81: Chapter 81 Hostility and Vigilance: She Suspects We Are Outposts of Chaos

The steam hammers in the Arsenal slammed against the anvil, the muffled thuds echoing off the brick walls one after another.

Old Tom was swinging his hammer thirty percent faster than usual—not because he was rushing work, but because he'd caught a glimpse through the window of the woman slowly moving across the square, and a nameless anger was burning in his chest.

Locke kicked open the door to the Intelligence Center, the doorframe groaning as if it were about to fall apart.

The swamp mud on his shoulders was still damp, and the hydraulic shears in his hand were dripping with murky water.

He crouched by the threshold, his voice dropping low—though even when he lowered his voice, the volume was about the same as anyone else's normal speech.

"She's been wandering the square for a whole hour. The South Gate sentry tower, the Arsenal, the Medical Station—she's scanned each place at least twice.

Old Tom says he's about to lose it. That woman stared at the modified gun for several minutes, counting the handmade hammer marks on the stock as if she were a coroner picking apart a corpse."

Lin Mo stood by the window without turning around.

The Deputy Medical Officer walked very slowly, her fractured ribs aching with every step, a reminder of her narrow escape from death.

Yet her eyes never stopped moving, a stark contrast to her sluggish pace: fast, accurate, and sharp.

Lin Mo was all too familiar with this look. In his past life as a product manager, when a top-tier risk controller took over a failing project, the first thing they did was never to patch things up. Instead, they would mentally dismantle the entire project into parts, marking every potential breaking point with absolute clarity.

"Let her look," Lin Mo said.

"Let her look?" Locke stood up abruptly, his voice nearly blowing the roof off before he forcibly stifled it—he knew Lin Mo hated it when people shouted in the Intelligence Center. "She's not just sightseeing! This is reconnaissance! It's standard procedure for the Astral Knights—the first step upon reaching an unfamiliar outpost is—"

"To assess defensive capabilities and potential threats. I know," Lin Mo turned around. "She is a guest now, not a prisoner. Guests have the right to look around."

Locke opened his mouth, then swallowed the curse that was on the tip of his tongue.

He had known Lin Mo for too long, long enough to know that the calmer the other man's tone was, the more complex his thoughts were compared to everyone else's.

The consequence of interrupting him was usually discovering three hours later that your own plan had been completely overturned, while Lin Mo's layout was already running ahead of reality.

The door to the Intelligence Center was open. The Deputy Medical Officer was standing at the entrance; she hadn't even made a sound when she arrived.

"I have three questions."

Lin Mo looked up from his documents. Locke instinctively gripped the handle of his hydraulic shears—not to attack, but with the instinct of a hunter gripping their weapon upon hearing a branch snap in the woods.

"Please, go ahead," Lin Mo said, putting down his pen.

"First," the Deputy Medical Officer's tone was not aggressive, yet it left no room for debate. Every word was like a scalpel cutting into fascia—no blood was drawn, but it had already touched the most sensitive depths. "Your sentries are equipped with homemade weapons. According to the Imperial Department of Military Affairs's weapon regulations for frontier settlements, any weapon manufacturing without the authorization of the Mechanicus is classified as technological heresy."

She paused, as if weighing the gravity of her next sentence. "Are you aware of this?"

"I am."

"Second," her rhythm remained unwavering. A strictly trained interrogator would never lose their composure just because they received the expected answer. "The Arsenal is producing day and night. The raw material is iron ore, but the annual output of the mining area cannot support this level of steel consumption—unless you have an undeclared secondary mineral source."

"Have you declared the actual iron ore output to the Imperial Department of Military Affairs?"

"No."

Locke's fingers tightened and then loosened on the handle. He couldn't stand this kind of interrogation-style conversation; it wasn't that he was afraid of not being able to answer, but that he simply didn't know how to lie. Yet, for every question the woman in front of him asked, the answer was a secret that Blackstone Town "must never tell outsiders." If she really ordered the Arsenal to be shut down, Locke would only have two choices: let her in to seal it, or knock her out. The second option had a problem—Alice would most likely use her Psyker powers to pin him to the wall.

"Third—" the Deputy Medical Officer stopped.

This pause was longer than the first two combined. It was so long that Locke thought she wasn't going to ask, and so long that Lin Mo had already mentally listed everything she might ask about: icons, banners, administrative structure, population registration, the number of Psykers... but she chose the second item on the list.

"This settlement on this planet has no Ecclesiarchy icons, no Imperial official emblems, and not even the gear insignia of the Mechanicus can be found." Her gaze passed over Lin Mo's shoulder and landed on the flag gently fluttering in the wind in the square outside.

