novelhk Chapter 16 Preparation
Chapter 16 Preparation
Now that we have a plan, all that's left is to take it one step at a time.
Liu En's life returned to its previous rhythm. Every morning he would wake in the workshop's rest area, eat breakfast, don his power armor, and lead his crew of mechs to the temple's wrecked ship warehouse. The field would expand, his consciousness would reach out, and the debris would disintegrate. Thousands of tons of metal wreckage would silently transform into atomic clouds, stored in higher-dimensional space. In the evening, he would return to the workshop, organize the day's harvest, and archive the new material composition information. He would handle a few scattered repair orders at night, accumulating some Throne Coins. He would lie down late at night, and the next day would be the same.
The days were as monotonous as the sergeant's repetitive commands, but Liu En didn't find them tedious. Each decomposition was a harvest, each blueprint a piece of the puzzle. The outline of the cruiser became clearer and clearer in his database.
Vitellius would come every week to pick up the parts, grab a coffee, and chat. Liu En extracted a considerable amount of information about black market identification codes from him—which middlemen were reliable, which were informants for the Ministry of Justice, and which port officials were the most efficient at getting things done for money. Vitellius dismissed it as mere curiosity, but Liu En memorized every single detail.
"Five hundred thousand is the bare minimum," Vitellius once said. "For cruiser-class identification codes, if you want a reliable one that won't be questioned easily, you'd better prepare eight hundred thousand to one million. Those old-model decommissioned ships are cheaper, but they're troublesome to check—if you run into a meticulous port authority who digs up the old decommissioning records and finds that the ship has long been scrapped, your code will be exposed."
Liu En asked, "Then what kind of code is the most secure?"
“Brand new.” Vitellius flicked his cigarette ash. “A completely blank registration record, no history, not in any public archives. This kind of code is the most expensive, but the safest—because there's simply nothing to compare it to. If you say it's a newly built ship, then it's a newly built ship. Nobody can argue with that.” He paused. “Of course, that's on the condition that you can explain which shipyard your ship came from. That's easy enough; find a small, remote shipyard, pay them a little money to add a record to it.”
Liu En nodded and didn't ask any more questions.
Saving money wasn't fast. The dismantling work in the shipwreck warehouse didn't generate Throne Coins—atoms and blueprints, though priceless, couldn't be directly exchanged for currency. His cash income mainly came from two sources: selling parts to the Temple Procurement System and taking on odd repair orders.
There's a limit to the parts business. He can't suddenly increase shipments; that would arouse suspicion. A few pieces a week, no more, no less, just enough to satisfy Akus. Repair orders, on the other hand, are steadily increasing—his reputation in Midnest is gradually spreading, and more and more merchants and workshop owners are coming to him. An old automatic loom, a broken industrial robotic arm, a malfunctioning measuring instrument. Each order earns him tens to hundreds of Throne Coins; little by little, it adds up.
When settling accounts at the end of the month, Liu En stared at the numbers on the dashboard for a while. His savings had increased from 150,000 to 170,000. At this rate, it would take nearly two years to save up 800,000.
too slow.
He needs a faster way.
A few days later, he found old Heck at the flea market. Heck's stall was still the same, piled high with junk collected from all over the place, and the air was filled with the mixed smell of machine oil and rust.
"Heck, I have a shipment I'd like to sell." Liu En squatted in front of the stall, lowering his voice, "Energy conduit components, military grade, very complete."
Heck looked up at him, a glint of shrewdness flashing in his cloudy eyes. "Military grade? Where did you get that?"
"A wreck warehouse. Taken from the debris towed back by the navy." Liu En took out a few small parts from his bag and placed them on the stall. These were reconstructed from atoms obtained from the decomposition, with an aged appearance, making them look no different from those salvaged from the wreckage.
Heck picked one up, scanned it with the detector, and then weighed it in his hand. "Good quality. How many do you have?"
"Not many. But there will be more in the future," Liu En said. "You name the price, 10% lower than the Temple's purchase price. But I want cash, not through the system."
Heck was silent for a few seconds, then nodded. "Okay. I'll take this batch. You can bring any more stock you need anytime, and the price is negotiable."
From that day on, Liu En had an additional sales channel. The Temple's procurement line continued, but the output was kept within safe limits. Excess parts—those high-value goods that shouldn't have too much of on Argus's side—flowed into the black market through Hek. The prices were lower, but the advantage was that it was clean and left no records.
The growth rate of the deposits doubled. Three months later, the deposits exceeded 300,000.
Meanwhile, the dismantling operations in the shipwreck warehouse never stopped.
Atomic reserves are advancing from tens of millions of tons to hundreds of millions of tons. Ship blueprints in the database are becoming more complete every day. The design of the Void Shield core components has completed the control circuitry, and the blueprint for the main thruster has been pieced together from hundreds of fragments to form a complete outline.
