70: Chapter 70 Extreme Warrior Trial: Why Should Mortals Be Recognized?

Blood.

On the slide, two crimson blood droplets were stained into different shades of blue, lying side by side under the microscope like two silent landscapes.

Alice's hand stiffened on the focusing knob, the warmth of her fingertips being slowly sucked away by the cold metal, her knuckles taut like a bowstring about to snap.

She had already looked three times.

The first time, she twisted off the plastic cap of the fine adjustment knob, thinking it was another malfunction of the microscope Old Tom had cobbled together from scrap—this old thing often mistook red blood cells for Chaos spores, so any error wouldn't be surprising.

The second time, she re-sterilized all the instruments three times with high-pressure steam, strictly following the procedures of the 17th edition of the Imperial Army Medical Manual: fingertip blood collection, centrifugation, Wright's staining, and mounting with neutral balsam, every movement as precise as a robotic arm. The result remained unchanged.

The third time, she did not look through the microscope. She closed her eyes, probing deep into her memory with filaments of psychic power, stitching together the molecular structure diagrams of the two samples frame by frame in her consciousness. The double helix of deoxyribose wound with the same curvature, the proteins folded with identical pleats, and even those active sites carrying a faint golden glow, never recorded in Imperial documents, looked as if they had been carved from the same mold.

Not similar.

Completely identical.

"Impossible."

She opened her eyes, her voice as light as a drizzle falling on the tin roof. The dispensary was empty, save for the buzzing of the microscope's cooling fan, which intertwined with the continuous sound of rain outside the window. Two-thirds of the tube of emperors gene repair fluid brought out from the Underground Shelter had been used, and the remaining half-tube glowed with a pale golden light in the temperature-controlled cabinet. And her own blood—the drop just squeezed from the tip of her left ring finger—was slowly coagulating on the slide, its edges curling into a withered, dark red arc.

She picked up the slide with tweezers and dropped it into an enamel jar filled with disinfectant. The cells lysed rapidly in the formalin, as if they had never existed.

Then she pulled open the deepest drawer compartment and took out the thin silver ring she had worn all her life.

The surface of the ring had been polished smooth as a mirror by the passage of time, only the inscription on the inside retained its original sharpness: Batch 17 · Sample γ.

She had seen this line of text countless times. Since she had memories, this ring, along with the psychic inhibitor ring, had become a part of her body. There were no parents or birthplace for her in the Imperial Psyker archives, only a cold string of numbers, various test reports, and the comment "Qualified Tool." She never asked. In this Empire gnawed by Chaos, tools do not need to know who forged them.

But today, this inscription suddenly possessed a scorching temperature.

She locked the door of the dispensary and turned toward the Intelligence Center. The drizzle hit her face, as cold as the sensation of the suppression ring against her skin.

The door to the Intelligence Center was ajar.

Lin Mo sat behind the desk cobbled together from ammunition crates, with three documents spread out before him.

The top one was the frontline casualty report delivered by Locke half an hour ago, its corners already frayed from his repeated rubbing. The names circled in red ink were like bleeding wounds: Yang Shitou's younger brother, Wang Defu's deputy, that sixteen-year-old boy who always loved to roast potatoes for everyone... Thirteen names, thirteen people who would never return.

"Thirteen more dead." He turned the report to the last page, leaving a deep indentation with his fingertip in the blank space.

The second was the inventory assessment of the supply station. The numbers written in pencil had been crossed out and changed five times, finally settling on "Fifty Days."

"Ammunition can hold out for fifty more days."

The third document had only one line, written forcefully with a fountain pen on a piece of yellowing letterhead, pressed under the other two documents, the ink bleeding through to the back of the paper—What exactly opens that door on the second level of the Underground Shelter?

He had been stuck on this door for twenty-seven whole days.

It was a metallic door, silver-gray all over, with no keyhole, no handle, and no keypad he could recognize. Old Tom had used a plasma cutter to burn at the door gap for three hours, melting away a third of the cutting head, yet not even a scratch was left on the door. Every time the mirror of the emperor approached it, it would emit an extremely faint pulse, like a heartbeat, rhythmic and silent, yet it never gave any instructions.

"Old Tom says this door isn't opened with tools."

Lin Mo muttered to the line of text, his voice shattered by the wind blowing in from outside the window.

"It is waiting for someone. Waiting for someone it recognizes."

Fifty days. The frontline casualty numbers were rising every day, the shadow of Chaos was creeping step by step toward Blackstone Town, and he was blocked from hope by a door that wouldn't open.

