Inventory

On the day her father and mother did not return, Ephrenia did not cry. She simply accepted it all as a matter of course.

On Lycaeus, such things were commonplace. Death could be considered a release. She would die too, perishing just as uselessly as all the other miners.

Yet, it did not matter; everyone was the same.

Ephrenia silently watched the direction from which her parents had returned, then turned her head to stare unflinchingly at the unreachably tall tower.

Father had told her that the masters of this world lived there. The life and death of the miners depended entirely on a single thought from those people. With just a single order, those armed-to-the-teeth lackeys of theirs would take away the ore that the miners had paid an immeasurable, painful price to excavate.

In exchange for a tiny, pitiful scrap of food and supplies.

At that moment, Ephrenia developed an incomparably intense hatred for the place called the tower. Yet the tower simply stood quietly there, like an immensely arrogant deity, looking down upon everything on the mining world.

The miners had all experienced this process. Soon, their full hearts of hatred and rage were crushed by the cruel pressure of survival, and the hungry stomach devoured all other emotions.

On Lycaeus, the miners had even lost the qualification to hate or feel anger.

Until one day, an older brother took over the heavy burdens of the camp, beginning to lead the entire camp in operating by another method.

The originally scarce food slowly began to grow more plentiful, and there started to be a slight surplus. The scale of the camp was also constantly developing and growing, and everything was heading in a good direction.

Later, she met that pale-skinned boy and recognized him as her younger brother. Ever since then, the development of the entire camp seemed to have entered an unprecedentedly favorable state.

Until it became the most powerful camp in the East District.

Ephrenia slowly closed the book on logistics management in her hand and once again began to tirelessly tally the supplies in the camp.

No matter how many times she performed the task, she would not feel the slightest impatience.

The destination of every single grain of food here ought to be recorded with absolute clarity.

Only those who had experienced the kind of hunger where stomach acid nearly ate through their stomachs could truly appreciate the preciousness of food.

Ephrenia absolutely refused to allow mistakes caused by her own carelessness, even though brother Sandman would not scold her.

"Ephrenia, are you taking inventory of the supplies again?" Sandman picked up the ledger dedicated to recording the camp's supplies, then frowned.

"Actually, you don't need to take inventory nearly that often. Once a month is more than enough." Sandman looked at the log, where entries appeared basically every two or three days, and spoke.

"Brother Sandman, this job is already much easier compared to the brothers and sisters down in the mines. I must ensure that there isn't the slightest error with the supplies, and this also concerns the plans you and Korax have." Ephrenia said very earnestly.

Korax only returned after a very long time, and every time he came back, he would chat with his sister for a while, telling her about the conditions of each different camp, what he had learned, and so on...

"Just in time, I also need to understand the current state of the camp's material reserves. Tell me about it." Sandman said directly.

He vaguely remembered that Ephrenia would later become the captain of Korax's flagship, the Gloriana-class battleship Shadow, and seemed to have concurrently managed the logistics of the Raven Guard Legion.

Korax being able to expand the Raven Guard to eighty thousand men from scratch in a mere sixty years was something Ephrenia had a hand in.

Do a bit more work; just treat it as practicing in advance.

"Alright, brother Sandman, let me tell you about the current material situation of the camp.

In the most extreme scenario, the food reserves are enough to support us for a month. The medicine stock is relatively scarce and insufficient to sustain us in a drawn-out war of attrition.

The weapons forged by the armory can only arm eight hundred people, and these are still only melee weapons, not chain weapons or power weapons.

We only have one hundred laser guns and one hundred fifty stun guns. These are the ones Korax brought back from those criminals in the west or the tower. Some of those models are already very old, overseer weapons looted from who knows what era over there. Aside from those, we have enough chain weapons or power weapons to equip about fifty people, and there are no others." Ephrenia reported these details as if reciting from a family treasure trove.

"Eight hundred, eight hundred it is. Eight hundred men strike first!" This famous wise saying inexplicably rang out in Sandman's mind.

"Well done, thank you for your hard work, Ephrenia." Having figured out the detailed situation, Sandman offered high praise to Ephrenia and then left the place.

"I really miss our Tower Curator. How wonderful it would be to borrow a few Hypercube Mazes from him. With this thing, would I still need to miserably count on my fingers to figure out how long we can hold out?" At this moment, Sandman felt an incomparable envy for the practically perverted technology of the Necron.

The Hypercube Maze was a magical item manufactured by the Necron, deserving to be called the technological storage bag of the Warhammer Universe.

The predecessors of the Necron were called the Necron, and because the star above their home planet constantly emitted intense radiation, the race's lifespan was extremely short. This radiation formed a strong curse, engraved within the genes of the Necron race.

Even though the Necron had already developed a technological level capable of spanning the Milky Way and had moved far away from their home planet, they still had no way to escape the doom of a mere few decades of lifespan, until they encountered that race of immortal beings known as the Old Ones.

Amidst intense jealousy, war broke out!

Thus, there appeared the spectacle of the world boxing champion beating up a kindergarten toddler.

The Old Ones led a host of lackeys to sweep across the Necron's territory with a crushing momentum, driving them back to their hometown.

Yet, the Old Ones were kind-hearted and spared the Necrons' lives, but in the Warhammer Universe, being kind-hearted was not a good thing.

The defeated Necrons began researching how to utilize stellar energy, and inadvertently discovered a C'tan sucking and feeding upon the star where their home system was located.

The Necrons used Living Metal to construct a huge body, luring this cloud of energy to attach itself to this metal shell, from which was born the first C'tan with a physical body—the Nightbringer.

C'tan were born from the plasma inside stars or energy fields in the cosmos, initially without consciousness. They were the incarnation of physical rules in the Material Universe, gods in the real universe capable of manipulating various energies, possessing a technological level far exceeding that of the Necrons.

The two major factions led respectively by the C'tan and the Old Ones launched a well-matched tug-of-war across the Milky Way with their respective underlings.

The galactic catastrophe known as the War in Heaven began.

The specific course of events had long since been lost in countless epochs, and the ultimate result ended with the complete failure of the Old Ones. The Old Ones were exterminated, while the C'tan were backstabbed by the Necrons, reduced to living batteries and imprisoned.

The Necron race ultimately spent the entire galaxy tending graves and sleeping.

The major power players successively exited the stage, and the biological son of the Old Ones, the Eldar, picked up the fruits of victory in the war and became the ruling hegemonic power of the galaxy, reigning over the Milky Way for sixty million years.

The disastrous fruit of the severe damage inflicted upon the galaxy by the War in Heaven was only just beginning to manifest. In the countless ages to come, the upper limit of power that the galaxy could support continuously declined, and intelligent races were endlessly entangled by the shadows of the Warp.

The degradation of the galaxy had begun.