72: Chapter 72 Old Tom's Ultimate Forging! The Thermometer is His Eyes

The silver-gray metal door exploded open three steps away from Alice—it didn't slide open; all the locks snapped simultaneously, and the entire door scattered outward as if torn apart by an invisible giant hand.

Stagnant air, sealed for ten thousand years, surged out carrying rust and dust, slamming against the cold tunnel walls with a muffled sound like the low growl of a trapped beast.

At the tunnel entrance, Locke raised his laser axe above his head; the humming of the blade charging up made one's eardrums ache in the narrow space.

"What was that noise?!" Locke roared in a hushed voice, the energy gauge on the axe glowing at its blinding maximum power.

Lin Mo did not turn back. His left palm suddenly grew hot—the mark of the mirror of the emperor surfaced beneath his skin, and a golden halo seeped out from between his fingers, like a red-hot branding iron searing into his flesh.

He clenched his fist tightly, forcing the heart-piercing, burning pain back into his bones.

"She opened it," Lin Mo said.

"Opened what?!"

"That door. The door that waited ten thousand years, only to open for her."

Locke opened his mouth, and the energy gauge on the axe dimmed slightly. "Your hand is glowing."

"I know."

"What does that mean?"

Lin Mo looked down at his palm. The golden light was fading, but it was not extinguishing; it was receding. Like a fist clenched for ten thousand years, finally slowly opening.

"It means she was right," Lin Mo raised his head, staring at the pitch-black doorway at the end of the tunnel. "That door was hers from the beginning."

The air in the circular room was bone-chillingly cold. It was not a physical cold, but the chill of frozen time.

Alice stood in front of that chair, not bending down, not touching—just looking.

The old man's dark blue uniform had faded to gray-blue, but the stitches at the collar and the wear marks at the cuffs remained clear.

He had his hands crossed on his lap, his back straight, as if he were still attending a military ceremony that would never end.

His face was shockingly well-preserved—the corners of his mouth were slightly upturned; that was not a smile, but the trace of a person engraving composure into their muscles in their final moments of life.

"He walked the final path alone," Alice's voice was very light, as light as a feather falling on snow.

Lin Mo stopped three steps behind her. He did not approach—he was waiting for her to speak.

"Lin Mo."

"Yes."

"Come over and look at this."

Lin Mo walked to the side of the chair and looked in the direction of her finger—the old man was wearing a simple silver ring on his left middle finger.

There was no decoration, only a line of tiny characters engraved on the inner ring. Alice gently removed the ring, turned it to the inside, and carefully identified it by the faint natural light in the room.

The engravings were worn almost invisible by the years, but she still read them out letter by letter.

"It is the serial number of the seventeenth batch," she said. Then she extended her left hand and placed it side-by-side with the suppression ring on her wrist—the engraving technique of the serial number, the angle of the handwriting, and even the depth of the cuts were exactly the same.

Lin Mo was silent for a long time. "Engraved by the same person."

"The same workstation. The same engraving tool. Even the rhythm of breathing was the same." Alice stared at the two lines of numbers for a long time, then shifted her gaze to the yellowed letter pressed under the old man's left palm.

The edges of the letter paper were not brittle, as if perfectly preserved for ten thousand years by some unknown force.

She pulled out the letter and slowly unfolded it. The high gothic handwriting was steady and powerful; every stroke seemed carved into the paper, carrying an unquestionable firmness.

There was no name at the end of the letter. Only a serial number. 17-083-AL.

"What did he write in the letter?" Lin Mo asked.

Alice folded the letter and gripped it tightly in her palm. Her knuckles turned white from the force.

"My name," she said. "The name he hadn't had time to give me."

She stood up, standing straight in front of the chair. She placed her right fist against her left chest, maintaining the standard farewell salute posture of an Astral Knights medical officer—this was a ritual used only for final goodbyes, the most decent and heaviest way of saying farewell she had learned in the empire.

Lin Mo stood behind her, not speaking. He noticed she was standing straighter than at any other time. It wasn't a soldier's uprightness, but a person finally straightening their spine in the face of their own origin.

In the corridor of the Underground Shelter, Locke leaned his laser axe against the wall and took out a cigarette. He didn't light it, just twirled it between his fingers.

"Do you believe in this kind of thing?" He looked at Lin Mo, who was walking out. "Ten thousand years later, your descendant stands before you with a ring engraved with the same tool—do you believe it?"

