33: Chapter 33: Recruiting Surrendered Soldiers, Strength Soars

Hope Star was not home to only Blackstone Town. News of the Imperial Frigate's visit spread across the planet like wildfire—those small settlements hidden in the wilderness learned one thing: there was a place called Blackstone Town that was being watched by those "above." When people are in despair, they instinctively move toward the light. Within a week, Blackstone Town's population exploded once again. This time, it wasn't exiles who came—it was stragglers.

Retired Imperial soldiers, mine security captains, remnants of militia units, and even camp followers from several shattered Space Marine Chapters—they appeared at the borders of Blackstone Town with their own weapons and experience. The first thing most of them asked was: "I heard you're fighting Chaos?"

Locke filtered them through three rounds. The first round weeded out those with impure intentions, the second round tested combat skills, and for the third round—he had the candidates fight him. The result was that Locke won against the last man, but it wasn't easy. Wiping the blood from the corner of his mouth, he said something that would be passed down in Blackstone Town for a long time: "These men, I'm taking them." The Blackstone Garrison expanded from three hundred men to nearly five hundred.

The first round eliminated those with shifty eyes, and the second round disqualified those with insufficient physical fitness—but by the third round, Locke encountered a problem: almost everyone who made it that far met his standards. In the end, he used the simplest method: fighting each person himself.

When the list from the first round was handed to Lin Mo, he circled a name—the man's service record listed him as a deserter, but the reason column was blank. Lin Mo had Marcus check the ID number and discovered that his files from his original unit had been destroyed. He didn't tell Locke about this discovery; he simply drew a question mark next to the name.

Among the stragglers was a veteran named Duran, who had been a miner before his service. During the second round of testing, he used a modified mining pick to disarm his opponent. In the third round, he was thrown to the ground three times by Locke, and all three times he climbed back up. Locke asked him why he came, and he said: "The mine collapsed, I had nowhere else to go. I heard they were handing out guns here." Locke asked if he knew how to use one, and he replied: "They're lighter than a mining pick." Locke gave a short laugh and assigned him to the third platoon.

Old Tom's Arsenal began operating around the clock. The sound of the steam forge hammer rang from morning till night as flintlock rifles, ammunition, and simple grenades continuously flowed off the production line. Old Tom himself rarely struck iron personally anymore—he spent more of his time on that STC core, wearing a magnifying glass and reading the circuits wire by wire, occasionally looking up to shout at an apprentice, "That part's tolerance is off, redo it!"

He had once read a sentence in a fragment from an Imperial database—[Humanity has expanded among the stars for ten thousand years, yet has never truly understood a single planet.] He hadn't understood it then. Now, standing on this nameless planet, smelling the sulfur and rust in the air—he understood.

Lin Mo stood at the entrance of the Arsenal. Behind him was the sound of five hundred garrison soldiers drilling; before him was the map of the Eastern Star Sector on the Intelligence Center wall, becoming increasingly crowded with markings. He drew a red circle around the location of Blackstone Town. The chaos attention level was steadily rising. But with every additional soldier on the defense line and every extra bullet stacked in the warehouse, he moved one step closer to the word "endure."

Stragglers and vagabonds, defective products forgotten by the Empire in its peripheral corners.

Lin Mo shifted his gaze from the map and looked out the window. Under the grayish-purple sky, the Arsenal's chimney was still quietly emitting smoke. Every day he spent on this planet told him the same truth: in this universe, there is no such thing as a permanent victory, only a defense that never wavers for a single day.

Some called them trash.

I call them—ammunition that hasn't been used up yet.

—Lin Mo, annotation on the title page of the garrison roster after incorporation.

Duran was Locke's greatest gain from this incorporation effort. This veteran's performance in the third round of testing wasn't the most outstanding—his physical fitness was only above average, and his shooting accuracy didn't make the top three. But Locke noticed his sense of positioning during the melee—he wasn't fighting on instinct, but on calculation. He had already decided where he should stand next before every exchange of fire. After the test, Locke called Duran aside and asked a question only a veteran would ask: "Which unit did you serve in?" Duran was silent for a few seconds before stating a unit designation that Locke had never heard of. Locke didn't press him. He knew that some units weren't on the public rosters.

In the third week after Duran officially joined the Blackstone Garrison, Locke intentionally led the squad into an unmarked swampland during field training. Duran stopped at the edge of the swamp, not following the squad ahead of him. Locke asked him why he wasn't moving, and Duran said: "The color of the mud over there is wrong." Locke crouched down to look where Duran was pointing—the surface color of that patch of mud was indeed darker than the surrounding soil, a sign of loose soil caused by a high water table.

