Warhammer, I really didn't intend to form a second empire!

As he turned off the communication panel, he thought of the Emperor and Horus once again.

The Emperor said that Horus was inferior to him. Whether this statement is true or not, it means that the Emperor had already included him in the plan for the Great Crusade, a son whose strength was recognized by his father but who had not yet joined the army.

Zhao Zheng suddenly wondered what Horus's expression would be when he learned that he had an older brother who had been recognized by the Emperor earlier and whose strength far surpassed his.

However, he still has his own things to deal with right now.

Chapter Twenty-Four: Strange Galaxy

Mining of the Taogang ore vein commenced in full swing nine days after the Qiankunxing Geological Team completed its first round of drilling.

Zhao Zheng stood on the edge of the new mining area, 140 kilometers north of Chiyang City. Under his feet was a gravel road compacted by heavy machinery. In front of him, dozens of large mining machines were peeling away the surface covering layer by layer along the vein, revealing the dark gray mineral layers with a metallic luster.

He bent down and picked up a piece of raw ore that had just rolled off the conveyor belt. He rubbed his fingertips on the rough surface. The ore was very dense, and the crystal particles were arranged very evenly. It could go directly into the smelting process without going through a complicated beneficiation process.

The quality of this ore vein is even higher than the raw material standards corresponding to the set of process parameters he found in the wreckage of the casting equipment in the B-2 system, as if someone had optimized the formula ratio for him before starting.

Zhao Zheng casually handed the ore fragment to the engineer standing next to him, then walked along the conveyor belt toward the smelting workshop in the mining area at a moderate pace.

The discovery and mining of this vein was marked as a top priority project in the empire's administrative system. Kongming had completed the scheduling plan for personnel and equipment to be transferred from surrounding industrial cities a week ago, and the production schedule for the first batch of ceramic steel was accurate to the hour.

In the past few years, a complete large-scale industrial and mining cluster has been built in the area north of Chiyang City. New mining faces can be put into operation immediately simply by connecting to the existing ore transportation network and energy pipelines.

When Zhao Zheng entered the smelting workshop, the trial production of the first batch of ceramic steel had just been completed.

The massive smelting furnace is slowly reducing its temperature. The instrument panel on the control panel displays the current cooling curve, and the dark red light shining through the furnace door casts a warm glow over the entire workshop.

Upon seeing Zhao Zheng, the workshop director immediately stood at attention and saluted.

"Your Majesty, the first batch of trial production was successful. Sampling and testing results show that the compressive strength and thermal shock resistance coefficient have both met the design specifications."

Zhao Zheng walked to the cooling tank, where a piece of ceramic steel plate that had been roughly processed lay quietly. The surface still had traces of the quenching liquid. The cold gray texture was more uniform than the test piece he had fired in the laboratory, and the size was several times larger.

When will the next batch be ready?

"Under the current operating conditions, one furnace can be produced every three hours. The expansion project is expected to be completed in a week, at which time the production capacity will increase fivefold."

Zhao Zheng didn't ask any more questions. He turned around, walked out of the workshop, crossed the road in the mining area, and returned to the Stormbird's take-off and landing platform.

He stood in front of the gangway, turning back for one last look at the ore vein being mined. The ceramic ore on the conveyor belt reflected tiny flashes of light in the sunlight, like a flowing underground river winding its way to the distant smelting workshop.

With the mass production problem of ceramic steel solved, he now needs to consider how to transform this material into actual equipment.

Currently, the Astartes descendants of the Great Qin Empire are still using the White Tiger-type power armor designed by Zhao Zheng a few years ago. While the design concept of that armor is mature, the armor base material is only a high-strength alloy, and its defensive performance and durability are gradually failing to keep up with the ever-strengthening physique and battlefield needs of the descendants.

He needed a new solution: a new type of power armor with a terracotta frame and main armor body that could fully utilize the protective advantages of terracotta material while also being compatible with the growing height and size of his offspring.

As Zhao Zheng boarded the Stormbird, his psionic senses probed into the Central Design Institute beneath Chiyang City before his footsteps could reach it. In that vast space that stretched for tens of kilometers, the lights were on year-round, and blueprints and models were piled up like mountains.

He sat down and began to envision the framework for the new power armor.

The first batch of application plans for ceramic steel was initially drafted on the third day after Zhao Zheng returned to the Lishan.

He divided the design scheme into three parallel routes: the first was to standardize the Astartes armor, based on the mature architecture of the White Tiger type, replacing the high-strength alloy with ceramic steel composite armor plates, and making appropriate optimizations to the joints and power transmission system.

