9: Chapter 9 Training Villagers and Establishing a Militia

A night wind blew from the north, carrying the unique sulfurous scent from deep within the mineral veins, mingling with the woody smell of cooking smoke. It smelled like this world's own, not entirely reassuring, aroma of dinner.

Lin Mo drew a larger circle on the village square.

Fifty people stood before him—some young, some middle-aged, a few not much younger than Old Tom. What they had in common were the calluses on their hands, the sun-weathered marks on their faces, and a certain silence in their eyes, honed by life's hardships. He had spent a month learning most of their names—now he needed to teach them how to kill an ork with a flintlock, and how to spell their own names after surviving.

He divided the fifty into five squads of ten, each with a squad leader. Four hours of military training, two hours of literacy class. This was the daily schedule he had set. Locke asked if he was insane—six hours of training every day, who would work the fields? Lin Mo said the advantage of the apprenticeship system was the iteration of experience: half would train in the morning while the other half worked the fields, swapping in the afternoon.

Locke was silent for a moment, staring for a long time at the rotation chart Lin Mo had drawn on the ground. The chart was as concise as a chessboard, each cell filled with a schedule precise down to the individual. His expression shifted first to confusion, then to focus—Lin Mo realized Locke wasn't just spacing out; he was reinterpreting the chart in his own way.

Lin Mo wrote ten characters on the stone slab to teach today: fire, powder, gun, retreat, advance, left, right, halt, save, life. He pointed at the first character with a branch and said, "This is 'fire.' You deal with it every day when making gunpowder." The fifty people stared at him as if he were a monster fallen from the sky.

The training was much harder than Lin Mo had anticipated. Not physically—the villagers' stamina was surprisingly good. People in Blackstone Village started doing physical labor from the age of five; their fitness was above passing. The difficulty lay in shifting their mindset. Most villagers had spent their lives merely "surviving"—work at sunrise, sleep at nightfall, run when orks came, die if they couldn't run. Lin Mo demanded they learn within a month to form ranks, follow commands, volley fire, and remain motionless until orders were given.

After the first day of training, Locke sat on a rock beside the training ground, silent for a long time. Lin Mo asked him what was wrong. Locke said that among the fifty, thirty were raw recruits, but their coordination was ten percent higher than expected—because seven of them had hunted with Locke for ten years, and most of the rest had handled weapons during ork raids.

"[Uncertain,]" Lin Mo said without turning his head. "[But moving forward is better than waiting to die.]"

"If we grouped greenhorns like Yang Shitou into a separate squad, dispersing the seven veterans as the backbone across the five squads, each leading nine rookies—would that be better?" Locke said.

The night wind blew again. This gust was colder than the last, carrying a scent mixed of metal and earth. He tightened the worn, frayed coarse cloth jacket around him—a gift from the villagers, much warmer than the T-shirt he wore when he crossed over.

Lin Mo was taken aback. He looked at Locke and realized this usually boisterous, burly man was serious. Locke had a fully formed tactical deployment plan in his mind—not learned from any military theory, but deduced from experience.

The wind moaned lowly as it passed through the ruins, as if something enormous were breathing underground. He told himself it was just the wind. But in the warhammer 40k universe, the wind was never just the wind.

"When did you start thinking about this?" Lin Mo asked.

"Last night, after you left," Locke said. "I lay awake thinking. If those fifty guns of yours could fire thirty pellets in one volley, at least a whole row of orks would fall before they reached the village."

He didn't speak. Locke, thinking something was wrong with his plan, pressed, "Is it not right?"

"No," Lin Mo said. "Your plan is better than the one I designed."

He silently calculated in his mind: how many days of food reserves remained, how much ammunition had been consumed, how many people were needed for the next patrol. These numbers meshed in his mind like gears, each one connected to three others—change one, and everything had to be recalculated.

He tore up the original training schedule in front of Locke and rearranged the timetable according to Locke's squad plan.

From that day on, before each training session, Locke would sketch his formations in the dirt, with Lin Mo watching beside him. They occasionally argued—most of the time, Lin Mo proved Locke's ideas were right. He didn't need to teach Locke tactics—he just needed to give him enough guns, enough gunpowder, and a blank slate to work with.

