In general, ships need resupply.
Not supplies for the people living aboard, but energy for the ship itself.
And up to this point, Kain's ship had never undergone an energy recharge.
The ship's own power supply system was an infinite energy device.
The first time he saw the energy generator inside the engine room, that cube had given him the illusion that it was something like the Tesseract.
In reality, that seemingly cubic form was not the true shape of the energy body. It was more like a framework used to contain and stabilize an infinite energy mass. The real infinite power source was inside.
As for what it actually was, of course he had no idea.
And as for the next stop on his journey, the Emperor's great ball of light had said that another one of those things existed there too, and told him to go find it.
As for the STCs he was currently being told to collect, no one had ever said he needed to hand them over to anyone. He just had to get them. It was said so casually that it felt like whatever he chose to do with them afterward was entirely up to him.
Thinking about it now, Kain suspected that Hyperdimensional Channel might be connected to the Emperor.
But Kain was more inclined to believe that the Emperor had seen the future, seen that he would connect to the system, and so had arranged for him to take the STCs to develop in other worlds, then use that growth to feed back into this one.
As for why he was not being told to hand them over, or to develop things directly in this world, the answer was obvious. The current environment here was simply too hostile. Nothing would be able to develop smoothly.
On one hand, the Imperium itself had obstacles like the Adeptus Mechanicus, which would never allow technology to spread freely and had no interest in modularized manufacturing and production.
On the other hand, the four Chaos Gods would interfere, and the other factions would hardly sit back and let the Imperium rise again through STC technology. They would most likely jump in to sabotage things as well.
In short, if STC technology was ever going to function properly again, it would need an exceptionally stable environment.
And in a place like Warhammer, where monsters and madmen were fighting everywhere, development on that scale was almost impossible.
He entered another special room beside the engine chamber. This was the room he specifically used to contact the Emperor.
Once activated, the room beyond the door was completely empty, containing nothing but a cold bed.
After walking over and lying down on it, he pressed a button. The scenery in his vision began to disappear, as if it were turning transparent, or perhaps simply blurring away.
Then came a sudden flash of light, and what appeared before his eyes was a blue celestial sphere.
"A lost warship?"
There was no spoken conversation. It was more like the glowing orb in the Main God Space, with the mission being transmitted directly into his mind.
And "lost warship" was simply Kain's own description.
Right after telling Miss Whisperer that he wanted to pay a visit, he had received a psychic summons from the Emperor telling him to come here again for another conversation.
The Emperor informed him of a star region where an experimental human warship developed during mankind's Golden Age still existed. It was similar to the ship he currently had, in that both were built with the most advanced technology available.
He was told to go claim it immediately, because the special vault storing the warship did not have much time left before it would be exposed to open space.
If he could not gain control of it and could not activate it, then he was to destroy it.
As for how many more such warships and ships might still exist, lost somewhere in this universe, Kain had no idea. That was why he had given them the label "lost."
Still, since it was a warship, it was obviously different from his own vessel.
A warship was meant for battle, while his own ship had no weapons system at all, so calling it a ship was more accurate.
That was not to say it truly could not attack. It had one special function. Once activated, it could, in a certain sense, turn the ship itself into an incredibly durable "weapon" and ram directly into the enemy.
But that function was also somewhat unstable, and he did not dare use it casually, because one slight mistake could punch straight through a planet.
Calling it brute force with a brick was actually pretty fitting.
"That's it?"
No further details were given.
"Open the complete catalog of Tyranid and Chaos Daemon species for me."
The moment those words left his mouth, the space around him began to change, as if things were appearing out of thin air, or perhaps being 3D-printed into existence.
In the blink of an eye, he found himself standing inside a library, and every shelf was filled with material on Daemons and Tyranids.
Next, he needed to download that knowledge into his brain.
But this kind of downloading was not like Infinite Terror's Main God Space, where knowledge could simply be shoved into your head in an instant. Here, you had to read it yourself, like copying homework, transcribing it into your own mind.
Fortunately, everything he saw here would stay with him. He could remember it all after a single glance, so there was no need to rely on brute-force memorization.
Back when he wanted to improve his ability to deal with whatever problems might arise while excavating STCs, he had asked for related knowledge, and the Emperor had created a complex simulated environment for him to practice in.
To improve his survival ability and his ability to respond under pressure, countless harsh scenarios had also been created so he could learn how to handle them.
Even his combat techniques had been learned here.
Still, no matter how incredibly real it all felt, once he left, those experiences that resembled life inside a virtual network would remain only as knowledge, not true experience.
Because the environments created here imposed their sense of reality upon the soul, not upon the body in any truly physical sense.
So the so-called rewards he obtained here were really just knowledge downloaded from the Emperor.
Of course, there was also the possibility of receiving physical rewards.
For example, panaceas.
But physical items were not given to him directly here. Instead, he was told where they were, and then he had to go find them and retrieve them himself.
So his relationship with the Emperor was more like that of a boss and an employee.
It was nothing like the Main God Space, where failure to complete a mission meant immediate erasure.
But here, if he did not work seriously and just slacked off, then he would not receive any "subsidies." And in a world like this, full of monsters and horrors, trying to survive without the boss's "subsidies" was unimaginably difficult.
That was why, whenever he traveled around on business, he always asked the boss for every kind of support he could get.
If he stayed here too long, he felt like he might go insane.
That said, the Emperor himself now seemed more like a program than a living being.
In the blink of an eye, the limited study-and-download period came to an end. He had replenished himself with even more information on Daemons and Tyranids, which should make dealing with them easier in the future.
Come to think of it, he had even seen some Tyranid strains here that he had never heard of before. It felt like the Imperium did not even possess that information yet.
It was not that the information was being withheld.
The Emperor simply had not encountered them yet.
No point thinking too much about it. He was preparing to head to another world.
(End of Chapter)
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