"They are the warriors who make me proudest, willing to give their lives for me. They are like pure ore, which I send into the furnace of war to forge wills and bodies as strong as tempered steel. I will clothe them in impenetrable armor and arm them with peerless weapons. Neither plague nor disease shall harm them. They will master the art of war and command ingenious technologies, making them invincible. They are my bulwark against fear, the defenders of all humanity. They are my Space Marines, and they shall know no fear."
—The Emperor
Fu Qinghai opened his status panel in his mind.
[Name: Fu Qinghai (True Name) Reincarnation Number: 60731920 Race: Space Marine (Transfigured Human) Height: 237 cm Weight: 281 kg Special Ability: Tony Stark Electronic Backup (17% complete), bound to brain Reincarnation Equipment: None Assimilation Points: 990 World Anchor: X1 Reincarnation Lives: X2]
His race had changed from Void-born Human to Transfigured Human.
He had no idea how long he had been unconscious in the cultivation pod. Just as he was about to ask Kunto, who was standing nearby, Ogedei and Talal hurried over.
When Ogedei saw Fu Qinghai sitting up perfectly well on an iron box, probes attached all over his body, he first breathed a sigh of relief.
"How is he, Master?" Ogedei asked first.
"He has mutated." Kunto carefully studied the data displayed on the screen at his workbench and spoke calmly.
"Uh..." Ogedei froze.
At those words, Fu Qinghai also turned to look at Kunto.
Kunto knew what Ogedei wanted to ask. Before he could speak, Kunto explained outright:
"I don't yet know what form the mutation has taken, but I can say for certain that his Gene-seed has mutated."
Kunto's meaning was clear: he had informed them of the mutation. Whether they chose to add the Gene-seed Locke would eventually produce to the White Scars' Gene-seed repository was up to them.
Kunto went on, "There's no need to worry. All his physical indicators are normal. He can become a perfectly qualified Space Marine."
Mutations weren't uncommon over the long generations of Gene-seed inheritance. Some were beneficial, granting a warrior unique abilities or making him exceptional in certain respects. But more often, mutations were harmful, like the Blood Angels' inherited afflictions, the Red Thirst and the Black Rage.
Some mutations also had obvious side effects. For example, the Mantis Warriors, a future successor Chapter of the White Scars Legion, sometimes fell into a state of total absorption in the midst of slaughter. Their eyes and minds perceived nothing but combat. Their reactions became so fast that it was almost as if they could foresee the future, anticipating every move their enemies made and slaughtering them with deadly precision, mowing them down with unmatched ease. The drawback was that, in this state, they couldn't distinguish friend from foe.
This combat state was an ability possessed by the White Scars' Primarch, Jaghatai Khan. But Jaghatai Khan suffered no side effect of attacking friend and foe alike. He could enter this state whenever he wanted and leave it just as easily. That was why Jaghatai Khan ranked among the top three Primarchs in personal combat prowess.
"Was it because of the accelerated cultivation?" Ogedei asked.
"I can't be sure, but I think so," Kunto replied.
Ogedei nodded slowly. "Understood, Master."
"You can take him now," Kunto said.
Ogedei bowed slightly. "On behalf of the White Scars, I offer you my respect and gratitude for all your efforts during this time."
As the two of them escorted Fu Qinghai back, the mortal crew members they passed stared in amazement at his massive frame and the linen robe draped around him.
After the boarding action, only seven Space Marines remained aboard the Shortblade. That was actually quite a lot for an escort frigate, and every Space Marine was familiar to the crew. They hadn't expected a new one to appear today.
The crew members who had seen Fu Qinghai before were even more astonished. A year and a half ago, he had been a tall, skinny child trailing after Ogedei.
That's right. A year and a half.
More precisely, Fu Qinghai had spent fifteen standard Terran months lying in Kunto's cultivation pod.
A year was long enough to make the short-lived people of his previous life on Earth feel as if an entire lifetime had passed.
But to the people of the Warhammer 40K universe, accustomed to long interstellar voyages,
it was all too short.
Ogedei sat stiff-faced in his wheelchair at the front, but Talal, who knew his old friend well, could tell what he was thinking.
Too fast. It had all happened far too fast!
At first, neither of them had known why they were escorting the Biologis Kunto Anastasio to Mars.
The Space Marines had heard of the Biologis and knew how important he was.
But they hadn't understood why so many Space Marines had been assigned to hide aboard a frigate and escort him apart from the main force.
Now they had a rough idea.
The fact that Kunto had made a Space Marine in just one year was enough to astonish the two of them—and the Imperium.
Ogedei and Talal had both gone through the full process of ascension.
Aside from two or three years of selection, a typical Space Marine needed many more years to complete the process. The nineteen superhuman organs were implanted one at a time, with each new organ implanted only after the previous one had fully developed.
Some candidates were stuck at the final step, the Black Carapace, for a full ten years.
The two men didn't know that, to speed up Fu Qinghai's development, Kunto had used numerous secret techniques of the Adeptus Mechanicus and even expended rare drugs he had spent years collecting. It was a one-off feat that couldn't be replicated.
"How many Biologis are there in the entire Imperium? It's impossible for every Apothecary to take part in a Space Marine's ascension," Talal said abruptly as they walked.
Ogedei knew what Talal meant. The burly man with the A-Fu head nodded slowly, agreeing with his companion.
"I don't need you to tell me. Even if you combined the Apothecaries of the entire Legion, they might not be worth a fraction of Master Kunto's little finger—assuming he even has one," Ogedei said.
"Or perhaps Kunto used a lot of techniques on Locke that, cost-wise, shouldn't have been used on an ordinary Space Marine," Ogedei added, offering another possibility.
Talal was taken aback. What technique could possibly cost more than creating one of the Imperium's elite Space Marines? Then a possibility occurred to him:
"Are you talking about the Adeptus Custodes?"
Talal knew little about the Officio Assassinorum's enhanced assassins, and he didn't even know much about the organization itself. The only thing he could think of that was more advanced than the technology used to create Space Marines was the Emperor's personal guard, the Adeptus Custodes who kept watch over the Imperial Palace on Terra.
He then asked, "But why would he do that?"
Ogedei shook his head.
The two of them would soon learn the answer.
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