, a glimmer flashed in the depths of her eyes—brighter than sunlight, and more fleeting than sunlight.

When she walked into the medical station, her steps were lighter than usual, a change she herself did not even notice.

On a Chaos cruiser about three weeks' voyage from Blackstone Town, a person wearing a black robe was contemplating a star map.

Beside him lay an intercepted Imperial communication record, marked with a coordinate—the Eastern Star Sector, the area around Hope Star, a point that had recently begun to appear frequently on the Warp fluctuation radar.

He remembered the old man who had shared half a piece of compressed biscuit with him in the ruins.

The old man said nothing, just shoved the biscuit into his hand and pointed to the ridge in the east—[There are people over there. They are good people.] That was the first affirmative sentence Lin Mo had heard on this planet.

The black-robed person drew a circle on that coordinate with his finger.

His nails were neatly trimmed, like someone who took his appearance seriously—but embedded in the crevice of his thumb nail was a dried, dark red stain, as if it had been stained a long time ago and could never be washed off.

He said a sentence to the Psyker behind him.

His voice was as calm as if he were discussing a dinner menu.

"At that coordinate, someone has started to look in the mirror."

The Psyker did not understand the meaning of this sentence but did not dare to ask.

The black-robed person stood up and walked toward the bridge.

As the hem of his robe swept across the floor, half a badge was revealed—it was the badge of the Inquisition, but it had been deeply gouged by a sharp weapon.

The Chaos cruiser changed its course.

Its new course pointed to a coordinate that had not even been officially recorded on the Imperial star map yet—Blackstone Town.

Volume 1: Survival on an Alien Planet, End.

---

Late that night, Lin Mo walked alone up to the ridge on the north side of the town.

Looking down from here, Blackstone Town resembled scattered shards of silver under the moonlight—sporadic lights, steam above the Arsenal, and the moving shadows of figures in the firelight on the sentry towers.

He stood on the ridge for a long time, letting the cold wind blow over him.

He remembered the old man who had shared half a piece of compressed biscuit with him in the ruins.

The old man said nothing, just shoved the biscuit into his hand and pointed to the ridge in the east—[There are people over there. They are good people.] That was the first affirmative sentence Lin Mo had heard on this planet.

Three months ago, he was still a product manager sitting in a cubicle writing PRDs.

Now he stood on a planet that had not even been officially recorded on the Imperial star map, with a town behind him that was about to have a name.

He did not know how long this path would last, nor did he know what that golden figure really wanted him to do.

But he knew one thing—he was no longer just "not wanting to die."

He wanted to see what this village, forgotten by the Empire in a corner of the universe, would eventually grow into.

He did not look back as he walked down from the ridge.

The night wind blew from behind him, carrying the cooking smoke of Blackstone Town toward the direction he was about to head—the path of the next volume begins at the end of the night wind.

That night, Lin Mo sat alone in the Archon's office for a long time.

The flag had already been taken down from the square—Locke said the wind was strong at night, so it was taken down to prevent wear and tear.

But those four characters still lingered in his mind, undissipated.

Shattered Dawn.

A year ago, he was a man fleeing in the face of death, armed only with high school chemistry knowledge; a year later, he was the flag designer for a place with a name on this planet.

He wrote a line in his notebook, then crossed it out, then wrote it again, and did not cross it out again: "I am no longer a person on the run."

This transformation was not generated at the moment some specific event occurred.

It was accumulated bit by bit, through every moment over the year when he did not run, every moment he turned around to face things.

He pressed his palm against that line of text, sitting there without moving.

Then he stood up and locked the notebook into the desk drawer; what he locked away was not just this line of text—it was the final period on the fact that "Lin Mo is a person who defends passively."

Starting tomorrow, he would take the initiative.

---

The arrival of Obsidian caused a subtle change in the trade pattern of Blackstone Village.

This merchant was not as slick as Kahn—he was more direct, more utilitarian, and more efficient.

While unloading, he had already gotten a rough idea of Blackstone Village's supplies, and before leaving, he made a proposal to him that he could not refuse: "I need a stable weapon supplier. You seem to have that potential."

His tone did not sound like a suggestion, but more like stating a fact.

When he spoke, his eyes did not look at Lin Mo's face—his gaze rested on the Arsenal gate behind Old Tom, as if estimating the workshop's daily output.

He did not answer immediately.

He glanced at Old Tom—Old Tom was inspecting a crate of tool steel brought by Obsidian, tapping the edge with his hand and listening to the resonance.

Old Tom looked up and nodded at him.

Lin Mo turned to Obsidian: "Let's talk terms."

This was the first time Blackstone Village had conducted trade negotiations with the outside world as an entity with bargaining power.

It was not begging, not charity—it was a transaction.

The two sides talked for nearly two hours under an oil lamp, finalizing the supply cycle, quantity specifications, and settlement methods point by point.

Obsidian insisted on settling with ammunition, while Lin Mo insisted on retaining a portion of the quota for barter exchange.

In the end, both sides took a step back—eight parts ammunition, two parts goods.

When Obsidian left, there was no expression on his face, but before boarding the ship, he looked back at the town; that gaze did not look like he was looking at a temporary stronghold, but more like he was evaluating an investment worth holding for the long term.

Obsidian's second batch of goods arrived on a moonless night.

Kahn also came when the goods were being unloaded—he had hitched a ride on Obsidian's ship.

When Kahn jumped off the ship, he patted the dust off his clothes, and the first thing he said to him was: "Your name has started to be mentioned on Terra. Not in a bad way."

Lin Mo listened under the oil lamp as Kahn finished relaying the news he had brought back from Terra—someone in the bureaucratic system of the Eastern Star Sector had noticed Blackstone Village's production data and was investigating upwards.

They were not coming to collect taxes, but to "evaluate."

Kahn's source was unsure whether this evaluation was good or bad.

Lin Mo was silent for a moment after hearing this.

He asked Kahn to pass on a new trade list to the person who had noticed him—not a bribe, but to let that person know: Blackstone Village could do more than what was written on the production data.

When Kahn took the list, he glanced at it and whistled.

The items on the list covered weapon accessories, calibration parts for simple communication equipment, and rough blanks for several types of precision parts—things that, outside of Blackstone Village, were usually only produced by official Imperial military suppliers.

After Kahn's ship left, Lin Mo checked the material list of Blackstone Town again that night—food stocks, ammunition inventory, and medical supplies.

All three figures were positive, but the growth was slow.

He wrote a conclusion at the end of the list: The goal of self-sufficiency was harder to achieve than expected.

He flipped through the production optimization plan extracted by Old Tom from the STC core again and found that the production bottleneck mainly lay in raw material supply—the mining speed of ore and coal could not keep up with the processing speed.

After thinking about it, he wrote a line in the remarks column of the list: A second ore source must be opened up in the near future.

He closed the ledger in the faint light of dawn and began to calculate his next plan.

Short-term problems could be solved by trade and capture, but long-term problems—energy, population, territory—required more fundamental solutions.

He had to expand.

Not out of ambition, but because without expansion, he would run out of breath in the supply chain bottleneck.

*— — Self-check system · Auto-log*

*[The mighty pass is like iron, yet today we stride across it from the beginning.]*

*— — Mao Zedong, "Yi Qin E · Loushan Pass". One of the memory fragments of the mirror of the emperor*