---o---
After dispatching the Lamenters, Zhou Ye left his office.
Klein could handle a great deal on his behalf, but a good number of matters still required his personal attention. Operating on the principle of one set in service and one set in reserve, he had prepared double the standard allocation of Primaris-grade Mark X Power Armor for the Lamenters before their departure. He had also included thirty sets of Terminator plate, though this was not entirely a matter of frugality on his part.
Terminator armor was an entirely different animal from standard Power Armor. A novice who climbed into a suit could barely move. And unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of these newly minted little yellow ones were novices. Better to let them familiarize themselves with it gradually. Handing an inexperienced warrior a full set of Terminator plate was just giving him something he could not use, and not every situation called for Terminators anyway.
He had also included three Centurion Warsuits, plus the usual complement of Power Swords, Chainswords, Storm Shields, and Boltguns, provisioned at roughly two or three weapons per warrior. And three freshly fabricated standard Dreadnoughts fresh off the production line.
The Contemptor pattern was simply resource-intensive, and Zhou Ye felt that deploying a parade of Contemptors at every opportunity was starting to attract a level of attention that would be difficult to explain to other Chapters.
He also transferred out from his own forces one World Eaters Apothecary, one Iron Warriors Techmarine, two fabricated Tech-Priests of his own construction, and seven Armed Puppets.
For the Armed Puppets, his explanation to the Lamenters consisted of two words: Abhumans.
Having passed through his modifications, any Armed Puppet could be dismantled and examined down to the skull and the interior would be completely clean. Zhou Ye had a personal distaste for things like Servitors, Servo-skulls, and Cherubs. What other people did with them was their business. He wanted none of them.
Strictly speaking, the Armed Puppets were not quite Abominable Intelligence either. Their consciousness had been cultivated through a combination of programming code and the Authority of the Herrscher of Sentience, making their fundamental nature something that did not fit neatly into any existing Imperial category.
The Lamenters received them with great respect and escorted them aboard, which was entirely appropriate given that those seven Armed Puppets and a complement of automated systems were going to be responsible for maintaining the entire Battle Barge. Zhou Ye had made sure to warn the Lamenters as well.
These small constructs were essentially utter psychic blanks in terms of combat ability. Do not send them into a battle.
And for the sake of everyone's peace of mind, do not let them interact casually with outsiders.
(They were not actually weak. In a one-on-one engagement, an average Astartes would not necessarily win.)
"Then forward, all of you. May this journey end among the stars."
With the weeping folk sent on their way, Zhou Ye returned inside and silenced his desk with a single punch. It had developed a habit of twitching.
Going forward, every detachment he sent out would maintain roughly this configuration. With the communicators in place, contact was near-instantaneous and rapid assembly was entirely feasible in an emergency.
He found himself genuinely considering that if he had existed in the 30th Millennium, found the Emperor and Malcador still in the early stages of building their enterprise, and walked up to them and declared himself the new Emperor of Mankind, the golden fellow would probably have welcomed him with open arms and handed him the title of Warmaster before he had finished the sentence. Then he could have gone off happily slaughtering things, or alternatively taken his own trailblazing ship and gone howling across the entire universe at maximum speed.
"Next is the Emperor's Children. What in the world have I done to them."
He left the departing ship behind and walked back into his estate.
Inside, he found a large gathering of powerfully built, superhumanly handsome men, each standing well over two meters tall.
These were the newly born Phoenixes.
Chk chk chk chk.
One of them was reducing a cucumber to fine, even pieces with practiced knife-work, pausing midway through to carve a decorative flower pattern into the vegetable.
Another had seized a live chicken, snapped its neck with a single twist, and begun the bleeding process. He then dropped it directly into a pot of boiling water without a second thought and started plucking the bird with his bare hands, entirely unbothered by the temperature.
The others were each occupied with their own preparations.
If Zhou Ye had not specified that this was the monastery and garrison he had built for the Emperor's Children, one could have walked in and been entirely convinced one had stumbled into the kitchen of a high-end restaurant.
Zhou Ye was a man of the Central Kingdom, and after so many years in this universe, the food situation had become a source of considerable grievance. He had not had a proper base of operations before. Now that he had his own planet, he could do as he pleased.
The Hyperion had always carried a supply of eggs and embryos in its storage bays. With the Authority of Creation at his disposal, he could produce living creatures directly. He had accordingly fabricated from scratch a collection of livestock from the 30th Millennium's genetic stock.