It was a flag stitched together from pieces of old military uniforms—Yang Shitou's wife had lost her husband while fleeing, and she had unpicked the uniform he left behind to sew it stitch by stitch. There was no double-headed eagle on it, only the outline of Blackstone Town's defensive fortifications, circling the settlement in rings. "I have never seen the flag in your square in any Imperial sector."

She stared straight into Lin Mo's eyes and said the final sentence.

"This settlement is either a forward outpost for Chaos infiltration, or it is a category of settlement I have never seen in any document from the Imperial Department of Military Affairs."

The air seemed to freeze for half a second.

Locke moved first. He took the hydraulic shears off the wall, needing to hold the heavy object to suppress the trembling in his fingertips: "Do you know how many battles we've fought here against Chaos—"

"Locke." Lin Mo raised his hand to stop him.

He then countered with a question for the Deputy Medical Officer. If any Imperial official had heard it, they would have flipped out on the spot. But Lin Mo was not an Imperial official; he was a product manager. The core skill of a product manager wasn't making final decisions, but laying out all the data in front of the other party and letting them reach the conclusion you wanted on their own.

"In all the years you've served in the Astral Knights, how many frontier settlements that strictly adhered to Imperial regulations have you seen survive their first five years?"

The Deputy Medical Officer did not answer.

"I've seen three," Lin Mo said, getting up and walking to the window. Outside the glass, the patched flag was swaying gently in the wind. When Yang Shitou's wife sewed it, she had added an extra stitch at each of the four corners—her ex-husband's uniform had worn out in those four spots, and she knew where it was weakest. "They all died. Not at the hands of Chaos, but at the hands of the Empire. They used all their resources to satisfy the regulations, leaving nothing to deal with a single Ork raid."

"So you think—"

"I don't make judgments," Lin Mo said, turning to face her. "I give you data. I know the Arsenal is non-compliant, I know that flag doesn't belong to the Empire, and I know the Medical Station doesn't have a permit issued by the Empire. But do you know how many guns we've built and how many people we've saved in the past two years?"

"How many?"

"Guns, three hundred," Lin Mo's voice was steady, but every number sounded like Old Tom's forging hammer striking hot iron, heavy and powerful. "People—all of last year, the Medical Station treated one thousand two hundred and thirty-seven wounded and sick patients, with forty-six deaths."

He paused for a second. Every time he said this, it felt like something was stuck in his throat.

"Among them were six children under the age of ten. It wasn't that they were too severely injured to be saved, but that our medical conditions were insufficient. We don't have pediatric antibiotics, nor do we have pediatric surgical instruments. Old Tom used his blacksmithing skills to forge two sets of miniature hemostats, but a blacksmith shop is not a medical device factory after all."

The Deputy Medical Officer's eyes flickered. The movement was extremely slight; if Lin Mo hadn't trained himself to capture micro-expressions in fractions of a second from user testing videos, he never would have noticed. Her chin lowered by about three degrees—that was the posture of someone stuffing new information into an old framework and rearranging it.

"I don't expect to convince you that these practices are compliant," Lin Mo said. "I'm giving you raw data. Use your own professional judgment to evaluate this settlement, rather than a rulebook shipped from Terra that has never touched the mud of the frontier. Because the people who wrote those regulations—"

"Have never spent a night on a frontier planet," the Deputy Medical Officer finished the sentence for him.

Lin Mo looked at her. He realized this wasn't a rebuttal, but a confirmation. She was confirming whether he had the courage to say this clearly.

Silence spread. Locke later told Lin Mo that during that silence, he had gone through every reason he'd ever had for a fight in his life, only to find that none of them applied. It wasn't that he couldn't win, but that this woman simply hadn't given him a reason to make a move.

Then the Deputy Medical Officer spoke. One sentence, which left both men in the room stunned.

"I will take the night shift at the Medical Station tonight. Your Psyker needs to rest."

She turned and walked out of the Intelligence Center. Locke stared at her back for three seconds—as she stepped over the threshold, her left foot hit a loose floorboard, but she didn't even lower her head—then he turned to ask Lin Mo: "Did she just say... she's going to take the night shift?"

"Yes."

"So she trusts us?"