The second option is a brand-new "Black Tortoise" type heavy armor design, which thickens the composite armor on the chest, shoulders and legs, increasing the protection capability by an order of magnitude compared to the original model. It is essentially an upgraded version of the Marauder armor.

The third route is the smallest in scale but the most technologically advanced; it is the ultimate armor design that Zhao Zheng named "Qilin" for the prototype design.

The Kirin-type drive system uses a miniaturized cold fusion reactor, with enough power output to support thicker armor layers and heavier weapon loads, and can even carry psionic amplification modules.

In Zhao Zheng's mind, this would be his true trump card in the future human empire.

He prioritized each of these three routes, listing the Xuanwu-type heavy armor as a short-term mass production target, while the Qilin-type entered the long-term pre-research stage and was stored as a technology reserve in the encrypted database of the Central Design Institute.

After receiving the framework of the design, the engineers at the design institute immediately began to divide the work. When the first batch of ceramic steel plates was transported from the smelting workshop of Qiankun Star to the underground assembly workshop of Chiyang City, the prototype frame of the first Xuanwu-type heavy armor was also completed by welding.

Unfortunately, refined gold has not yet been found, otherwise Zhao Zheng would really like to use refined gold as the main material for forging. Although radiant gold is also good and is the main material of the Imperial Guard's power armor, its quality is still not as good as refined gold.

Zhao Zheng had already thought it through. If he couldn't find the refined gold before returning to the empire, he would wait until after his return.

In fact, what Zhao Zheng really cares about is his good brother Conrad Coz's home planet, Noztramo.

Noztramo couldn't even be described as rich in adamantite; it was practically a planet growing on adamantite. It was a complete waste that Conrad, such an unreliable Primarch, blasted it away with a single shot.

Zhao Zheng would never allow such a thing to happen. Even if it meant stealing it, he would take Noztramo by force, slaughter all those beasts there, and then immigrate there.

Kang Laoba's willpower was never top-notch, and these beasts were one of the main culprits who accelerated his downfall.

Zhao Zheng had also thought it through. Although he would be taking over his home planet, it didn't mean he wouldn't offer compensation.

Anyway, the Milky Way is so big and there are so many habitable planets, finding a decent garden world for them to be their home planet again is no problem at all.

If we build some infrastructure and colleges on top of that, and educate those children, it will be much better than the Eighth Legion being basically all beasts in the later stages.

Okay, it's decided then!

Zhao Zheng did not immediately go to the workshop to observe the assembly progress. Instead, he asked Hua Tuo to send the latest report on the second phase of the psionic pulse field experiment to the tactical panel of the Lishan.

The experimental data from the second batch has been fully collected and compiled into a table by Hua Tuo in the report.

Data shows that during the more than six months of continuous exposure to psionic pulse fields, the gene expression curves of all the test subjects' offspring showed varying degrees of convergence shift.

The most outstanding group of offspring has physiological indicators approaching those of the Imperial Guards, and this trend of convergence continues without any signs of saturation or decline.

Zhao Zheng read the report in its entirety and then added a comment at the end.

"The start of the third phase of the experiment has been postponed by six months to allow for a more thorough accumulation of existing data."

"In addition, select the best-performing group from the second batch of subjects and conduct a separate high-intensity pulsed field irradiation comparative experiment. The frequency and intensity can refer to the optimal parameters of the fifth group in the previous round, but the irradiation cycle is halved to see if they can adapt."

After replying to the report, he switched the communication interface to the regular reports from marshals across the empire.

Han Xin's work in the W-9 star system has entered its third month. The Scale Clan's technical database has been initially inventoried, which contains a wealth of knowledge about alloy smelting and precision machining.

Sun Wu's expeditionary fleet has completely taken control of the space station in the K-3 star system, which is suspected to be a remnant of the Covenant era. During the shipboard data collection operation, a large number of well-preserved data storage units were discovered, and they are currently being analyzed by Bian Que's technical team.

Wang Jian was handling the two billion descendants of humanity from the Age of Conflict in the G-2 star system. After completing the initial registration, they had begun the first round of basic education and industrial skills training. The progress on his end was going smoothly, without encountering any obstacles, and all administrative procedures were proceeding step by step according to the standard plan.

Li Jing, Li Cunxiao, Chi You, Meng Tian, ​​Wei Qing, and others also made their own gains, and the territory of the Qin Empire was steadily expanding outward.

Zhao Zheng glanced at Bai Qi's report and then closed it. This bastard had slaughtered another alien civilization. Anyway, those aliens must have been desperate before they died. Judging from the result, it was still an efficient cleanup, and the post-war resource recovery rate reached or exceeded the standard.

