40: Chapter 40: The Allied Forces Defeated, the Eastern Half of the Country Recovered

The discovery of the Ark Key gave Blackstone Town a brief breathing window, but the main force of the Chaos Forces would not stop just because a key had appeared. After losing their navigation beacons, the Chaos Forces spent several weeks reorganizing their formations—without a unified command system, they fought independently, which ironically made it harder for Locke to predict the timing and direction of their next attack.

The large-scale offensive finally arrived. Thousands of Chaos infantry pressed against the Blackstone Town defense lines from three directions simultaneously. Locke's garrison stubbornly held back the first wave—the crossfire of laser weapons and flintlocks formed a death zone on the perimeter. But the second wave broke through the outer defenses, and the third wave slammed directly into the central position where the Town Hall was located.

Lin Mo stood at the entrance of the Town Hall, with the last loaded flintlock and that unused laser gun by his side. He handed the laser gun to a recruit next to him who had run out of ammunition—a young man of about eighteen who had escaped from Riverbend Town and had only passed his shooting qualification a few days ago. He placed all the spare energy cells into the young man's hands.

The battle lasted all day. By evening, the Chaos Forces' attack finally began to wane—not because they were defeated, but because their individual losses had exceeded the threshold they were willing to bear. When the last Chaos warrior's corpse fell at the edge of the defense line, Locke stood in the ruins leaning on a notched battle-axe, silent. The results of the battlefield tally left him sitting alone in the Intelligence Center for a while. The casualty figures were high, but Blackstone Town still stood. The main garrison force was still there, the Ravens were still there, Old Tom's forge hammer was still ringing, and Alice's Medical Station was still treating the wounded.

The chaos attention level dropped from seventy-two to sixty-five. After the allied forces retreated, nearly half of the eastern region of Hope Star saw no more organized Chaos activity for a period of time. That night, Lin Mo sat in the Intelligence Center and drew a large circle over the Hope Star region on the full map of the Eastern Star Sector. Half of the East—liberated. Although the Chaos Forces had collapsed, he still knew: they would come back. And when that happened—he couldn't just stand at the Town Hall entrance and wait anymore.

Lin Mo sat alone in the Intelligence Center for an hour. He drew an arc on a blank sheet of paper extending from Blackstone Town to the eastern half—not a defensive arc, but a supply arc. Liberated land meant longer supply lines, more defensive points, and more dispersed troops. He drew a circle at the end of this arc: if the Chaos Forces organized another counterattack from the edge of the eastern half, how long would it take for Blackstone Town's main force to arrive? The answer he calculated made him tuck the paper into a drawer—not to throw it away, but to keep it to look back on later.

---

The night wind blew from the north, carrying the characteristic sulfur scent from deep within the ore veins, mixed with the woody smell of cooking smoke; it smelled like this world's unique, somewhat unsettling aroma of dinner.

Lin Mo stood in the ruins for a long time until moonlight leaked through the gaps in the clouds, shining on the spread-out star map. The Chaos Forces had retreated, but he knew it was only temporary. He drew a line on the map—pointing from Blackstone Town to further away.

*In the blank space of Chapter 40,*

*there is an echo that has not yet landed.*

When the news of the liberation of the eastern half spread through Blackstone Town, no one cheered. After weeks of continuous defensive combat, those still alive had no energy left to express themselves. Lin Mo stood at the Town Hall entrance, watching the small groups of people in the square—some were repairing walls damaged by artillery fire, others were carrying the bodies of the fallen. A young woman crouched beside a stretcher covered with a cloth; she didn't cry, but simply kept her hand on the cloth without moving it.

Lin Mo later learned 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 not to be recorded to wipe the numbers away.

He didn't walk over to comfort her. At that distance, anything he did would be superfluous. The only thing he could do was turn back into the Intelligence Center and, on that full map of the Eastern Star Sector, color the liberated area a different shade. Not the color of victory—but a color to make himself remember how many people lay upon this land.

In the night, Alice came to the Intelligence Center to deliver a bowl of medicine—it was for Lin Mo. She said his left hand had been trembling slightly after the battle, a muscle stress reaction from high-intensity use of psychic power. He hadn't noticed, but she had.

Lin Mo took the bowl of medicine, glanced at it, and said, "I didn't feel like there was any problem."

Alice sat down across the table, showing no intention of leaving. "You never feel like there's a problem," she said, "but your hand has been trembling in your own sensory blind spot for two days."

He didn't argue further. He drank the medicine, set down the bowl, and looked at her. The light from the oil lamp illuminated her face clearly—a bit more clearly than usual, because there was a hint of fatigue in her eyes that she had suppressed but not entirely hidden.

"You haven't slept well today either," he said.

Alice didn't deny it. She looked down at the full map of the Eastern Star Sector on the table—at the area Lin Mo had colored differently. "That woman," she said, "the one crouching by the stretcher. Her husband was in the third row. Enlisted seven months ago, he was a volunteer."

Lin Mo didn't speak.

"Before he left, he came to the Medical Station and asked me to keep something for him," Alice's voice was flat, "saying that if he didn't come back, I should give it to her. It was an Imperial military dog tag with a word carved on the back—her name." She paused, "I gave that dog tag to her this afternoon."