"No," Lin Mo said, watching her back outside the window. Her walking posture was different from when she arrived: when she came, it was reconnaissance mode; now, it was the mode of mentally redrawing a map. Her chin was lowered by three degrees, her shoulders had relaxed from a confrontational stance to a thoughtful one, and her stride had changed from a measuring, mincing step to a purposeful, hurried gait—she was fitting the data Lin Mo had given her into her own judgment framework. "She doesn't trust us; she's calculating."

A golden light flickered at the edge of his vision. It wasn't a visual image, but more like an intuition brought on by a change in temperature. It was telling Lin Mo one thing: there was something hidden in this woman's blood, a design from the same era as the metal wall underground. It wasn't a coincidence; it was intentional.

Locke shouldered his hydraulic shears and walked toward the door. After a few steps, he turned back: "Then what happens when she's done calculating?"

"Once she's done, she'll give herself a reason."

"A reason for what?"

"A reason to stay."

Locke turned these words over in his mind a few times, bent down to pick up the hydraulic shears he had put down, and walked toward the Arsenal. A few steps out, he turned back and threw out a sentence: "Then let's give her one."

His tone was exactly the same as when he said "Then we fight" on the battlefield, carrying the decisiveness of having confirmed a target.

Old Tom stopped Locke at the entrance of the Arsenal.

"That female officer asked me three questions." Old Tom wiped the machine oil from his hands with his apron; the grease had long since seeped into every crack in his palm prints and couldn't be wiped clean. "She asked about the angle of the hammer marks, the quenching temperature, and the tolerance of the rifling in the gun barrels."

"How did you answer?"

"I said the hammer marks were hammered by hand, the temperature was judged by eye, and the rifling tolerance was the width of a single hair." Old Tom threw his apron onto the table, his beard bristling high—that was his way of showing pride while trying to feign anger. "Then she recited three numbers, the standard specifications of the Imperial Mechanicus. Compared to the standards she recited, my margin of error—"

"How much of a difference?"

"Three-thousandths," Old Tom's beard bristled even higher. "The gun barrels produced by the Imperial Mechanicus's fully automated forging lines have a margin of error three-thousandths greater than what I, a blacksmith judging by eye, produce."

"So you stunned her."

"It wasn't me who stunned her," Old Tom turned around, picked up a newly forged gun action part, and examined it carefully against the light from the window. "It was her who was stunned, but she didn't pretend not to see it. She said directly to me—'Your craftsmanship shouldn't be judged as criminal by a rulebook written by people who have never touched a hammer.'"

Locke was silent for two seconds: "That judgment is more genuine than anything I've heard praising her."

"You've never praised her."

"I didn't mean praising her," Locke shook his head. "I meant... I'm not ready to trust her yet. But Old Tom, you already have."

Old Tom didn't answer. He placed the gun action part into the finished goods box nearby—tomorrow, these parts would be assembled into a new gun and issued to the sentry at the South Gate tower, who wasn't even twenty years old yet. The boy's parents had died in an Ork raid, and this gun was his only hope for surviving the next attack.

In the operating room late at night, Alice was performing the third debridement on a crash victim.

The oil for the surgical lamp was running out; the wick flickered a few times inside the glass shade, stretching the shadows on the operating table. Alice didn't look up. She knew exactly how much oil was left, just as she knew that the third compartment on the tray held hemostats, the second shelf of the right cabinet held spare bandages, and that if the patient suddenly hemorrhaged, she had three seconds to grab the emergency tourniquet from the edge of the sterile zone. It wasn't something she consciously remembered; it was an instinct carved into her muscles by over 1,200 surgeries.

There was someone at the door. She looked up and saw the Deputy Medical Officer standing there, carrying a spare surgical gown.

"I'll take the second half of the night. Your Psyker needs to sleep—this isn't a suggestion, it's an order from one military doctor to another."

Alice's hand paused above the hemostat: "I don't need—"

"You do," the Deputy Medical Officer walked to the sink, bent over, and began to disinfect her hands according to standard procedure. Her rhythm of washing hands was exactly the same as Alice's—not an imitation, but muscle memory taught by the same instructor and repeated countless times in the same legion. "You had a bad habit when you were in the legion, always thinking you could hold out without sleep. But every time you pulled a sixteen-hour shift, your left hand would be 0.3 seconds slower than your right when removing bandages. During mass casualties, 0.3 seconds is the difference between saving a leg and an amputation below the knee."

Alice's fingers tightened on the handle of the forceps. Their cohort had received too much training, including memorizing the physical limits of their comrades. It wasn't out of concern, but professional instinct—knowing where everyone in the team's limits lay was the only way not to be dragged down by unexpected breakdowns on the battlefield.

