Sisters

Two young sisters from an ordinary industrial world had dreamed of giving their family a better life. Through diligence and hard work, they became apprentices of the Adeptus Mechanicus, changing both their own fate and that of their family.

It sounded like a very inspiring story.

If one only looked at the first half of it, then it certainly was.

When the young Ovilia and her close sister-in-arms left their hometown together, carrying their dreams with them, neither could have imagined that they would one day stand on opposite sides.

At the time, they were merely two novice apprentices who had just passed the examinations of their homeworld's Mechanicus temple and had been selected to study at a Forge World in the sector.

Through diligent study, they rose from children of ordinary worker families and successfully crossed the class divide, becoming apprentices of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Though they were only the lowest-ranking apprentices, passing the examination had completely transformed their status.

Their parents had leapt from ordinary workers to minor nobility on the industrial world. Their lives, incomes... everything became something they had never dared imagine.

Ovilia's parents not only became low-level supervisors at the factory, but also received an opportunity to undergo life-extension surgery.

Though it was merely the most basic form of life-extension surgery, and Ovilia had exchanged the reward for passing her apprenticeship examination for it, it was still life-extension surgery—surgery that could grant ordinary people another ten years of life.

Ovilia had originally only hoped that her parents could live a few more years and enjoy the good life brought about by her efforts.

Yet this seemingly insignificant choice earned her the favor of Belisarius Cawl, and she became the apprentice of that famed High Sage.

It sounded unbelievable at first. Why would High Sage Belisarius Cawl take notice of such a little girl? Just because she was devoted to her parents?

From a certain perspective, that was indeed the reason.

High Sage Belisarius Cawl was vastly different from ordinary clergy of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

The most striking difference was that he was already ten thousand years old.

That was an utterly absurd number, because aside from Cawl himself, no other Tech-Sage had ever lived beyond a thousand years.

They either died or went mad.

Thus, Cawl's existence itself was an incomprehensible miracle.

This High Sage from the Great Crusade Era had even personally lived through the Great Heresy. Though he had performed countless modifications on himself to prolong his life, to the point where he had become less than human, High Sage Cawl had once been a believer in the sanctity of the human body who rejected the visibly transformative mechanical neural augmentations favored by most Tech-Priests.

Though even then, Cawl had already tampered with his own brain to make himself smarter.

Belisarius Cawl had been a technological heretic who never followed the rules for ten thousand years.

His unconventional conduct was such that, if the things he had done were exposed, both Chaos and the Imperium would hunt him down like mad.

For that very reason, he deeply despised his fellow members of the Adeptus Mechanicus, believing them to be mere slaves of the Omnissiah who only followed established procedures, bowed, and burned incense, with no capacity for technological innovation.

He preferred those who could break convention.

And so, by a twist of fate, a novice apprentice who seemed unwilling to follow the rules became the apprentice of a High Sage.

Though Ovilia might not have studied under Cawl himself, but rather one of his clones, even a clone of Cawl possessed enough knowledge to train a new sage.

But Ovilia's sister was not so fortunate.

When Ovilia had already completed her sage thesis and merely needed to pass the Forge World's assessment to become a true sage, her sister was still struggling desperately in the position of artificer.

At one point, she had even fallen so low that she might have been assigned to the Astra Militarum as a military Tech-Priest.

In the end, Ovilia secretly extended a hand. With her mentor's tacit approval, she transferred one of her academic projects to the other woman, allowing her to gain an opportunity to advance to sage as well.

Though Ovilia had helped her friend, and the other woman had been grateful for that help, from another perspective, Ovilia's assistance could also be considered a form of... humiliation.

A humiliation of her abilities.

For that reason, their relationship fractured. In the end, they turned against each other and became rivals.

After Cawl left the Mariupol Sector, Ovilia suffered political persecution from certain factions on the Forge World. They wanted to seize the furnace Cawl had left behind and steal the knowledge of that High Sage.

Ovilia lost everything because of it. She had nearly been stripped of all her implants and stuffed into a Stasis Field to become a living statue.

And the one who orchestrated all of this was Ovilia's former sister, her rival.

Yet although it appeared on the surface that Ovilia's sister had persecuted her and taken everything from her, Ovilia knew perfectly well that it was actually the other woman's way of protecting her.

Because if Ovilia's sister had not struck first, pledged herself to the Forge Master of that Forge World, and completed the purge of Ovilia in advance, Ovilia certainly would not have survived.

Ovilia understood this clearly, and she also knew that she absolutely could not return and confront her sister about it.

But now, she had gained an opportunity to reclaim everything that belonged to her, and that made Ovilia decide to take a gamble.

"As long as you take my token and find her, she will provide you with assistance. Of course, you cannot reveal that I was the one who sent you to her." After explaining the situation to Chen Xi, Ovilia revealed her plan. "As long as you establish contact with her and then 'sell' these xenos creations to her, you can obtain enough resources for me to make a comeback."

"You're willing to 'sell' all these xenos creations to her?" Chen Xi looked at Ovilia, apparently surprised by her generosity.

"Of course not all of them. Just a portion—enough to make her interested in you and willing to invest in you." Ovilia naturally could not possibly give up all the xenos creations. She only intended to use part of them to 'sell' to her sister.

"All right, it sounds feasible enough. But how much are you planning to offer? What do you want in exchange for these things? And how much do I stand to gain from this?" Chen Xi looked at Ovilia and asked the most crucial questions.

"One Canoptek Spider, one Tomb Spyder, several Scarabs, and the remains of several Necron Warriors... hmm, at most, two Gauss Flayers as well." Ovilia listed the items with a pained expression. "That should be enough to trade for a small forging furnace and a standard biological research laboratory, along with some Astra Militarum equipment.

What exactly you can obtain will depend on your abilities, and on whether you can catch that Forge Master's attention and make him invest in you."