43: Chapter 43 Perfect Frequency

Each panel was a separate monocrystalline silicon wafer, etched for centuries by genetically modified silicon-eating bacteria, its internal circuit density reaching the theoretical limit of human technology.

If an Inquisitor from the Inquisition were present and could understand Cawl's operations, they would undoubtedly drag him to the stake and burn him without hesitation.

These things—from space-folding technology to crystal resonance panels, from Blackstone Pylon fragments to the alien code flowing across the screens—were each enough to make an ordinary Tech-priest scream and flee the chamber; each was a piece of heresy explicitly forbidden by the Adeptus Mechanicus and requiring purification by fire and prayer.

But Cawl did not care.

Four colors of data streams flowed across the panels.

Green was the standard binary code, sourced from the Adeptus Mechanicus's standard database, representing Cawl's status as a "legitimate" member of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Whenever conservatives visited, he would let these green data streams occupy the main screen—though such occurrences had become rare.

Those conservative Magos were increasingly reluctant to board The Inquisitor; they privately referred to the ship as the "Ark of Heresy" and whispered in the council halls of Mars about whether Cawl's soul had been forsaken by the Omnissiah.

Blue was the quantum encryption algorithm Cawl had developed himself, used to process research data that was too dangerous to ever be intercepted by any external device.

This algorithm changed its key every 0.3 seconds, with the key itself synchronized via a quantum entanglement communication array with Cawl's secret databases in three different star systems.

Even if the Chaos Gods were to invade personally, it would take an incredibly long time to crack even a single iota of it.

Gold was the inscriptions read directly from the surface of the Blackstone Pylon—inscriptions that were neither text nor code, but a deeper form of information encoding etched into the very structure of matter.

The Necrons wrote their technology into the laws of physics themselves, much like carving an instruction manual into stone, except this "stone" was the underlying architecture that constituted reality.

The appearance of every line of golden inscription meant that Cawl understood a fraction more of how that ancient race perceived the universe.

Red represented those parts that had not yet been fully understood.

These were fragments of information that Cawl had studied for three centuries, yet could only confirm their existence without being able to parse their meaning.

The red symbols flickered, danced, and reassembled on the panel, sometimes manifesting unsettling patterns, and other times scattering into chaotic noise.

In Cawl's research, red was his greatest enemy and his greatest motivation—because every red symbol deciphered meant that humanity's understanding of the universe had advanced by one small step.

And every step forward caused the success rate of humanity's survival to fluctuate upward by an infinitesimal amount.

In the center of the operation platform, a real fragment of Blackstone Pylon was suspended.

It was not large, only the size of an adult's fist, a perfect regular octahedron with a surface as black as congealed void.

It reflected no light—beams directed at it would simply vanish, as if swallowed into another dimension.

Yet it was not entirely pure black: if one stared long enough and at just the right angle, one could see something flowing and rotating within that bottomless darkness, following laws beyond human cognition.

This was a fragment from the surviving Blackstone Pylon of Cadia.

During that catastrophe—when Abaddon's "Vengeful Spirit" slammed into the planet's surface, shattering the crust and causing Warp energy to surge forth like a breached dam—the vast majority of Blackstone Pylons on Cadia were reduced to dust.

Only a few fragments were cast into space during the explosion, later recovered by Cawl's automated collection ships.

This piece was the most complete of them all.

Standing before it was Belisarius Cawl.

His appearance was no longer that of the young Magos who had stood before the Emperor ten thousand years ago.

His metal body, over three meters tall, was pieced together from hundreds of meticulously forged armor plates, each concealing weapons, sensors, or life-support systems.

Some were designed by his own hand, some were reverse-engineered from alien technology, and some he could not even recall when he had installed—over the millennia, the number of modifications he had performed on himself was so vast that even his own memory core could not accurately tally them.

A massive arched structure protruded from his back; that was the casing for his plasma reactor, its surface covered in the mysterious runes of the Adeptus Mechanicus of Mars.

To Cawl, those runes were nothing more than meaningless decoration—he did not need runes to make the reactor work; his reactor followed the laws of physics, not faith.

But he chose to keep them, simply because when dealing with conservative Magos, "looking traditional" could save a lot of trouble.

This was a wisdom learned over ten thousand years of survival: sometimes, the most rational choice was to pretend to be less rational.

His head was the last remnant of his human form.

That face—if it could still be called a face—was half pale human skin, covered in the marks of ten thousand years of time: wrinkles, scars, and blemishes left by early biological modification experiments; the other half was entirely mechanized: a metal skull, glowing red optical lenses, and data ports embedded directly into the bone.

The human left eye had grown clouded—a cloudiness brought by the passage of time, an irreversible mark left by ten millennia on living tissue.

The mechanical right eye, however, was eternally bright, its red glow like a lighthouse that never extinguished in the dim light of the meditation chamber.

Both eyes looked at the same world, yet saw different things.

The human eye saw shapes, colors, and shadows—ways of perception branded into human genes since ancient times.

The mechanical eye saw electromagnetic spectra, thermal radiation distribution, and Warp energy fluctuations—perceptual dimensions that had been written into his consciousness core during ten thousand years of modification.

Both his eyes—the human left eye and the mechanical right eye—were lit at this moment, not out of emotion, but because his consciousness core was performing a calculation of staggering scale.

He was parsing the 734th activation sequence of the Blackstone Pylon.

He had been working continuously for 417 standard Terra hours.

But for his modified body, this was nothing.

The integrated circulatory system within his body could run for years without maintenance, his consciousness core possessed self-repair capabilities, and his mind—that structure composed of four soul fragments, so complex that even he could not fully comprehend it—could switch to a different part when one became fatigued, achieving true, uninterrupted thought.