"The patient situation for the second half of the night," Alice stood up and yielded her position. "Bed one is under observation for concussion, check pupil response every half hour. Bed two has a risk of infection after the leg fracture was set; use the antibacterial dressings from the second shelf of the third cabinet for dressing changes. Bed three's fever has broken, but it's highly likely to return between four and five in the morning; call me immediately if there are any changes."

"Your drug classification system," the Deputy Medical Officer took the medical record book.

Alice looked at her for two seconds, then began to explain in great detail. It wasn't a work report, but one medical officer to another, laying out the management plan for battlefield resources.

"Medicines are shelved according to injury severity. The A-grade rack holds emergency hemostatics and anti-infectives; the B-grade rack holds orthopedic fixation and burn treatments; the C-grade rack holds antipyretics, analgesics, and daily supplies. Nurses don't need to cross zones to retrieve medication, and they can fill an order in as little as seven seconds."

The Deputy Medical Officer nodded. "Between the outpatient clinic and the operating room, what do you use to communicate priority?"

"Currently, we just shout."

"That's too inefficient." The Deputy Medical Officer picked up a leftover strip of bandage, folded it into thirds, and continued, "Use colored strips. Red for immediate surgery, yellow for wait-and-observe, and green for treated and transferred to the recovery zone. Tie the strip to the patient's left wrist; any nurse passing by can tell the urgency at a glance without having to ask."

Alice's brow twitched, a movement somewhere between surprise and approval—a look she rarely showed others. In all her years on Hope Star, she had never met anyone capable of offering effective suggestions on medical management. "Continue."

"Lin Mo's register uses charcoal pencils to track consumption. Switch to different colored inks to correspond with different batches of medical supplies; a single chart could simultaneously show consumption rates and expiration warnings." The Deputy Medical Officer placed the hemostat back on the tray, using the exact same method as Alice: tips facing down, handles facing out, placed on the right side of the tray.

Because they had been taught by the same instructor: hemostats must be placed on the right, as most military doctors are right-handed. In an emergency, using the left hand to grab it would waste half a second adjusting the tip—and when dealing with arterial bleeding, half a second meant permanent nerve damage.

"Where did you learn these methods?" Alice asked.

"Not in the Astral Knights." The Deputy Medical Officer lowered her head and began checking the pupils of the patient in bed one. "It was after a crash, at a frontier outpost. We survived for two months on a single crate of emergency supplies. We had no surgical lights, so we used mirrors to reflect moonlight; we had no sterile gloves, so we boiled cloth strips in water; when we ran low on medicine, we cut a single antibiotic pill into four, gave one piece to each person, and prayed that a quarter dose would be enough."

Alice fell silent.

Then, the corner of her mouth quirked up ever so slightly. The movement was tiny, but real. It was the expression of being professionally acknowledged by a professional peer. In the Astral Knights, she never showed this expression to outsiders; it was reserved only for comrades who had fought side-by-side to save the same batch of wounded and survived the same all-nighters.

The conversation in the latter half of the night was like two rivers that had once flowed into the same sea, then diverged, only to meet again in an unnoticed tributary.

At 2:17 AM, while debriding a wound for an infected miner, the Deputy Medical Officer subconsciously ripped off her disposable sterile gloves and switched to cloth gloves.

Alice saw it.

The Astral Knights Medical Manual, Volume 3, Chapter 7, Section 4, was explicit: debridement surgery must be performed using standardized sterile gloves; any substitute material was a violation. One demerit for the first offense, and a demotion after three.

She said nothing, simply pulling open the third drawer on the left of the cabinet under the operating table—where the cloth gloves were kept—and pointing it out to the Deputy Medical Officer.

The Deputy Medical Officer looked up at her. That look held many things: surprise, calculation, and the brief hesitation of an Imperial officer considering whether to report a colleague for a violation. Then, she put on the gloves—without hesitation, without excuse, and without saying, "This is against regulations."

Because in this operating room, at 2:17 AM, the infection was spreading, and the tactile sensation of sterile gloves couldn't detect the extent of the subcutaneous infection. At this moment, the miner on the operating table needed the military doctor to use her fingers to sense the temperature difference under the skin. The manual wouldn't make that judgment for the doctor; only the doctor could.

At 3:04 AM, during a shift change, both reached for the same bottle of rubbing alcohol, and their fingers collided.

Neither pulled back, because they both noticed the calluses on the other's knuckles.

Those weren't calluses from holding a scalpel. They were worn down, day after day, from the technique of using fingers to apply pressure to pressure points to stop bleeding—the very technique taught by the same legion and the same instructor.

