Chapter 398: Primordial Space Marines
For Ryo, merely performing surgery to supplement the missing organs was nothing more than a clumsy patch along an existing technological path that, in his eyes, was flawed.
His purpose in contacting these Inductii warriors of the Imperial Fists and deeply studying their physiological and geneseed issues caused by the missing organs went far beyond treatment.
His gaze pierced through the current technological predicament and cast towards a much more distant and grand goal—Lady Astarte's original design blueprint.
As the original core designer of the Space Marine project, the Astartes that Lady Astarte envisioned were far from what the Imperium sees today.
In her perfect design, the current Space Marines were merely imperfect, transitional semi-finished products.
However, this grand project was abruptly interrupted when her collaborator, Erda, the mother of the Primarchs, stole the still-incubating Primarchs and scattered them across the galaxy.
Having lost the uncontaminated, purest genetic material of the Primarchs as the final "key" and "stabilizer", Lady Astarte could no longer complete her ultimate perfection of the Space Marines.
This unfulfilled dream and immense sense of frustration ultimately drove her, in despair and anger, to participate in the failed coup against the Emperor initiated by the Grand Provost Marshal. In the Emperor's personal presence, she committed suicide in His genetic laboratory, ending her brilliant and tragic life in the most devastating manner.
However, her most core research data was not completely destroyed.
This portion of incredibly precious technological legacy, containing the possibility of the Space Marines' true perfect form, was secretly preserved by the paleontology genetics cult Ryo belonged to at the time.
When that cult was later purged, this invaluable treasure—along with the last preserved, pure sample of genetic material from all twenty Primarchs left by Lady Astarte (the most primordial and flawless design templates for the geneseed of all twenty Legions)—fell into the hands of Ryo, who had a lowly status at the time but luckily survived the chaos.
For hundreds of years, Ryo had carefully guarded this secret that was sufficient to overturn the foundation of the Imperium.
Now, facing Rogal Dorn's request and these Inductii warriors plagued by defects, he believed the time might have finally come.
The plan he submitted to Dorn was ostensibly to thoroughly repair the physiological defects and geneseed mutation issues of the Inductii warriors, aiming to "reset" them to the optimal state under current technological conditions.
But deep within the technical details of this plan, he cryptically integrated theories and fine-tuned parameters originating from Lady Astarte's original blueprint.
He intended to use this treatment as an opportunity to conduct a cautious "verifiable practice."
He didn't just want to repair these warriors; he wanted to take this chance to reactivate and test that dusty, truly perfect design concept.
The primordial geneseed templates in his hands were the ultimate guarantee for realizing all this.
Ryo's ambition was far from being as simple as curing a group of warriors; what he wanted to do was pick up Lady Astarte's unfulfilled dream and attempt to complete the ultimate blueprint for the "perfect warrior" that was supposed to lead humanity towards a brighter future.
This was undoubtedly walking a tightrope. Once his deeper purpose was exposed, the resulting tremors would far exceed those of the warp engine.
But in Ryo's view, if they merely settled for patching up an existing system with inherent deficiencies, humanity would never be able to break through its current predicament.
To face the darker challenges that might arrive in the future, he had to take risks and touch that original glory buried by the dust of history.
According to Lady Astarte's original design, the complete augmentation of a Space Marine should be divided into three stages.
Among them, the first stage—the implantation and adaptation of the geneseed—had an ideal process that fundamentally differed from the method commonly used in the Imperium today.
In the original perfect vision, the augmentation did not rely on complex and highly risky surgical procedures to implant prefabricated artificial organs one by one.
Instead, the highly purified geneseed corresponding to a specific Legion was implanted directly into rigorously screened candidates.
This geneseed would act as a complete biological blueprint and power source. Through an exquisite process blending genetic engineering with arcane bio-alchemy, it would directly guide the growth of all necessary artificial organs within the candidate's body.
The greatest advantage of this "endogenous" augmentation method was its ability to perfectly solve the problem of rejection reactions.
Because all the organs were differentiated and cultivated by the candidate's own cells under the guidance of the geneseed, they were essentially homologous to the host's body on a physiological level. This greatly reduced the surgical failure rate and long-term adaptive complications.
This was originally meant to be a safer, more efficient plan that better guaranteed the integrity and potential of the augmented warrior.
However, because the technological plan was not completely perfected and standardized in its early stages, coupled with the fact that after the Primarchs were scattered, the "templates" (their Primarchs) that each Legion relied upon to cultivate their geneseed varied in state and integrity. This resulted in this idealized direct implantation plan failing to be stably realized in the vast majority of the Legions.
Ultimately, in the Imperial Fists, Ultramarines, and the vast majority of Astartes Legions, forced by realistic technological bottlenecks, the augmentation process degenerated into the much more cumbersome and riskier model used today.
That is, individual artificial organs must first be pre-cultivated in special culture vessels using the geneseed, and then these "foreign" organs are implanted into the candidate one by one through a series of complex surgeries.
This not only increased the risk of failure at every step but also buried hidden dangers of long-term rejection reactions and poor organ synergy.
According to the information Ryo possessed, among the twenty founding Legions, only the Blood Angels Legion—because the genetic structure of their Primarch Sanguinius was exceptionally stable and near-perfect—successfully inherited and maintained this first-generation technology of "direct geneseed implantation and autonomous internal organ generation."
The advantage of this technological route was not only reflected in a higher augmentation success rate and higher coordination between the warriors and the Primarch, but it also brought a massive advantage unmatched by other Legions: a significant relaxation of the requirements for candidate quality.
Because the core of the augmentation lay in the endogenous guidance and adaptation of the geneseed within the host's body, rather than the forceful implantation of multiple independent external organs, the Blood Angels' augmentation process displayed astonishing tolerance and adaptability.
Their geneseed seemed to possess some powerful "assimilation" and "correction" capability, able to compatibilize and integrate some of the host's original non-standard genetic sequences to a certain extent.
Precisely because of this, the Blood Angels Legion's requirements and restrictions for candidates were far lower than those of other Legions.
(End of Chapter)