28: Chapter 28 The Journey to the Stars Begins

Following the metal wall incident, Blackstone Town entered a period of relative calm. Lin Mo utilized this time to accomplish three things.

The first task: he had a simple perimeter wall built around the abandoned mine. It wasn't meant to keep people out—it was to keep out wild beasts and overly curious villagers. The wall's purpose wasn't a physical blockade, but a signal: this place is marked. Construction took five days, using harvested hardwood and scrap stone from the pit. Rock personally supervised the work, requiring every pillar to be struck three times with a hammer to ensure it wasn't loose before allowing the next one to proceed. When the wall was finished, Lin Mo went to inspect it and found that Rock had left observation holes at each of the four corners—not because he was told to, but because Rock felt they should be there. Lin Mo didn't say anything, but in his mind, he moved Rock's name from the 'Reliable Soldier' column to the 'Potential Commander' column.

The second task: he established a dedicated archives room next to the Town Hall. Wooden shelves held Marcus's hand-drawn map of the Eastern Star Sector—the edges of the paper were already frayed, and it was covered in coordinate markings repeatedly revised with charcoal pencils; the empty Imperial Logistics Department forms left by Cassius—those forms were messy in format but staggering in information density, where a fringe world with a population of less than fifty thousand was compressed into three rows of numbers; fragmented blueprints Old Tom extracted from the STC core—some half-drawn, some with only a single line of annotation and an arrow; and coordinate records from the underground shelter—the handwriting was scrawled, as if written by someone during a bumpy ride. This room, less than twenty square meters, became Blackstone Town's first true Intelligence Center. Lin Mo placed a wooden table in the center of the room, with an oil lamp and a stone slab for writing memos.

The third task: he had Rock select a group of people with basic literacy from the garrison—about twenty of them—to begin learning the interpretation of basic STC data from Old Tom. Old Tom's teaching method was blunt—he would toss a chip and a magnifying glass to a student and have them count the circuit paths themselves; if they were wrong, they started over until they got it right. This brutal teaching method was surprisingly effective: two weeks later, four people could independently distinguish the most common circuit modules on an STC chip. Old Tom privately told him that one young man was more composed than the others—while others grew impatient by the third count, that man counted seventeen times, only looking up once he was absolutely certain of his judgment. Lin Mo noted this detail but didn't immediately move the young man to more advanced work. It was better to let him stay rooted at the bottom for a while longer rather than pulling at the seedling to help it grow too early.

The chaos attention level was experiencing a slight rebound. It wasn't a defection, nor an invasion—it was Chaos recalibrating its level of focus on this planet. The gravitational pull of the name 'Blackstone Town' within the Warp was growing stronger, though it hadn't yet reached the threshold to trigger a new round of actual attacks.

That night, Rock walked straight into the Intelligence Center after returning from a patrol to the north. He didn't knock, placing a piece of grayish-white withered grass on the table in front of Lin Mo, and said with a grim face: 'To the north. About two days' journey. A patch of grassland is completely dead—not burned, not poisoned. When I stepped on it—the ground was hot.' When he said 'hot,' he unconsciously rubbed the back of his left hand with his right—that was the hand he'd used to brace himself when he tripped on the dead grass, and it still held a prickling, burning sensation. Lin Mo picked up the withered grass and examined it against the oil lamp. The blade showed no signs of charring, but it had begun to pulverize from the root, crumbling into grayish-white powder with a gentle squeeze. He put down the grass and said nothing, tucking it into the notebook next to the STC data slate Old Tom was deciphering—as a new, unclassified clue. As he tucked it in, his finger touched the powder, and his fingertip felt a faint heat, like the last trace of warmth left behind when that patch of grass was still alive.

Lin Mo only learned later that this planet had a designation on the Imperial star charts, but no one remembered its name. In the warhammer 40k universe, there are far more unnamed planets than named ones—they are just a string of numbers on a star chart, gathering dust in an archive, waiting for some battle destined to go unrecorded to wipe the numbers away.

