39: Chapter 39 Slaanesh's Defeat, the Key Appears

The Chaos Forces fell into expected disarray after losing their navigation beacon. One of them—a vanguard force composed of Slaanesh cultists—rushed prematurely toward the outer defensive lines of Blackstone Town due to a breakdown in coordination with other warbands. Locke did not waste this opportunity.

The moment the Slaanesh vanguard charged into the ambush zone, he didn't rush to close the net. He allowed the front line to penetrate a bit deeper, and only after confirming no reinforcements were following did he order the trap shut. The accuracy of this judgment allowed the subsequent battle to conclude in a very short time. Lin Mo noticed this detail during the post-battle review—Locke's tactical judgment was evolving from intuition to experience; he was no longer just a fierce warrior who charged blindly.

His hearing returned after a brief period of ringing—first the sound of distant flowing water, then his own heartbeat, and finally the breathing of those around him.

The night wind blew again. This gust was cooler than the last, carrying a scent that mixed metal and earth. He wrapped his frayed coarse cloth coat tighter—it was given to him by the villagers and was much warmer than the T-shirt he had been wearing when he first crossed over.

He took advantage of the disconnect between the Slaanesh units and the other Chaos Forces, concentrating fire to crush this isolated vanguard before they could reach the main defensive line. The battle itself wasn't particularly noteworthy—a standard ambush that Locke had executed many times. However, while clearing the battlefield, Locke discovered something on the corpse of the Slaanesh vanguard Commander. It was a silver, palm-sized, key-shaped object. The material wasn't metal—it was a translucent substance he had never seen before, with extremely fine silver veins flowing inside, identical to the veins in the crystal Alice had discovered in the ore months ago.

Locke brought it back to Blackstone Town and placed it before Lin Mo. He didn't say a word. Lin Mo opened a drawer, took out the silver crystal he had kept there, and placed it next to the key. Their internal veins lit up on their own without any external light source—it wasn't just glowing, but a resonance, as if two pieces of the same broken object had finally been placed on the same table. The crystal that had been locked in the drawer for months had been as quiet as an ordinary stone—but now, its internal silver veins were flowing, breathing, and responding to that key from the distant battlefield.

Alice looked at them, an expression appearing on her face that Lin Mo had never seen before—not fear, not surprise—but a sense of confirmation. It was the look of something she had long suspected but never proven finally being validated. She whispered a single word: "Key."

He knew the key she spoke of wasn't an ordinary one. It was the key to the world behind the metal wall underground. An Ark Key. He asked if she had seen such a thing before. Alice shook her head. She said she hadn't seen the physical object—but while serving in the Astral Knights, she had read similar descriptions in medical archives, a record concerning a 'Gene-lock Matcher.' That device functioned on a principle similar to this key—identification, matching, and unlocking. She had thought it was merely a conceptual description in theoretical literature. Now, she was seeing the real thing.

The chaos attention level dropped from seventy-five to seventy-two. Lin Mo put the crystal and the key back into the drawer together and locked it. He didn't tell anyone about the connection between the key and the underground shelter—he didn't need to. Because the moment Alice saw that key, she already knew everything.

Distant starlight shone upon these ruins, casting mottled shadows. He didn't know how long he had been on this planet—time had lost its meaning in the fires of war, leaving only instinct: survive today.

In the blank space of Chapter 39,

there is an echo that has yet to land.

The defeat of the Slaanesh vanguard gave him a brief moment to breathe. During that time, he did something he had always wanted to do but never had the time for—he walked into the entrance of the underground shelter, stood before that metal wall, and pressed his palm against it. The wall did not react. The mark of the mirror of the emperor did not light up either. The wall recognized him, but the wall was not equivalent to him. He traced the patterns with his fingertips, imagining the person who had carved them thousands of years ago standing in the same spot, performing the same action.

