…
Talon System.
Talon I. Hive World Tyrone.
Deep beneath the crust of the hive world, far below the lowest transit shafts and forgotten foundations of Tyrone Hive, Qin Mo remained inside the fortress he had built with his own hands. It was not a palace, though some of his followers had begun treating it like the seat of a ruler. It was not a temple, though enough impossible machines worked within its walls to make any Tech-Priest either weep, pray, or reach for a flamer.
It was his sanctum. His laboratory. His bunker against a galaxy that treated privacy as either treason, weakness, or opportunity.
Layers of plasteel, blackstone-laced insulation, gravitic mass baffles, noospheric dead zones, and deliberately misleading heat signatures concealed the complex from orbital scans. Psychic detection slid across the fortress like rain across sealed glass. Auspex returns saw only bedrock, old foundations, and the static clutter of a hive world too dense for clean readings.
Here, secrets could survive.
So could he.
Before him, an advanced multi-spectrum auspex array glowed in the dim chamber. It was not designed to watch stars, ships, or battlefields. Those problems were simple by comparison. This device had been built for interdimensional surveying, its sensor vanes tuned to phenomena no Imperial savant would have recognized as anything but heresy written in mathematics.
The display shimmered with images from another realm. Not the Materium. Not the Warp. Not a Necron pocket crypt, an Eldar webway branch, or any half-remembered xenos structure Qin Mo could neatly categorize.
It was his own pocket realm.
A sealed dimension, personal and alien at once, pulsing with patterned energy. It did not contain planets, atmosphere, oceans, or matter in the conventional sense. It stored information as tension, energy, and shape. It recorded changes in reality with a scale and fidelity that would have made a Mechanicus data-vault look like a child scratching numbers into ash.
Qin Mo watched the screen with narrowed eyes while his hands continued working. Fine tools moved between his fingers. Micro-coils seated themselves into place. A compact device took shape on the workbench before him: a palm-sized communications unit fitted with a vox-microphone, directional emitters, signal stabilizers, and a casing dense enough to survive field use.
It looked like an experimental comms system because, in the most limited and misleading sense, that was what it was.
The chamber door opened.
Belisarius Cawl stepped inside.
Or rather, something wearing Belisarius Cawl's shape did.
The Archmagos entered with the clatter of mechanical limbs, the sweep of red robes, and the ponderous urgency of a being composed of too many augmetics and too much self-importance. The imitation was excellent. The gait, posture, optical lenses, servo-limbs, and even the layered vox-tones were reproduced with insulting precision.
"Twenty of the Lamenters Astartes are incompatible with the Primaris conversion protocols," the pseudo-Cawl reported in a flat, mechanical tone. "My auguries suggest they will die in the near future."
The moment the words left its mouth, the illusion failed by choice rather than weakness. Cawl's towering form compressed, distorted, and folded inward. Robes became hard angles. Servo-limbs vanished. Fleshless geometry twisted in midair until the figure had become a boltgun suspended unnaturally above the floor.
It hovered there, perfectly detailed and entirely absurd.
Qin Mo did not look away from the screen.
"No impersonating prominent figures like Cawl," he said sharply. "And definitely don't take the form of weapons or machinery. No one else knows you're a C'tan Shard except me. What do you think someone would do if they saw a talking boltgun?"
The boltgun sagged in the air as if offended.
The Shapeshifter let out a sigh with far more theatrical weight than the situation deserved. It was not breath. It had no lungs unless it chose to imitate them. The sound existed purely to express annoyance.
Silver light rippled across its surface. The weapon unfolded into a nondescript male humanoid, the plain-faced disguise it used when accompanying Qin Mo in public as one of his enforcers. Broad shoulders. Forgettable features. Enough presence to discourage questions without drawing them.
Then the form changed again.
The male body softened, narrowed, and lengthened into a silver-haired human woman with elegant features, pale porcelain skin, and eyes bright with old mischief. The shape was too perfect to be natural, but not so perfect that a casual observer would immediately reach for a weapon. This was the persona the Shard preferred in private spaces, where mockery could be sharpened without risking panic among the mortals.
"Should I include a collar accessory with this form?" the Shapeshifter asked, voice heavy with sweetly poisoned irony.
Qin Mo finally turned from the screen.
He glanced around the laboratory. Sterile walls. Suspended lumen-orbs. Surgical frames. shelves of tools, power cores, containment rings, folded drones, and half-finished devices whose purposes ranged from battlefield logistics to things that would get a Magos executed for curiosity alone.
Then he looked back at her.
"In a lab? You tell me."
The Shapeshifter's smile thinned.