"Did you learn this at the frontier outpost, too?" Alice asked.

"No," the Deputy Medical Officer said. "We learned this together in the Astral Knights. Same instructor, same day. You might have forgotten, but I couldn't."

At 4:00 AM, after changing the dressing for the last patient, the Deputy Medical Officer stood at the doorway of the operating room and said something. Her voice was very soft, almost drowned out by the hissing of the surgical lamp.

"You are more yourself here than you ever were in the legion."

Alice, who was organizing the surgical instruments, froze in mid-motion.

"You haven't changed," the Deputy Medical Officer said, taking off her surgical gown and folding it neatly on the washstand. "It's just that in this place, no one asks you to be someone else. In the legion, you were Medical Officer Vian, and your rank determined your value. Here... you are the person who remembers the name of every patient."

This sentence remained in the operating room after the night shift ended, mingling with the scent of alcohol and disinfectant, like something that even high-temperature sterilization couldn't remove. When Alice later recounted it to Lin Mo, she realized: the moment she turned off her communicator and stayed on Hope Star, she hadn't just chosen a location. She had chosen a space where she could save lives according to her own will—not by the manual of Terra, but by her own clinical judgment; not as a tool of the Astral Knights, but as a doctor who remembered the name of every casualty.

This distinction was defined by rank and regulations within the Imperial system. On Hope Star, however, it was defined by whether a person chose to stay in the operating room until 3:00 AM or go back to the dormitory to rest.

The next morning, in the plaza.

Yang Shitou was carrying a bundle of metal plates from the crashed wreckage salvaged from the swamp toward the warehouse. As he passed the plaza, he saw Lin Mo standing under the flagpole. He set down the metal plates and wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand.

"Lord Lin Mo, that female officer went into the Medical Station in the middle of the night yesterday. My wife said the lights inside were on until the roosters crowed." There was no complaint in Yang Shitou's tone, just a statement of what he had observed. He spoke differently from Locke: when Locke said, "I think," his mind was already made up; when Yang Shitou said, "I think," he was genuinely unsure. "My old lady says she's never seen an officer in the legion who cares so much about the wounded."

"How did your wife recognize she was an officer?"

"My wife said it was the way she tied her military boots—the laces tied to the second eyelet, not the third; it's the Astral Knights' way of tying them for forced marches. Only someone who has been a military dependent would notice such details." Yang Shitou chuckled honestly. "My wife says someone who can tie laces like that wouldn't hurt us in this place."

Lin Mo patted his shoulder. "Tell her that her judgment is likely correct."

"Should I tell Captain Locke? He crouched on the roof opposite the Medical Station for half an hour last night, saying he was afraid the Deputy Medical Officer would steal our medical supplies in the middle of the night."

"No need. Locke has his own way of judging."

Yang Shitou hoisted the metal plates and continued toward the warehouse. He never asked unnecessary questions—not because he wasn't curious, but because he knew that when Lin Mo said "no need," there was already a plan in motion behind the scenes.

Wang Defu stood under the corridor by the plaza with his hands behind his back, watching for a long time. The Deputy Medical Officer came out of the Medical Station, went to the well to draw water to wash her face, tied up her hair, and walked back in. There was not a shred of hesitation in her movements, no struggle of indecision about whether to stay. She had made her decision—going straight from the night shift into the day shift. This wasn't helping out; this was joining the staff.

"You don't need to learn from Locke and crouch on the roof." Lin Mo walked under the corridor.

"I'm not watching her." Wang Defu took his hands from behind his back, holding a crumpled cigarette, but didn't light it. "I'm counting how many patients she's changed dressings for this morning. Twelve. More than our nurses change in a morning. Do you know what this means—an officer of the Astral Knights, doing the work of a nurse, and putting in more effort than the nurses."

"What does it mean?"

"It means she isn't just acting out of conscience." Wang Defu finally lit the cigarette and took a deep drag; the spark of the cigarette was almost invisible in the daylight. "She is working for this place. Even if she isn't one of us yet."

The bitter taste of tobacco drifted in the air for a few seconds. Wang Defu had been here for five years and had seen too many outsiders: Imperial tax collectors arrived with their heads held high and left cursing; Mechanicus personnel arrived with airs of superiority and left with notebooks full of craft data; Rogue Traders arrived with smiles on their faces and left shaking everyone's hand. But never had an outsider, whose ribs hadn't even healed, voluntarily worked two consecutive night shifts.