The flame of the oil lamp flickered slightly in the silence.

Lin Mo didn't say "Thank you for your hard work," nor did he say "This was a necessary sacrifice"—both sentences would be lies in this context, and he knew Alice understood how false they were better than anyone. He only said one thing: "I owe those people a better plan."

Alice looked up at him. "It's not a debt," she said, "it's repayment. You are still repaying it, and they know it."

He didn't know how that sentence bypassed all his habitual self-defense mechanisms and landed directly inside him. He looked down at the map, at the area colored in that different shade, and remained silent for a long time.

When Alice stood up to leave, he called out to her—not to say anything specific, but just to ask: "Have you ever—" He stopped for a moment, reorganizing his words, "Have you ever been afraid that following me would lead to a place you don't want to go?"

She stood at the door for a moment, not looking back, and simply said: "Yes."

He thought she would say something more, but she didn't. She just opened the door and left, leaving that word "Yes" under the oil lamp of the Intelligence Center. Lin Mo sat in that light for a long time before realizing that the word "Yes" without a follow-up was an answer he understood—it didn't mean she would leave because she was afraid; it meant she was afraid, yet she was still here.

He remembered the old man in the ruins who had shared half a piece of compressed biscuit with him. The old man hadn't said anything, just stuffed the biscuit into his hand and pointed to the eastern ridge—[There are people there. Good people.] That was the first affirmative sentence Lin Mo had heard on this planet.

The battlefield tally after the Chaos Forces' retreat lasted for two days. During the cleanup process, Lin Mo noticed a detail—the direction of the Chaos Forces' retreat was not randomly dispersed, but all concentrated toward a single coordinate point. That coordinate point was not at any known location on the star chart.

He stood in front of the wall of the Intelligence Center, spreading out all the captured Chaos maps on the table and piecing them together. No—it wasn't a puzzle; those maps themselves came from different parts of the same master map. Their scales were consistent, their annotation symbols were consistent, and their drawing precision levels were consistent. These weren't crude maps drawn by several independent Chaos warbands—they were produced using the same standards and the same set of cartographic specifications. The military maps used by the Chaos Forces used the same set of standards as the Empire. Lin Mo stood before the pile of spread-out maps for a long time, murmuring to himself in the faint light of dawn: "The strategic materials of Chaos are being produced uniformly by someone within the Imperial system."

The steam hammers of the Arsenal echoed from afar with regular strikes. Each strike came at a fixed interval—thump—thump—thump—like a heart that wouldn't stop, supplying blood to the entire town. Lin Mo listened to that sound in the Intelligence Center, using it to calibrate his own breathing rhythm. He needed to ensure his judgment wouldn't grow dull from fatigue, and that he wouldn't overlook those small, potentially fatal pieces of information due to the pressure of time.

*Waiting for the person who turns to the next chapter to listen.*

Lin Mo moved his gaze away from the map and glanced out the window. Under the grey-purple canopy of the 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 a defense that never slackens for a single day.

*War is the language of Chaos,*

*but construction is humanity's answer.*

*—Lin Mo's casual notes while inspecting the Arsenal after the war*

On the third day after the liberation of the eastern half, Lin Mo received an anonymous letter. The letter was in a standard Imperial envelope, with no markings on the seal. The content of the letter was just one sentence: "The wall you dug up in the north—it's not the only one."

No signature, no date, no method of delivery. It just appeared on the table in the Intelligence Center, as if someone had walked in and placed it there when he wasn't paying attention.

Lin Mo read the letter three times. Then he walked to the door of the Intelligence Center and checked the lock—no signs of tampering. He walked to the window—the window was bolted from the inside. The source of this letter was a mystery. But the wall it mentioned—he knew that wasn't information just anyone could know.

Someone else was watching Blackstone Town from the shadows. And this time, that person—or rather, that group of people—chose to hand over a note instead of raising a rifle.

Post-war reconstruction began the next day. There were no mobilization meetings, no slogans—the walls that needed repairing were right there, the fortifications that needed rebuilding were right there, and every person standing knew what they had to do. A one-armed veteran used one hand to carry bricks, moving three times slower than a normal person, but his rhythm never stopped. A ten-year-old girl was handing water to the bricklayers; her hand holding the bowl was steady—steadier than a ten-year-old child's should be. Lin Mo passed them while on patrol and said nothing. He simply wrote a line in his notebook: Blackstone Town doesn't need heroes. What it needs is for every ordinary person to stand firm in the place they are supposed to be.

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

*[A broken halberd buried in the sand, its iron not yet consumed,*

*I wash and rub it to recognize the dynasty of old. If the east wind had not favored young Zhou Yu, the deep spring of the Bronze Bird Terrace would have locked away the Two Qiaos.]*

*—Du Mu, "Red Cliff." Memory fragments sealed within the mirror of the emperor quietly surface in the darkness.*

When the emperors gene repair fluid was discovered, Lin Mo failed to notice one thing—next to the container labeled 'No. 17', there was an empty container rack. The numbered label on it had fallen off. But at the bottom of the metal rack, a line of very small words was engraved: 'For the 18th. If he is still alive.'