It's unclear how Bai Qi encountered these aliens. The total number of aliens encountered by all the expeditionary commanders under Zhao Zheng combined probably doesn't even equal a quarter of the number of aliens Bai Qi killed.

It's really strange that such an "alien radar" would appear in one's own legion. Although Zhao Zheng is also bloodthirsty, he is not necessarily more cruel than Bai Qi. Even though aliens don't have human rights, you should at least leave some behind as "talents".

With so many mines, even the Qin's engineering equipment isn't enough! Shouldn't we quickly find some "talent" instead of having our own people mine the mines?

The prototype skeleton of the Xuanwu-type heavy armored battle armor completed its final welding process in the assembly workshop.

Zhao Zheng received a message from the manufacturing team on the Lishan. He then walked out of the bridge, passed through three airtight doors along the corridor, and arrived at the final assembly workshop on the 120th floor underground of Qiankun Star.

The armor's skeleton was fixed on the assembly stand. The cold gray ceramic steel skeleton gleamed softly under the arc light. The hydraulic servo systems and drive shafts at the joints were neatly arranged, completely consistent with the markings on Zhao Zheng's design drawings. All the connecting parts used precision-machined parts based on the casting process taught by Zhao Zheng, and the meshing accuracy was half a level higher than the current model.

Zhao Zheng stood in front of the platform for a moment, his fingertips tracing the inner edge of the sternum frame. The rivets and welds there were arranged as expected, and no deviations were found.

The design of this Xuanwu-type heavy armor is a complete iteration based on the Baihu·Raider type. Its overall height is half a meter higher than the Raider armor, and the width of the shoulder armor area is nearly doubled to accommodate a more powerful power unit and additional protective armor layers.

The front of the breastplate adopts a three-layer composite structure: the outer layer is a standard ceramic steel armor plate, the middle layer is a honeycomb alloy buffer layer previously developed by Zhao Zheng, and the inner layer is a thickened carbon fiber woven mesh.

The entire system weighs nearly twice as much as the Marauder armor, but because the power unit has also been upgraded, mobility will not decrease much, while the improvement in armor protection is substantial.

Moreover, the true purpose of the Xuanwu Heavy Armor is actually for boarding operations; for ground advances, the upgraded SCVs and Goliath are sufficient.

Zhao Zheng stayed in the workshop until late at night, until the head sensor array of the Xuanwu-type battle armor completed its first power-on test and the cold blue optical lens lit up in the cockpit, before he turned and left.

When Zhao Zheng returned, the bridge of the Lishan had already switched to night lighting mode. The brightness of the holographic star map was dimmed, and the coordinates of the newly occupied star systems on the pale blue edge of the imperial territory flickered quietly in the low light.

He sat back on the ship's throne, his gaze slowly moving across the star map.

Tao Gang has begun mass production, the Xuanwu-type battle armor is entering mass production, and the data from the psionic pulse field experiment is progressing steadily. Everything is going smoothly.

Zhao Zheng sometimes felt uneasy about this smooth progress. In Warhammer, this cesspool, how could everything be developing in the direction he had expected?

The journey went smoothly, no problem, but the fact that it went so smoothly made Zhao Zheng a little suspicious.

Zhao Zheng tapped his fingertips lightly twice on the armrest, his gaze still fixed on the ever-expanding pale blue halo on the star map.

Despite the doubts, there is currently no reason for him to stop.

He pulled up the real-time monitoring footage from the Qiankun Star Central Research Institute. The screen showed Hua Tuo standing in front of the operating table in the experimental chamber, bending over to examine a set of tissue slices that had just been taken out of the petri dish.

The slices were taken from skeletal muscle samples of a test subject who had completed the third round of pulsed field irradiation. In the magnified microscopic images, the cross-sections of the muscle fibers showed a denser arrangement than those of a typical Astartes, and the distribution density of cell nuclei and the number of mitochondria were also significantly higher than the baseline.

Zhao Zheng magnified a detail: the spacing between the myofibrils was nearly a quarter narrower than that of the control group, which meant that the contractile force output would be higher for the same volume.

He then looked at the blood test results next to him. The hemoglobin concentration was higher than normal, the red blood cell count was stable, and there were no signs of hemolysis or abnormal proliferation.

My body is getting stronger, but not at the cost of my health.

Hua Tuo seemed to sense Zhao Zheng's psychic gaze, raised his head and nodded slightly in the direction of the camera, then lowered his head again to record a few lines of annotations on the data panel.

Zhao Zheng turned off the monitoring screen and turned to the edge of the holographic star map.

There is a gray area marked "Unexplored" located approximately seventy light-years southwest of the Qin Empire's territory.

The forward reconnaissance unit transmitted a set of unusual signals from that area forty-eight hours ago.

