154: Chapter 158 Holy Scripture, Page 1

Mars, at the foot of Olympus Mons, in the core council chamber of the First Forge Temple.

This hall was buried three thousand meters beneath the Martian crust. Its walls were cast entirely from adamant alloy forged over tens of thousands of years, their surfaces densely inlaid with gear patterns and copper conduits.

The gas exhaled by the air conditioning system carried a unique scent—a mixture of machine oil and incense. It was the "Holy Air Formula" that the Adeptus Mechanicus had not changed for tens of thousands of years.

Twelve hovering seats were arranged in an arc around a central circular holographic table.

People sat in eleven of those chairs.

The remaining one was empty, with a copper gear that had been polished for millennia resting on its seat, representing the presence of the omnissiah.

Kolosius sat in the head position, his spine flush against the cold mechanical spinal brace on the back of the chair.

The left half of his face was flesh, while the right was a precision-interlocking copper-silver alloy. A faint whir of servo motors sounded whenever his mechanical eyeball rotated in its socket—a sound that had accompanied him for seven hundred years.

The communication had just been disconnected.

A communication record from a Terra messenger remained on the holographic table. It was absurdly short, containing only one sentence.

"The Unifier is about to arrive in Martian orbit. Please prepare for reception."

It didn't even have a signature.

The council chamber was silent for about five seconds before the low-frequency hum unique to political machinery began to operate.

"The Unifier." Ferion, the Fabricator-General of Military Affairs sitting in the seventh position, was the first to speak. His voice squeezed out of a throat-mounted amplifier, carrying a metallic rasp. "The leader of those barbarians on Terra calls himself The Unifier. What has he unified? A trash ball covered in radiation?"

No one laughed.

Motilla, the Dogma Guardian in the third seat, rotated the three metal joints in his neck extremely slowly, bringing his fully mechanized head to face Ferion.

"You haven't finished reading the analysis report." Motilla's voice lacked any inflection, as his vocal cords had been replaced by a standardized synthetic vocoder two hundred years ago. "The military forces on that trash ball completed one hundred percent surface conquest in the past seventeen years. Zero residual resistance. Every armed stronghold on Earth has been completely purged."

"Seventeen years," Motilla added.

The hydraulic pistons on Ferion's mechanical arm tightened slightly.

Unifying the entirety of Terra in seventeen years.

How long had the Martian Civil War lasted? His own predecessor had fought in that war for six hundred years and died without a victor being decided.

"How much military strength does he have?" Kolosius spoke.

His voice wasn't loud, but the buzzing of all private data exchanges in the council chamber ceased instantly.

Motilla pulled an information cable from the data port at the back of his head and plugged it into the holographic table.

An extremely rudimentary military intelligence projection appeared on the table.

"According to intercepted data from peripheral reconnaissance satellites, Terra's currently confirmable military forces include: approximately eight million ground infantry, roughly one hundred and twenty thousand light armored vehicles, nearly zero aerial units, zero naval forces, and zero aerospace capability."

"No aerospace capability?" Ferion's mechanical arm relaxed.

"He can't even reach orbit. How is he coming to Mars? By swimming?"

This time, two low-ranking priests let out short bursts of mechanical laughter.

Kolosius did not join the conversation.

He stared at the military data on the projection for a long time, his gaze lingering on the final line of notes.

The note read: The above data only covers traditional military forces. Intelligence regarding the 'Thunder Warriors' cannot be assessed due to insufficient samples.

Thunder Warriors.

This term had appeared forty-seven times in communication intercepts from Terra over the past three years.

There were no visual records, no technical parameters—only a vague description: super-infantry subjected to large-scale genetic modification.

Kolosius did not read this note aloud.

"Gentlemen." He tapped the holographic table twice with a mechanical finger, and the display switched to a real-time defense deployment map of Martian orbit.

"No matter what he arrives in, the fire coverage of the thirty-six orbital defense platforms has no blind spots. His messenger said he is 'about to arrive,' but so far, our long-range detection network hasn't discovered any large-scale fleet movements on any route from Terra to Mars."

"In other words, either he hasn't set out yet..."

"...or he doesn't intend to come from the front."

This sentence caused the temperature in the council chamber to drop a bit further.

Kolosius leaned back into his chair, the mechanical spinal brace letting out a soft click.