"What on earth did you lock inside?"

Just then, footsteps sounded at the doorway. Alice stood in the frame, holding a tube of pale golden liquid in her hand. There was no name on the test tube label, only a simple sketch of a human silhouette with a faint glow drawn above its head. She walked in and gently closed the door behind her.

This was the first time she had voluntarily closed the door to the Intelligence Center.

"What is this?" Lin Mo took the test tube and held it up to the kerosene lamp. Extremely fine silver patterns flowed within the pale golden liquid, like frozen lightning, shifting restlessly under the light.

"My blood."

Alice's voice was as calm as if she were saying, "It's raining hard today."

Lin Mo's hand stopped abruptly in mid-air. The flame of the kerosene lamp flickered, casting a swaying shadow across his face.

"Your blood."

"I isolated the active ingredients of the emperors gene repair fluid." Alice pulled up a chair and sat down, her fingertips tapping lightly on the table. "I found a molecular structure that has never been recorded. It is not a derivative of the Emperor's blood, nor is it a variant of any Primarch's gene-seed. It is older than the Great Crusade, and earlier than the Golden Throne."

"Something from before the Golden Age."

"Yes." She paused, the sound of rain outside seemingly becoming exceptionally clear at this moment. "Then I used my own blood as a control."

"And the result?"

"Completely identical." Alice raised her eyes, her gaze crashing straight into the depths of Lin Mo's eyes. "Every nucleotide arrangement, every peptide bond connection, every spatial conformation of the active sites—there was no difference. I conducted three independent experiments, and the results were exactly the same."

Lin Mo placed the test tube gently on the table, right between those three documents and that line of text. The pale golden light reflected off the ink on the paper, like a drop of solidified tear.

"No cross-contamination?"

"I used three different centrifuges, three different batches of reagents, and completed the experiments at three different time intervals."

"Are you sure?"

"I am sure."

Silence washed over the room like a tide. The sound of rain drummed against the tin roof, emitting a monotonous and heavy sound, like the pendulum of a countdown clock.

"So you came to find me." Lin Mo finally spoke.

Alice raised her left hand, slipped off the thin silver ring, and showed him the inscription on the inside.

"Batch 17." Her voice was very light, yet carried an unquestionable certainty. "I have seen that door. It is inscribed with 'Human Civilization Continuation Laboratory · Test Area No. 17.' The end of the horizontal stroke of that '7' is curved 0.3 millimeters more than the standard font. It is the work of the same person as the inscription on my ring."

Lin Mo's body leaned forward five degrees unconsciously.

"How can you be sure it's the same person?"

"My job is to identify molecular structures." Alice put the ring back on her finger. "Identifying handwriting is a hundred times simpler than identifying protein folding. I have seen one hundred thousand molecular structure diagrams and one hundred thousand handwritten experimental records. I cannot be mistaken."

The office fell into silence again. The rain gradually eased, the raindrops changing from fine, dense threads to sparse drumbeats, tapping on the roof, and also on the hearts of the two people.

"Someone who has never seen their own parents," Lin Mo said slowly, "recognizing the handwriting left by kin on a door sealed for ten thousand years."

Alice did not answer. Her fingers turned lightly on the suppression ring; the scar branded by a hot iron years ago was now faintly burning beneath her skin.

"What do you plan to do?" Lin Mo asked.

"I have already taken the remaining solution for sequencing," Alice said. "The results will be available tomorrow morning. And then—"

"And then open the door."

"And then open the door."

Lin Mo stood up and walked to the window. The rain outside had stopped, and a full moon emerged from the clouds, illuminating the muddy dirt road as if it were paved with crushed silver. The light from the Intelligence Center leaked out through the window, casting a crooked rectangle on the ground.

"Alice."

"Hmm."

"Are you afraid?"

Alice was silent for three seconds.

"Afraid." She said honestly. "But I am not afraid of whose descendant I am. I am afraid that after pushing open that door, I will discover that I have been a designed test subject since birth. Afraid that all my choices were actually written on an experimental record sheet a long time ago."

Lin Mo turned around, the moonlight outlining his upright back.

"Your significance here was never written by anyone else." His voice was low and firm, like an iron block hitting the ground. "It is what you chose yourself. You chose to turn off the Imperial communicator, chose to stay in Blackstone Town, chose to bring your blood sample to me. Every choice was yours, and it has nothing to do with any experiment."