A new system prompt silently surfaced at the edge of his vision: [mirror of the emperor · Environmental Scan Complete. Warp erosion residue detected—preliminary surface penetration level. Warning: This area has been marked. Recommended to trace the source and block the spread of contamination as soon as possible.] Lin Mo closed the prompt, his gaze lingering on the notebook for an extra moment. The system had only confirmed what he already suspected—this was more than just a patch of dead grass; this was the forces of Chaos testing the boundaries of the material realm. The threat to the north wasn't an accidental local phenomenon, but the starting point of a slowly spreading rift.

Lin Mo stood before the wall of the Intelligence Center, facing the full map of the Eastern Star Sector. His gaze swept from left to right—from the edges of the sketched coordinates to near the center—finally landing on a point marked 'Hope Star Communication Station (Abandoned)'. That was the last functional communication node mentioned in the records left by Cassius, which theoretically could still send and receive short-range Warp signals. If it was still there—even if only part of the equipment was operational—Blackstone Town would no longer have to rely on second-hand news from rogue traders to piece together external developments. The starting point of the expedition had been found.

A hand-drawn star chart hung on the wall,

Its edges already curled and frayed.

—The first arrow Lin Mo drew on the star chart the night before deciding on the expedition.

He glanced out the window. In the night, Blackstone Town was dotted with a few oil lamps—one hung at the entrance of the medical station, the orange-red light of the forge peeked through the Arsenal's window, and figures moved behind the windows of several homes. Under every lamp was a person rebuilding their life. The expedition wasn't an impulse—it was the necessary first step to find a way out on this land being devoured by Chaos. He pulled his hand back from the map of the Eastern Star Sector, finding his fingertips coated in a layer of dust accumulated on the parchment. He didn't wipe it off, heading toward the door to find Marcus and discuss the matter.

In its first week after completion, Blackstone Town's Intelligence Center welcomed its first group of users—not Lin Mo, but Rock and several veterans returned from scouting. They crowded around the map of the Eastern Star Sector, pointing at the markings and arguing over which supply line was safer. Rock leaned forward with his fists on the edge of the table, his eyes following a winding ridgeline, his finger tapping heavily twice on a certain route on the map—that position was exactly the site for the new communication station he had marked earlier. Without anyone telling him, Rock had reached the same conclusion as Lin Mo's analysis based solely on combat experience. A veteran next to him disagreed, saying that route had to cross open ground and was prone to ambush. Rock didn't argue; he took a charcoal pencil and drew a dashed line for a detour—it added two days to the journey, but it was under the cover of the ridge the entire way.

Lin Mo stood at the door for a few seconds before turning to leave. He didn't go far—he stood for a while by the wall outside the Intelligence Center, listening to the arguments and the sound of the charcoal pencil scratching across the paper from within. The Intelligence Center had already begun to function on its own. He no longer needed to personally stand before every map to explain every line. This was exactly what he wanted—a system that didn't rely on a single individual to operate.

The operation of the Intelligence Center became more efficient after Rock and the other veterans moved in. They didn't just look at maps—they added their own annotations next to every route Lin Mo marked. 'This route can't be used during the rainy season; the soil turns to sludge, and wheels get stuck and can't be pulled out.' 'The view from the high ground at these coordinates is blocked by the northern ridge; you can't see anything from up there, but you'll expose yourself instead.' 'This water source dries up during the dry season; it was just a layer of bottom mud when we passed by last time.' Every annotation carried details that only someone who had actually walked that path could write.

Those annotations continued to accumulate. Every new note represented a field verification—someone had truly walked that path, someone had truly stood guard at that high point. The information in the Intelligence Center was no longer just lines and coordinates on paper; it was becoming living experience.

Lin Mo looked at those annotations and didn't edit a single one. He simply added a sign to the doorframe of the Intelligence Center, writing three words with a charcoal pencil: 'The War Room'. This place was no longer just a place to store information—it was becoming a place where decisions were made.

Lin Mo stood by the doorframe, glanced at the shadow cast by those three words under the oil lamp, and then turned into the night. He didn't look back at the sign—he didn't need to confirm what he had done. The War Room was already there; the rest was a matter of making it truly operational.

—Self-Check System · Automatic Supplemental Record

[In the scent of rice flowers, a bumper year is foretold, amidst the chorus of frogs.]

—Xin Qiji, 'West River Moon'. Memory fragment of the mirror of the emperor.