The energy frequency and radiation characteristics did not match any known alien or human activity he had ever seen before; it was neither like the crude electromagnetic noise of the Greenskins nor the highly modulated psionic pulses of the Eldar.

Moreover, the other side's technological strength should be quite good, because the Qin Empire's reconnaissance fleet could not detect any signal source at all. It was as if there was a huge object there, but they could not detect it, and even the instruments did not show anything when scanning.

Zhao Zheng felt a strange sense of familiarity with it, but for a moment he couldn't quite place it.

Something about this place felt off to him. He felt like he had seen this kind of signal somewhere before, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it.

Chapter Twenty-Five: The World of Tombs

Zhao Zheng temporarily labeled the gray area on the star map as "Anomaly Zone - α". After locking the coordinates, he ordered the outpost reconnaissance units to remain in place and prohibit them from approaching further.

But subsequent exploration reports came back over the next few days, each one intensifying the strange feeling of knowing something but not being able to pinpoint its source.

The abnormal signals exhibited a strange regularity in the passive sensor recordings, with an extremely narrow spectral distribution and extremely high precision, completely unlike the radiation fluctuations produced by natural celestial bodies.

Zhao Zheng reviewed the data repeatedly, and finally, during one of the replays, a sentence from a technical analysis memo from Bian Que's team suddenly came to mind.

Isn't this just a necromancer?!

Zhao Zheng wanted to immediately order his men to leave the area, but before he could give any further instructions, the last line of the report made him truly alarmed.

"Extremely low-intensity energy fluctuations were detected at the edge of the region, which appear to be a maintenance system for some kind of long-term dormancy. Its characteristics are somewhat consistent with the descriptions of the 'Necropolis Empire' in some previously analyzed surviving documents."

Unless they die completely, the sleeping undead will awaken from their slumber time and time again, and the "living metal" around them will also awaken.

Moreover, this is the materialistic iron fist of the material universe, whose technological strength is enough to crush the current human empire and the Qin Empire.

Honestly, Zhao Zheng didn't want to fight to the death with these hopeless aliens; it wasn't worth it, and it was too dangerous.

Zhao Zheng didn't know how long this tomb world had been asleep, nor how large it was, but judging from the strength and stability of that abnormal signal, it should be quite large.

If left unchecked, it will become a huge threat to the Qin Empire once it awakens on its own.

Zhao Zheng issued the order almost immediately: all expeditionary fleets on the front lines of the Great Qin Empire were to cancel their original operations, and the elite troops that had been transferred were to immediately assemble near the coordinates of "abnormal zone-α".

The fleets of the five expeditionary marshals, Li Jing, Han Xin, Sun Wu, Wang Jian, and Bai Qi, completed their relocation within the same week. After meeting at the designated coordinates, the fleets formed a massive joint formation with a total of over 5,000 warships, including 800 Great Wall-class battleships and more than 4,000 escort and support vessels of various types.

On the ground assault side, front-line generals such as Chi You, Xiang Ji, Meng Tian, ​​and Li Cunxiao also led their respective Astartes companies to arrive with the fleet.

At the pre-battle meeting, Han Xin projected the spectral characteristics and spatial distribution pattern of the abnormal signal onto a holographic star map, speaking in a calm tone.

"The signal source is located below the surface of this planet in the star chart, and given its current location, it may have been in a dormant state for tens of millions of years."

"But its energy system is still operating at extremely low power, and we cannot be sure when it will wake up. The best way is to deal with it before it fully wakes up."

Han Xin's plan was simple: first, use the fleet's orbital firepower to conduct a probing bombardment of the planet's surface and observe the surface's reaction pattern. If the planet was indeed a tomb world, then this level of stimulation would easily provoke the undead to launch a defensive counterattack. At that time, the location and scale of its defense system could be determined based on the intensity and distribution of the counterattack.

Ground forces will land while simultaneously suppressing orbital fire, prioritizing the destruction of all suspected energy transmission nodes on the planet's surface to reduce their energy reserves.

Less than ten hours after the operational meeting ended, the joint task force was deployed to the target planet's orbit.

Zhao Zheng did not personally command the battle; he simply handed over the overall coordination to Han Xin, and then sat on the throne on the Lishan ship's base, observing the battle remotely through a holographic screen, ready to take action at any time.

At the moment the war began, he was also simultaneously observing the changes on the planet's surface, assessing the true threat posed by the undead.

The first round of orbital bombardment was launched simultaneously after Han Xin gave the order. The main guns of eight hundred Great Wall-class battleships sprayed the planet's surface in low-power mode. The beams burned neat arrays on the planet's surface, melting large areas of surface rock into dark red glassy depressions.