"Lord Sage, we genuinely can't cut through it," Gamma-9 pushed an on-site construction report in front of Andy, his tone laden with helplessness.
"Engineering Department One moved thirty percent of our stock of melta charges over, attaching them directly onto the giant centipede's joint connections to detonate."
"As a result, apart from scorching that layer of black carapace slightly darker, not even a hairline crack was blown open."
"While it isn't as hard as adamantite, its wave-absorption properties are far too disgusting. When the melta jet strikes it, the heat is instantly dispersed and conducted away, completely failing to form a concentrated cutting point."
Andy looked over the data on the report, his brow furrowing.
It was indeed a bit troublesome.
Two giant centipedes, several kilometers long, combined with that thick biomass armor—their total weight was an astronomical figure.
Without dismembering them into smaller pieces, towing them back was flatly impossible.
At the time, Aethel had used fifty floating cannons focusing their fire simultaneously to barely overload a giant centipede.
Standard floating cannons fired high-energy particle beams, whose core lethality principle relied on ultra-high energy density to instantly disrupt matter.
Meanwhile, high-density directional melta charges operated on the principle of using instantly released high-temperature jets to destroy matter.
In terms of physical energy release characteristics, the two were actually quite similar.
The sole difference was that floating cannons offered superior energy-focusing effects, boasting smaller, more concentrated focal points.
Melta charges, on the other hand, suffered from a slightly larger degree of thermal dispersion.
Yet against wave-absorbing carapaces specifically evolved to counter energy weapons, that tiny bit of dispersion made a world of difference.
If even standard floating cannons required a long time to chip away at them, melta charges stood no chance whatsoever.
To forcibly slice open those things, Andy would have to dump his entire stockpile of melta charges into the attempt.
That would be way too spendthrift!
"Then we won't cut them," Andy waved his hand, making a decisive call. "Since we can't tow them back, we won't bother."
"In any case, that location is only four hundred kilometers from Horisenburg—merely a few hours' drive for our transport convoys."
"Have Engineering Department One set up a temporary outpost there, dispatch a few groups of heavy engineering drones, and disassemble them slowly."
"Disassemble the internal soft tissue and organs first—those are easy to break down and represent high-value biomass samples."
"As for that outer shell, just leave it sitting there for now."
Gamma-9 expressed some concern: "Leaving it sitting there... won't someone steal it?"
"Who would dare?"
Andy's tone was breezy: "These natives on Zais can't run away fast enough when they see the Læss."
With the big issue settled, it was time for the smaller ones.
Although the giant centipedes couldn't be towed back, those several thousand Læss corpses were brought back truckload by truckload by Engineering Department One.
Currently, the cold storage vaults were bursting at the seams.
Alien corpses were piled everywhere.
If they weren't processed quickly, once those things thawed and rotted, the stench would be enough to choke the entire base to death.
Andy had spent the past few days studying these corpses.
He discovered a very interesting phenomenon.
The class stratification of Læss society was directly reflected in their anatomical structures.
Ordinary Læss workers and fodder possessed relatively simple bodies—pure flesh, blood, and chitinous exoskeletons.
Yet those elite units with wings and wing-blades sprouted from their bodies were vastly different on the inside.
Upon the dissection table, Andy sliced open the arm of an elite warrior.
Deep within the dark red muscle fibers lay a layer of white, rigid yet resilient bone structure.
The surface of the bone was covered in fine, dense striations, through which faint bio-electric currents flowed.
Active bone.
Andy thought that this was likely the core secret behind how Aethel was able to pump out "Skeletal Combatants."
After several days of research, Andy discovered that this type of bone possessed exceptional biocompatibility and plasticity, complete with built-in neural conduction capabilities.
With just a slight electric current, it could move on its own.
Furthermore, it required no servomotors—the bone structure itself functioned as a transmission assembly.
No wonder those Skeletal Combatants looked tattered and crude, yet moved with such uncanny agility.
So that was the underlying foundation.
The neural chip modules Andy later hauled back from the giant centipedes were also built from a variant of this active bone.
"Fine material," Andy mused, looking at the bone specimen in his hand, a practical use already forming in his logic core.