His output could not match an Agri-world, of course. Those planets extracted their world's life force through spectacularly aggressive methods to produce absurdly large harvests. A single Agri-world was typically required to feed several Hive Worlds simultaneously, which was why the fall of one Agri-world to a Chaos incursion inevitably produced famine across an entire cluster.
Zhou Ye found the whole arrangement deeply aggravating. Whatever else he did with this planet, he was committed to keeping the ecology intact.
As for the Emperor's Children specifically, the grievance factor was admittedly part of it. Whenever he processed Gene-seeds through his own hands, considerable personal bias inevitably became embedded in the result. Some of it was deliberate. Some was not.
A standard Emperor's Children warrior was supposed to be a generalist of extraordinary refinement. Music. Painting. Culinary arts. The classical accomplishments of a cultivated individual, each mastered to a high standard.
These Gene-seeds, after passing through Zhou Ye's hands, had produced warriors who were exceptional at precisely one of those things.
The rest was a catastrophe.
"Brothers, food is ready!"
Zhou Ye's eye twitched as a mob of Emperor's Children came charging through the doors hauling enormous pots and serving vessels, streaming into a vast dining hall. They had commissioned the Iron Warriors to design and build it, and the Iron Warriors had obliged with expressions of visible and complicated feelings throughout the entire construction process.
The hall was now occupied not only by the Emperor's Children themselves but by a large number of mortals, the majority of them family members of the Astartes present. It was one of the privileges extended to families with a warrior in the ranks. The vegetables and fruit on the tables had been grown by the Emperor's Children themselves. Zhou Ye's sustained commentary on the subject of food production had given them, after cooking, a second great passion in life: farming and animal husbandry.
Self-sufficiency. That was the spirit.
"Big brother, the food is so good. When I grow up I want to be an Astartes too. Wuwuwu..."
"Praise the great Angels..."
Zhou Ye had long since stopped being surprised by any of this.
The three Macragge-born Word Bearers had also warned him about the risks of corruption through comfort. The concern was not without merit. Noble families who grew up eating well were generally fine. But suddenly lifting the desperately poor into extraordinary luxury and sustained happiness was a genuine Slaanesh risk.
Zhou Ye's solution had been characteristic in its directness.
He had corrupted them himself first.
The specifics were not visible yet. But once the Star Rails were fully established, the effects would become apparent in ways no one would expect.
"My lord, your lunch is prepared. I have made for you stir-fried yellow beef, sour-vegetable fish, golden prawn balls, and poached cabbage in broth."
An Emperor's Children warrior in a spotless white chef's coat, a large character meaning Special Grade embroidered on the shoulder, set several plates before Zhou Ye with practiced and deferential care.
This one was the champion of the new cohort. Only the champion had earned the right to serve as Zhou Ye's personal head chef, along with the title of Special Grade Chef.
It was genuinely excellent food.
But--
"What have you DONE!"
A purple Contemptor Dreadnought standing nearby swung one power claw toward the new warrior with an expression of absolute outrage.
This was Rylanor, the Ancient of Rites, whom Zhou Ye had finally woken.
His temperament was extraordinarily stable, which Zhou Ye had confirmed by throwing a Techmarine into the chamber for Rylanor to hit as a stress outlet during the awakening process. The warrior had not been wrong. He had emerged from ten thousand years of waiting without a trace of residual bitterness.
He had walked out of the sarcophagus and seen this.
He could confirm with certainty that these were Emperor's Children. They were continuations of his battle-brothers. They were the sons of the Phoenix.
But why did they produce this feeling of absolute and profound wrongness?
Rylanor fixed Zhou Ye with a deeply suspicious stare.
Zhou Ye silently poured himself a glass of wine.
Emperor's Children production. Obviously exceptional.
"..."
Rylanor felt that this Chapter Master was insufferably smug, but found himself unable to articulate a specific objection.
"I am passing responsibility to you from this point. These men are all local. Those are their families. Based on everything I have observed, a great many Imperial Astartes are psychologically quite underdeveloped. The Salamanders, who maintain close ties with civilians, actually fare considerably better. For their mental and spiritual health, and for their resistance to corruption, all of this is necessary."
He paused.
"One more thing. What weapons do they excel at?"
"Dual blades!!"
"..."
Rylanor fell silent.
Zhou Ye had already left.
He had, at this precise moment, an excellent new plan to facilitate his next phase of operations.