Alice looked into his eyes. Under the moonlight, there was a layer of extremely faint golden reflection in his pupils, not the dazzling blue-white of psychic power, but a deep, quiet radiance, like gold buried deep underground.

"And what about you?" She asked softly. "Have you also never asked about your own origins?"

Lin Mo's gaze drifted toward the moon outside the window. That moon was much like Earth's, only larger, brighter, and carrying a desolate silver hue.

"I come from a very distant place," he said. "So far that no one in this world can verify my identity."

"So you don't ask either."

"So I don't ask either." Lin Mo withdrew his gaze and looked at Alice. "Because in this world, I only need one person to know where I came from."

"Who?"

"Myself."

The night wind slipped through the window gap, rustling the documents on the table. The line of text about the door appeared exceptionally clear in the moonlight.

"That distant place," Alice asked, "do people there fight wars too?"

"Not this kind of war." A faint smile tugged at the corners of Lin Mo's mouth. "People there don't use Bolters and Chainswords to fight. They use rules, they use debate, they use a whole set of procedures that everyone agrees upon. They believe that as long as the procedure is just, a just result can be obtained."

"Does it work?"

"Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't." Lin Mo's smile vanished. "But here, justice belongs only to those who survive. Some rules are worthless in this world polluted by Chaos."

"For example?"

"For example, some doors can only be opened by you."

Alice stood up and walked to the door. She grasped the doorknob and paused.

"Eight o'clock tomorrow morning," she said. "I'll bring the sequencing report to find you."

"Good," Lin Mo nodded. "I'll be waiting for you."

She pushed the door open and stepped into the night. The moonlight stretched her shadow long, extending all the way toward the Medical Station.

Lin Mo stood by the window, watching her back disappear at the end of the path. The lights of the Medical Station soon flickered on, separated from the lights of the Intelligence Center by a muddy dirt road, facing each other across the boundless darkness like two stars refusing to extinguish.

He returned to the table, picked up the tube of pale golden blood, and placed it next to the mirror of the emperor on his chest.

There was no reaction.

Just like the countless times before, the two objects from different eras, yet inextricably linked, lay there quietly like two souls waiting to be awakened.

"It's not that there is no connection," Lin Mo said in a low voice. "It's just not the time yet."

He put the test tube into the deepest part of the drawer and locked it. Then he blew out the kerosene lamp and walked into the night.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow, they would push open that door together.

Hundreds of kilometers away, on the command bridge of a Chaos outpost.

The Masked Commander stood before the giant star map projection, motionless. His metal mask, devoid of any expression, reflected the flickering light points on the star map. At the coordinates north of Blackstone Town, a faint energy pulse flickered rhythmically at a frequency of three times per minute, like a heart awakening.

"She is approaching that door."

His voice came through the mask, carrying a metallic resonance and a hunger suppressed for thousands of years. It was the excitement seeping from the bones when a hunter finally sees the prey walk into the trap.

The adjutant—a Chaos Sorcerer with purple spirit fire burning in his eye sockets—took a step forward, the hem of his robe sweeping across the cold metal floor.

"My lord, the intensity of the energy pulse is increasing exponentially. At this rate, in three days at most, she will be able to touch the door's activation mechanism."

"It won't take three days." The Masked Commander raised his hand, covered in burn scars, and lightly swiped across the projection table. A scarlet line pointed directly from the Chaos outpost to the northern mountains of Blackstone Town. Where his fingertip passed, the 3D cross-section of the mountain automatically unfolded—a huge inverted pyramid-shaped space hidden inside the mountain, divided into seven levels from top to bottom, each marked with different functional areas.

"Look here." His finger stopped at the second level of the inverted pyramid. "Experimental Zone No. 17 of the Human Civilization Survival Laboratory. The biological lock on that door only recognizes her genetic sequence and psychic signature. Without her, even if we blow the entire mountain flat, we won't be able to open it."

"So we have been waiting for her to push that door open herself."

"Yes." The Masked Commander's finger moved upward and stopped at the very top level of the inverted pyramid. That area appeared in a glaring blood-red on the projection. "The moment she pushes that door open is the moment we recover 'Sample γ'."

The adjutant let out a low laugh, the sound reflected back and forth by the metal walls in the enclosed bridge, becoming sharp and harsh.

"We have waited ten thousand years for her."

"We have waited ten thousand years, we don't mind waiting another dozen hours." The Masked Commander turned off the star map projection. The bridge instantly plunged into darkness, with only the indicator lights on the dashboard flickering, casting jumping light spots on his metal mask. "Order the Third Assault Squad to prepare for orbital insertion. Depart after dark."