Lin Mo stopped at the tunnel entrance, letting his eyes adjust to the light outside. "I don't believe in probability. But I believe in planning."

"Planning?"

"Someone knew this day would come ten thousand years ago. He arranged everything—the ring, the serial number, the door's identification sequence, the matching algorithm for the psychic signature. It's not a coincidence; it's design."

Locke was silent for a moment and stuffed the cigarette back into his pocket. "Then how long did he wait?"

"Until the moment he died."

"Fuck," Locke cursed, not with anger, but with a rough, brute-like respect. "Then he's a real man."

"He is," Lin Mo said.

That night, moonlight fell through the sparse canopy, painting irregular silver spots on the ground like a shattered star map.

Alice placed the letter in the deepest part of the medicine room drawer, together with the first sample of the improved coagulant, and locked it. She did not open it to read it again—there was no need. Every word on that letter was already engraved on her bones.

She took the silver ring out of the drawer, sterilized it over an alcohol lamp, and rinsed it clean with distilled water. When she put the ring on her right ring finger, it was a bit too large—she pulled out a length of medical suture, wrapped it three times around the inside of the ring, tested the fit, and added another loop. After putting it on, she held her finger under the light and turned it over to look—the silver ring surface reflected a soft light under the lamp.

Someone knocked on the door of the medicine room.

"The door isn't locked," Alice said without looking up.

It was Wang Defu who entered, carrying an oil lamp in one hand and a coarse ceramic bowl in the other. The wheat porridge in the bowl was steaming, with two slices of glistening cured meat resting on top.

"Old Tom asked me to bring this," he placed the bowl in the corner of the workbench. "He said you'd definitely be up very late tonight and wouldn't be able to hold up without eating."

"Thank him for me."

"Thank him yourself if you want to," Wang Defu pulled up a stool and sat down, glancing at the ring on her hand without asking anything. He had stayed in Blackstone Town for three years and had seen too many people with that expression on their faces when they were troubled. "Drink the porridge while it's hot. It gets fishy when it cools."

"Wang Defu."

"Hmm?"

"Have you ever thought—whose descendant you are?"

Wang Defu was stunned for a moment. He thought about it, then smiled—that kind of smile wasn't because he thought it was funny, but because he felt that this question itself was something he wasn't qualified to think about. "My grandpa was a miner, my dad was a miner. Counting further back, probably still miners." He paused, "In the empire, most people don't deserve to know where they come from. The only ones who can know are the nobles and—"

He glanced at Alice and swallowed the second half of his sentence.

"People like you," he corrected himself. "The kind of people who are kept in mind by someone."

"Not kept in mind," Alice picked up the porridge bowl and stirred it slowly with a spoon. "It's planning. Before he died, he wrote the future of someone he had never met, stroke by stroke, into this yellowed paper."

Wang Defu was silent for a while. "Then you must live. You can't let his arrangements go to waste."

Alice did not answer. She lowered her head and took a sip of the porridge. The porridge was very hot, so hot that her eyes turned a little red.

That same night. In the forging room of the Arsenal, the furnace fire was burning brightly. Old Tom had taken off his jacket, wearing only a coarse cloth vest soaked in sweat, holding a freshly quenched gun barrel blank, comparing it repeatedly against the furnace fire. His white beard was dyed orange-red by the firelight, and the gullies on his face in the flickering flames looked like a living map engraved with years of blacksmithing.

Yang Shitou was pulling the bellows on the side, pushing and pulling, the rhythm as steady as a pendulum—he had been pulling the bellows at this workstation for three years and had never let the furnace temperature fluctuate beyond the allowable range.

"Alright, stop." Old Tom held the gun barrel up to his eyes, squinting one eye to look at the rifling along the inner bore. After looking for a full cup of tea's time, he threw the gun barrel into the scrap bin with a clang. "No good. This one is scrapped."

"Scrapped again?!" Locke was squatting in the corner wiping his laser axe and nearly jumped up when he heard this. "Old Tom, you said the one yesterday was scrapped, and the one the day before yesterday was also scrapped—what kind do you actually call qualified?!"

Old Tom turned around, his face beneath his beard redder than the furnace fire. "You take this thing to fight—"

"Yes, I take it to fight!"