Locke stood up and brushed the mud off his hands, saying nothing, but later that day he moved Duran's name from the third platoon to the Reconnaissance Group. It wasn't because Duran's fitness was superior—it was because his eyes could see things others didn't notice.

The footsteps of the militia on the training ground were faintly audible in the distance. When Locke was away, training was taken over by the veterans he had trained—those who had survived crusades and defensive wars. Their training methods were even stricter than Locke's because they knew all too well how low the margin for error was on the battlefield. Lin Mo would occasionally stand outside the training ground fence to watch them, not to check progress, but to remind himself—those people crawling in the mud and holding rifles under the scorching sun were the true foundation of Blackstone Town.

—Self-Check System · Automatic Supplemental Record

But he did not know that a pair of eyes in the darkness had already fixed upon him—and had been watching for a long time.

Old Tom discovered a mineral sample he had never seen before in a corner of the Arsenal—it was something Yang Shitou had picked up while patrolling to the north. The surface of the ore had a layer of crystals that glowed faintly blue. Old Tom struck it with a hammer, and the hammerhead bounced back. He squinted at the stone for a long time, then ran a fingernail across the crystals—no mark was left behind.

He held the ore under an oil lamp to examine it for a moment, muttering to himself: "The hardness of this thing... is higher than the Empire's standard alloys."

When Lin Mo passed by, Old Tom handed him the ore. The mirror of the emperor flashed at the edge of his vision—

—Unknown mineral. Suspected STC material residue. Requires further analysis.

He placed the ore in the sample cabinet of the Intelligence Center. Yet another thing that needed to be figured out. But at least—they had one more chess piece that might change the situation.

That night, Lin Mo stood alone on the roof of the Town Hall, looking at the grayish-purple sky of Hope Star. The wind blew from the north, carrying a faint scent of sulfur—the characteristic atmosphere of the edge of a Chaos active zone. The mirror of the emperor flashed slightly at the edge of his vision, not as a warning, but as a reminder—the chaos attention level was slowly rising. He looked at the worn wristwatch on his arm—the last functioning item brought from Earth. The watch showed the time as three in the morning, but on this planet, time had long since lost the meaning it had on Earth. He tucked the watch into his sleeve and turned to walk off the roof. A long day awaited him tomorrow.

That mineral sample dug up from the ground triggered four hours of continuous testing by Old Tom that night. The ore's hardness was nearly double that of Imperial standard alloy, but what concerned Old Tom most wasn't its hardness—it was the weak energy fluctuations it inherently possessed. These fluctuations were different in frequency from the golden light produced by the mirror of the emperor, but they shared the same direction: both were evolving toward "energy stabilization."

He wrote the test results on a piece of paper and added a sentence at the end in his crooked handwriting: "Can be used as casing material for the mirror of the emperor."

Lin Mo froze for a moment when he saw that sentence. The mirror of the emperor was currently "incorporeal"—it existed in his consciousness without a physical form. But what if the material Old Tom discovered could be used to create a "container"? A physical device that could carry, stabilize, and amplify the power of the mirror of the emperor?

He drew a sketch in his notebook. The sketch looked like a talisman—it could be worn on the wrist, embedded in a weapon, or placed anywhere it was needed. Something that would make an incorporeal power "tangible."

He showed the sketch to Old Tom. Old Tom looked at it for a long time, then looked up and said: "I need three months."

Lin Mo nodded. "Three months."

Three months. He needed to make it through these three months before Chaos struck again.

As he walked out of the shed, he ran into Alice, who was bringing a medical supply list. She glanced at him, didn't ask where he had just come from, and simply handed over a piece of paper: "The medical station's new inventory list. You said you wanted to see it last time."

When he took the paper, he noticed that in addition to the medicine data, a blade of grass had been drawn in the blank space at the bottom—sketched casually with light lines, as if the pen tip had hesitated for a moment before leaving the paper. He didn't ask what the blade of grass meant. But when he folded the paper and put it into his file folder, he did not place it with the other documents.

[The ancients spared no effort in their pursuit of knowledge, achieving success only in their old age after a lifetime of youthful toil.

What is learned from books always feels shallow; to truly understand, one must practice it personally.]

—Lu You, "Reading on a Winter Night to Show My Son Ziyu." Memory fragments sealed within the mirror of the emperor quietly surfaced in the darkness.

While on night patrol, Duran found a copper coin nailed to a tree trunk outside the town—an Imperial copper coin, but the left eye of the double-headed eagle on it had been deliberately ground away. He didn't know what it meant. But he kept the coin.