NABC Chapter 12 Lucius
Chapter 12 Lucius
The next morning, Liu En woke up without hesitation.
He sat on the edge of the bed, picked up the metal business card, and dialed the number on it using the data tablet. After a few rings, the woman's voice came from the other end.
"Resolute Cargo Operations Office"
"I'm a skilled craftsman who came for the job interview yesterday," Liu En said. "I'll sign the contract."
The woman's voice immediately became warmer. "Sir, that's wonderful. When would be a convenient time for you to come? I've already made arrangements with the shipyard; they can receive you anytime."
"today."
"Okay, okay, I'll arrange it right away. Just come directly to the dock, sir, and contact me when you arrive."
Liu En hung up the communication and began packing his things. He first checked the data panel, bulletproof vest, and robe to make sure all the forged identity information was there. Then he stood up and looked around the underground bunker where he had been staying for less than two weeks.
The ceramic steel walls were thick and sturdy, and the hydraulic airtight doors were heavy and reliable. But now he was leaving, and he couldn't leave any trace.
Field unfolds.
The workbench vanished. The lighting panel went out, turning into a stream of particles—everything he had personally sculpted was disintegrated, piece by piece, returning to its most basic atomic form. Even the additional ceramic steel reinforcement layer on the wall was peeled off, leaving only the original structural steel wall. The airtight door was dismantled and replaced with the original, ordinary metal door.
In less than five minutes, the safe house was transformed back to its original state—an empty, dusty, abandoned warehouse. There was no trace of anyone having lived there.
Liu En took one last look at the room, then turned and opened the old metal door, leading six mechs into the maintenance corridor. The door closed behind him with a dull thud.
He had already traveled the route from the lower nest to the spaceport before, and this time it was much faster. The guards at the checkpoint, seeing his red robes and mech servants, didn't ask any further questions, as usual. In the domed hall of the spire, worshippers still knelt before the Emperor's colossal statue, the smoke from incense and candles lingering. He crossed the conveyor belt, boarded the space elevator, and arrived at the spaceport in geosynchronous orbit.
The Resolute's dry dock was at Dock 102 in the port area. He found it according to the address on the business card. A medium-sized, greyish-white cargo ship was moored in the dock, surrounded by maintenance supports and pipes. The hull showed obvious signs of rust and welding repairs, and several of the porthole panes had been replaced with inconsistent colors. The propeller nozzles at the stern still bore traces of burning from the last voyage.
The woman was already waiting at the dock entrance. She had changed into a dark formal suit, her hair was neatly combed, and she was followed by two technicians in overalls. Seeing Liu En approaching with six mechs, she quickly went to greet him.
"Sir, welcome."
Liu En nodded. The woman led him into the dock, introducing the ship as they walked. The captain of the Resolute was named Hawke, a man in his fifties with scars on his face from warp travel—irregular lines that looked as if something had stretched them open from the inside. He stood by the gangway, and when he saw Liu En's red robe and his servant, his expression became respectful, but there was a hint of scrutiny in his eyes.
"Sir, skilled craftsman," Captain Hawke extended his hand, "the Resolute needs professionals like you."
Liu En shook hands with him without speaking. Captain Hawke didn't seem to mind and led him on a tour of the ship. The interior of the Resolute was older than he had imagined; the corridors were dimly lit, and the air carried an old, musty smell mixed with engine oil and sweat. The engine room was on the lowest level, with the rogue subspace engines occupying half of the space, and pipes and cables extending from them. The readings on the dials fluctuated within the normal range, but the pointers jittered more than on newer ships.
"This is the core." Captain Hawk patted the engine casing. "I've been sailing for twenty years, and this thing has never been easy to handle. Last time we sailed, the cooling system malfunctioned twice in subspace, which almost scared me to death."
Liu En stood in front of the engine, not reaching out to touch it. His field of vision had a radius of ten meters, allowing him to sense the engine's surface temperature, vibration frequency, and fluid pressure within the pipes—these were superficial pieces of information, obtainable without decomposition. But to acquire complete information about the material's composition, understand its aging process, and internal structure, he had to disassemble the physical object.
He found a discarded cooling pipe removed from an engine in the engine room, lying in a corner pile of scrap. The pipe was cracked, and there was obvious wear at the joints. Liu En picked it up, his fingers touching the pipe wall. His field expanded, and his consciousness reached it. The decomposition command was issued. The discarded pipe transformed into a cloud of atoms, and at the same time, a complete set of information on the material composition flooded into his database—the material formula, pipe wall thickness, and sealing structure of the wandering engine's cooling system were all recorded.
