Warhammer begins in 2026

After completely eradicating all the strongholds of the alien soul race and melting away the last wisp of their original soul, the entire star field returned to complete silence.

Huang Feng stood on the void bridge, looking at the star map that had been completely purified and was free of any distortion or pollution. His gaze swept over this dead corner of the Milky Way that had been blocked and isolated from the outside world by subspace storms for many years. Unintentionally, he captured an extremely special, stable, and grand spatial resonance signal in the deep scan data of the fleet.

This signal was unlike a ship's engine, a planetary energy core, or any alien psionic energy fluctuation; it was pure, orderly, and immense to the extreme, carrying the rich characteristics of humanity's golden age of technology.

After comparing and tracing the data, Huang Feng quickly confirmed the identity of this ancient artifact—the HALOS beacon, a giant global navigation and stabilization device from the dark technology era of DAOT.

In the existing records of the human empire, the Pharos Beacon has always been a legendary ancient relic.

The Empire today possesses only a few dilapidated, malfunctioning, and incomplete Pharos beacons, which can barely serve a weak navigational aid. Despite exhaustive research into ancient texts and the dismantling and study of fragments, the Mechanicus has been unable to decipher the core principles, let alone replicate or build a new beacon. For the Mechanicus, a complete Pharos beacon exists only in ancient data fragments and prayer records.

But what Huang Feng found at this moment was a fully preserved, functional, and never-stopped Pharos beacon.

Its performance ceiling far surpasses the Star Communication Array and Star Torch Navigation System that the human empire currently relies on.

The Star Torch can only provide single-path guidance and weak subspace stabilization, with limited coverage. It will still fail and become chaotic in the face of high-intensity subspace storms. The Star Communicator relies on psionicists to transmit communications, which is extremely vulnerable to interference and interruption from chaos, psionic energy, and distortion.

The fully-equipped Pharos beacon is a true star-scale, all-domain device.

It continuously emits broad-spectrum real-space resonance waves outward, smoothing out the subspace turbulence across the vast star field, centered on the planet where the beacon is located. It forcibly suppresses local subspace distortions, weakens the storm intensity, and directly and significantly reduces the probability of the opening of the demon rift and the appearance of demons.

At the same time, it can calibrate all warp driveways across the entire domain and standardize star sector navigation coordinates, making the originally dangerous, chaotic, and potentially disorienting subspace routes, which could be torn apart by storms at any time, stable, accurate, and safe.

Simply put, a fully-equipped Pharos beacon can completely transform an entire chaotic and dangerous galactic region into a stable, safe, and secure territory suitable for human long-distance travel.

This is precisely the core infrastructure that the Great Expedition needs most right now.

Without hesitation, Huang Feng immediately ordered the mobilization of forces to prepare for a personal investigation.

She issued a command to Mars, summoning a massive number of high-level Mechanicus technicians, ancient deconstruction scholars, sacred engineers, and ruin restoration teams. The entire elite Mechanicus expeditionary force set sail immediately, heading to the target planet along with the fleet.

In addition, Huang Feng brought with him his treasured trump card that he had kept for many years—a complete set of STC templates from the Pharos series preserved from the Golden Age.

The STC in her hand is the most original, complete, and undamaged ancient design blueprint, covering all the data for the beacon infrastructure, energy modules, resonant core, and stabilization array.

But blueprints are just blueprints.

The theoretical design of the Golden Age still has subtle differences from the fully-fledged beacon that has been operating for thousands of years and has undergone the baptism of real-world star system stability maintenance. Many details of dynamic adaptation, star system fine-tuning, and energy self-adaptation can only be fully demonstrated by a physical object.

Huang Feng's purpose for this trip was to personally observe, dissect, compare, and review.

She intends to use the complete STC blueprint in her hand as a basis to benchmark against this fully functional Pharos beacon that has been running for thousands of years, to supplement all the actual combat operation data, correct design deviations, and complete the dynamic adaptation modules.

The fleet quickly reached the target planet's orbit.

This is an ancient colony planet with a stable environment and geology. There are no traces of war or alien inhabitants. At the top of the core continent of the entire planet stands a giant tower-like building that pierces the clouds.

The tower is constructed entirely of a dark gold special alloy, engraved with energy circuits and resonance patterns from the golden age. Countless ring arrays are stacked on top of each other, and the core pearl at the top constantly releases a broad-spectrum resonance wave invisible to the naked eye, silently calming the subspace disturbances in the surrounding star field.

Even after tens of thousands of years without maintenance, this ancient behemoth continues to operate steadily, radiating across the entire star field, allowing this former storm-isolated zone to maintain a relatively stable subspace environment year after year.

Upon its release, a massive number of mechanical engineering instructors were instantly thrilled.

They scanned the giant beacon layer by layer, recording data, analyzing loops, and comparing it with ancient texts, their hands trembling and their faces filled with piety.

In their understanding, ancient divine structures of this level had long been lost, and now witnessing the complete operation of the structure was tantamount to witnessing an ancient miracle of the Cult of Machines.

Huang Feng slowly walked to the front of the beacon core platform, unfolded the Golden Age STC data template in his hand, and compared the two.

On one side are cold, perfect, and static ancient design drawings.

On one side is a fully-fledged combat prototype that has undergone tens of thousands of years of star field baptism, autonomous adaptation, and dynamic fine-tuning.

Countless subtle differences, supplementary modules, adaptive energy logic, and special correction structures for the raging subspace emerged one by one.

Huang Feng's eyes were calm, and he already had a clear plan in mind.

She needs to thoroughly understand all the operating logic of this fully-fledged Faros beacon, fill in the missing practical adaptation modules in the STC template, correct blueprint loopholes, and optimize energy range and overall coverage.

Once the data is fully collected and the templates are completely perfected, the future human empire will be able to independently mass-produce and deploy the new Pharos beacons across the entire domain.

At that time, the subspace storms across the entire galaxy will be suppressed layer by layer, warp drives will be fully unblocked, the probability of demons appearing will be greatly reduced, the efficiency of the Great Expedition will see a qualitative leap, and humanity will truly gain absolute dominance over the galactic region.

However, Huang Feng was well aware that while the coverage area of ​​a single fully-fledged Pharos beacon was vast, it was still a drop in the ocean when considering the entire expansive Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way is a boundless expanse of star systems, with countless branch star systems and scattered, turbulent subspace regions. To completely smooth out the subspace turbulence throughout the Milky Way, construct a stable navigation network with no blind spots and full coverage, and completely envelop the entire Milky Way within a stabilizing force field, at least a thousand standard fully-fledged Pharos beacons would need to be mass-produced and deployed, interconnected, and have their force fields superimposed to completely cover all blind spots in star systems and achieve full-domain voltage stabilization and full-course calibration.

Huang Feng raised his hand to touch the cold core tower and began to record the real-time operation data of the beacon line by line, quietly reviewing all the details that needed to be filled, optimized and upgraded next.