His previous excursions to the Hive Worlds for population had been conducted in a style that could only be described as quintessentially Central Kingdom in character. He had picked up a few fruit baskets and walked straight into the planetary governors' offices for a direct conversation. The gifts had been well received. The governors had been cooperative and easy to deal with. The PDF soldiers who assisted him had each received a small cherry for their trouble, which had produced remarkable efficiency.
But this could not be the long-term approach.
He wanted to operate as a Rogue Trader. The problem was that he did not possess a Rogue Trader Warrant. A planetary governor could issue one, technically, but a gubernatorial Warrant was worth almost nothing in practice. What Zhou Ye was after was a genuine Warrant from an established Rogue Trader Dynasty, the kind of lineage that had been accumulating legitimacy and legal weight for centuries.
That was not something he could fabricate from scratch.
So in order to make his Rogue Trader persona credible, and to ensure it would not be picked apart by anyone who looked closely, Zhou Ye had arrived at a solution.
He was going to rob a Rogue Trader Dynasty.
Robbing them outright felt slightly inelegant, however. So instead he planned to conduct a sting operation.
The logic was straightforward. Fruit was among the most precious luxury commodities in the entire universe. The incident where Sanguinius had eaten all of Horus's fruit aboard the Vengeful Spirit, nearly driving the Warmaster to apoplexy, had made the value of the commodity perfectly clear to anyone paying attention. You did not get that angry over something easily replaced.
So Zhou Ye had arranged for over ten thousand tonnes of fruit. He intended to proceed through space conducting open and unremarkable trade. He was fully confident that someone, somewhere, would attempt to raid him.
At which point he could kill everyone aboard with complete legal justification.
He felt, genuinely, that he was being extraordinarily reasonable. He did not even necessarily need to kill everyone. As long as those involved were free of Chaos taint, he really only needed to borrow their legal shell for a while.
"Remember this. From this moment, I am no longer your Chapter Master. You are no longer Astartes. You are either Geneforged labor-constructs or unusually intelligent Ogryns, take your pick."
Zhou Ye addressed his assembled warriors. This excursion was pure, uncomplicated commercial activity.
If they encountered pirates, those would simply be additional ships to incorporate into the fleet and refitted into fresh Battle Barges.
He genuinely could not imagine how a modest and thoroughly unremarkable trade expedition could possibly turn into a Grand Free-for-All.
The last time had been a simple recruitment run, and that had become a Grand Free-for-All.
But that was fine. It had still been part of the plan. The recruitment had been completed. As long as his planning was thorough enough, things tended to work out.
Besides, his presence in the Warp was effectively nonexistent. Even a Pariah cast a psychic shadow in the Immaterium. The fact that he cast none meant Tzeentch should have very limited ability to interfere with him directly. The Tillius incident had been a genuine anomaly. He had simply had the misfortune of blundering into the opening act of a Tyranid Hive Fleet incursion.
The other forces, the two Astra Militarum regiments and the Space Wolves company, had almost certainly been planted there by Tzeentch specifically to aggravate Nurgle. They had been pieces in someone else's scheme. Zhou Ye had not been part of the design.
"So our operation this time will be to--"
The door to the room was kicked open by a Contemptor Dreadnought.
"I am informed," Rylanor said, his vocoder at a noticeably elevated pitch, the optical lenses flickering with an unsettling light, "that a rather excellent war was conducted while I was asleep. And that every other Dreadnought Ancient in the Chapter was roused for it."
A rather excellent war. An Apocalypse-class engagement. A thorough thrashing of a Daemon Primarch's forces. The expulsion of said Daemon Primarch from the planet. The subsequent destruction of the planet itself.
Who, in this sequence of events, had not been invited?
"That is unfortunate. Well. This too is part of the plan. Dismissed, everyone. Return to your preparations."
Zhou Ye stepped sideways and vanished from a position where no one had line of sight on him, without anyone in the room perceiving the moment of departure.
Rylanor did not find Zhou Ye.
He instead turned his attention to training the Emperor's Children.
He had intended to instruct them in the traditions and disciplines of the IIIrd Legion.
What he discovered was that every single one of them fought as though personally inhabited by the spirit of Angron.
Their swordsmanship advanced at a frightening pace.
Their artistic sensibility could not be described as underdeveloped. It could more accurately be described as below bacterial levels.
There was one exception.
Culinary arts: maximum possible grade. Secondary specialty: farming and animal husbandry.
Rylanor grumbled, complained, and swore under his breath. And then, voice taut with a blood pressure that would never be truly comfortable again, he began to tell them the history of their Chapter, the story of its deepest shame, and the name of their eternal enemy.
Fulgrim.
---o---