With this information, he could determine the engine's current condition. He walked around the engine bay, touching the outer shells of several key components—not disassembling them, but simply using touch to sense them. Combined with a shallow scan of the area, he concluded that the material aging was within acceptable limits, but there was fatigue at three weld points, and a set of seals needed replacement. He didn't address the issue on the spot but instead saved this information.
"Let's sign the contract," he said.
The woman took a contract from her briefcase and handed it to him with both hands. Liu En quickly glanced through it; the terms were consistent with what they had discussed yesterday. He wrote "Cohen Severo" in the signature field—in high Gothic script, neat but lacking fluency. The woman put the contract away and handed him a crew member's identification card.
"The departure time is twelve days from now. Adults can board the ship earlier, at any time."
Liu En took the ID card without saying anything. He and his servants moved into the crew cabin of the Resolute.
The days leading up to the voyage were uneventful. He spent every day in the engine room, replacing almost all the spare parts piece by piece and giving them a weathering finish. The data on the rogue engine in the database was now complete.
Twelve days later, the Resilience departed port on time.
The journey from the spaceport to Mandeville Point takes about a day. The Perseverance departed its berth at the space station, its thrusters ignited, and the hull accelerated smoothly amidst the hum of the inertial cancellers. Through the porthole, the outline of Helsard's Nest City gradually shrank, becoming a bulge on the gray-yellow landscape, before disappearing into the darkness. The sphere of Armageddon occupied half the porthole, and below the clouds stretched endless industrial fumes and pollution. Liu En stood by the porthole for a few minutes, then turned and returned to the engine room.
The time has come to enter the subspace.
Captain Hawke ordered everyone to take their positions over the loudspeaker. Liu En could feel the ship's vibration frequency changing, and the power of the rogue engines climbing to a level never before reached. In his field of vision, something began to condense around the ship—not matter, not energy, but something he couldn't categorize. Subspace.
The moment the ship passed Mandeville Point, everything outside the porthole changed.
The normal starry sky vanished, replaced by a chaotic, flowing expanse of color. Purple, red, and orange intertwined, like the veins of some colossal creature. These colors were not static; they surged, swirled, tore apart, and reformed, occasionally coalescing into blurry, incomplete shapes—a face, a hand, the outline of a building—before instantly dissipating. The crew members were pale; some whispered the Emperor's prayers. The ship's guards—a squad of ten—donned fully enclosed bulletproof armor, laser guns at their ready, and doubled their patrol frequency.
Liu En felt nothing at all.
His consciousness was functioning normally. His body felt no discomfort. But his field perception was activated in the subspace—not passively receiving information, but actively perceiving things that could not possibly exist in the physical universe.
He leaned against the hull, extending the field of energy as much as possible to cover the outer edge of the Resolute's hull. Subspace "matter"—if it could be called matter—began to flood his senses.
At first, it was sparse. A few atoms—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen—appeared as if they had accidentally fallen in from the real universe. Their trajectories were chaotic, seemingly carried about by the energy flow of the subspace. Liu En touched them—in the subspace, his field itself could achieve "contact." He issued a decomposition command, the atoms atomizing into an atomic cloud, while information flooded in. Atoms were stored, information archived. Few in number, but undeniably present.
Then he discovered something else.
An atom. Not carbon, not hydrogen, not any element known on the periodic table. Its nuclear structure was incredibly stable, its electron cloud arranged in a pattern he had never seen before. Its mass was between that of iron and silver, but it was chemically extremely inert, reacting almost nothing with any other element. Even more strangely, when his consciousness came into contact with this atom, the information structure it presented to him was blank. There was no fixed crystal orientation, no fixed molecular configuration, only a pure, undefined state of existence.
Liu En focused his attention, touched one of these atoms, and decomposed it. Complete information about the composition of matter flooded his consciousness. He then tried to replicate it using ordinary atoms from his inventory—but failed. Ordinary carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, no matter how they were combined, could not produce that unique information structure. This atom could only be obtained from subspace.
Moreover, their numbers are astonishing.
After his field of vision had persisted in the subspace for some time, these atoms began to flood his perception like a tidal wave. Not just one or two here and there, but countless, overwhelming. They existed in every corner of the subspace, forming the basis of those chaotic colors. Liu En realized that the subspace itself was composed of these atoms—or rather, these atoms were a projection of the subspace onto the material plane.
He tried to shape it using these atoms.
For his first attempt, he sculpted the simplest object—a small cube. Atoms were retrieved from the warehouse and assembled layer by layer under the control of his consciousness field. The cube took shape. Its surface was smooth, its texture dense, and it weighed slightly more than a similarly sized piece of ceramic steel, but its strength seemed comparable. He scraped the surface with a dagger, leaving no mark.