"—the rifling is off by less than a hair's breadth. Do you know what that means? The bullet will go off course when it leaves the barrel. Two hundred meters away, it will be off by two palm widths." Old Tom extended two rough fingers. "Two palm widths is a human life. It could be yours, it could be Shitou's, it could be any kid who rushes up carrying this gun."

Locke was stunned by these words. He looked at Old Tom, then at the scrap bin, which was already half-filled with scrapped gun barrels.

"That 'hair's breadth' you're talking about, I can't even see it with the naked eye," he said.

"It's your business if you can't see it. I can see it. The things I make myself, if I don't see them as qualified, I can't sleep." Old Tom picked up a new blank from the workbench and clamped it back onto the fixture. "Who do you think I'm making guns for? For the Emperor? The Emperor doesn't lack this gun barrel of mine. I'm making guns for Blackstone Town. Making guns for everyone who might stand in front of you tomorrow to take a bullet for you."

Locke didn't speak again. He put the laser axe back in the corner, walked over and squatted beside the scrap bin, picked out a scrapped gun barrel from inside, and weighed it in his hand.

"This one—it looks straight to me."

"That's because your eyesight isn't good enough."

Locke laughed—it was a laugh of frustration, but not real anger. "Old Tom, I've known you for three years. You're still the same."

"The nature can't be changed. Neither can the gun barrels." Old Tom waved his hand without turning his head. "Yang Shitou, get the bellows going. If we don't get a qualified one tonight, the furnace doesn't go out."

Yang Shitou grunted, his large hands gripping the bellows handle again.

"Shitou," Old Tom suddenly spoke.

"Hmm?"

"You've followed me for three years. Pulled the bellows for three years. Don't you feel bored?"

Yang Shitou was silent for a moment and said in a muffled voice: "Bored."

"Then why are you still here?"

"Because you're here." Yang Shitou's rhythm of pulling the bellows didn't change, one push and one pull, as steady as the heartbeat of the earth. "Not a single gun barrel you've made has ever exploded. Learning behind you, I feel at ease."

Old Tom didn't speak again. The furnace fire flared up again, casting the shadows of the three men onto the opposite brick wall, like three metal statues being forged.

Locke squatted by the scrap bin and rummaged for a long time, then suddenly spoke: "Old Tom."

"Speak."

"If one day—I'm saying if—we here can make more than just gunpowder guns, can make armored vehicles, can make starships—would you still have to scrap them one by one like this?"

Old Tom's hammer paused for a moment. Then it fell onto the gun barrel blank again, clang, clang, clang, three times, the rhythm a beat slower than before.

"That depends on what I learn first," he said, his voice much lower than before. "I can't even understand the STC blueprints right now—most of those symbols, I don't recognize. But that doesn't stop me from calibrating this gun barrel right now."

He held the gun barrel up to his eyes again, looking around it against the firelight. Then he placed it on the qualified bench.

"This one is okay," he said.

Yang Shitou grinned—that was the first time he had smiled all night.

The duty nurse at the Medical Station rushed into the medicine room in the second half of the night. A wounded man who had just had his stitches removed during the day suddenly began to convulse violently—it wasn't a high fever from a wound infection, but his eyes lit up by themselves in the darkness, and a very faint purple fluorescence surged in his pupils.

Chaos corruption. It wasn't an external infection, but the remnants left by a piece of Chaos psychic shrapnel during a patrol on the northern front two months ago. The wound had been cleaned very thoroughly at the time, but a psychic particle invisible to the naked eye had embedded itself in the bone joint, lurking until now.

When Alice arrived, the wounded man's fingers were scratching five deep marks into the railing of the iron bed—his fingernails were all split, but he himself couldn't feel the pain.

She had the nurse hold down the wounded man's shoulders, slid the suppression ring on her left wrist to her palm, and slammed it onto his forehead. The silver light of the ring flared up instantly upon contact with the skin, and the purple light in the wounded man's pupils was like being gripped by an invisible hand, flickering violently twice before completely extinguishing.

His body jolted, then went completely limp. His breathing returned to normal.

Alice pushed the suppression ring back onto her wrist and wiped the tip of her nose with the back of her hand—no blood, but the temperature of the ring was at least five degrees higher than usual.

