Chapter 168: Blood Angels: Praise the Great Dragon Emperor of Grand Cathay!!! (Patreon)

Of course, it wasn't just warships and Terminator power armor. Heydrich also planned to send people to help maintain these men's flagship.

In truth, that meant sending people in to give all the assorted freaks and monsters aboard a thorough working-over. Besides, the Blood Angels had suffered heavy losses and needed to fix their own gene-seed problems, so they couldn't leave anyway.

That meant Heydrich was in no hurry. Converting everyone to Primaris and dealing with the gene-seed issue would both take time. Once the first batch of gene-seed had been tuned, he would adjust it according to the feedback.

"Gulp…"

Sure enough, when Karlaen took the A-Ruan Pouch, he trembled. Through the pouch's special observation system, he saw the mountains of supplies stacked densely inside.

Power armor, ammunition, small and medium vehicles, Terminator power armor and more sat there in neat, orderly piles.

Even as the Blood Angels' second-in-command and Captain of the First Company of the Blood Angels Chapter, he had never seen such a vast store of equipment.

The Blood Angels had always lived hand to mouth. They owned a great many holy relics, but most of them were useless in practice.

Many so-called holy relics could only ever be holy relics, with no combat capability at all. A few were incredibly powerful, even ridiculously overpowered.

But those were only a small minority. Not all of them were like that.

"Praise the great Zhendan Dragon Emperor!!!"

The assembled Sons of Sanguinius praised him wholeheartedly. They resolved that from now on, whenever they praised the Emperor and their genefather, they would add the great Dragon Emperor as well.

After all, this man was going to solve their gene-seed problem, and he had given them so many assets besides.

———

Meanwhile, aboard the ecosystem-Ark.

"Achoo!!!"

Heydrich couldn't help sneezing, and then he rubbed his nose.

"Is someone thinking of me? Anyway, I guessed right. Dante is a hidden Perpetual. After dying and coming back, he awakened the Perpetual's traits."

Heydrich muttered as he read the report in his hands. He had operated on Dante precisely to test this. His own priest had also brought a dose of Heydrich's Path serum along when performing Dante's Primaris surgery, and that was what dealt with Dante's gene-seed and the curse.

Heydrich had made that serum based on the situation that day. Otherwise, treating the Blood Angels one by one would have worked him to death.

He might as well experiment directly on Dante, since the guy was probably a Perpetual. Besides, Heydrich had performed far too many Primaris surgeries to count.

Calgar, for one, had gotten his Primaris surgery here. That old man had instantly turned handsome and young again, just like Dante.

So his retirement was effectively a long way off. After all, he was also GW's cash cow, and Heydrich doubted even a fallen Primarch could kill him if one came down in person.

Something would always preserve him, whether the Emperor manifesting or some other bizarre reason. That was standard operating procedure.

Magnus the Red had picked fights with the Space Wolves many times, after all, and had even been banished by Bjorn the Fell-Handed.

All Heydrich could say was: don't carry the rigid power hierarchies of domestic Chinese novels into Warhammer. Everyone's strength here floats.

"So, dear, could you explain what this is?"

Just then Pearl's voice sounded right beside his ear, and Heydrich shivered.

Pearl was holding her own A-Ruan Pouch. Inside it sat a huge Blackstone Fortress, and unluckily for him, it was half wrecked.

Heydrich had good reason to feel guilty. While he'd been out having the time of his life fighting a splendid expedition against the Tyranid bugs, he had come away with an antimatter fleet converted from a Hive Fleet.

He had also completely wiped out this tendril fleet of Leviathan. The results were brilliant, one might say.

But while he was enjoying the battle up front, someone had to handle logistics for him.

That meant personnel assignments and supply, on top of keeping his three planets running. And someone had to wrangle with the Imperium's various factions, even though this was the Ultramarines' Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar.

The Imperium had plenty of factions here anyway, and the whole thing was a mess.

So Pearl's face was grim. Heydrich had dragged home yet another Blackstone Fortress.

As a former space Necron Cryptek, she knew exactly what this thing was worth. And knowing exactly was what made her face go dark.

"Our Blackstone reserves are extremely limited. They're nowhere near enough to fully repair it. And a Blackstone Fortress that isn't fully repaired is better used as a disposable bomb."

"Uh…"

Heydrich rubbed his nose, not sure how to explain. This thing had imprisoned Magnus the Red, but the Khorne Bloodthirster Skarbrand had invaded it with ease.

The thing was designed to cut off the Warp. A fully intact Blackstone Fortress could even travel stably inside the Warp.

In theory, any daemon or Warp creature that touched it would be destroyed on contact by Blackstone's properties. The problem was that the Chaos Space Marines would never be able to command an intact Blackstone Fortress.

Not just them. Humanity as a whole probably couldn't either. Even the so-called soulless ones actually have souls. It's just that other people's souls are positive and theirs are negative.

So the only ones in the universe suited to using an intact Blackstone Fortress were the space Necron, and Heydrich's people.

After all, their souls were bound to their bodies. They weren't in the Warp, so they wouldn't form any messy soul tides.

But that was for an intact fortress, and this one was clearly neglected and decayed. Heydrich's STC repair templates were useless on it. STC templates were the essence of human technology, and the STC repair template was a special kind of nanobot.

Those nanobots carried fairly complete technological templates inside them, so he could simply call up those templates to repair things.

The Blackstone Fortress, however, wasn't human technology at all. Repairing it required a huge amount of Blackstone.

