Building Heaven on Earth

Dawn came quietly to Colchis amid the alternating radiance of its twin stars. First, the east turned pale, driving away the night's chill. Then that sickly orange-red spread across the sky like spilled blood, proclaiming the beginning of another scorching day.

Yet the highland settlement awoke even before the sun.

Under Zhou Beichen's plans and Lorgar's miracles, an unprecedented vitality surged through this once-barren land. People no longer labored numbly merely to survive. A fire called hope burned in their eyes, kindled by Lorgar's existence and the Earthly Heaven Zhou Beichen had described.

Construction required materials, technology, and methods beyond anything this desert had ever known.

Zhou Beichen stood on a stretch of flat ground designated as the workshop district. Beneath his feet lay piles of soil and mineral samples of different colors and textures. His brow was tightly furrowed as he pinched a handful of grayish-white powder between his fingers, grinding it carefully.

Cement. One of every transmigrator's essential miracles. But here, the standard proportions of limestone, clay, and gypsum were a distant dream. Colchis did not lack minerals, but their varieties were strange and their composition unknown.

"Father, have you found the substance that hardens when mixed with water?" Lorgar's voice came from behind him. He had just helped several believers secure the metal frames of their new homes, and his towering body still carried the dampness of morning dew.

Zhou Beichen handed him the powder. "I found a mineral similar to tuff. It becomes somewhat interesting after calcination, but its bonding strength is insufficient, and it dries too slowly." He kicked several chunks of broken stone held together with this "knockoff cement." At the slightest touch, crumbs fell from the joints. "A failed product."

Imitating Zhou Beichen, Lorgar felt the fineness of the powder with his fingers before examining the fractured stones. There was no impatience in his violet eyes, only focused analysis. "Would it require a higher firing temperature? Or perhaps another additive? I noticed a kind of red sandy earth in the western canyon. Its texture is quite unusual."

Zhou Beichen gave Lorgar a surprised look. This ability to draw inferences from one example had gone beyond simple learning. It was practically an instinctive scientific mindset. A primarch's potential truly was terrifying.

"Let's try it." Zhou Beichen never begrudged experimentation. "Also, gather every biological skeleton or shell fragment you can find and burn them into ash. And... bring more of that heat-resistant white clay."

He threw himself into experimentation, listing every substance he could find that might contain calcium, silicon, or aluminum as a candidate. There was no standard Portland cement formula, so he would use exhaustive trial and error. Using local Colchis materials, he would cobble together a usable binding agent.

Several days later, after countless failures and the edge of the workshop district had accumulated a small graveyard of failed products, a turning point finally came.

By chance, they mixed calcined tuff powder, shell ash made from crushed shells of some drought-resistant mollusk, red sand from the western canyon, and a small amount of white clay. After adding water and stirring, the slurry displayed remarkable plasticity and setting properties. While it dried, Zhou Beichen checked on it nearly once every hour.

The next morning, he kicked the hardened, mottled gray-red block with all his strength. The painful recoil shooting through his toes delighted rather than angered him.

"It worked!" A nearly unrestrained smile appeared on his face.

Its strength was far below that of true cement, and its color was ugly and patchy, but it could indeed bind stones firmly together. It would be enough for low walls, level flooring, and even reinforcing cisterns.

"Let's call it... Colchis Clay." Zhou Beichen patted the solid block and announced it to Lorgar and the believers gathered around him.

A low cheer rose from the crowd. They did not understand complex chemistry, but they could see something real—something that could change their lives. And they credited it to the wisdom brought by the son of god and Zhou Beichen's guidance.

Their attempts at saltmaking and glassmaking were likewise filled with knockoff ingenuity.

Colchis had no sea, but the underground brine in certain low-lying areas had an extremely high mineral content. Zhou Beichen directed the people to dig shallow ponds and use the scorching sunlight of the twin stars and the ceaseless hot winds for natural evaporation. The crude salt they obtained was bitter and toxic, so he made rudimentary filters from relatively clean sand and charcoal, purifying it again and again until they finally obtained salt that was slightly yellow but edible. For a settlement that had long lacked a stable salt supply, this was undoubtedly an enormous blessing.

Glassmaking proved even more difficult. Pure quartz sand was out of reach, so he could only repeatedly wash ordinary sand, adding the relatively pure white clay and shell ash left from making Colchis Clay as flux. Firing temperature posed another problem, since the crude earthen kilns had limited capacity. In the end, they did not produce transparent glass, but rather semi-translucent, lumpy glass-like material filled with bubbles and strange colors.

"Did we fail?" Lorgar asked as he looked at those bizarre chunks of glass.

Zhou Beichen picked one up and held it to the light. A hazy glow refracted through its cloudy interior. "No. In a sense, we succeeded." The corner of his mouth twitched. "It can't be used for windows, but after polishing, it can be made into ornaments, or... lens blanks. The important thing is that we proved this path works."

The greatest surprise came from Lorgar.

As the settlement expanded, its need for power became increasingly apparent. Human labor had limits, especially in this harsh land. Zhou Beichen had muttered several times, "If only we had a windmill," and Lorgar took it to heart.

He spent several days observing the wind directions. Then, using his inhuman strength and precise control, he led members of the church guard and the believers in building one. They used the longest, strongest metal beams gathered from the wreckage of the crashed aircraft and Crater Mountain as the main shaft and frame, while thick tanned sand-beast hide and collected flexible metal sheets became the blades. Without gears or bearings, he improvised, grinding hard stone into crude bearing supports and meshing mechanisms, then reinforcing them with Colchis Clay mixed with fine sand.

