After Lox and Dorn split up, he immediately made his way in secret to the rust-red planet.
Mars had been the cradle of humanity's cutting-edge technology during the Dark Age of Technology. It had fallen countless times, only to rise again countless times.
Now, Mars had emerged from the shadow of its former civil war.
Countless Tech-Priests and sages had poured everything into restoring vital facilities destroyed by the Dark Mechanicum during its retreat: forge temples, orbital shipyards, research centers, and more.
If one looked down upon the planet from Mars's ecliptic plane, one would see that the colossal docks and space factories scattered through low orbit formed a distinctive gear-like shape together with the planet itself.
Innumerable transport ships exchanged materials at Mars's orbital docks. Precious metals and rare resources from across the galaxy fed this primordial behemoth, while Mars's industrial products were shipped back out to countless worlds aboard those same vessels.
The merchant ship carrying Lox and the others was no different from any other trading vessel as it slipped into the traffic.
After docking at the trade port, Lox's group immediately changed transportation and rented a transport craft capable of traveling across the planetary surface at supersonic speeds.
Their destination was called the Labyrinth of Eternal Night, or the Noctis Labyrinth, a special region located between Valles Marineris and the Tharsis Plateau.
Psychic methods could not directly reach that region. When the Emperor sealed the Void Dragon Mag'ladroth, he locked down the entire area's space-time.
All psychic divination, sorcerous prophecy, and instrument scans became futile fantasies, leaving outsiders no choice but to use clumsy methods to search for the Labyrinth of Eternal Night.
Finding a labyrinth capable of shifting its spatial coordinates with nothing but one's own eyes in a region famous for its labyrinthine canyon