On the fourth day of training, Yang Shitou experienced his first live-fire drill. First shot: miss, the pellet flew into a nearby bush. Second shot: miss, this time even farther off. Old Zhou watched from the side without a word. Yang Shitou gritted his teeth, raised the gun—third shot. The pellet grazed the edge of the target, scraping a shallow white mark on the wooden post. For a boy who had first touched a gun just a week ago, it wasn't bad. Locke lit a roll-up and muttered two words from the corner of his mouth: "Not bad." Yang Shitou didn't respond, but that night he practiced cleaning the gun barrel until his technique was twice as precise as before.

The sound of flying gravel echoed against the palisade wall, like someone hammering a stone drum.

A torch burned in the center of the square, with fifty people standing in a circle around it. Thirty days ago, they were just villagers fleeing from orks. Now they were a unit with squad leaders, formations, and a rotation plan. Lin Mo stood in the shadows beyond the torchlight, watching those silhouettes gilded by the fire. These people held flintlocks in their hands and carried in their pockets ten characters they couldn't write a week ago—this was the second light he had kindled in this dark universe.

The first light was himself.

*Fifty pairs of hands accustomed to hoes,*

*now hold something heavier than grain.*

"[Follow the map. Three days.]"

That night, Lin Mo went alone to the hill outside the village. He needed some time to himself. In the distance, the lights of Blackstone Village flickered in the night wind, like a small boat tossed in a storm. He reviewed all the information acquired since activating the mirror of the emperor: ork weaknesses, atmospheric composition, underground energy fluctuations. It felt as if this information had been organized and placed directly into his mind—not learned, but taught to him. The question was: who taught him?

A wind blew from afar, carrying a faint, indistinct whisper. Not a sound, but a vibration. Lin Mo touched the octagram pendant in his pocket—it was warm. Not ordinary warmth, but a rhythmic pulse, like a heartbeat. He gripped the pendant in his hand, and at that moment, a golden light flashed at the edge of his vision—a blurry face flickered in the darkness for an instant. Not the Emperor. It was someone he had never seen before.

Lin Mo sat before the map in the Intelligence Center for a long time, looking at the coordinates he had circled. Coordinates of the Chaos octagram, coordinates of underground energy fluctuations, coordinates of the Mining City expedition—these points were scattered across different regions of the star chart, but when he connected them with a line, he reached a chilling conclusion: these points weren't random. They formed an arc. The center of that arc pointed in a direction he wasn't yet ready to confirm.

He didn't tell anyone about this discovery. Not out of distrust—he needed more data to confirm the arc wasn't a coincidence. He drew a question mark on the map, then locked it in a drawer.

Old Tom was silent for a full day after testing the metal fragment's composition. He locked himself in the workshop, skipping lunch and dinner. Lin Mo knocked on the door in the evening. Old Tom didn't open it, only said through the wooden panel, "This alloy shouldn't exist on this planet." Lin Mo stood outside the door, silent. He understood what Old Tom meant—if a fragment of Ultramarines armor from before the Horus Heresy appeared in the mineral veins of a planet on the Empire's fringe, there was only one explanation: this planet had once been a vital Imperial stronghold in some era.

Lin Mo walked alone to the hill outside the village. A wind blew from afar, carrying the dry scent of dust and a faint hint of metal—Hope Star's unique smell, which had taken him a long time to get used to. He took the octagram pendant from his pocket and placed it on his palm. The pendant reflected a dull luster under the starlight. He turned it over several times but found no new clues. However, he noticed one thing: the pendant's temperature was more than a degree lower than his body heat—as if it had just been brought from somewhere colder. He returned the pendant to his pocket. Some clues, before the answer appears, are better known to as few as possible.

*Burying the first seed anew.*

*At the edge of Blackstone Village,*

*the sentries don't see the horizon—*

*they see a blank coordinate system waiting to be filled.*

*Every path is drawn by Lin Mo's hand.*

*At the edge of Blackstone Village,*

*—Lin Mo's Blackstone Village defense system takes initial shape*

What he didn't notice was that his shadow stretched across the ground, taking on a shape that was not human.

Another day ended. The number of days he had spent on this planet was slowly becoming a figure he dared not dwell on. But he was still alive each day—that was enough.

*[Desert sands gleam like snow, the Yan Mountains' moon a hook.*

*When will I wear a golden bridle, galloping swiftly through clear autumn?]*

*—Li He, "Horse Poems." Memory fragment from the mirror of the emperor*