Liu En spent several nights in his private workshop cross-validating the ship design knowledge he extracted from the Marcus data core with the blueprints pieced together from wrecked ship fragments. The design parameters from the two sources were largely consistent; where there were differences, he adopted the superior solution. A complete and optimized blueprint for the Gothic-class cruiser gradually took shape in his database.
He's still missing one thing.
Deep within the wreck warehouse lay a sealed-off area. The debris there wasn't ordinary wreckage, but fragments of "ghost ships" recovered from the Warp—ships that had drifted in the Chaos Sea for decades, even centuries, towed back to Lucis by Imperial salvage crews, but never properly processed. The fragments were covered in a corrosion he'd never seen before, not chemical, not biological, but something deeper.
Liu En stood outside the fence of the containment zone, looking at the silent fragments. His field of vision couldn't reach there—he looked at the containment zone set up by the temple to isolate potential psionic contamination. But he could use his extended consciousness to perceive the surface color and general shape of the fragments, which gleamed with an abnormal, dark purple luster under the emergency lights.
He needed to go inside. Not to dismantle them—those fragments might genuinely pose a risk of psionic contamination—but to obtain information he couldn't currently glean from ordinary wreckage: the long-term effects of warp travel on a ship's structure. Without this data, the ships he built would be "clean," untouched by the trials of warp space. He didn't know if this was a good thing or a bad thing, but he needed to know.
Vitellius gave him an answer a few days later.
"Things from the sealed-off area? Don't touch them." Vitellius's tone was unusually serious. "Those were retrieved from the warp, and nobody knows what's on them. The temple has specialized priests who handle them; they wear special protective suits and perform purification rituals before daring to touch them. You're just a second-tier craftsman, without any psionic protection training; going in there would be suicide."
"What are those purple things on the fragments?"
"I don't know. And nobody wants to know." Vitellius shook his head. "Some things are safer not to know than to know."
Liu En did not insist. But he kept it in mind—there were still many things he didn't know about the effects of the warp on matter.
In his third year at Lucifer, his savings exceeded 500,000.
Liu En sat at the workshop's workbench, staring at the number on the data panel. Five hundred thousand—just enough to buy the lowest-tier cruiser identification code. But Vitellius had said the lowest tier wasn't secure. He needed eighty to one million to buy a brand new, blank registration record.
We're still short 300,000 to 500,000.
At the current rate, he could save enough in another six months to a year. But he couldn't wait that long. Not because he was in a hurry, but because he knew that in the Warhammer universe, the longer a plan dragged on, the more variables there would be.
He needs to find new sources of income.
The opportunity came sooner than expected. One afternoon, Vitellius brought news.
"There's a job at the temple; the pay is high, but the requirements are also demanding. Are you interested?"
"What kind of work?"
"An old Thinker, the core equipment of the Temple's archives department. It's been running for over a hundred years without stopping, and its internal optical circuitry is severely aged. Ordinary maintenance methods can only provide temporary solutions. The Temple's technical priests have tried several times without success, and now they're planning to try outsourcing." Vitellius looked at him. "Acus recommended you."
Liu En thought for a moment. "How much is the compensation?"
"Three thousand. If it can be repaired."
Three thousand. For him now, that was still a considerable income. Liu En nodded. "I'll take it."
The Thinker's condition was worse than he had anticipated. Liu En spent three full days in the Temple's server room, opening the device's casing and scanning the internal optical circuitry layer by layer using his field of view. The aging was more severe than the Temple's technical priest had estimated—it wasn't a problem that could be solved by replacing a few circuits; the core optical chips showed signs of ablation.
He didn't replace the chip. Instead, he used atomic reshaping to regrow a layer of optical waveguide material on the chip's surface, completely repairing the ablation marks. He disassembled and reshaped the aging optical circuitry segment by segment—first locating the faulty section of wire, disassembling it to obtain material information, then using atomic reshaping technology from his inventory to replace it in situ. No need to remove it for replacement; he rebuilt it directly in place. During the three-day repair period, he spent two and a half days on pretense of debugging and testing—the actual work took less than half a day.
The moment the equipment restarted, the head of the Temple's archives department—a gray-haired technical priest—stared at the stable data stream on the screen and remained silent for a long time.
"It's even higher than the factory standard," he said, his voice tinged with disbelief.
Liu En received three thousand Throne Coins and a letter of recommendation from the Temple Archives. The letter was simple: Cohen Severus, a second-tier technical craftsman, possesses excellent equipment repair skills; it is recommended that he be given due consideration.
The value of this letter of recommendation gradually became apparent over the next few months. More outsourcing work came his way, with increasingly higher pay. Liu En's monthly income rose from two or three thousand to five or six thousand. His savings surpassed six hundred thousand and were heading towards seven hundred thousand.
At this rate, he should be able to raise a million in another two or three months.