That was why Pearl looked so unhappy. Heydrich had taken all the Blackstone Cawl had collected, but the amount was still limited.

"Don't just haul back every shiny thing you see. The Imperium of Man and our Necron tech are one thing, but a lot of these Old Ones' legacies are unusable even once you have them. Many of them are downright dangerous."

Pearl sighed helplessly as she looked at him, then sat down and drank a cup of hot tea.

"It's not the same. I can convert this thing into a planetary fortress."

Heydrich walked up behind Pearl and hugged her from behind. His craftsmanship really was top-tier. Hugging her felt no different from hugging Irena.

Incidentally, Irena was a Sister of Battle, but after Heydrich reshaped her beauty with imaginary numbers, she couldn't be compared to the muscle-bound sisters at all.

"Your Blackstone probably can't restore the fortress to even a third of its peak. So what will you do? Cut your warship construction plan? Stop expanding the Titan legion? Or halt the production of conventional equipment and throw all your productive capacity into matter conversion?"

"Uh…"

Pearl clearly didn't care about his somewhat placating expression. One sentence left Heydrich choking.

He did have a matter conversion device, but converting something like Blackstone would consume a terrifying amount of productive capacity. He would have to turn his entire output into Blackstone production.

Even so, getting enough Blackstone to fully repair the fortress would take at least a hundred years.

And reaching the level of Heydrich's planetary fortress would take millennia, one after another.

Only a madman would do that. So, however reluctant he was, he could only shelve the idea for now.

"Forget how to deal with those people for a moment, what about these? The Triarch Praetorians are the Custodes-equivalent unit among the space Necron, direct retainers of the Silent King Szarekh. If we handle this badly, we may end up facing the Silent King too soon."

Pearl took out a recording at that moment. It showed that group of Triarch Praetorians.

People said the Imperium of Man was a rotting corpse. But even a rotting corpse is still a whole corpse.

The space Necron were a corpse in pieces, every part elbowing the others.

Never mind the Storm King, who had already planned to betray them. Even the machine-intelligences converted from Necrons, like Pearl and her people, looked down on those soulless wastes.

They now had complete souls, and a sense of smell and touch like living beings. They even had children!

Who cared about the damned Silent King now? They went after the space Necron even harder than the Imperium of Man did!

Take the time Heydrich went solo against the Tyranids. They'd fought a Necron Overlord, drove him into a fury, and he summoned these things.

Ordinary space Necron kept their distance from the Silent King and these Triarch Praetorians too. But who would have guessed Heydrich's side would be so merciless?

"So give up that idea, unless you can build technology with a higher conversion efficiency."

"Hmm…"

Heydrich blinked at Pearl's words and fell into thought.

"But I'm warning you: don't blow up this ecosystem-Ark, or we'll be sent right back to square one."

"Uh-buh, uh-buh, uh-buh…"

Hearing that, Heydrich gave up thinking. Everything he built had the potential to become a bomb.

The bigger he built it, the bigger the explosion.

So he went back to working on the cross-star-region teleportation problem.

First, he had already given up on direct teleportation. The blast from that thing was far too extreme.

He had given up because he feared he would blow up an entire sector.

So Heydrich now explored another possibility based on the Orks' grand-scale oscillator: building two grand-scale oscillators and linking them together. Put simply, a stargate system. At least this time it wouldn't fire matter out like a cannonball.

It still couldn't compare to the Star Rail, but it could solve the immediate crisis.

The neighboring Star Rail universe had plenty of similar technologies too, though none compared to the Star Rail.

If other cross-star-region methods were air freight, the Star Rail was sea freight, and sea freight was no slower than air. That made many interstellar methods look pretty useless.

But here it was different. Anything more stable than the Warp was good.

"Good that you understand. Just continue your original research. There's almost no one in the whole galaxy who can out-fight you, but combat strength is the least important of your abilities. I'm now working on capturing a World Engine. We used one ten thousand years ago to patch the Eye of Terror. Strictly speaking, that's Aeon technology, and we have no complete system for it."

"Fine, I'll get back to my research."

Heydrich said nothing more. In truth, the stargate technology already existed. It was the Blackstone gates the space Necron used. Humans just couldn't use them. Whoever did, died.

"We now have five newborns, and the Silent King holds a Relic that can observe the general state of the space Necron. This is no simple matter anymore. The Silent King will go mad."

Pearl frowned deeply. She had already hidden the newborns and locked down the news completely, but that only bought time.

Sooner or later they would face the Silent King, and the entire space Necron with him. It was a constant headache for her.

Pearl hadn't spelled this out to Heydrich, of course, but both of them knew.

Heydrich wasn't too worried, since he held the Iron Curtain Virus. To fight the space Necron he had even begun iterating on it continuously.

But he didn't hold the Emperor's Scepter, and the virus's foundation wasn't the Anti-Organic Equation, so its power couldn't yet compare to the original Iron Curtain.

Pearl knew all this, but she understood even better how terrifying united space Necron were. The hope of reviving their race might well drive them mad and unite them, and negotiation was out of the question.

With the pride, or rather arrogance, of the space Necron, the only way to get them to sit down and talk was to beat them into submission.

Honestly, with Heydrich's overall strength right now, even facing only the Silent King Szarekh's Szarekhan Dynasty would be a struggle, never mind all the space Necron.

"Hah. All of you, be careful. The matter of these newborns must stay secret."

Having no good solution for the moment, Pearl could only remind her people once more. There was no need to worry too much, though. Once Magnus the Red returned to Holy Terra, they could fully rely on the power of the Imperium.