By the time he walked out of the underground passage and back to the surface, the sky had already darkened. The lights of Blackstone Town flickered in the night wind in the distance. He stood at the exit of the passage for a while, thinking: perhaps the true purpose of this shelter wasn't to defend against anything—but to preserve things that should not be forgotten.

The silver key-shaped object found on the Slaanesh vanguard Commander's corpse had been in Locke's pocket the entire way back. On his return to Blackstone Town, he would touch his pocket every so often to confirm it was still there. Not because he was afraid of losing it—but because he felt as though the key's temperature was changing, not due to the environment, but on its own.

He didn't mention the temperature when he handed the key over. But when Lin Mo opened the drawer and placed the silver crystal and the key together, Locke saw the veins inside both flash simultaneously. He said nothing and turned to walk out. Some things don't need an explanation—seeing it was enough.

The footsteps of the militia on the training grounds could be heard faintly in the distance. When Locke was away, training was taken over by the veterans he had trained—those who had survived the expeditions and defensive battles. 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 and watch them, not to check on 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.

He stood there, looking at everything before him, and suddenly felt a very strange sensation—if someone had told him a month ago that he would be on a planet an unknown number of light-years from Earth, using high school chemistry to make gunpowder, college club experience to build guns, and product manager logic to plan a village's defense system—he would have thought that person was insane. But now he was here, and every single thing was actually happening.

Locke believed in one thing: on the battlefield, there are no perfect plans, only perfect habits. Therefore, his way of training recruits wasn't to teach them how to execute tactics, but to make their bodies remember what to do even when they were too exhausted for their brains to function. Changing magazines, crawling forward, judging cover—these actions had to be practiced until they could be done without thinking. Because Chaos won't wait for you to be ready before attacking. They will appear at the moment you are most tired, most lax, and most wanting to give up. Locke had to ensure that when that moment came, everyone in Blackstone Town would have bodies that moved faster than their minds.

Waiting for those who turn to the next chapter to hear.

Lin Mo looked away from the map and glanced out the window. Under the gray-purple sky, the chimneys of the Arsenal were still quietly emitting smoke. Every day he spent on this planet told him the same truth: in this universe, there are no permanent victories, only defenses that never slacken for a single day.

The arc of Chaos slowly tightened on the star map,

like a rope approaching a throat.

—Lin Mo's memo after the Chaos Arc Analysis Meeting

What he didn't notice was that his shadow on the ground was stretched into a shape that did not belong to a human.

After the battle ended, Duran sat on the edge of the ruins, drawing circles on the ground with the handle of his modified mining pick. He wasn't drawing meaningless circles—they were structural diagrams of mining tunnels. Before becoming a warrior of Blackstone Town, he had been a miner for twelve years. A miner's instinct allowed him to quickly judge the optimal attack and defense routes in any terrain.

Locke walked over and crouched beside him, watching the diagrams he drew for a while. Then he said, "In the future, you won't just be fighting; you'll also help me draw combat maps. Your eyes are more useful than a scout's—you can see the underground structures."

Duran looked up at Locke. That was the first time someone had called him "useful"—not because he could kill, but because his skill at drawing maps was also a weapon on the battlefield. He nodded and continued drawing, but his movements were a bit faster than before.

While counting equipment after the battle, Duran found a strange object—a metal container made by Orks, containing a liquid that emitted a faint green glow. He poked the wall of the container with his gun barrel, and the glow in the liquid produced a ripple with the movement. He didn't throw it away—a miner's intuition told him that such an unnatural thing was worth studying. He put the container into his backpack, deciding to hand it over to Alice after returning to town. Perhaps hidden within those crude Ork artifacts was some creation they themselves didn't understand.

The night deepened. The lights of Blackstone Town went out one by one, leaving only the torches on the watchtowers swaying in the wind. He stood by the window for a while, then returned to his desk to continue writing his plans.

[Facing white blades, blood flows in confusion; since when did those who die for honor care for rewards?]

—Gao Shi, "Song of the Yan". Memory fragment from the mirror of the emperor