When that giant windmill, more than ten meters tall and crooked-looking, filled with wasteland-punk character, was slowly raised on the windward slope of the highlands under Lorgar's command and everyone's efforts, the entire settlement erupted.

Driven by the ceaseless hot wind, the blades began to turn slowly but steadily, creaking with a teeth-grating yet immensely stirring sound. Through that absurdly crude stone transmission system, power was sent below. It could turn millstones to grind grain, drive bellows to feed a fire, and Zhou Beichen even modified a slightly damaged small electrostatic generator he found among Korfalon's supplies and connected it, hoping to produce a weak current—though for now, it could only make several tiny bulbs emit dim, flickering light that might go out at any moment.

But that was enough. This windmill, embodying Lorgar's painstaking effort and brimming with knockoff ingenuity, became the most conspicuous landmark of Earthly Heaven—a miracle in the process of becoming real.

Zhou Beichen stood beneath the windmill, looking up at the enormous shadow slowly turning overhead. He listened to the grinding of its gears and felt the faint vibrations rising from the ground beneath his feet. At his side stood a busy, energetic crowd. They looked at him and the mountain-like Lorgar with undisguised trust and worship in their eyes.

They called out, "Pastor Beichen!" and "Son of God!" as they offered them the best food and clean water. Children chased each other between newly built stone houses whose cracks had been smoothed over with clay. In the distance, tender green shoots had already emerged from drought-resistant crops in newly cultivated fields, watered by underground sources Lorgar had sensed and improved irrigation methods.

A surge of heat struck Zhou Beichen's chest without warning.

The lake of his heart, once cold and accustomed to seeing everything as assets and investments, seemed to have received a massive stone. Ripples spread outward, stirring something deep beneath the surface.

These... people. They were no longer vague, quantifiable user groups or loyal capital. They were living beings, warm, with faces and stories. They cheered for a mouthful of clean water, found contentment in a child's smile, and reverently offered the little they had painstakingly saved to him and Lorgar.

He had used them, wielding faith as a tool and hope as bait. He had told himself this was merely a transaction, an investment.

But now, seeing those faces glowing with longing for heaven and feeling their utterly untainted trust, the precise formula at the core of his heart—the one built around profit—became disordered for the first time.

"Father," Lorgar's deep voice sounded beside him, carrying a trace of barely perceptible concern. "You seem... different."

Zhou Beichen abruptly came back to himself and ruthlessly suppressed that fleeting wavering deep inside. He could not doubt himself, at least not now. He had chosen this road, and he had to continue walking it.

"It's nothing." He drew a deep breath and forced his voice back into its usual calmness. "I was only calculating the next allocation of resources."

He turned away, no longer looking at the faces that unsettled him, and fixed his gaze on the still-creaking windmill. "Lorgar, we now have a preliminary material foundation. But a heaven requires an ideological core even more."

That night, Zhou Beichen and Lorgar sat facing each other inside the enormous tent serving as a temporary command post. On the wooden table between them lay an outline for the new doctrine, written by Zhou Beichen in charcoal.

"The Covenant Church is outdated and rigid. It sanctifies suffering, but it is merely a tool of rule." Zhou Beichen tapped the paper. "The core of our New Covenant must be you, Loga Aurelian."

He explained point by point:

"First, you are the messenger sent by the Father God, the reformer of the Covenant, not the heir of the old faith. Your arrival signifies the end of the Old Covenant and the beginning of the New Covenant."

"Second, the core of the New Covenant is 'action and salvation.' Faith lies not only in piety of the heart, but in using our hands to build heaven and change this world. Suffering is not the purpose. The Father God's will is to eliminate suffering. Labor, creation, and mutual aid are all forms of prayer."

"Third, divine grace manifests through 'miracles,' but even more through 'wisdom.' Whether it is Colchis Clay, purified salt, the windmill, or your ability to foresee the future, all are wisdom and grace bestowed by the Father God through you, meant to build heaven."

"Fourth, heaven is on earth, not beyond it. Our efforts at this very moment are laying the steps toward heaven. Every believer who devotes themselves to this is a cornerstone of heaven."

Zhou Beichen's voice echoed through the tent, calm and constructively deliberate. What he was building was not merely a religion, but a social organization combining politics, economics, and military power. Its central cohesive force was the cult of personality around Lorgar and their shared vision of Earthly Heaven.

Lorgar listened silently, his violet eyes as deep as the night. He understood Zhou Beichen's intentions and the practical considerations behind them. Yet when he heard phrases such as "action and salvation," "wisdom and grace," and "heaven is on earth," some innate yearning for order and meaning deep within him seemed to receive an answer.

This was not merely control and exploitation. It seemed... to contain something on a higher level, something that might perhaps be called goodness.

"I understand, Father." Lorgar slowly nodded. "I will incorporate these doctrines into future sermons and actions."

Outside the tent, the settlement's lights glittered like scattered stars. The windmill's massive silhouette turned slowly beneath the night sky, its creaking blending with the people's work chants and whispered prayers into a strange, vibrant symphony.

Zhou Beichen walked to the entrance of the tent and looked out over this "heaven" he had personally brought into being, now growing wildly. His expression was complicated.

The plan was advancing steadily, and the assets were appreciating wildly.

But why did he feel that he, too, was being swept into the tide he had raised with his own hands, finding it harder and harder to maintain the detached posture of a cold-eyed investor?

It seemed this transaction had cost him far more than he had expected.