48: Chapter 48 The Outer Reach of the Green Starfield

The outskirts of the Green Sector were quieter than Locke had anticipated.

It was too quiet. When the Expeditionary Force reached the Asteroid Belt at the edge of the Green Sector, the expected Ork patrols did not appear. Nor did the expected fortifications. From the Raven's reconnaissance pod, Locke looked down upon the observable regions of the nearby star systems—there were no signs of large-scale troop movements, no strongholds, and no outposts.

This wasn't normal. Orks were not creatures known for their stealth; their activities always left traces—wreckage, exhaust fumes, and violently reshaped terrain—but there was nothing on the outskirts of the Green Sector. Locke had the Raven descend and circle around once more, confirming that it wasn't just quiet in one direction—from every direction, there were no signs of activity.

Orks were not creatures known for their stealth. Locke circled again in the Raven's reconnaissance pod, carefully observing every fold of the ground from an even lower altitude—no wreckage, no exhaust fumes, no violently reshaped terrain, nothing.

This meant either the Orks had already withdrawn from the area, or something else had cleaned up the battlefield for them before they arrived.

Locke found a clue in the orbital station's Intelligence Center. When he wiped the console screen, it revealed a line of ancient Forge World markings underneath—this was an abandoned Forge World of the Adeptus Mechanicus. The text indicated it had once been a supply station for the Ultramarines Legion, abandoned during the Great Crusade. A data slate was still plugged into the data port below the screen.

He pulled the data slate out and brought it back to the transport ship. It took Marcus nearly a day to find a way to read the ancient slate—the encoding format it used was years ahead of current Imperial standards, requiring layer after layer of backward compatibility to open. When they finally opened the data slate, it contained a complete military map of the Green Sector—drawn before the Horus Heresy, marking all known Ork habitats and activity routes within the Green Sector.

A line was marked on the map with ancient Ultramarines tactical symbols. It was a planned purging route that ran through the entire Green Sector.

Locke stared at the line in silence for a moment. Then, he spread out his own hand-drawn star chart on the map table, compared it with the ancient military map on the data slate, and traced the agreed-upon marching column with a charcoal pencil.

Lin Mo received the reconnaissance data sent back by the Raven at the Intelligence Center. He looked at the surface of that grayish-yellow planet—it was too quiet. He wrote a note on the edge of the report: "Orks don't clean up their front door and wait for people to inspect it. Someone was here before them."

The distant starlight shone on the 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.

A data slate older than any existing record in the Imperium,

stored a marching route that had never been executed.

The unusual silence on the outskirts of the Green Sector led Locke to a decision—to abandon the original advancement route and instead move slowly along the edge of the Asteroid Belt, using rock formations for cover while observing. This change cost more time but also prevented the Expeditionary Force from exposing its position too early. Three days later, news from the scouts confirmed his judgment: the range of Ork activity within the Green Sector was larger than indicated in the intelligence—if the Expeditionary Force had advanced according to the original plan, they would have been discovered by now.

Locke recorded this discovery in the marching log, adding a note at the end: "Intelligence on this area—whether from the Imperium or our own—is not accurate enough. From here on, every step must be explored by ourselves."

In this sea of stars, every inhabited planet is an isolated island. The Imperium does not save isolated islands; it only records their coordinates after they fall. Lin Mo didn't know if this was cold-hearted, but he knew that if he wanted to survive, he couldn't count on any reinforcements from the other side of the star sea.

The unusual silence of the Green Sector received a new interpretation after Marcus obtained accurate aerial images. Those seemingly empty areas showed faint thermal signals under higher resolution—something beneath the surface was radiating heat. It wasn't volcanic activity or geological fissures—it was artificial structures. Massive artificial structures buried beneath the surface.

Locke compressed the images and data into a package and sent them back to the Blackstone Town Intelligence Center via communication equipment. In the message note, he wrote only one sentence: "Something is buried under the Green Sector. It's not natural. Do we fight?" Lin Mo did not reply immediately after receiving the message. He stood in front of the wall in the Intelligence Center for a long time, looking at the location of the Green Sector on the hand-drawn map of the Eastern Star Sector—he had already drawn many small circles and notes there, and now he had new information to update. He picked up a charcoal pencil, drew a large circle next to the location of the Green Sector, and wrote a few words: Scout first, decide later.