This woman's logic wasn't "I owe you all"; it was "If I don't do this, the recovery time for the wounded will increase by at least 30%, and 30% is the threshold where the infection rate slides from controllable to uncontrollable."

She was working based on data. Lin Mo recognized a kindred spirit in her—even if she would never understand the term "Product Manager" in her life. They were essentially the same type of thinker: observe the status quo, identify the bottleneck, provide an optimal solution, and then use data to prove the plan's effectiveness. The only difference was that he optimized systems, while she optimized human survival rates.

Lin Mo ran into Locke in the plaza. Locke had just returned from the swamp extraction point, covered in mud, carrying a bundle of communication cables on his shoulder. He glanced in the direction of the Medical Station, where the Deputy Medical Officer could be seen through the window, bending over to change a patient's bandages.

"She asked me about weapons yesterday."

"And ore, and the idol," Lin Mo said.

"Before I returned, she had already sought out Old Tom to ask about weapons. Stock hammer marks, quenching temperatures, rifling tolerances—every question hit the mark." Locke crouched down, set the hydraulic shears on the ground, and wiped his face with his sleeve. "She said Old Tom's gun barrels are three-thousandths more precise than the standard Imperial Mechanicus. Using numbers to compliment people—I've only ever heard that kind of praise when you talk about 'conversion rates,' 'user retention,' or 'marginal costs.' Did you drug her?"

"No. She's just like that by nature; she speaks with data about everything."

Locke was silent for a good while, then said something that made Lin Mo feel his trust in him over the years hadn't been wasted: "The questions she asked were all too accurate. So accurate that I kind of regret not having the answers prepared before she asked."

"She isn't here to find fault."

"I know," Locke said. "Who would help change the bandages for twelve patients before finding fault?"

"She is looking for a reason," Lin Mo said, watching the bending figure in the Medical Station window. Her movements were crisp and clean, with not a single wasted motion, as if she were splitting every second in two. "A reason to stay."

Locke turned the words over in his mind, and when he spoke, there was not a shred of hesitation: "Then give her one."

The tone was exactly the same as when he said "Then we fight" on the battlefield.

Lin Mo stood in the plaza, watching Locke hoist the cables and walk into the Arsenal. The sound of the steam forging hammer came from inside, one beat, then another. The rhythm was faster than that of a standard Imperial factory, meaning the production line efficiency was at least 20% higher than Imperial specifications. Old Tom had applied Lin Mo's "Product Manager Scheduling Method" to the Arsenal, squeezing every second to the absolute limit.

The people of Blackstone Town were using their own methods to push up the probability of survival, bit by bit. Pushing it word by word, barrel by barrel, life by life.

Under the night sky, the fog in the direction of the swamp was dispersing. Where the fog receded, a light was revealed. Not starlight—twenty kilometers to the southwest, a faint blue-purple pillar of light was rising from the horizon.

Lin Mo's pupils contracted sharply. He had seen this color before. On the battlefield of the Slaanesh demonic army, that was the residual light leaked when a Chaos Psyker tore through reality.

His left hand subconsciously reached into his pocket. The silver-patterned crystal was lying quietly inside, but at this moment, it was incredibly hot. It wasn't physical heat, but a burning sensation that pierced through skin and bone, stabbing straight into his nerve endings. It had sensed something. Something that came from the same design system as itself, something that was closing in on this place.

The golden light at the edge of his vision exploded—this time, it wasn't a vague intuition, but a sharp, blade-like frozen frame.

In the image was the silhouette of a Chaos cruiser, its bow slowly emerging from a purple Warp rift that was tearing through reality, the hull covered in writhing, twisted, evil inscriptions. In the center of the bridge, a figure clad in black armor with gold trim raised a hand, its index finger pointing precisely at the direction of Hope Star.

The image lasted less than half a second before dissipating. But Lin Mo didn't need more.

They weren't here for the ship. From the very beginning, they were coming for her.

He looked up at the window of the Medical Station. In the warm yellow light of the oil lamp, two women from the Astral Knights stood side by side in front of the operating table. Their wounds had not yet healed, their story had only just begun, and they didn't yet know the true mission of that crashed ship.

The silver-patterned crystal he had received from Alice was pressed against his thigh, carrying a heat that did not belong to this era, pulsing quietly.

When the manuals of Terra were bound into books, no one asked the woman on the frontier, who built her tent out of orc bones, if she had slept well the night before.

In her pocket, the small device from fifty thousand years in the future was still quietly waiting to be lit up again.

But the person it was waiting for—perhaps, had already arrived before it was lit up.