---o---
"Are you genuinely certain these were cultivated from the Gene-seeds recovered at Istvaan III, and not from that Primarch's own personal stock?"
Rylanor had found Zhou Ye again. This time it was not to pick a fight.
By now he understood who and what he was dealing with. A Primarch whose capabilities were not inferior to his own Gene-father's. He also understood that what had been done to him was not simple bullying. Keeping him in the Stasis Field had served a genuine purpose, allowing the soul that had endured ten thousand years of solitary waiting to recover fully within a specialized containment. Waking him prematurely would have undone everything.
All of that Rylanor could accept. He had no alternative in any case, so acceptance was the only available posture.
What he could not so easily accept was this collection of thoroughly bizarre Emperor's Children warriors. He had serious doubts about the origins of those Gene-seeds.
"Absolutely from them. You have my word. No deception, for young or old alike."
Zhou Ye's tone was righteous and utterly unshakeable.
He always meant what he said. If things then proceeded differently from what was intended, that was simply not his responsibility. The universe was full of change. Warhammer in particular was a place where human life was famously and constantly unpredictable. Since he could not control every change, the only option was to adapt and find whatever small pleasures each situation offered.
Praise be to Aha.
"..."
Rylanor left. He had found no evidence of wrongdoing, and these were clearly Emperor's Children regardless of how they had turned out. There was nothing further to be done.
Life was like certain unpleasant situations. Refusal was not an option. Endurance was the only path forward.
He had his own mission. The Emperor's Children: the Legion most loyally devoted to the Emperor of all the Legions. Even when their Gene-father fell to betrayal, only a vanishingly small fraction had followed him willingly. And these men before him were deeply familiar, even so. They reminded him of someone. A legend. The first son of the Emperor's Children.
And they showed him something different as well. A kind of openness. A genuine ease with imperfection. Not the relentless pursuit of flawlessness for its own sake, but something more human than that. He had only ever seen that quality in one other person before.
And yes. Sometimes the pursuit of perfection was itself the most perfect form of failure. Humanity was born with flaws. Perhaps imperfection, in the end, was its own kind of completeness.
With that thought, Rylanor drifted away. The enormous frame of his Contemptor Dreadnought managed, against all reasonable expectation, to carry the unmistakable air of a solitary figure walking through the cold and scattered leaves of an autumn wind.
Zhou Ye stared after him in complete bewilderment.
What had gotten into that one.
"I seem to recall the Figurine King has a Fulgrim specimen in his collection. Perhaps I should ask him for some genetic material when the time comes and fabricate a proper one myself."
The thought drifted through his mind.
He had no particular interest in the existing Fulgrim copy, in truth. The reason Fabius Bile had handed that clone over to Trazyn was straightforward enough: the copy was walking the same road as the original had walked. Whether it would eventually fall to corruption or somehow resist was genuinely uncertain. But either way, the matter had stopped being relevant. Zhou Ye felt he could produce a substantially better result through his own efforts.
He was prepared to guarantee that any Fulgrim fabricated by his own incomparable ingenuity would turn out differently from the original in every conceivable way. That was essentially a certainty.
He had grown thoroughly accustomed to this particular flavor of things going sideways, the events that carried that unmistakable texture of the universe doing exactly what it wanted and finding it all somehow both aggravating and faintly amusing.
Take these Emperor's Children. They were exceptional in the culinary arts, yes. But there was one fundamental difference from the original Legion that went beyond even the cooking.
The original Emperor's Children had looked at food the way they looked at all art. Everything was required to be perfect in color, aroma, and taste, each dish a flamboyant aesthetic achievement, beautiful above all else, a spectacular object that happened also to be edible.
The Emperor's Children fabricated by Zhou Ye were simply glad that it tasted good and that everyone at the table was full.
That was what had unsettled Rylanor most.
Zhou Ye's expression had not wavered for even a fraction of a second during the entire conversation. Faced with that absolute composure, Rylanor had found himself with nothing left to say. So he had left.
Not long after, however, Rylanor noticed something.
"Where is that young one?"
"He went on the business trip with the Chapter Master."
"..."
Rylanor stared at the empty space where the culinary champion, who also happened to be the swordsmanship champion, had been standing.
A deep and persistent suspicion took root and refused to leave.
Was that deliberate? And how had he even managed it?
Akurduana had been catastrophically bad in that particular department. Rylanor had eaten his cooking once. That chapter of memory was sealed permanently and would not be revisited.
---o---
Aboard the transport ship, Zhou Ye had removed his heavy Power Armor.
His armor looked identical to standard Astartes plate on the outside. In practice it was nothing of the sort. He had not fabricated himself a proper black carapace, and he had no neural link points anywhere on his body. Even his three-meter frame was simply energy projection, his actual dimensions shaped deliberately to match what the role required.