"Yes, my lord."

"Also," the Masked Commander added, his voice carrying an unquestionable coldness, "take her alive. Whoever dares to hurt a single hair on her, I will feed their soul to Slaanesh's Prince of Pleasure."

The adjutant bowed and retreated. Only the Masked Commander remained on the bridge.

He walked to the porthole and looked at the pitch-black universe outside. The distant star emitted a dark red light, like a rotting eyeball.

"You cannot escape," he said softly to the void. "All the samples in your batch have my mark carved on them. No matter where you run to the ends of the earth, I can find you."

Outside the bridge, the engines of three Chaos orbital drop pods ignited simultaneously. The orange-red flames tore through the darkness, leaving three burning trails in the night sky, like three daggers piercing toward Blackstone Town.

When Lin Mo returned to his residence, the night wind had become biting. He wrapped himself tighter in the coarse cloth jacket with frayed cuffs—this was given to him by the villagers of Blackstone Town, much warmer than the pure cotton T-shirt he was wearing when he transmigrated.

The moment he pushed the door open, the mirror of the emperor on his chest suddenly vibrated slightly.

It wasn't an alarm. It was a pulse slower, deeper, and warmer than an alarm, like a heart that had been sleeping for ten thousand years, finally beginning to beat at this moment.

Lin Mo stopped. The moonlight shone through the window, drawing a sharp line of light and shade on the floor. The tube of pale golden blood he brought back suddenly lit up in the moonlight, with silver patterns flowing rapidly within the liquid, as if it had come alive.

Then, he heard that voice.

It wasn't heard with his ears. It appeared directly in the depths of his consciousness, a fragment of memory from another world, like a piece of broken glass that had traveled through time and space, clear and within reach.

"Since ancient times, who has ever escaped death? Let my loyal heart shine in the pages of history."

Wen Tianxiang. "Passing the Lingding Ocean."

Lin Mo stood in the darkness, his blood seemingly freezing at this moment. He thought of the waves at Yashan, thought of Lu Xiufu carrying the little emperor to jump into the sea, thought of those Chinese people who chose to die standing tall when their country was broken and their families destroyed.

They knew they couldn't win. They knew they would die. But they still chose to fight.

Why?

Because they knew that what is more important than living is what one lives for.

The Emperor had sat on the Golden Throne for ten thousand years, enduring the pain of his soul being torn apart, supporting the crumbling Imperium of Man. He never wanted a group of slaves who only knew how to kneel and shout "Long live the Emperor." He wanted humanity to be able to live standing tall, like their ancestors, brave, tenacious, and never yielding.

Lin Mo suddenly understood. He and the god sitting on the Golden Throne actually wanted the same thing. It was just that they took different paths.

The Emperor used gene primarchs and Space Marines to forge the sword of humanity. And he, an ordinary person from Earth, wanted to use his own way to light a lamp for humanity in this dark universe.

He looked down at his chest. The pulse of the mirror of the emperor continued, beat after beat, gradually synchronizing with his heartbeat.

"What are you telling me?" he asked softly.

The mirror of the emperor did not answer. It never answered questions. It only provided information, only passed on the spark. Decisions must always be made by people themselves.

Lin Mo walked to the table and picked up the tube of pale golden blood. The moonlight passed through the bottom of the test tube at a perfect angle, projecting a line of tiny laser-engraved text onto the table—

If you are reading this line, it proves that I am no longer here.

Go to Zone B and find container No. 00.

There is a letter left for you there.

Lin Mo stared at that line for a long, long time.

It was not "left for the latecomer." It was not "left for the finder."

It was left for you.

The person who wrote this line knew ten thousand years ago that there would be someone from another world reading this line. He knew he would die, and he also knew that the spark he left behind would one day be ignited.

He put down the test tube and sat on the edge of the bed. The moonlight shone on his face through the window. In the direction of the distant mountains, the exhaust flames of the three Chaos drop pods had disappeared at the end of the horizon, but Lin Mo could feel a cold malice rapidly approaching Blackstone Town.

It was almost dawn.

The mirror of the emperor vibrated again. Another memory fragment surged into his consciousness like a tide.

"Lying in the deep of night, listening to the wind and rain, iron horses and icy rivers enter my dreams."

Lin Mo gripped the mirror of the emperor on his chest tightly. The wind outside the window became more urgent, carrying the metallic scent of the distant Chaos warships and the smell of impending blood.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow, the door will open.

And the war has only just begun.