40: Chapter 40 Belisarius

The Inquisitor, an Ark Mechanicus of the Dominus class belonging to Belisarius Cawl, glided silently through the Warp.

It was the pinnacle of technological crystallization from the Forge World of Mars, a mobile temple of the Adeptus Mechanicus's faith and power, and the most loyal companion Belisarius Cawl had known over ten thousand years of existence.

Its entire hull was covered in dark iron armor, the surface crisscrossed with energy conduits and weapon emplacements. Countless flickering warning lights outlined the solemn, heavy, Gothic-cathedral-like silhouette of the Dominus-class The Inquisitor against the dead silence of space—red lights indicated active systems, blue lights indicated standby status, and the occasionally flickering golden lights meant a system was executing functions not recorded in any official manual.

The prow was engraved with the gilded cog emblem of the Adeptus Mechanicus of Mars.

That emblem once covered three hundred square meters of armor, every gear groove inlaid with real gold, and the light it reflected under the sun of Terra once illuminated half the shipyards of Mars.

Today, the edges of that gilded cog emblem had been eroded by the turbulence of the Warp, leaving it mottled, with the dark gray base exposed where the gold had fallen away.

Yet, that half-cog still exuded an inviolable majesty—much like the face of its master: half decaying flesh, half eternal metal.

Dozens of massive cooling conduits extended from the sides of the Ark Mechanicus, constantly venting pale blue plasma plumes.

Those conduits were one of the most prominent features of the Dominus-class Ark Mechanicus; each was twenty meters thick and three hundred meters long. Their interiors could no longer be maintained due to lost technology, and their structures were so complex that even a Tech-priest could only rely on prayers to maintain them.

They traced faint paths against the chaotic background of the Warp, paths that were instantly swallowed by the turbulence, only for new ones to appear immediately—like matches struck in the dark: brief, yet sufficient to leave traces of light upon the retina.

The Inquisitor was sailing along a precisely calculated course.

This course was not a path known to the Imperium; it was a "safe passage" drawn by Cawl himself over the past three hundred years, through the analysis of Warp energy fluctuations during the destruction of Cadia, the observation of the expansion patterns of the Great Rift, and countless near-death field surveys.

Even so, "safe" was merely a relative concept—on this route, the intensity of the Warp turbulence was "sufficient to tear apart unprotected ships" rather than "sufficient to decompose all matter at the atomic level."

The hull was wrapped in three layers of nested void shields.

This was the most proud defensive system of the Dominus-class Ark Mechanicus, The Inquisitor—most Imperial warships had only one layer of void shields, a few elite warships could equip two, while the triple-nested technology was a byproduct of Cawl's research into the Blackstone Pylon, and it had not yet been officially recorded by the Adeptus Mechanicus of Mars.

The three shields operated at different frequencies: the outer shield vibrated at a low frequency, specifically to resist physical impacts; the middle shield operated at a medium frequency, used to deflect energy weapons; and the inner shield pulsed at a high frequency, designed specifically to neutralize Warp corruption.

Each layer adjusted its resonance at a frequency of tens of thousands of times per second to adapt to changes in the external environment in real time.

The phase difference of the three shields was precisely calculated mathematically to ensure they did not interfere with each other, yet could fuse instantly when necessary to form a brief but nearly indestructible joint barrier.

When the three shields reached their resonance peak simultaneously, they would cast a fleeting silver-blue halo around the ship.

The halo lasted less than a hundredth of a second, yet it was breathtakingly beautiful—not the solemn beauty of the Ark Mechanicus's cathedral-like stained glass, but a cold, mathematically precise beauty that emerged spontaneously from pure physical laws under extreme conditions.

Below the bridge. The core area with the thickest armor. Behind twelve biometric identification doors and eight layers of psychic shielding.

Here.

If a standard Tech-priest were to enter this area, he would likely immediately chant the "Litany of Anti-Heresy" and then sound the alarm in fear and anger.

Everything here—from the metallic composition of the bulkheads to the composition of the air, from the spectrum of the lighting system to the distribution of the gravitational field—strictly deviated from the "Sanctuary Standards" stipulated in the scriptures of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

There were no shrines here. No incense burners. No statues intricately carved from brass and ebony that were ubiquitous on ships of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Nor were there any gear and skull decorations that were wiped three times a day by Tech-priests, anointed with holy oil, and recited with thousands of prayers.

The bulkheads were intentionally left bare.

The dark silver metal surface had no paint, no plating, and not even any decorative carvings.

But if one looked closely—if one had visual sensors like Cawl's—one would find that the metal surfaces were covered in micro-circuits invisible to the naked eye, with a density four hundred times that of standard Mars technology, and their operational logic fused human binary, Aeldari lattice calculation, and... Necron quantum logic.

This was a new modification project Cawl had undertaken on The Inquisitor—when building this chamber, he did not use any standard blueprints but personally designed the specifications for every armor plate, every circuit, and every air circulation valve.

Before resurrecting Guilliman, he spent three hundred years collecting materials, then another one hundred and fifty years building it, and finally another hundred years constantly modifying, optimizing, and rebuilding it.

In all the archives of the Adeptus Mechanicus, in the "Codex Registry" of Mars, within the most classified databases of the Inquisition, and on the official structural diagrams of The Inquisitor, this location was marked as "Plasma Reactor Cooling Tank No. 3."

An inconspicuous designation that required no special attention from anyone and had never been checked in its ten-thousand-year service history.

But in fact, this was Cawl's true sanctuary—his laboratory, his meditation room, his armory, and even the most hidden corner of his soul.

The internal space of the Sanctum of Meditation was nearly four times larger than the theoretical value calculated from the outside.

He had achieved this spatial folding through reverse-engineering Blackstone Pylon technology.

Cawl had caught a glimpse of this concept from Necron technology and spent a millennium turning it from theory into reality—an unstable reality.

Tiny space-time rifts occasionally appeared in the northwest corner of the chamber, causing tools and parts to disappear inexplicably and reappear hours later in completely impossible locations.

Cawl had long since become accustomed to this.

He even specifically placed a box of inferior Servo-skulls in the active rift zone as a "sacrifice to the space-time continuum"—this was both a pragmatic damage-control strategy (rather than letting precious tools disappear, it was better to feed the already half-broken Servo-skulls to the rift) and also a manifestation of the helplessness deep within Cawl's consciousness.

When he first made this decision, deep within Cawl's consciousness, the four entities that had coexisted for ten thousand years had already evolved into a small-scale war.