However, extracting the bones one by one from several thousand corpses represented a massive workload.
Relying on servitors to debone them would take until next year.
Andy required a more efficient, automated method of processing.
Right—at the far end of the industrial sector, there happened to be a functional area operating quietly in the background with a low profile: the hydroponic farm.
An "Eden-Class Prototroph" raised plump and healthy by Andy resided there.
The prototroph was an omnivore that consumed any organic matter. Previously, Andy had only fed it garbage.
Now, it was time to treat it to a proper meal.
Andy took over the hydroponic farm's control system, modifying the prototroph's decomposition protocols:
[Directive: Adjust organic matter decomposition mode.]
[Targets: Soft tissue, muscle, internal organs, blood.]
[Preserve: Skeletal structures, specialized organs.]
[Execution Strategy: Targeted enzymatic hydrolysis.]
As the directive was issued, the hydroponic farm's reaction kettles began operating.
The nutrient solution originally used to produce starch spheres shifted in composition, turning into a highly corrosive bio-enzymatic solution that left bone unharmed.
Truckloads of Læss corpses were dumped into the feed hoppers.
After several hours of soaking and decomposition...
The soft tissue dissolved into a thick organic soup, absorbed by the prototroph to convert into energy reserves.
Meanwhile, those squeaky-clean active bones were filtered out by screening meshes and delivered straight to the discharge chute.
Consuming the flesh while spitting out the bone—zero waste whatsoever.
Packaged into crates, the processed active bones were delivered directly to the Underground East Sector via drones.
At the Xenos Technology Parsing Station, the samples were swallowed up by nanorobots.
Andy's objective this time was crystal clear.
He had no intention of using these bones to study Skeletal Combatants.
While cheap, those things possessed pitiful combat power—mere cannon fodder grade.
Deep Space Industries followed an elite force doctrine and had no need for such trash.
What Andy had his eyes on was another material converted from active bone:
[Taoguer Bionic Material].
A high-strength composite material synthesized by the parsing station, restructured based on the molecular architecture of active bone.
Its physical performance was extraordinary.
Its raw hardness exceeded the Imperium's standard plasteel by 30%, while weighing 20% less.
Its other performance parameters were equally impressive.
Moreover, it inherited active bone's super-resilience, resisting shattering upon impact while absorbing vibrations to a certain degree.
It was, without hyperbole, an exceptional material for constructing structural components.
It might sound somewhat ironic, but Deep Space Industries' current technological profile was actually quite lopsided.
In high-end domains, Andy could easily produce nanometer-precision components.
Yet when it came to plasteel—the most ubiquitous general material found across Imperial Navy warships and power armor...
Andy barely possessed any inventory!
The reconstructor had limited capacity, and all of it was devoted to producing high-purity specialized alloys.
To sustain the precision machining center, the reconstructor had to run at full throttle, leaving zero capacity to spare for churning out plasteel.
Furthermore, plasteel was not a natural mineral; ceramic crystals and high-strength alloys had to be thrown into a plasma environment and put through a complex sintering process to lock their molecular structures, requiring specialized heavy production lines.
Yet eighty percent of Andy's production capacity was invested in precision machining, leaving him no room to build a dedicated plasteel foundry.
In the past, to craft armor plates for the Vanguard, he could only grit his teeth and force the high-frequency machining mother machine's capacity to fabricate them—a process akin to using a scalpel to chop firewood, suffering a catastrophic loss in efficiency.
This batch of Taoguer Bionic Material was different. The parsing station spat out ready-to-use finished plates—no sintering or forging required, ready for installation on the spot, with specifications outperforming standard plasteel by a solid margin.
Best of all, it perfectly inherited plasteel's porous molecular structure, allowing dyes to penetrate for permanent coloration.
One could only say this batch of Læss corpses had arrived at the most opportune moment.
Several thousand corpses could yield several hundred tons of active bone, which could then be converted into Taoguer Bionic Material.
Using xenos corpses to plug an industrial gap...
This play not only solved the garbage disposal problem, but also achieved complete plasteel independence.
A massive win all around.
The production line spun up to full capacity.
Upon the parsing station's black circular platform, black nanofluid surged continuously, devouring bones and spitting out off-white plates.
