What? The Primarch is back... hey, my slipped disc is cured, and suddenly I can stand tall.

The feast ended when the Khan left-or rather, most of the guests dispersed.

Only a bunch of warriors who could hold their liquor remained, still fooling around with the Wolf Brothers.

The Light of the People faced many problems, the biggest being the order to return directly to Terra. Their original itinerary would have taken them through several important regions.

The Crimson Tide's admirable habit of establishing recruitment grounds wherever they went had created a vast recruitment network. After everyone withdrew, those grounds were swiftly converted into recruiting stations for the Astra Militarum, continuing to supply soldiers to defend the Emperor's Holy Domain. But problems followed.

The Crimson Tide's recruitment had suffered major setbacks. They could not expect the descendants of the billions aboard their flagship to meet their current recruitment needs.

Along their route lay many former key recruiting regions.

The most important was a liberated Hive World.

William cautiously handed the information to the Khan. "We only need to stop briefly and let the tens of thousands of recruits who have passed screening come aboard."

"Tens of thousands?" Even Jaghatai Khan's brow twitched at that order of magnitude.

The Commissar previously responsible for leading this world had borrowed the recruitment model of an Astra Militarum regiment, the Vostroyan Firstborn: the first child of every family would undergo the trials.

Selection for the Astartes was nowhere near as easy as recruitment into the Astra Militarum. They could certainly throw twenty million ten-year-olds into the trials. Perhaps two thousand would survive, enough to produce an entire Chapter outright, but that would leave a generational gap in the world's talent and seriously affect its development.

They were not quite that heartless. The first stage was only as demanding as a normal College Student Fitness Test, and anyone who did not want