"Ferion, raise the peripheral defense level to Grade Three."

"Motilla, continue analyzing the communication intercepts from Terra."

"The rest of you, meeting adjourned. We will reconvene if there are new developments."

The maglev bases of the seats activated one by one, and eleven high-ranking priests, whose bodies were more than sixty percent metal, filed out of the council chamber.

Kolosius did not leave.

He sat in the empty hall, staring at the copper gear on the empty chair.

It had been tens of thousands of years.

The omnissiah had never responded to a single prayer.

Now, someone calling himself the "Unifier" from Terra was coming.

Kolosius closed his only fleshy eye.

The mechanical eye remained forever open, its red pinpoint of light flashing in the darkness.

As the deduction screen unfolded in the holographic projection, Li Cang's gaze remained fixed on the tracking icon in the bottom-left corner labeled with the Emperor's coordinates.

The icon had been moving from the first second the deduction began, heading toward Mars at high speed.

This was within Li Cang's expectations.

Then the icon stopped.

It stopped in an asteroid belt between Terra and Mars, nearly twenty million kilometers away from Martian orbit.

Li Cang used his finger to magnify the tracking icon threefold.

The coordinates did not change.

The Emperor stayed in the asteroid belt, motionless.

He switched the tracking screen to the main projection, attempting to retrieve real-time visuals of the Emperor's current location.

The system refused.

A line of small gray text floated in the center of the screen.

[Independent hero unit behavior does not accept external observation. When the unit actively produces behavioral results perceivable by the public system, visuals will automatically resume.]

Li Cang shrank the magnified icon back down.

He couldn't see what the Emperor was doing.

The system wouldn't tell him either.

The only information he knew was that the Emperor hadn't gone to Mars; instead, he had detoured into an asteroid belt full of space debris and stopped.

The deduction timer ticked quietly in the top-right corner.

The total deduction time was not infinite; the score was directly linked to time efficiency.

For every hour wasted, one percentage point would be deducted from the final score.

And the Emperor was in that pile of rubble, doing who knows what.

Li Cang's fingers began to tap on the armrest.

Martian Peripheral Monitoring Outpost No. 17.

This outpost was built on an asteroid less than two kilometers in diameter, roughly forty million kilometers from Mars itself.

There was only one person in the entire outpost.

Tech-Monk Kaland, who had been in the cult for nineteen years, had been rotating between such remote outposts.

His job was extremely simple: stare at the old spectrum analyzer in front of him, record all signal sources entering and leaving the Martian peripheral airspace, and report "No anomalies" to his superiors every four hours.

In nineteen years, he had reported "No anomalies" nearly forty thousand times.

The space in the outpost was very small.

A folding bed, an analyzer, a recycled water circulation device, and a small omnissiah gear shrine that had been polished to a shine.

Kaland's daily habit was to recite a passage from the Scripture before the shrine before bed.

It wasn't out of piety, but because there was truly nothing else to do.

At this moment, he was half-lying on the folding bed, his three mechanical fingers on his right hand unconsciously fiddling with the iron edge of the bed frame.

The waveform on the analyzer screen was just as it had been every day for the past nineteen years—flat enough to be hypnotic.

Kaland's fleshy eye was nearly closed.

Then the analyzer let out a chirp.

He was all too familiar with that sound.

It was the standard notification tone for a new signal source entering monitoring range. it sounded every few days, usually a passing mining transport or a routine military patrol boat.

Kaland didn't open his eyes; his left hand reached out and pressed a key on the keyboard to bring up the frequency analysis of the signal source.

He had performed this action thousands of times.

After pressing the key, he habitually glanced at the screen.

Then he sat bolt upright on the bed.

The frequency reading displayed on the analyzer was not in any frequency band he recognized.

Kaland rubbed his fleshy eye and leaned his face closer to the screen.

The frequency value was slowly rising, and the signal strength climbed all the way from weak to medium, and was still intensifying.

He ran a comparison through the analyzer's database.

No matching results.

This frequency did not belong to any active vessel of the Martian military, any known commercial transport fleet, or any communication characteristics recently intercepted from Terra.

The analyzer's database search reached the bottom layer.

Stored there was a batch of ancient frequency records labeled "Historical Archive · For Reference Only."