In his second attempt, he used these atoms to shape a small conductor—replacing a section of copper wire in the laser gun's power pack. The power pack's output parameters remained unchanged, and its conductivity was normal.
On his third attempt, he used these atoms to shape a complex part—a gear made of hardened steel. The resulting gear was indistinguishable from a standard steel gear in size, weight, and hardness.
The universal atom can replace almost all atomic matter.
Liu En sat in a corner of the engine room, spending several hours repeatedly testing. He combined these atoms with carbon to obtain a material similar to alloy steel; with silicon, he obtained a semiconductor; and used alone, he obtained a neutral base material with properties between ceramic steel and plastic steel. It has no fixed properties, but can simulate the atomic arrangement of any known material according to the instructions given during molding.
He named this atom: the universal atom.
The stockpile of universal atoms in the warehouse continued to grow during the subspace voyage. Not explosively, but through a steady, gradual accumulation. Due to the ship's protection and the limitations of its range, he could only capture atoms that happened to drift within a ten-meter radius. But several weeks of voyage were long enough that by the time the Perseverance emerged from subspace, its warehouse had accumulated a considerable number of universal atoms—along with other ordinary atoms that had fallen from the real universe.
He reclaimed the area.
There was no projection. He had no projection in the warp. Chaotic energy flowed around him, but found no crack to penetrate. The whispers, the illusions—they all ceased to exist within him.
Other people are not like him.
The Resolute's subspace voyage lasted eight weeks—calendarly, it began in the third week of 930.M41 and ended in the fifth. But inside subspace, time meant nothing. The crew experienced several severe tension reactions; some began talking to themselves in the corridors, others claimed to see faces wriggling on the bulkheads. The naval commander ordered no one to act alone and increased the density of patrols around the engine room and bridge.
Captain Hawke looked terrible, but he insisted on inspecting the entire ship every day. When he reached the engine room, he saw Liu En sitting in front of the instrument panel, his expression calm as if nothing had happened.
"Aren't you nervous, sir?" he asked.
Liu En shook his head. "I'm used to it."
Captain Hawke glanced at him but said nothing more. Such composure was not uncommon among members of the Mechanical Order. He simply nodded and continued his patrol.
In eight weeks, the Perseverance experienced three malfunctions. One was an overheating of the cooling system pump, another was a clogged filter in the air circulation system, and the third was an unstable signal receiver in the navigation equipment.
During the first malfunction, Liu En disassembled the overheated pump and used a field scan to discover severe bearing wear. He didn't have a spare part, but he found an old shaft of the same specifications in the scrap heap—one that had been previously replaced on the ship. He disassembled the old shaft, obtained its material composition information, and then used atoms from the warehouse to reconstruct a new bearing, replacing the worn part. The pump returned to normal operation.
The second malfunction was a clogged filter. Instead of replacing the entire filter, he touched the filter element and sensed that the blockage was a mixture of dust and sludge. He directly broke down the clogging layer on the filter element's surface—atom-by-atom stripping—and the filter was clear again. No replacement or cleaning was needed.
The third malfunction was due to an unstable signal receiver on the navigation device. He disassembled the device and performed a field scan layer by layer. The problem lay with an aging signal cable. He didn't have a spare, but he removed a short section of cable of the same specification from a discarded junction box next to the device, disassembled it to obtain its information, and then used a rework kit from the warehouse to replace the aging part with a new one. After the device was recalibrated, the signal stabilized.
Captain Hawke was very satisfied with his performance. The crew's gaze towards him changed from awe to reliance. Whenever the ship shook more violently, several sailors would run to the engine room door to check and make sure Liu En was still sitting there before leaving with peace of mind.
One day in the eighth week, the navigator's voice came over the radio—hoarse, tired, but with obvious relief.
"We are about to leave the warp. Everyone will return to their fixed positions."
The Resolute hull shook violently a few times, and the chaotic colors outside the portholes suddenly seemed to be wiped away by an invisible hand, replaced by a normal starry sky. The ship slid out of Mandeville Point, the engine power decreased, and it returned to sub-light speed cruising mode.
Liu En looked out through the small porthole of the engine room.
That was no ordinary star.
At the very center of the field of vision, a white sphere of light burned. Surrounding it was a massive ring structure made of metal and ceramic—the confinement ring of the artificial sun, with a diameter measured in millions of kilometers, composed of countless closely arranged ring segments. The inner surface of the confinement ring was covered with densely packed reflectors and heat dissipation fins.