Now that he needed to play the part of an ordinary if ambitious trader walking into an unfamiliar port, he let his natural form reassert itself. Just under one hundred and eighty centimeters.
The plan was straightforward in concept. Star Rail tracks sitting unused were worthless. Low-profile use of the Rails required people who could operate along them with legal standing in the Imperium. A Rogue Trader, operating with exceptional autonomous authority and minimal Administratum oversight, was the ideal solution. A genuine Rogue Trader Dynasty Warrant would eliminate an enormous amount of friction across virtually every situation he could anticipate needing to navigate.
He needed one. Preferably one of the rare Warrants carrying a bloodline trace of Imperial heritage, the most prestigious grade a Dynasty could hold. If that proved unavailable, any Dynasty with genuine age and accumulated legal weight would serve.
That also meant he could not present himself as Astartes for this operation. No one would be sufficiently unhinged to launch a boarding attack against an Astartes ship over a cargo of fruit. His three hundred-odd warriors needed to stay hidden below decks, and the visible complement of the ship would be ordinary mortal soldiers, presenting the appearance of a private merchant's armed retinue.
"Ahead of us is a significant sector hub. It has a very stable Mandeville Point and the Quintus Hive at its center, which holds upward of a hundred billion inhabitants. Every variety of person and enterprise converges there, and several Rogue Trader Dynasties maintain a visible presence. Let me see what suitable targets are available."
He scrolled through the data-slate in his hand, mapping out the next phase.
Fruit was not ammunition. That distinction put him in a comfortable operational position. A ship visibly carrying military supplies would attract certain categories of Chaos raider almost automatically. A ship carrying nothing but fruit, in theory, should attract attention only from those aligned with a particular god of excess. Unless things went profoundly wrong, it was about as non-threatening a cargo as the 41st Millennium offered.
This was a chance to find out whether any genuinely large fish would take the bait.
"In a moment, you two come down with me. No Power Armor. You are Geneforged labor-constructs."
He looked back at the two individuals standing behind him. Both were artificial Homunculi constructs of his own fabrication.
Because Archmagos Cawl's genuine Primaris Astartes were still sealed in their stasis vaults, his constructs were physically larger than standard Firstborn Astartes. That was, counterintuitively, an advantage. Geneforged labor-constructs of the cheaper grades tended to run considerably taller than standard warriors, sometimes approaching Primarch height. Of course, the economical varieties were usually more impressive in stature than in intellectual capacity, occasionally performing below even Ogryn standard. Any Astartes who needed to move through civilian space incognito could do considerably worse than passing as one of those large and not-too-bright constructs. It was actually a fairly common approach.
"I am sincerely hoping this does not develop into a Grand Free-for-All. All I want is a Rogue Trader Dynasty shell to operate through."
He looked down at the Hive World below, which had consumed virtually its entire planetary surface until nothing remained except the structure of the hive itself.
He already knew what to expect and it was still striking to see directly. Hive Worlds came in many scales and this was not one of the modest ones. Aestia had hive structures, but Aestia also had open ground, agricultural zones, an external environment that a person could stand in. This world had none of that. The entire planet had been hollowed out and rebuilt from the inside. It looked like a colossal hive of insects viewed from orbit, each spire punching through the atmosphere entirely, and the population within defied easy imagination.
What it did not defy was easy inference. A place like this would have every kind of person, every kind of vice, and every kind of opportunity layered on top of each other a hundred billion deep. Its senior authority was not a mere Planetary Governor either. A sector hub this significant warranted a Lord Sector, considerably more powerful and considerably harder to deal with than a standard Governor. If everything proceeded according to plan, Zhou Ye would have no reason to interact with that individual at all.
He used the identification codes he had acquired to clear the transport through the planet's docking approaches, and the ship descended smoothly toward the starport.
"Captain, I have three Terminator squads and four Centurion units on standby. Say the word and I can have them deployed to your position."
Ai-chan's voice came through before they touched down.
"Do not deploy them. Those are for responding to boarding actions. More importantly, has the livery and Chapter marking been changed? By now I expect the Star of Trailblaze has caught the attention of the golden fellow upstairs."
He had personally destroyed a Daemon Primarch. He could feel the weight of a very large and very baffled question mark radiating from the Emperor's direction. The Star of Trailblaze Chapter identity was burned. He was confident of that.
The problem was that even though he did not travel through the Warp himself, information did. Every Imperial vessel ran with its Gellar Field active, and every Imperial vessel carried the Ecclesiarchy's presence aboard. That presence functioned as a signal receiver in the Immaterium whether anyone intended it to or not. The Emperor, with ten thousand years of practice at operating through the faith-network, had a virtually unlimited number of avenues to locate anyone who had drawn his attention.
