Raw Adamantium Ore

In troubled times, heroes emerged. With humanity on the brink of extinction, a man named the Emperor stepped forward!!

The Emperor—the most powerful Psyker in human history, the most badass of the Immortals, an existence countless Warp creatures dared not name aloud, founder of the Imperium of Man, savior of humanity, the great Omnissiah, the face of the Omnissiah...

For ages, the Emperor had remained behind the scenes, guiding humanity onward. Now, at the urging of his old friend Malcador the Sigillite, this peerless powerhouse finally decided to shoulder his own responsibilities.

With lightning speed, the Emperor unified Holy Terra, the homeworld of the Imperium of Man, which had been torn apart by warring factions. He improved the new generation of Space Marines, forged an alliance with the Adeptus Mechanicus of Mars, and launched a Great Crusade to reclaim humanity's lost territories!!

To ensure the Great Crusade proceeded smoothly, the Emperor used his own genes as a template and combined them with dark, forbidden Warp technology to create twenty Primarchs. Each of the Emperor's twenty overpowered sons possessed abilities beyond the limits of mortal imagination.

They possessed unimaginable martial strength, could manage the affairs of hundreds of planets at once, and tear apart Main Battle Tanks weighing hundreds of tons with their bare hands.

Those were merely traits common to the Primarchs. Every Primarch had their own particular area of expertise.

The twenty Space Marine Legions created using those Primarchs as templates were the true backbone of the Great Crusade.

These Space Marines, with two hearts and three lungs, were killing machines created purely for war. They knew no fear. The meaning of their birth was to slaughter every enemy of the Emperor.

Any Astartes placed in another world would have been an invincible protagonist, but they had been born here—in this universe called Warhammer. Never mind the Astartes; even beings as powerful as the Primarchs, as powerful as the Emperor...

In the end, half the Primarchs became neither human nor ghost, while the great Emperor, leader of the Imperium of Man, ultimately became a dried corpse forever trapped upon the Golden Throne.

Of course, none of that had much to do with Sandman, who was currently wrestling with iron ore, because some things were simply too far away.

What he could make use of from his memories of his past life was the memory concerning Korax, the Primarch of the 19th Legion.

The Primarchs should have been grateful to have such a loving "birth mother" as Erda. If not for that saintly mother, the Primarchs would have grown up on Terra according to the Emperor's plans, received the Emperor's personal instruction, taken over their Legions once they came of age, and made outstanding contributions to the Emperor's Great Crusade.

The Emperor would then have had more time to carry out his grand plans and attempt to escape humanity's ultimate fate of evolving entirely into a Psyker species and becoming food.

If not for Erda, Korax would not have fallen onto Lycaeus, living off whatever food he could find and hiding from the overseers' threats. Of course, compared with many of his other brothers, Korax's circumstances could be considered quite good. Compared with those brothers who had fallen onto death worlds, the planet Korax landed on was practically paradise.

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 with Horus, the first returned son, he was around one hundred and fifty years late. By the time he took over his Legion, the Raven Guard had even become Horus's personal troops.

Sixty years after Korax took command of the Raven Guard, the Horus Heresy broke out. Korax had done his utmost to reorganize the Legion in the shortest possible time and reshape it according to his own will, building it from nothing into a force of more than eighty thousand. Sadly, everything came to an end on Istvaan V, and the entire Legion was buried in that shameful betrayal.

To rapidly rebuild his Legion, Korax sought the Emperor's aid. The Emperor gave him the universal genetic template used to create the Primarchs, allowing him to cultivate a new generation of Astartes. Yet the Alpha Legion agents who had infiltrated the Raven Guard had long witnessed everything. Those shameful traitors corrupted Korax's recruits, and after the war, at the pleas of those badly mutated recruits, Korax could only personally execute his severely mutated sons.

Afterward, the Raven King shut himself inside Raven Tower for an entire year. When Korax slowly walked out through its gates, he looked back at his stunned sons. He wanted to say something, yet stopped himself. In the end, he merely said without looking back, "Nevermore," before setting off alone upon the road of revenge.

That was Korax's story. All of it remained far away from Sandman. What Sandman needed to do now was find a way to complete his daily quota and fill his growling stomach.

For some reason, Sandman discovered that ever since he had transmigrated here, his appetite had been growing larger and larger, as though this body had entered another growth spurt.

"Eh, struck gold again." Sandman, who had been wrestling with the iron ore beneath his feet, stopped swinging his pickaxe and spoke in surprise.

The red Hematite ore, originally as large as an adult, had been broken into evenly sized chunks under Sandman's constant excavation. Yet one chunk the size of a football displayed a completely different color from the other fragments.

Strands of golden lines intertwined with the red Hematite. It was unmistakably an incomparably precious piece of Adamantite.

Adamantite was an extremely rare and hard metal. Apart from a few exceptionally blessed planets in the galaxy that possessed abundant Adamantite Ore, most Adamantite occurred alongside minerals such as obsidian and Astralite, and its content was extremely low. Once a piece of Raw Adamantium Ore like this was refined, it could yield at least a tennis-ball-sized piece of pure Adamantite.

This raw ore alone was enough to equal a week's rations for Sandman. Yes, the Mechanicus Guild on Kiavahr was just that ruthless. Rather than a Mechanicus Guild, they were better described as slave masters through and through.

The Adamantite refined from a football-sized piece of raw ore could only be exchanged here for seven days' rations, and sometimes even that was subject to deductions.

The miners on Lycaeus often had to labor hard for an entire day just to earn enough rations to cover one day's energy expenditure. More often, they could not even scrape together half a day's rations. As for comrades buried when mine tunnels collapsed during excavation, they could only blame their own bad luck. On Lycaeus, such people could not be saved even if someone wanted to save them.

Besides tunnel collapses, the miners also had to endure the overseers' whips from time to time. In mining zones lacking medicine, once they were injured, it meant their lives had already begun counting down.

Nor were the mining zones safe otherwise. Deep within the mines lurked many ferocious beasts. Life was tenacious; even on a mining planet, countless other creatures struggled to survive. Over several centuries, this mining planet of Lycaeus had long since formed a unique ecosystem.