The outer ring of structures is surrounded by countless orbital facilities: docks, space stations, weapon platforms, communication arrays, and logistics hubs, layered upon each other. Further out, the planet itself moves slowly into view—a gray-black sphere, its surface devoid of any natural color, only covered by a dense array of city lights and industrial gleams.
Lucius. The world-forging master.
The Perseverance entered planetary orbit, joining a busy flow of traffic. The surrounding ships increased—cargo ships, transport ships, Imperial Navy patrol boats. All were strictly adhering to navigational markings. Through the porthole, he could see the nearest orbital dock: a cruiser-sized hull lay in the dock, surrounded by hundreds of workers in spacesuits working on its surface.
The Perseverance was docked at a cargo port in planetary-synchronous orbit. Captain Hawke announced over the loudspeaker that the voyage was over and the crew could disembark for rest, but needed to return within seventy-two hours to prepare for the loading of cargo for the return voyage.
Liu En received an encrypted data card containing five hundred Throne Coins. He tucked the card into the inner pocket of his robe, then left the engine room with six mechs and headed for the gangway. Captain Hawke stood at the gangway and walked towards him.
"Sir, Master Technician," Captain Hawke extended his hand and shook it, "We owe you so much for this journey. Without you, the Resolute might not have survived those three breakdowns."
Liu En nodded. "It's my duty."
Captain Hawke hesitated for a moment, then lowered his voice and said, "Sir, I'd like to ask—what are your plans for the future? If there aren't any immediate arrangements, the Resolute will need a maintenance worker when it returns. I can talk to the shipowner; the salary is negotiable. To be honest, I've never met many professionals like you in my entire career."
Looking at Captain Hawke's scars and weariness, Liu En shook his head. "No. I have things to take care of here."
Captain Hawke didn't press the matter, only sighing. "Then I wish you all the best, sir. If you wish to continue on this route in the future, the doors of the Resolute are always open for you."
Thank you.
Liu En turned and walked down the gangway, leading his servants into the cargo port's transit hall.
The walls of the hall were inscribed with prayers and icons of emperors, more exquisite and magnificent than those of Armageddon. A massive, transparent armored glass panel adorned the dome, through which a glimpse of the artificial sun and the intricate network of rail systems could be seen. In the distance were moving walkways and shuttle stations, with signs in Low Gothic indicating the directions to different hive cities.
Liu En checked the information terminal and selected Fel Maxim, one of the largest hive cities in Lucis. There, he found the Temple of the Mechanicus, as well as numerous workshops and laboratories for rent. He needed to find a place to properly and systematically learn the Mechanicus's techniques and knowledge, so that his identity as a "second-tier technical craftsman" wouldn't be exposed to the real tech gurus.
He boarded the shuttle to Fel Maxim, which sped along the tracks, piercing the planet's atmosphere, and landing at the spaceport atop the hive city. Looking out the shuttle's window, Fel Maxim's hive complex was taller and denser than Helsard's. Layers of spires reflected a metallic sheen under the greyish artificial lights. The lower levels of the hive were shrouded in haze, but the air above was clear and clean, revealing the distant Mechanicus Temple—a colossal Gothic building of metal and glass, topped with a gear and skull emblem.
The shuttle bus came to a stop, and Liu En stepped out of the station. He needed to find a workshop.
In Phil Maxim's Midnest area, workshop rental listings were everywhere. He spent an hour looking at several places before finally choosing a secluded, reasonably priced independent workshop. The space, nearly a thousand square meters, had its own ventilation system and power outlets, and thick terracotta walls. For a Level 2 craftsman, the workshop was a bit small, but sufficient.
The workshop was empty—a bare metal floor, exposed pipes and cable connectors, and a single white fluorescent light hanging from the ceiling. He closed the door, put the six mechs into alert mode, and began modifying the space.
Atoms were retrieved from higher dimensions and reshaped into workbenches, lockers, lighting panels, and ventilation filtration systems on the walls. He even partitioned off a ten-square-meter rest area in a corner, placing a bed and a table there. The entire process took less than two hours.
Once everything was ready, Liu En sat down at his worktable and retrieved Marcus's data core from the database.
He needs to learn. Learn systematically, from beginning to end.
The technical system of the Mechanicus is vast and complex, but with Marcus's memories as an index, he can follow the clues and fill in the gaps in his knowledge step by step. The principles of the warp engine, the structure of energy weapons, the servo system of power armor, the data processing logic of the Thinker—all the knowledge is there, he just hasn't had time to digest it before.