She dropped the matter with a small nod, though amusement still lingered at the edges of her eyes. Qin Mo could almost see the thought behind them: which one of them was truly pretending to live like a mortal?
Instead of continuing the joke, she stepped closer and peered at the auspex display.
"What is this?" she asked. The sarcasm had faded. Genuine curiosity replaced it, sharper and more dangerous.
"My dimension," Qin Mo replied.
On the screen, a vast expanse unfolded in luminous threads. Tens of thousands of glowing filaments stretched across a dark void, interwoven into lattices, knots, loops, and spire-like structures. It resembled a spider web only at first glance. The longer one looked, the more the comparison failed. The strands were not passive. They trembled with information. They bent, tightened, relaxed, and pulsed as if reacting to events outside themselves.
Subtle ripples moved through the realm. Some were gentle, barely visible fluctuations. Others passed through the lattice in deep waves, distorting whole regions before fading into background tension. To most observers, the movements would have seemed decorative or meaningless. Qin Mo knew better. Each ripple represented distortion across space and time on a scale that normal instruments could not measure cleanly.
"A week ago, I confirmed that this pocket realm is not merely accessible to me," he said. "I can influence it. More importantly, it can influence me."
Ever since his reawakening, the C'tan power within him had been returning in stages. At first, the dimension had been something he could perceive but not touch, a parallel frame of reference not unlike the way a psyker perceived the Immaterium. Useful, strange, and distant.
For a long time, it had felt like looking through armored glass.
Now the glass had cracked.
"What does that mean?" the Shapeshifter asked. Her brows drew together, the expression deliberately human but the confusion beneath it real.
Qin Mo raised one hand and placed it lightly against the side of her neck, guiding her closer to the display. The touch was casual, but precise, turning her attention toward a cluster of strands near the center of the projected realm.
"It means this place was born from me, or I was born with it. I haven't decided which phrasing is less misleading. It is not a naturally occurring dimension like the Warp. It is not one of the ancient domains associated with other C'tan. It is unique. Self-contained. I am its origin, its access point, and its anchor."
He had reached the conclusion reluctantly. The Void Dragon was known, at least in fragmented lore, for feats of dimensional engineering far beyond mortal comprehension. Other Star-Gods could shape reality in their own ways, and even shards retained echoes of those principles. A fragment might not birth a cosmos, but it could carve a pocket, define rules, and bind power into a private frame of existence.
The strange part was that the Shapeshifter seemed unaware of that capability.
That ignorance was either genuine damage, careful theater, or both. Qin Mo had learned not to assume those categories were separate.
"Well, it is impressive," the Shard said flatly. She offered a few slow claps without enthusiasm. "But what good does this unstable realm do you? The Materium doesn't exist inside it. No planets. No people. No ships. No delightful little mortals to terrify."
"It is of immense use," Qin Mo replied.
He manipulated the auspex controls. The image shifted, moving across the luminous lattice until a drone came into view. The automaton was sleek, angular, and coated in reactive alloy that reflected the realm's light in thin silver lines. It drifted without engines, held in place by rules Qin Mo had written into the space around it.
Ahead of the drone rose a massive spire-like construct formed from countless bundled energy threads. Each strand carried pulses of encoded data. The whole structure flexed minutely, correcting its own geometry with each ripple that passed through the dimension.
The Shapeshifter tilted her head.
"Why does that look like a building made of strings?"
"Because everything in this realm expresses itself as threads," Qin Mo said. "That is a communications relay. Crude, but functional. Its purpose is to transmit and receive data across the dimensional lattice."
"Crude, he says, while making architecture out of private reality," the Shapeshifter muttered.
Qin Mo ignored her.
"I ran a test. Without dimensional manipulation, a signal routed through the relay still behaves like a conventional transmission once its destination is mapped back into the Materium. Across interstellar distance, it would take hundreds or thousands of years to arrive. Functionally useless."
He tapped a control rune. A waveform appeared beside the relay, crawling along a glowing strand at painfully slow speed.
"But by inducing controlled ripples, I can alter the signal path. Not by shortening distance in ordinary space, but by deforming the temporal relationship between origin, transit, and reception. The message does not outrun light. It is carried through a region where the relevant interval has been compressed."
The Shapeshifter's eyes brightened.
"So you are using time distortion inside your own dimension to accelerate transmission. Faster-than-light communication without the Warp. Not through space, but through controlled temporal offset."
Qin Mo smiled.
"Correct. That earns you one hour of unrestricted transformation time. Be whatever you like."
The Shapeshifter's expression turned almost radiant.