"Transfer him to isolation observation. Postpone tomorrow morning's stitch removal to the afternoon." She turned and returned to the medicine room without stopping for a step. But after closing the medicine room door, she gently rubbed the metal surface of the suppression ring with her thumb—the temperature was still rising.

The lights in the Intelligence Center were still on. Lin Mo stood before the wall, looking at the increasingly dense markings for a long time. The wall was covered with terrain, resource points, and known Chaos activity trajectories within three hundred kilometers around Hope Star. Behind every marking was a name—the names of scouts, the names of surveyors, the names of soldiers who died at the marked points.

Footsteps came from the other end of the corridor. Very light, the kind of lightness where military boots deliberately control the landing point.

"You haven't slept yet," Alice's voice sounded from behind him.

"Neither have you."

She walked to his side and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him before the marking wall. Her hand without the ring was crossed over her chest, and the hand with the ring hung by her side.

"That letter," she said.

Lin Mo did not turn to look at her. "Say it when you want to."

"I want to say it now." She took the folded letter out of her pocket, unfolded it, and handed it to him. "It's very short. You'll understand after you read it."

Lin Mo took the letter and finished reading it by the only oil lamp on the wall of the Intelligence Center.

The letter had no date, no header, and no signature. There were only a few lines of handwriting in high gothic, steady without a trace of trembling—they were the final words chosen from a thousand thoughts by a person who knew they would never have another chance to speak.

After reading it, Lin Mo folded the letter and returned it to her.

"What did he say?" He asked again—not so much because he hadn't understood it, but because he wanted her to say it herself.

"He said—'By the time you open this letter, I will have no regrets. I didn't have time to give you a name, but you will surely have a name of your own. I entrust Laboratory No. 00 to you. Everything inside is yours. It was not left to you by the emperor, nor was it left to you by the empire—but by me, an old researcher with designation 17-083-AL, left for you alone. Follow the map of the corridors; the exit is at the end of a three-day journey. You must walk out alive. You must live.'"

When Alice reached the last sentence, her voice paused for a moment on the final word. Then she finished the rest—"You are not a tool. You have never been a tool. You are my descendant. And you are my hope."

The Intelligence Center was silent for a long time. Only the wick of the oil lamp on the wall occasionally emitted a faint crackle.

"He was never a man of the empire," Lin Mo said softly.

"What?"

"He said 'not left to you by the emperor, not left to you by the empire'—he was drawing a line. He separated his work from his identity. He built Laboratory No. 00, but he did not believe the things inside belonged to those who ordered him." Lin Mo shifted his gaze from the letter to her face. "He is protecting you. Not with walls, doors, or identification sequences—but with his own name. Or rather, with the fact that he had no name at all."

Alice clutched the letter tightly. The edges of the paper trembled slightly in her palm.

"Why would he go to such lengths?" Her voice carried a faint, imperceptible tremor. "He didn't even know if I would be born, or if his bloodline could continue in this darkness for ten thousand years—"

"He knew," Lin Mo interrupted her—his tone was light but certain. "He believed this letter would be read. He wasn't gambling on luck. He was waiting. Waiting for someone he believed would surely come."

Alice lowered her head, refolded the letter, and put it back in her pocket. Her hand paused in her pocket for a moment, touching the edge of the silver ring. The ring was cold, but her fingers were warm.

"Do you know what the strangest thing is?" She suddenly spoke.

"What?"

"I read that letter, learned my designation, and learned where I came from—but the first thing that came to my mind wasn't any of that." She looked up at the dense markings on the wall. "I thought: there are three beds to remove stitches for tomorrow. The coagulant labels for No. 2, No. 3, and No. 4 haven't been applied yet. The formula for that vial of medicine could still be optimized for another round."

The corners of her mouth twitched—not a smile, but a sense of confirmation rising from deep within.

"I finally know who I am. But after knowing, the first thing I want to do is finish the work I didn't complete today."

Lin Mo watched her for a long time, then nodded slowly. "That is what it means to be alive."

"What?"

"After finding yourself, continuing to do what you are supposed to do—that is what it means to be alive. It's not revenge, it's not hatred, it's not holing up in that laboratory and isolating yourself from the world. It's continuing to label coagulants, continuing to change dressings for patients who need stitches removed. Continuing to be yourself."

Alice was silent for a few seconds. Then she turned and walked out of the Intelligence Center, her pace as fast as usual.

When she reached the door, she paused without looking back.

