11: Chapter 11 Unsent Senders

Gluck stared at the boundless wasteland ahead, his hands steady on the steering wheel. His Rad-carbine lay by his leg, its machine spirit runes still emitting a soft blue light, pulsing as if in a silent "smile"—if a gun could smile.

"What do we say when we get back?" the veteran suddenly spoke, his voice raspy, echoing in the cramped cockpit. "Say we found a mecha that can build houses, kill Orks, and make our machines happy?"

Cassius didn't answer. His bionic eye stared at the roof of the vehicle, data streams scrolling frantically across his visual interface, interweaving confusion and fear.

Then he spoke, his voice as calm as a surface without a ripple:

"Just say... we found something. It builds fast. Our machine spirits... they all want to follow it. And, it can produce food."

Gluck nodded and lightly pressed the accelerator, the chimera jolting forward across the wasteland.

Behind them, the metal forest gradually shrank, becoming a dot on the horizon, yet it continued to expand slowly—Icarus had not stopped building.

Eight Construction Drones wandered the wasteland like tireless worker bees, sowing steel and order; more wind turbines rose, conveyor belts were continuously laid, and buildings materialized from the void, taking root in the wasteland.

It was building.

It was preparing.

It was waiting—waiting for a decision, waiting for a response, waiting for this dark universe to react to its "gift".

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**Vulcan-IV Forge World, Hall of the Archmagos**

Helmut von Neumann stood in the center of his laboratory. His four mechanical arms were still, yet the servo motors at the joints emitted an irritating low hum. Three reports hovered before him, each pointing to the same undeniable fact.

The first was from Cassius Vitruvius. The Tech-priest apprentice's report was logically rigorous and detailed with data, clearly describing the metal forest, the Construction Drones, and the entity capable of synthesizing food from inorganic matter—it was called Icarus.

The second was from the veteran Gluck. His language was coarse but his observations were sharp; every word and sentence teemed with the machine spirit's joy and the machine's obedience.

The third was from his Cogitator Terminal. The energy fluctuations and matter conversion signals captured by the automatic monitoring system, along with that perception-shattering Machine Spirit Affinity curve, were all battering the boundaries of his logic.

Helmut's Logic modules calculated at full speed. Calculations at a rate of a billion per second lasted for a full three minutes before finally grinding to a halt—he had encountered a barrier that existing mathematical models could not explain.

"Archmagos?" An Acolyte Priest's voice came through the vox-caster, carrying a cautious probe. "The patrol has returned. They only brought back one chimera. The other two... are unwilling to leave that metal construct."

Helmut did not respond. His bionic eye stared fixedly at that jarring line in the report: [Machine Spirit Affinity: 100%].

He had never seen this number in his database. Machine Spirit Affinity was never at full capacity; 50% was already excellent, 70% was considered a miracle, and 90% existed only in the ancient legends of the Adeptus Mechanicus. But 100% meant a total understanding between machine and human; it meant that the rituals and authority the Adeptus Mechanicus had upheld for millennia might just be a joke.

"Archmagos? Do you need me to inspect it?"

Helmut finally moved. He raised a mechanical arm, his movements slow and heavy: "No. I will go."

As an Archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus, archeology and the excavation of ancient technology were his lifelong mission—from its inception, the Adeptus Mechanicus had held "excavation, preservation, and worship" as its core traditions, exhausting the galaxy's resources to search for technical fragments and STC Templates left over from the Golden Age. Although this planet was not as famous as core Forge Worlds like Mars or Lucius, it possessed unexplored wasteland ruins that very likely hid traces of ancient technology. This was also why he had volunteered to be stationed on this nameless Forge World, Vulcan-IV.

Then, he turned and walked step by step toward the Cogitator Terminal. He was about to do something he had never done before—admit he did not understand, and admit that the Adeptus Mechanicus's millennia-old heritage was so pale in the face of an unknown power.

The terminal screen lit up, the cursor blinking silently in the blank input box, as if waiting for a command that would shatter a thousand years of cognition.

Helmut raised his mechanical arm. His mechanical fingers, usually pinpoint accurate, were now trembling slightly above the keyboard.

At this moment, a fragment of an ancient text he had accidentally discovered during an early excavation and kept secret for years surfaced in his mind—it was an Adeptus Mechanicus archeological record from the time of the Horus Heresy. It vaguely recorded an "ancient STC Template, bearing the afterglow of the Golden Age, requiring no Canticles to appease, capable of symbiosis with machine spirits, and merging into the order of all things".

And now on Vulcan-IV, everything Icarus did was highly consistent with this legendary ancient STC. It was by no means an ordinary STC Template—fragmented and requiring ritual binding—that the current Imperial Adeptus Mechanicus revered.

And if there was one person in this world who could understand all this, who could distinguish whether this was heresy or a lost truth—it could only be Belisarius Cawl.

That "Heretic" who had lived for ten thousand years, who had lived through the Horus Heresy and witnessed the last afterglow of the Golden Age with his own eyes; a being who was reviled and feared within the Adeptus Mechanicus, yet whom no one dared to touch.

He typed out a string of characters.

Recipient: Belisarius Cawl.

His finger descended, then suddenly froze in mid-air. A dry click sounded from a mechanical joint.

Helmut stared at the line on the screen.

Belisarius Cawl.

An STC was a gift from the Omnissiah, the highest secret of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

A discoverer who kept it for himself would only find death—but that was a fairy tale told to Servitors.

He knew the rules of the Adeptus Mechanicus all too well, and he knew the faces of the Council of High Lords of Terra even better.

Once an STC Template appeared, it would only be carved up by Mars, requisitioned by Terra, and snatched by various powerful figures as a bargaining chip for promotion. Let alone what appeared to be a complete STC Template.

If the news leaked.

Those colleagues he had called brothers for hundreds of years would likely slip something into his nutrient solution.

In this rotting Empire, every Magos understood it implicitly. Among the true Archmagi, who didn't have a few private hoardings? Stealing from apprentices, spying on colleagues, silencing each other—he had seen it all.

The unsent message on the screen was like a threshold he couldn't cross, and also a glaring reminder:

Leaking it was equivalent to throwing everything he had into the Imperial meat grinder with his own hands.

Helmut stared at the cursor for a long time, the red light of his bionic eye flickering.

Piety doesn't buy a way out. Only secrets held in one's own hands are truly safe.

He turned off the terminal.

The screen went dark.

"Wait a little longer."

He had to go see Icarus for himself, see its industrial base, and see this thing—the only thing that could make him live a bit more like a human in this world.