3: Chapter 3 Blood and Iron

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Locke said that Ork scouts usually arrive one to two days ahead of the main force.

Lin Mo did the math. The footprints in the southern hills were discovered yesterday, which meant that a small squad of scouts would appear around Blackstone Village tomorrow at the latest, or as early as today.

He didn't wait.

On the morning of the third day, he followed Locke's patrol out of the village. It wasn't for a patrol—it was to set an ambush.

He chose a spot in a dried-up creek valley on the northern ridge. Both sides were protruding rock walls, and the bottom was less than three meters wide. If Orks were traveling through the woods, this would be the path of least resistance.

"Are the grenades ready?" Locke asked.

"Three of them." Lin Mo patted his waist. "The saltpeter purity still isn't high enough, but this batch's power should be double that of the last one."

Old Zhou found a position atop the rock wall, his longbow already strung. Two other Village Guards lay in ambush at the valley's exit, holding their spears level.

They waited for less than two hours.

One popped out of the grass first. Then a second. The third walked at the rear; it was half a head shorter than the first two, but its shoulders were broader.

Scouts. Three of them.

Locke gripped his battle-axe tightly. Old Zhou's bowstring went taut.

Lin Mo didn't move. He was waiting—waiting for them all to enter the narrowest section of the valley.

The first Ork stepped into the ambush zone.

He lit the fuse, counted two seconds in his head, and threw it out.

The clay pot traced an arc through the air and landed among the three Orks.

Boom.

At that moment, the sound of the explosion became the most beautiful sound in the world. Shrapnel and dirt sprayed in all directions, and the shockwave flattened a circle of bushes on both sides. The first Ork didn't even manage a cry before being sent flying by the blast. The second was left with a bloody mess below its calves, dark green blood gushing from a dozen wounds simultaneously; it dropped to one knee, growling, but did not fall.

The third one—the shortest but broadest—was stunned for a second.

Then it let out a roar and charged toward the rock wall where Lin Mo was hiding.

"Fuck!" Locke jumped out, swinging his battle-axe down with his full body weight—

Only a shallow white mark was left on the bone-plate armor.

The Ork didn't even take a step back.

Locke's expression changed. Old Zhou's arrow hit the other Ork's shoulder, but the arrowhead got stuck in that thick green skin and failed to penetrate. The Ork impatiently ripped the arrow out and looked down at the wound—a few drops of dark green blood seeped out, but the bleeding stopped quickly.

In that moment, Lin Mo saw the cruel equation: A mortal's maximum output equals an Ork's minimum defense.

"The second one!" he shouted, pulling a second clay pot from his waist.

Light. Throw.

This time, he aimed at the feet of the Ork charging toward Locke.

Boom.

Shrapnel hit the Ork's calf, making it stumble—only for a moment. But it looked down at its bleeding knee, then raised its head, those yellow bestial eyes staring straight at Lin Mo.

It remembered him.

The fragments of the second grenade finally caused substantial damage—the Ork with the wounded calf bled more and more dark green blood until it collapsed to its knees, letting out a muffled, thunderous roar.

Locke didn't miss the opportunity. He rushed forward, aiming his battle-axe at the only area not covered by bone plates—the neck—and swung down.

The battle lasted less than three minutes. Two dead, one escaped.

A rout was a worse signal than a victory.

"At least one got away," Locke said, wiping green blood off his axe blade. "It'll go back and report."

Lin Mo didn't respond immediately. He was conducting a post-battle review—three grenades had only taken out two Orks; the accuracy and lethality were lower than he had anticipated. The shrapnel's kill radius was about a meter smaller than expected; the saltpeter purity was still insufficient.

But that wasn't what unsettled him most.

It was when that fleeing Ork looked back at him one last time—he clearly saw something akin to 'I'll remember you.'

This wasn't right. Orks were fungi-modified organisms; did they have this level of cognition?

Within his mind, the mirror of the emperor lay quietly, popping up no relevant information.

On the way back to the village, Xiao Wu walked at the very back. The seventeen-year-old blacksmith's apprentice had a gash on his left calf from flying debris, and blood had already stained a large patch of his trouser leg.

"Is the injury serious?" Wang Defu met them at the village entrance.

"Not serious," Old Tom answered for Xiao Wu, his voice muffled, "but it's hard to say about next time."

Lin Mo knelt in front of Xiao Wu to check the wound. Fortunately, it hadn't hit the bone, but the gash was deep.

Suddenly, he remembered something.

In his mind, within the 'library' of the mirror of the emperor, a certain book flipped to a page. What was written there wasn't tactics or weapon parameters—it was a line of poetry.

*[Ready to shed the blood of a hundred thousand heads, one must pull back the universe with all one's might.]*

He was stunned for a moment.