Watching the steadily ticking yield numbers, Andy felt thoroughly pleased.
At this rate, within three days, this entire batch of corpses would be fully processed into assets.
However...
Just as Andy prepared to close the display and catch a breath...
A sharp alarm suddenly rang out across the Underground East Sector.
The parsing station's operational indicator light flipped from green to an eye-searing red.
The smooth-flowing nanofluid suddenly ground to a halt, solidifying stiffly atop the circular platform.
"What happened?"
Andy felt a jolt in his heart.
This was his prized treasure—it better not be broken!
"Bower! What happened?" Andy shouted into the comms channel. "Did we lose power?"
Bower's voice returned quickly, sounding even more panicked than Andy: "Boss! Power is fine, voltage is rock solid!"
"The parsing station stopped on its own—it... it seems to be stuck!"
"I'm coming over immediately!"
Andy cut the comms and dashed frantically toward the East Sector.
By the time he arrived, Bower was circling the platform, pulling at his hair in desperation.
"Boss, look!"
Bower pointed at the screen on the console.
"It was working fine a moment ago, then suddenly a bunch of garbled text popped up and it stopped!"
Andy leaned in to take a look.
The screen displayed no error codes, showing instead a spinning golden progress bar:
[Deep reverse-engineering in progress...]
[Progress: 99%...]
Andy was stunned.
Deep reverse-engineering?
In all his time using the parsing station, he had never seen this prompt before.
In the past, whatever was dumped in yielded results within minutes—either converted into materials or components.
Why was it requiring a loading bar this time?
Besides, a golden progress bar looked anything but ordinary!
"What's going on?" Bower asked in a low voice. "Did we feed it too much and choke it?"
"Let's wait and see."
Andy kept his eyes glued to the screen.
His logic core rapidly analyzed this anomalous scenario.
The sample size fed in this time was indeed massive.
Several thousand corpses, all belonging to the exact same species, sharing the exact same skeletal structure.
Such a large-scale, high-purity, homogeneous sample input had never occurred before.
Could it be that...
While Andy was contemplating, the progress bar reached its end.
Ding— A crisp prompt tone sounded.
Golden light burst forth, resolving into countless complex data streams before converging into a line of striking, large text:
[Deep parsing complete.]
[Massive homologous biological samples detected; genomic sequence completeness reached 100%.]
[Source technology blueprint successfully reverse-engineered.]
[Obtained:]
[Universal Genetic Blueprint: Active Bone.]
A line of fine text explanation followed underneath:
[This blueprint has been added to the engineering database.]
[You can now utilize bio-cultivation vats, consuming basic organic matter to directly cultivate active bone of any shape or specification, without needing to extract it from corpses.]
Staring at those lines of text, Andy froze entirely.
There was a perk like this too??
Granting a blueprint directly?!
One had to understand that while Andy could previously use active bone to convert materials, that was contingent on the premise of "having corpses."
Once the corpses ran out, the material supply would cut off—an unsustainable model.
Now, however, the parsing station had cracked the genetic code of this material directly!
Granting the blueprint meant Andy now possessed the core technology to "grow materials"!
From now on, he wouldn't need to hunt Læss across the world.
As long as organic matter remained in the hydroponic farm, he could continuously transform it into high-strength active bone, before converting it into Taoguer Bionic Material!
This was no longer just a matter of plasteel independence.
This completely unlocked an infinite loop from "garbage" to "advanced building materials"!
"This thing has undocumented features too??"
He turned to look at Bower, finding him equally dazed.
"Boss... does this mean..."
"It means we're rich."
Andy patted Bower on the shoulder, the blue light in his electronic eyes shining with astonishing brilliance.
"From now on, we don't have to pinch pennies anymore."
"Use this awesome material freely for me!"
"Use it for building houses, use it for building vehicles—hell, if we're paving roads, pave them with this too!"
"And another thing..."
If sheer volume could manifest miracles, what about other xenos materials?
If he could secure enough Aeldari bone, could he reverse-engineer their technology blueprints as well?
Turns out this thing was a full-blown civilization harvester!
So long as he killed enough and plundered enough, there was no technology it couldn't steal!