Orichalcum Raw Ore

In times of chaos, heroes emerge. When the human race teetered on the brink of extinction, a man named the Emperor stood up!

The Emperor, the most powerful Psyker in human history, the mightiest of the Immortals, a being that caused countless Warp entities to refrain from speaking his name, the creator of the Imperium of Man, the savior of the human race, the great Omnissiah, the face of the Machine God...

In ancient times, the Emperor had always guided the human race from behind the scenes. Now, at the urging of his good friend Malcador the Sigillite, this peerless hero had finally decided to shoulder his responsibilities.

With lightning speed, the Emperor unified the Imperium of Man's homeworld, Terra, which was embroiled in warlord conflicts. He improved the next generation of Space Marines, allied with the Adeptus Mechanicus on Mars, and launched a Great Crusade aimed at reclaiming humanity's lost territories!

To ensure the smooth progress of the Great Crusade, the Emperor used his own gene-template combined with forbidden Warp technology to create 20 Primarchs. Each of the Emperor's 20 overpowered sons possessed abilities that surpassed the limits of mortal imagination.

They possessed unimaginably powerful combat prowess, capable of handling the administration of hundreds of planets simultaneously and tearing apart main battle tanks weighing hundreds of tons with their bare hands.

These were merely the common traits of the Primarchs; each Primarch had their own unique specialization.

The 20 Space Marine Legions forged using these Primarchs as templates were the main force of the Great Crusade.

These Space Marines, with their two hearts and three lungs, were killing machines built purely for war. They knew no fear; their sole purpose was to slaughter all enemies of humanity for the Emperor.

Any single Astartes could be a protagonist in any other world, but their world happened to be this one, this universe called Warhammer. Let alone Astartes, even Primarchs, even the Emperor...

In the end, half the Primarchs became abominations, neither human nor ghost. The great Emperor, leader of the Imperium of Man, ultimately became a withered corpse, forever trapped on the Golden Throne.

Of course, all this had little to do with Sandman, who was currently wrestling with iron ore, as some things were too distant.

From his memories of his past life, the only thing useful now was the memory concerning the Primarch of the 19th Legion, Korax.

The Primarchs should be grateful to have had a "birth mother" like Elda who doted on them. If not for their saintly mother, the Primarchs would have grown up on Terra according to the Emperor's plan, receiving his personal tutelage, and then taking over their respective Legions to make outstanding contributions to the Emperor's Great Crusade.

This would have given the Emperor more time to complete his grand designs, attempting to escape humanity's ultimate fate of evolving into a psychic race and becoming food.

If not for Elda, Korax would not have fallen onto Lycaeus, living off the charity of others, hiding under the threats of overseers. Of course, compared to many of his brothers, Korax's situation could be considered quite good. The planet where Korax descended was practically paradise compared to the worlds where some of his brothers fell.

If there was any regret, it was that Korax returned to the Imperium too late.

The Raven King was the last Primarch to return to the Imperium. Compared to Horus, the first son to return, he was about 150 years late. By the time he took over his Legion, the Raven Guard had already become Horus's private army.

The Horus Heresy occurred sixty years after Korax took command of the Raven Guard. Korax had done his best to reorganize the Legion in the shortest possible time, reshaping it according to his will and developing it from scratch to a scale of over 80,000 men. Unfortunately, everything came to a halt on Istvaan V, where the entire Legion was annihilated in that disgraceful betrayal.

To quickly rebuild his Legion, Korax sought help from the Emperor. The Emperor gave him the common gene-template used to create the Primarchs, nurturing a new generation of Astartes. However, Alpha, who had infiltrated the Raven Guard, had already witnessed everything. The disgraceful traitors corrupted Korax's new recruits. After the war, Korax could only personally execute these severely mutated offspring at their own request.

Afterward, the Raven King confined himself to the Raven Tower for a full year. As Korax slowly walked out the door, he looked back at his stunned offspring. He wanted to say something but hesitated. In the end, he simply said without looking back, "Never again," and embarked on the path of vengeance alone.

These were Korax's stories, and they were still a long way from Sandman. Sandman currently had to figure out how to complete his daily tasks and feed his growling stomach.

For some reason, Sandman found that his appetite had been growing larger since he transmigrated, as if his body had re-entered a growth spurt.

"Huh, another gold drop," Sandman said in surprise, stopping his mining pick as he wrestled with the iron ore at his feet.

The red hematite, originally as large as an adult, had been broken into evenly sized pieces by Sandman's continuous mining. A football-sized piece of ore, however, displayed a color completely different from the surrounding fragments.

Strands of golden lines intertwined with the red hematite, revealing an incredibly precious piece of orichalcum.

Orichalcum was an extremely rare and hard metal. Besides a few uniquely endowed planets in the galaxy with rich orichalcum deposits, most orichalcum was found alongside minerals like obsidian and astralite, and its content was very low. This single raw ore containing orichalcum could yield at least a tennis ball-sized piece of pure orichalcum after refinement.

This raw ore was worth at least a week's worth of rations for Sandman. Yes, the Mechanicus Guild on Giava was that black-hearted. It was more accurate to call them slave owners than a Mechanicus Guild.

The orichalcum that could be refined from this football-sized raw ore would only fetch seven days' worth of rations from them, and sometimes even less.

Miners on Lycaeus often had to work hard all day to obtain enough rations for their daily energy consumption, but more often than not, they couldn't even gather half a day's worth of rations. As for their companions who were buried by mine collapses during excavation, they could only blame their own bad luck. In such situations on Lycaeus, there was no way to save them.

Besides mine collapses, miners also had to endure the overseers' whips. In mining areas lacking medicine, an injury meant their life was on a countdown.

Furthermore, the mining areas were not safe. Deep within the mines, many ferocious beasts resided. Life was tenacious; even on mining planets, countless other creatures survived with great difficulty. Over centuries, a unique ecosystem had long been established on the mining planet Lycaeus.