"Lin Mo."

"Yes."

"Your hand—the one that was glowing underground just now. Does it still hurt?"

Lin Mo looked down at his left palm. The mark of the mirror of the emperor had returned to normal temperature, but the edges of the mark were clearer than usual.

"It doesn't hurt," he said. "It is waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

"For when you are ready, too."

Alice stood at the door for a moment, then walked out. As she left, the silver ring on her right ring finger flashed with a soft light at the edge of the moonlight at the end of the corridor.

The next morning, the corridor of the Medical Station was filled with the scent of disinfectant and the cool air unique to the morning.

"There are three beds to remove stitches for today," Alice said to Lin Mo as he walked toward her at the entrance of the dispensary.

Lin Mo's gaze rested for a moment on the silver ring on her right ring finger. Then he nodded and turned toward the direction of the Archon's office. He walked two steps and stopped without looking back.

"That ring, it looks quite nice."

Alice did not answer. But on her way to the Medical Station, she turned the hand wearing the ring over to look at it in the morning light—the silver surface reflected a warm glow in the sun.

At noon, Old Tom walked into the Medical Station carrying a newly crafted bolt-action gunpowder rifle. The wood grain on the stock still carried the scent of freshly polished new timber.

"Officer Alice, are you here?"

Alice poked her head out of the dispensary. "Master Tom? What is it?"

Old Tom placed the rifle on the table; the gun body hit the table with a crisp, clean sound, like two pieces of metal locking together perfectly.

"Yesterday, Locke asked me what I should do if one day we could build more than just gunpowder rifles." Old Tom pointed to the rifle. "I said I have to learn to read STC blueprints first. I thought about it all night—can't just think about it. I'm starting to learn today. There is paper and pen in the Medical Station; I'll go to the Intelligence Center later to borrow a basic symbol reference table for STC. If there are any characters I don't recognize, you'll have to help me look—you know more imperial text than I do."

Alice looked at him for a few seconds. Then she took a stack of blank prescription slips from the drawer, flipped to the back, and neatly wrote a few characters on the top page with her pen.

"Learn these first. They are the most common abbreviations in the STC standard technical documentation." She tore the paper off and handed it to him.

Old Tom took the paper and held it at arm's length—he was farsighted—and squinted his eyes, reading it letter by letter. When he reached the third one, his beard twitched—that was his reaction every time he understood something new.

"Alright. I'll memorize this today." He folded the paper, stuffed it into the chest pocket of his work clothes, and patted it. "I'll come back to you for new ones once I've learned these by heart."

He turned to leave, but Alice called him back.

"Master Tom. Thank you for the porridge you had Wang Defu bring over last night."

Old Tom's footsteps paused. He waved his hand without looking back, his voice coming from the other end of the corridor with the unique roughness of an old blacksmith—

"I've forged iron my whole life and don't know anything else. I only know two things—straightening gun barrels and feeding those who need a hot meal."

Alice watched his back disappear at the end of the corridor. She turned the silver ring halfway around her finger—the seam on the inside of the ring had completely blended with her body temperature, and she could almost no longer feel its existence.

The letter was very short. Alice had engraved every word into her memory—it was so short that she had memorized it all after reading it the first time.

It was not some grand literary work, not a last will and testament, not a manifesto written by a laboratory director to the future before the apocalypse descended. It was just a few words spoken by an old researcher with designation 17-083-AL, after knowing his time was running out, to someone he would never see.

"By the time you open this letter, I will have no regrets. I didn't have time to give you a name, but you will surely have a name of your own. Follow the map of the corridors; the exit is at the end of a three-day journey. You must walk out alive. You must live."

In the evening, she finished her day's work and washed her hands in a wooden barrel at the entrance of the Medical Station. After washing her hands, she didn't leave immediately—she stood at the door and watched the sunset for a while. The orange-red light reflected from the window of Lin Mo's office, casting a long golden patch of light on the ground in front of her. She stood there without moving, letting the light slowly move from her toes to her ankles, then to her knees, and finally disappear completely. Before the light left her body entirely, she gently touched the last trace of golden warmth with the hand wearing the ring.

Then she turned and walked into the shadows of the Medical Station.

