---o---
Out in the void of space, a flash of light bloomed against the dark. The Hyperion dropped into orbit around a new planet.
"Great Captain, we have arrived at yet another new world."
"I know. So what kind of world is this one."
Zhou Ye said it with just a thin edge of barely contained exasperation. It had been five years since Aestia.
The less said about those five years, the better.
To start with, he had jumped to a green planet.
He had been extraordinarily excited. He dove straight down without a second thought. The moment he hit the ground, a frog no taller than his ankle had blown him clean off his feet. Then he landed and proceeded to brawl with the entire forest, every plant, every vine, every tree.
The table he currently used was made from the wood of that planet. Klein had to regularly put it through a full carbonization cycle with a flamethrower, or it would bite people.
He had assumed he had landed on Catachan. He had roamed that entire planet and found not a single human being.
He had arrived at a conclusion that sat poorly in his stomach: this was a planet of nearly identical nature to Catachan. As for the people who had once lived there, well. Nobody knew whether they had never existed, or whether they had simply lost their long war against the local flora and been killed by Catachan's flowers.
The rest of the time had been mining.
He had jumped to an uninhabited mineral world with no known life on it and, more importantly, no stable Mandeville Point in the surrounding space. Which meant the Imperium had probably never noticed it existed.
He then unpacked every last piece of equipment he had and assembled a complete extraction operation. The Warhound Titan included. he had disassembled and rebuilt the whole thing as a mining machine. He then handed the entire production line over to Klein and Ai-chan to manage, and personally constructed a Universal Hibernation array, and went to sleep.
Before going to sleep, he had driven a single strike into the planet's crust and shattered the entire continental shelf, allowing the machines to dig at maximum speed.
Since the Thousand-Person Theater existed, there was no transportation problem. Extracted and refined ore went directly inside. No logistics required. So across those years of spectacularly violent and thoroughly destructive extraction operations, he had accumulated a substantial amount of raw material.
Of course there were costs. But what Zhou Ye needed right now, more urgently than anything else, was to find a suitable planet and establish his own Chapter.
And he had used the materials from this haul to convert the entire exterior of the Hyperion into something that looked like a Battle Barge. Or at least it appeared that way from the outside. He had also built a second one with the leftover material, which was currently sitting in the Thousand-Person Theater.
The exterior was a Battle Barge, but the interior had been extensively modified. First and foremost: the Void Shield was installed. That thing that dumps its absorbed energy directly into the Warp was incredibly useful. The Gellar Field was in there as well. He had no intention of entering the Warp, but better prepared than not.
Last and most important: the orbital jump engine. He had wanted to build an Aether Phase Engine, but the Authority of the Herrscher of Truth had its limits. That level of engineering was a civilization's absolute technological ceiling and clearly the ceiling of this universe was not yet high enough to produce one.
So Star civilization technology had been shelved for the foreseeable future. Not a realistic option in the short term.
But what this jump engine did have going for it was stability. Even across a gap of several light-years, one flash and he arrived. The drawback was that it required Star Rail tracks.
Every time he jumped to a new location, he was laying down a new track. So if he ever wanted to return to Aestia, he could simply follow the tracks he had already laid. it would take no time at all.
The second Battle Barge he had built carried the same purpose as his own: to blaze new trails.
Zhou Ye had also noticed that his power, aside from the Herrscher of Finality's template, was now tied to the Path system of this universe's Star Rail. The more tracks existed in this cosmos, the more they were used, the stronger he grew. There was even a possibility that he might eventually become a genuine Aeon of this universe's own Star Rail.
And beyond the energy drawn from the Warp's conversion process, as the number of tracks grew and the number of people using them increased, it could generate vastly larger quantities of Imaginary energy for him. If that number grew large enough, he might even be able to directly link to Imaginary Space.
At that point, he might finally be able to pull himself out of this cesspit.
So his current plan was to find a suitable feral world. Use its population as his recruitment base and found his own Chapter there. Change identities, adopt the Chapter Master disguise.
His Space Marines would, of course, be extensively modified. He had already completed work on the Gene-seed program. Specifically: introducing a trace quantity of Honkai into the Gene-seeds. Anyone implanted with the altered Gene-seeds would become his Honkai Zombies.
In a universe with Imaginary Space, more Kin meant more accumulated Imaginary energy. More Imaginary energy meant more Kin. A perfectly self-reinforcing loop, one foot lifting the other.
But this universe had no Imaginary Space.
Cultivating Kin and manufacturing pseudo-Herrschers here was pure energy expenditure with no return. A colossal waste.
So raising a Chapter of Space Marines loyal to himself through this universe's own biological and technological methods was far more practical. And in the beginning, all of this would need to remain completely hidden.
A Chapter Homeworld was therefore essential. Once he had one, all he had to do was get the Planetary Governor on his side. And in terms of Imperial administrative efficiency, nobody was going to notice anything for a very long time.
Once he had accumulated enough power, he would reveal the Star Rail network at a time of his choosing. Zhou Ye was willing to guarantee that the old dried-up corpse sitting in the Palace on Terra would have absolutely no objections.
"The planet below appears to be in an unstable temporal state. Captain may wish to investigate and see if there is anything worth retrieving."
"Hm?"
"Through your temporal Authority. Time in this region of space is very unstable. Past flowing to future, future flowing to past — neither is unusual here. As long as causality is not violated, you may be able to reach in."
"Is that so...."
Zhou Ye nodded slowly, then dropped from the sky and landed on the planet's surface.
He could feel it immediately. The instability was palpable. Something had clearly happened here.
He raised one hand into a claw. The Authority of the Herrscher of Finality activated. He reached, and in an instant, he felt something. He gripped it, and pulled.....
"A Gene-seed. Let me read its memory.... yes, let me see. I am a Luna Wolf from Holy Terra. I was sent to Istvaan III on the Warmaster's orders to put down a rebellion. We put it down successfully. But why haven't my brothers sent anyone to pick me up?"
"Ah...."