Shipping goods from the game to the World of Warhammer

Unbeknownst to Rhodes, at the very moment he stepped onto the surface of Mordax, deep beneath the forging complex, the core engine of the "Thinker-Alpha-7" was emitting an abnormal roar.

That giant computing device, which occupies three entire underground levels, is encased in thick ceramic steel plates and contains hundreds of millions of logic circuits and crystal storage arrays. It is the computing core of this city complex.

It is responsible for coordinating the entire production process from raw ore smelting to finished product assembly, while monitoring the operation of hundreds of production lines within the foundry city. At this moment, its main display panel is flashing large swaths of chaotic garbled code at an extremely fast speed. The green data streams that should have been neatly arranged are being eroded by clusters of dark red abnormal characters. Each infected logical node is spreading outwards at a geometric rate, devouring healthy code segments.

The name "Code Demon" is like an old scar to every tech priest on Mordax.

The term "reignition-type forging world" refers to industrial planets that were once dormant. They were either occupied by heretical rebels during a long war, with their machinery deliberately destroyed and desecrated; or they lost all production capacity under the onslaught of chaotic storms, with the corrosive energy of the warp seeping into every cable and every logic board, twisting sophisticated industrial systems into a mad and meaningless pile of scrap metal.

The production systems of these planets collapsed, the forges went out, the gears stopped turning, and they became lifeless steel ruins, until the expeditionary fleet of the Mechanicus finally reclaimed these lost worlds.

Rekindling a furnace that forges the world is one of the most sacred rituals of the Mechanicus. Tech-priests search the wreckage for a repairable core forge and, with strict rituals and elaborate prayers, gradually restore its operation, clean the contaminated data network, replace the corroded logic array, and make the production line, which has been idle for decades or even centuries, roar again.

Mordax is such a planet that has been reignited. About two hundred years ago, the first expeditionary restoration team of the Mechanicus spent a full seventeen years pulling this Forgeworld, which had been ravaged by the Chaos Warband for nearly half a century, back into the Emperor's glory.

The problem is that the pollution of chaos can never be completely eradicated by physical cleaning.

For those obsolete demons that infiltrated the core code of the Thinker during the heretical occupation, the purification rituals of the Mechanicus can temporarily suppress their activities—the Technologists chant binary prayers around the Thinker's shell and burn data scrolls soaked in holy oil. These rituals can indeed dispel obsolete entities that have already appeared with a certain probability, but no one can guarantee that the abnormal fragments hidden in the deepest code have been completely removed.

Every so often, from a few months to a year or two, these dormant digital parasites will reawaken.

They can take over the souls of one or more Thinkers, making these logic engines, which should be calmly calculating, frantic and uncontrollable. At best, this can cause production line parameters to become disordered and temperature control deviations to cause the entire batch of products to crack and become scrap during the cooling stage. At worst, it can cause the forging furnace to overload, turning an entire foundry workshop into a pile of twisted and deformed scrap iron in an explosion.

The last major outbreak occurred seven months ago, resulting in the loss of nearly 15 percent of the production capacity of Mordax's third foundry complex. The shockwave from the furnace explosion even reached two neighboring foundry cities, from which it has not yet fully recovered.

Of course, Rhodes was completely unaware of these things at the time.

But any trouble caused by the Cult of Mechanics presents him with the perfect opportunity to disguise his SCV as an STC.

He noticed the unusual solemnity in Casal's tone, and also the direction the camera focused when the two servo skulls suddenly stopped rotating—they weren't looking at him, but at the ground beneath their feet, as if something was wrong with the forging city itself.

"Father Casal," Rhodes said slowly, his tone carrying just the right amount of concern, "it seems something troublesome has happened? If it's convenient, could you tell me a little about it? After all, as partners of the Vandreich dynasty, we don't want Mordax to suffer any unnecessary losses."

Casal's two mechanical prosthetic eyes focused simultaneously on Rhodes' face, emitting a faint "hum." After about five seconds of silence, the high-ranking technical priest seemed to have made some kind of judgment; his shoulder-mounted servo skull began to slowly rotate again, and a low, sighing electrical sound emanated from his throat speaker.

"The Scrap Code Demon," Casal said briefly. "By Om Messiah, the Lord Thinker of the Third Deep has just been corrupted again, causing seven secondary terminals to simultaneously go out of control, and the production capacity of the Eleventh Forging Workshop has been halted. This happens every few months. Our purification rituals can only expel the demons that have already manifested, but can never eradicate the source."

He paused, the optical focus in his mechanical eyes shifting slightly. "However, this is not a realm a wandering merchant can enter, Lord Rhodes. Forgive my bluntness, but you don't even have any mechanical implants, and you probably lack sufficient understanding of the mysteries of the God of Machines."

This is typical of tech enthusiasts; discussing internal matters of the Mechanicus with them depends on how many mechanical parts you have. Rhodes inwardly grumbled.

Casal was willing to reveal this to a wandering merchant largely out of a sense of emotional catharsis, even though his sanity had been almost entirely lost due to mechanization.

He didn't expect an ordinary human, without even a decent reinforcement plate embedded in his body, to offer any effective solution to the digital plague that had plagued them for decades. In his understanding, only the great sages on Mars could possibly find the answers to this level of technical problem, and Mars was far too far away from Mordax's sector.

However, to his surprise, the wandering merchant standing in front of him did not show the expected bewilderment, but instead slightly curled the corners of his mouth.

"Father Casal," Rhodes' voice wasn't loud, but it sounded exceptionally clear in the empty metal corridor, "If I told you I had a fragment of an STC machine, the technology recorded within of which happens to have mechanical repair capabilities, I wonder if you would be interested in learning more about it?"

The corridor fell silent for a moment.

"...What did you say?" For the first time ever, Casal's synthesized voice showed a tremor almost like human emotion. "STC?"