The spare test tube rack brought by Old Tom had been moved from the window to the center of the workbench. There were three newly prepared coagulants in the dispensary waiting for her to label—No. 2, No. 3, and No. 4. She picked up the pen to write the labels. Her hand was as steady as a rock. The tip of the pen drew a clean arc on the paper; the arc of the finishing stroke was exactly the same as the arc of the last letter on that letter.

After applying the labels, Alice sat alone in the dispensary for a long time. She picked up a pen and wrote a few short lines in high gothic on the back of a blank prescription slip—it was the first time in her life she had written words of her own:

"Plain paper carries a last wish, each word heavy as a thousand pounds. Though the call has never been heard, we are already kin by blood." —Alice, the night she read the letter, written on the back of a prescription slip.

The markings on the wall of the Intelligence Center were becoming denser, like a map being filled in inch by inch. Behind every marking were people's names, sweat that had been shed, and nights that had been endured. Lin Mo sometimes thought that if one day he could leave this planet alive, what he would remember would not be the tactics and decisions—but the lights that shone in the darkness.

The mirror of the emperor trembled gently deep within his consciousness. It wasn't an alarm, but a confirmation. A faint yet firm response, coming from the Golden Throne, spanning ten thousand years of time and the endless sea of stars.

A golden sea of light flashed through his mind, countless stars blooming in the sea of light, like millions of pear blossoms blooming at the same time.

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

In this sea of stars, every inhabited planet is an isolated island. The empire does not save isolated islands; the empire only records their coordinates after the island falls. Lin Mo knew that if he wanted to survive, he could not count on any reinforcements from across the sea of stars.

But he also knew that from tonight on, that statement would have to change.

Alice was no longer a rootless duckweed. And he was no longer fighting alone.

The next day at noon, Lin Mo called Locke, Old Tom, Wang Defu, and Yang Shitou into the Archon's office. The map on the table was spread out, and a thick red line was drawn facing the direction of the southern ridge.

"Follow this route, three days," he said, pointing to the red line on the map. "Laboratory No. 00 has a complete map of the corridors; one-third is underground, two-thirds are on the surface. The destination is here—" He drew a circle on a marker point with the tip of his pen. "An outpost from the old era. If the supplies and equipment inside are well preserved, it will be enough for us to push the defensive line to the south of the ridge."

Locke leaned over to look at the markings, then looked up at Lin Mo. "Are you sure you want to spend three days exploring this? Chaos patrols could come back at any time."

"Precisely because they will come back," Lin Mo said, "we must go."

Old Tom knocked his pipe against the table leg with a clatter. "I'm going with you. Those old devices need maintenance, and none of you can understand STC interfaces."

"I'm going too," Yang Shitou stood up, his voice not loud but steady. "If there's stuff to move on the road, I have the strength."

"Just save your strength for moving things," Locke patted his shoulder. "Leave the fighting to me."

Wang Defu was the last to speak. He looked at the circled coordinate on the map, then looked at the people present.

"Lin Mo," he said.

"Hmm?"

"This coordinate—it's less than a day's journey from the direction where the last Chaos patrol appeared."

"I know." Lin Mo tapped his finger on the map. "So we have to move fast."

Wang Defu was silent for a moment. "Alright. I'll prepare two extra days of dry rations."

"It's a three-day journey, so bring enough supplies. I'll arrange the water and dry rations." He paused. "But before we leave, everyone go to the Medical Station and have Officer Alice check your health. It's three days of mountain roads—if anyone's wounds haven't healed, they won't be able to make it."

Lin Mo nodded. "We leave tomorrow morning."

"We leave at dawn." Locke stood up and shouldered his laser axe. "I'm going to keep watch on the watchtower."

"Don't drink," Old Tom said without looking up.

"Got it, got it." Locke waved his hand and walked out of the office.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the sea of stars, a pitch-black warship was quietly changing its course.

The Techmarine of the Ultramarines stared at the scanning screen, his face changing suddenly. On the holographic screen, a string of signal identification codes that had been silent for ten thousand years was pulsing at a stable frequency—not a fake signal from Chaos interference, not equipment failure, but a genuine response signal encrypted with Golden Age standard protocols.

He did not report to Guilliman immediately. He first sent a highest-priority encrypted message to Terra. The content was only six words:

"Found them. They are still alive."

The pitch-black warship turned its bow. Its new course was pointed straight at Hope Star.

The door opened.

The people inside saw the light.

The people outside finally saw them, too.