This wasn't a memory from Earth. This was something the golden figure had shoved in. But why this line? Looking at the blood on Xiao Wu's leg, he suddenly understood.

That golden figure—the man sitting on the Golden Throne—had experienced battles far more tragic than this. He had seen the blood of a hundred thousand heads. That poem wasn't literature; it was a memory. It was something he had written himself, or perhaps, something he had experienced firsthand.

Lin Mo stood up and patted the youth's shoulder. "Tomorrow, I'll teach you new safe positioning."

Xiao Wu nodded with tears in his eyes.

---

While cleaning up the battlefield, Locke tore something from the neck of a dead Ork.

A metal pendant hung on a crude iron chain. A symbol was engraved on the pendant—an octagram. Eight rays radiated outward from a central point, the edges surrounded by a flame-like pattern.

Locke didn't understand what it was, but he instinctively felt something was wrong with it. He only dared to pick it up using a piece of cloth.

The moment Lin Mo saw that symbol, the golden light at the edge of his vision flared up—brighter than any time before. It was like someone had struck a match against his retina.

—chaos eight-pointed star. Mark of Khorne.

—Warning: Risk of Chaos infiltration in this area.

—Chaos Attention Level risen to 10.

He took the pendant, wrapped it in cloth, and put it in his pocket.

On the way back to the village, the metal pressed against his thigh in his pocket like a piece of shrapnel buried in flesh.

Strangely, the moment his fingers touched the pendant, his chest suddenly felt warm—it wasn't a burn, but more like something was responding.

The feeling vanished in less than half a second. But he was certain: it wasn't an illusion.

---

Late that night, hundreds of light-years away.

Alice Vian woke up with a start from a dream.

It wasn't a nightmare. It was *that* dream—the dream she had been having for three days.

There were no visuals in the dream, only sound. A man's voice, whispering something. She couldn't hear the content clearly, but the temperature of that voice was warm. Moreover, over the past three days, that voice had become clearer each time.

Today—just a second before she woke up—she heard one word clearly.

That word was: "A..."

Her heart was beating so fast it felt like it would break through her ribs.

She sat up, her long silver-white hair draped over her back, the psychic inhibitor ring on her wrist glowing faintly with a cold light. The cabin was very cold, but fine beads of sweat broke out on her forehead.

She knew that signal. That signal coming from the direction of Hope Star, faint as a spider's silk—it was growing. And it was the same thing as the voice in her dream.

She focused her attention, extending her perception toward that direction—

When her fingers touched the inner wall of the psychic inhibitor ring, a dull pain made her frown.

She withdrew her perception.

But in the instant she withdrew—

She perceived something that flashed by. It didn't come from that direction. It came from herself. A strange sense of resonance she had never felt before, as if something had lightly plucked a string deep within her psychic essence.

That string was still vibrating.

In her seven years as a psychic communicator, she had never had this feeling.

She reached out to touch the psychic inhibitor ring; the inner side was icy, like a hand that would never hold hers.

Then she froze.

The surface of the inhibitor ring reflected her eyes. And in her eyes—she wasn't sure if she had seen it correctly—for a split second, the silhouette of a man appeared.

That silhouette appeared for less than a fraction of a second before vanishing. But she was certain: it wasn't her own reflection.

---

At the same moment, Blackstone Village.

Lin Mo had his eyes open in the darkness.

The octagram pendant in his pocket pulsed with a faint heat through the cloth. He reached out and pressed his chest—that spot was also heating up, as if something were throbbing beneath his skin.

He couldn't describe the feeling. It was like someone in a very distant place was knocking on a door he couldn't hear.

But tonight was different.

Tonight, in that instant—he saw a pair of eyes.

Those eyes didn't belong to anyone on Earth. They were silver-gray, like the stars that were eternally frozen in Hope Star's orbit.

He didn't know whose eyes they were.

But he was suddenly certain: the thing that golden figure had handed him wasn't knowledge, nor was it power.

It was a person.

He rolled over and pulled the blanket a bit tighter.

Under the grayish-purple sky of Blackstone Village, and on an Imperial transport ship hundreds of light-years away, in these two completely unrelated places, two people opened their eyes at the same time.

They saw the same starry sky.

They heard the same voice—

Though neither of them knew yet that the voice belonged to the other.

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*[Ready to shed the blood of a hundred thousand heads, one must pull back the universe with all one's might.]*

*—Memory Fragment No. 3 of the mirror of the emperor.*

*Lin Mo didn't know who wrote this poem. What he knew even less was that in the golden figure's 'library,' this poem was tucked inside the only book that wasn't locked.*

*The cover of that book had no title. But on every page, the same name was written.*

*That name was Alice.*