The Star of Trailblaze livery was gone. Zhou Ye had repainted and re-marked everything under a different designation entirely.
As for using the Lamenters as ongoing cover, he had considered it, but something about it felt like poor form. Their luck was genuinely catastrophic in ways that made him reluctant to attach his own identity to their banner. They had barely completed three Star Rail jumps before running directly into a Chaos presence. Fortunately the threat level had been minimal, nothing but a disorganized low-grade heretic cult, and Mario's force had cleared it without difficulty. Mario had duly reported the incident through the communicator group, confirmed cleanup was complete, and indicated they were preparing for the next jump.
As a plumber laying pipes, Mario was adequate. The pipes, however, needed people to use them. That was Zhou Ye's primary objective for this excursion. A Rogue Trader Dynasty would open every door that needed opening.
The transport settled onto the starport landing surface.
Zhou Ye stepped out with his two Homunculi flanking him, pushing a large cargo container. Inside were quantities of fruit and row upon row of wine bottles, every one of excellent vintage.
To his own palate, informed by the standards of New Tillius, this was roughly equivalent to the fruit that had nearly given his settler population chronic indigestion from overconsumption. In a Hive World, even in the upper hive districts, these goods carried prices that most inhabitants would never accumulate in a lifetime.
His destination was equally straightforward. He walked directly to the local Merchant Guild hall.
This required being visible. He needed to draw in the right kind of attention. As for the risk of attracting Chaos interest through luxury goods rather than military supplies, theoretically a cargo of fruit and wine should only appeal to forces affiliated with a particular god of excess. Theoretically.
He was moderately uncertain about this. He had decided it did not matter.
And then, very quickly:
"By the Throne, what is that wine."
The Merchant Guild hall erupted.
Zhou Ye's method had been thoroughly direct. He uncorked one bottle and poured a small quantity into a glass, letting the aroma spread through the room without ceremony or preamble. The fragrance hit the assembled merchants like a physical force.
By the standards of his previous life on Earth this wine would have commanded a respectable price. By the standards of the 41st Millennium, where Baal-vintage wines sold across the entire known galaxy and people of insufficient willpower had reportedly been corrupted simply by drinking them, and where a single piece of fruit placed on the open market in Holy Terra commanded enough currency to purchase an entire palace on less prestigious worlds, this was something different. A Hive World was not Holy Terra. The prices would not reach those heights. They were more than sufficient regardless.
"So then, honored colleagues. What price are each of you prepared to offer?"
He smiled pleasantly at the assembled crowd. His Authority scanned through them in the same moment, cataloguing each one without visible effort. No corruption. No taint. Also nothing particularly interesting from a strategic standpoint. He was a complete unknown here, had no existing relationships, and had no patience for the slow process of building them through careful social navigation.
Better to make a large and obvious noise and see what it attracted.
In most circumstances this approach would have been tactically equivalent to announcing one's own death. For Zhou Ye it was precisely calibrated.
And sure enough.
A woman stepped forward from the crowd. Her clothing was striking, her bearing composed, and the smile she wore was the kind that had been refined through long practice into something that revealed nothing whatsoever of the mind behind it.
Every other person in the room took a quiet and collective step backward.
"My lord. The Oliveira Dynasty would be very interested in having a conversation with you."
The sharp intake of breath that swept through the remaining merchants was almost synchronized.
Several faces went pale with shock. Several more arranged themselves into expressions of poorly concealed resentment. The Oliveira Dynasty was not a name one argued with in this sector. It was entirely obvious that every profit from this cargo would flow to them. It was also entirely obvious that they would likely maneuver to control the source of the supply permanently. The looks directed at Zhou Ye in that moment ranged from pity to contempt to the particular expression reserved for someone who has walked into a very obvious trap while congratulating themselves on their cleverness.
When you were out there making a name for yourself, identity and background mattered.
Having goods was not sufficient. Arriving at a place like this without existing standing and stumbling directly into the path of a genuine powerhouse? Whatever he was carrying, he was about to be stripped of it entirely, probably down to the hull plating.
The remaining merchants found reasons to be somewhere else.
Zhou Ye did not react with any particular urgency.
The woman had personal shielding active. Breaking through it to read her directly without any outward sign would take a moment but it was not a serious obstacle. And she was clearly not a simple figure. The expressions on the faces of every other person in this room confirmed that without any additional investigation required.
He could already feel the edges of her mental defenses. Given a small amount of time, they would open without a sound.
"Then, my beautiful lady, please lead the way."