She immediately became a winged serpent, then a marble statue, then a child-sized version of Qin Mo making an insulting face, then a three-eyed aristocrat, then a small hovering fish made of silver flame. The changes came too quickly for a human eye to follow cleanly, each form flowing into the next with delighted precision.
"I expected you to build a continent-sized Noosphere array," she said while wearing the face of a long-dead noblewoman. "Or perhaps a moon-based psychic amplifier. Mortals love moons. They look at them and immediately think, 'This would be better with a weapon installed.'"
"I would have considered it, if I hadn't had to dispatch the Celestial Engine to Agripinaa," Qin Mo said. "But we're short on time. This prototype will have to do."
He sat at a design console. A crystal-slate interface woke beneath his hands, displaying structural schematics, material tolerances, power distribution maps, and a skeletal outline of a humanoid frame.
The Shapeshifter stopped mid-transformation and leaned over his shoulder.
The design was roughly five meters tall, humanoid in proportion but not human in implication. The body was sleek and obsidian-black, with layered plates flowing into one another without visible seams. Its proportions were elegant but built for war: broad shoulders, long limbs, reinforced spine, and internal channels designed to conduct power far beyond any mortal reactor.
The surface finish was unmistakable.
Living necrodermis.
The same general principle used in the bodies of C'tan shards.
"Your current meat body isn't failing," the Shapeshifter said. Her voice lost its playful edge. "Why build a new shell?"
Qin Mo's hand stopped above the interface.
For a moment, the only sounds in the chamber were the soft hum of suspended machinery, the clicking adjustment of the auspex array, and the distant vibration of fortress systems breathing through the bedrock.
Then he looked at her.
"That meat body is not just a shell," he said quietly. "It is me."
The Shapeshifter held his gaze. For once, she did not immediately answer with mockery.
"Apologies," she said after a pause.
Whether the apology came from sincerity, calculation, or some imitation of both, Qin Mo chose not to examine too closely.
"What is the new form for, then?" she asked.
"A remote-controlled avatar."
He returned to the design. Lines shifted beneath his fingers. Internal conduits rearranged. Power-routing pathways threaded through the torso and limbs. The skeletal frame widened fractionally to accommodate redundant control nodes and emergency isolation layers.
Constructing a new body from living metal meant far more than aesthetics or survival.
It was a strategic answer to a persistent flaw in his position.
Qin Mo had power. He had industry. He had armies now, whether he liked the political implications or not. But he still had one body, one set of eyes, and one physical location. Even with drones, relay systems, command networks, and loyal officers, the problem remained brutally simple.
He could not be everywhere at once.
That was why he had created the energy-channeling pendant for Yoan. That was why his honor guards bore internal conduits capable of drawing upon a fraction of his power. Those measures worked, but only within strict limits. They were tools, not true extensions of himself. Push too much energy through them and the systems overloaded, burned out, or risked catastrophic feedback into the wearer.
The necrodermis extracted from the Nightbringer shard had changed the equation.
It was not enough to make another C'tan. Qin Mo had no intention of attempting something that stupid without several more centuries of study and a safer galaxy, neither of which were available. But it was enough to build a vessel. A durable, conductive, responsive body capable of carrying his will at range.
"Pity the Nightbringer fragment isn't here anymore," Qin Mo muttered. "This new shell would have made a perfect testbed."
The Shapeshifter went still.
Her eyes sharpened with the bright, terrible enthusiasm of an immortal predator who had just found a way to be relevant.
"You do not have that shard," she said. "But you do have another Star-God fragment nearby."
Qin Mo looked at her.
"You mean you."
"Naturally."
"You are not exactly combat-rated."
The Shapeshifter straightened, returning to her silver-haired human form with exaggerated dignity.
"Still a C'tan Shard," she said. "I cannot challenge the Nightbringer. I cannot challenge you. But I am not so weak that I cannot help you run an experiment."
Qin Mo studied her carefully.
That was the problem with the Shapeshifter. Sometimes she lied because lies amused her. Sometimes she told the truth because truth was the sharper blade. Sometimes she offered help because the offer itself placed hooks in the future.
But the logic was sound.
A remote necrodermis avatar needed to be tested against a being that understood what living metal meant, what C'tan energy felt like, and what failure would look like before the instruments could name it. Mortal test subjects would tell him whether the control link moved limbs. The Shapeshifter could tell him whether the vessel felt real.
That made her useful.
Usefulness did not equal trust.
Qin Mo leaned back from the console and gave a slow nod.
"Alright. I'll begin preparations."
.....
If you'd like to support me and read a bit ahead, feel free to check out my Patreon. (https://www.patreon.com/c/Hemont).
Do you like this Novel? Then pls consider supporting me by Commenting or Rating it.
.....