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

— Locke's log on the night he discovered the ancient Ultramarines marching map.

But he didn't know that a pair of eyes in the darkness had already fixed on him—and had been watching for a long time.

Late at night, Lin Mo and Alice were discussing the exploration plan for the Underground Shelter in the Intelligence Center. On the table was a floor plan of the first level of the shelter, along with the second-level layout Marcus had inferred based on detection data. As the two leaned over the oil lamp to study the route, Alice's finger accidentally brushed the back of his hand.

Both of them paused for a moment.

Then Alice withdrew her hand as if nothing had happened and continued pointing at a spot on the map, saying, "The structure of this secret chamber is different from the first level—its walls are thicker and the sealing is better. If it contains materials related to the Emperor's Gene, we need to be extra careful when opening it."

Lin Mo nodded. The warmth of her fingertip still lingered on the back of his hand—it was light, like a warmth brought inadvertently by the night breeze. He pulled his attention back to the map. But after that, he noticed that when Alice spoke, she intentionally kept a distance of about a fist's width between them.

The discussion that night lasted until the early hours of the morning. Lin Mo and Alice went over every detail of the shelter—the length of the corridors, the locations of the secret chambers, and the patterns of the flowing lines on the walls. While analyzing the psychic fluctuation data, Alice would occasionally tap a location with her finger, emitting a faint psychic pulse—this was the Astropath's way of perceiving spatial structures. Every time she emitted a pulse, the mirror of the emperor at the edge of Lin Mo's vision would flicker slightly—as if the two systems were exchanging information at their own frequencies. He didn't know if Alice had noticed this. But he made a mental note: there was some kind of resonance between the mirror of the emperor and her psychic power. This resonance wasn't something he triggered actively—it happened on its own.

The discovery of the second-level space in the Underground Shelter sparked a low-key but intense discussion within the core team of Blackstone Town. The core question of the discussion was: should they go down now?

Locke objected: "We don't even know what's in there. Going down rashly, not to mention the loss of personnel, might trigger something we don't understand."

A new female engineer had arrived at the Arsenal, named Cheng Wei, a mining engineer who had escaped from the Green Sector. When she came to report, Old Tom's first words to her were, "Do you understand circuits?" She said, "Yes." Old Tom threw her a roll of blueprints for the STC auxiliary system. She looked at them for a moment and began making annotations—marking three locations where energy transmission efficiency could be improved. Old Tom watched her for a while; he didn't say it was good, but he left the blueprints with her.

Old Tom supported Locke's objection: "For a facility of that construction specification, the access system won't be a simple mechanical lock. It will have energy shields, possibly automated defense systems, and at the most conservative estimate, biochemical isolation measures."

But Alice held a different opinion: "There may be things we need in that space. The emperors gene repair fluid is only what's in container No. 17—what's in containers 18 to 20, we don't know. But if those things are on the same level as the original liquid, they could change Blackstone Town, or even the entire landscape of the Eastern Star Sector."

After hearing everyone's opinions, Lin Mo made a new decision: "We're not choosing one or the other. We'll do the preparatory work first."

He drew up a preparation list: Old Tom was responsible for studying the shelter's energy system, attempting to gain access without triggering defense mechanisms; Alice was responsible for studying why her psychic signature could open the first door and whether this ability could extend to the second door; Yang Shitou was responsible for monitoring the air composition of the underground space to ensure those who went down wouldn't suffocate; and his own task was to figure out the relationship between "element x" and the underground space.

Breaking a large problem down into four smaller ones—this was a core skill he had learned as a product manager on Earth. Here, that skill still worked.

["Plucking chrysanthemums by the eastern fence, I leisurely catch sight of the southern hills."]

— Tao Yuanming, "Drinking Wine." Memory fragments sealed within the mirror of the emperor quietly surfaced in the darkness.

Alice went to the entrance of the Underground Shelter alone late that night. She didn't go down—she just stood at the door for a moment. But the suppression ring emitted a very faint hum in front of that door, like a child calling for its mother.