The timestamps on these records showed that the last time they were actually received was over twenty-six thousand years ago.

The comparison result popped up.

Match: 99.7%.

Corresponding Entry Name: [Golden Age · Standard Pattern Warship · Main Engine Startup Frequency].

Kaland's three mechanical fingers stopped fiddling simultaneously.

He stared at that entry name for a full ten seconds.

Then he stood up, walked to the analyzer, and ran the comparison again.

The same result.

99.7%.

He ran it a third time.

The same result.

Kaland's left hand—the one that still retained flesh and blood—began to tremble.

It wasn't from the cold; the outpost's climate control was maintained at twenty-two degrees.

He walked to the communication console, compiled the signal data into a standard format anomaly report, and sent it to the superior relay station.

After sending it, he sat back down on the edge of the bed.

Beside the bed was that gear shrine of the omnissiah.

Kaland looked down at the gear polished by his own fingers. His lips moved, but no sound came out.

Kolosius was in his personal cubicle at the underground command center, flipping through an analysis report of intercepted communications from Terra.

He had just reached the third page when the communication panel lit up.

The emergency encrypted channel, from the peripheral monitoring network relay station.

He reached out a mechanical arm and connected the line.

The priest on duty at the relay station was speaking three times faster than usual.

"Archpriest, Outpost No. 17 intercepted an abnormal signal source thirty-two minutes ago. The signal frequency has an extremely high match with our historical database."

Kolosius did not answer, waiting for the rest.

"The matching entry is..." The duty priest's voice caught for a moment. "...the main engine startup frequency of a Golden Age standard pattern warship."

Kolosius's mechanical eyeball stopped rotating.

"Signal bearing?"

"The No. 2 asteroid belt near the Terra-Mars route, approximately twenty million kilometers from Martian orbit. Signal strength is continuously increasing, and the heading is shifting."

"Shifting toward?"

"Directly toward Mars."

Kolosius cut the communication.

He didn't flip through the report anymore.

He stood up, walked out of the cubicle, and hurried back along the metal corridor to the core council chamber.

The air conditioning in the corridor still blew that scent of machine oil and incense, no different from when the meeting adjourned thirty minutes ago.

But the speed of Kolosius's gait had changed.

He pushed open the sealed door of the council chamber, walked to the holographic table, and pulled up the real-time data from the Mars-wide sensor network.

In the direction of the No. 2 asteroid belt, a pinpoint of light was accelerating.

The light's signal characteristics matched the string of numbers he had just heard perfectly.

This was impossible.

Golden Age warships had disappeared from the universe for over twenty thousand years. All known wreckage had either been dismantled for recycling or had completely lost functionality over the long ages, becoming cold iron shells floating in the vacuum.

No one could reignite an engine that had been dead for twenty thousand years.

No one.

Kolosius's right hand—a mechanical hand composed entirely of precision gears and hydraulic joints—clenched at the edge of the holographic table, the metal of his fingertips letting out a high-pitched screech against the surface.

He activated the cult-wide emergency broadcast.

"All high-ranking priests, return to the core council chamber immediately."

Then he added a sentence.

"Bring your Scriptures."

The Emperor's coordinate icon in Li Cang's deduction screen finally moved.

It pulled out of the asteroid belt and lunged directly toward Mars with terrifying acceleration.

In the same second, the system popped up a brief prompt.

[Independent hero unit has produced behavioral results perceivable by the public system. Visuals restoring.]

The holographic projection refreshed.

The reddish-brown sky of Mars appeared on the screen.

The edge of the atmosphere was glowing.

A massive white warship with lines so sleek they didn't belong to this era was slowly penetrating that rust-colored cloud layer.

Its engines emitted a deep, golden light that pulsed with a rhythmic beat.

Every scratch and crater on the hull spoke of the fact that it had once died.

But it was alive now.

The golden figure standing on the bow deck of the warship did not look toward the surface of Mars.

His gaze bypassed the atmosphere, bypassed all the sensors and communication arrays on this red planet that were currently in a state of panic.

He was waiting.

Waiting for those who had read the first page of the Scripture to step out on their own.

The score column in the bottom-left corner of the deduction screen jumped.

[Current Deduction Logic Consistency: SSS]

[Emotional Resonance Value: Continuously Rising]