188: Chapter 192 This ball, I even sucked out its atmosphere.

The resistance on the K-7 Primarch Planet collapsed faster than anticipated.

In less than three hours, the defensive lines of the core industrial city-states in the northern hemisphere had been plowed into a wasteland by the black figures of the Astartes wielding Chainswords. The tracked mechs that the native army took such pride in were as fragile as a child's plastic building blocks before the Macro-cannon of Number Fourteen's Dreadnought.

Inside the command cabin deep within the Exile Void Fortress, the system panel was automatically filtering radio waves intercepted from the surface.

The channels were filled with piercing static. A trembling request for communication, marked by a distinct electronic synthesized tone, was translated and projected onto the main viewport.

It was the final transmission from the natives' High Archon. They were willing to hand over control of all arsenals and all the nuclear fuel accumulated by the royal family, pleading only for this demonic warship—hovering in the sky like a solar eclipse—to stop deploying those undead giants who emitted toxic gas.

Li Cang's fingers tapped twice on the edge of the console.

He glanced at the long-winded list of surrender conditions. These natives still clung to a ridiculous negotiation mindset, attempting to trade their laws and dignity for survival.

His thumb pressed the red disconnect button in the upper right corner without hesitation.

The communication window instantly shattered into a silent cluster of static snow.

"I don't want control."

Li Cang looked at the resource storage bars on the motherboard, which were mostly dim due to the long-distance void jump they had just completed.

"The crude gunpowder junk produced by your shoddy arsenals isn't even fit to trim an Astartes' toenails."

He pulled up the history creator and opened the miscellaneous sub-file library he had conveniently copied from the bottom levels of Mars. He selected a set of blueprints tagged by the system as 'Severe Violation of Interstellar Ecological Conventions'—the Depriving Planetary Refining Pedestal.

The system popped up a standard high-risk warning box, cautioning that this operation would face severe condemnation from the great map Public Morality Court and could lead to irreversible ecological collapse of the planet.

He pushed the button all the way to the bottom.

"The Morality Court is within range of those Elves' cannons. But here, this is a Map Black Zone."

Within the abdominal armor layers of the Exile Void Fortress, which gaped open like an abyssal maw.

Thousands of Gravity Drop Modules, each the size of a skyscraper and cast as a pitch-black cylinder, plummeted toward the surface of K-7 with the release of hydraulic gates.

These black metal blocks carried no parachutes. Relying on their own weight and thrusters, they acted like crude nails, violently smashing through the concrete foundations of the native city-states and pinning themselves deep into the planet's mantle.

Native residents fled in all directions through the streets, thinking this was a new round of orbital bombardment.

But these cylinders did not explode upon landing. The outer Adamantium Ramparts quickly deployed in all directions, revealing a dense interior of frantically spinning gear sets and suction hoses as thick as tunnels.

That was the lowest-tier yet most effective 'Ground Scraper' in the Warhammer universe.

Tens of thousands of hollow-eyed Servitors arrived with the second wave of airdrops. Holding High-frequency Melta Guns and Rivet Guns, they swarmed over the newly deployed refining pedestals like ants, beginning to physically connect the pipes to the local underground mineral vein cores and major water sources.

The catastrophic industrial extraction began.

A massive roar replaced the planet's natural wind. Over a hundred refining pedestals activated simultaneously.

The inland freshwater lakes that K-7 took pride in began to boil and recede at a visible rate. The lake water was not evaporating; it was being sucked dry by those thick pipes and fed into the fortress's lower decks as reactor coolant.

The Primary Psionic Pulse Belts deep in the crust were shredded by violent drills. Along with the surrounding high-grade carbon ore, they were transformed into pillars of grey light shooting into the sky via powerful traction beams directed toward near-Earth orbit, continuously feeding into Li Cang's furnace maw.

The ecosystem collapsed within half an hour.

Vast stretches of once-lush virgin forests withered and carbonized under acid rain and rapidly rising surface temperatures. The palace buildings once used for negotiations were leveled by Servitors with cutters, clearing space to stack tons of crudely smelted alloy ingots.

On the command cabin's large screen.

The red warning lights for various resource shortages turned into a healthy, full green one by one.

genesis points flickered, soaring from the depths to break through a threshold sufficient to initiate a second troop production cycle under this tournament format.

"This meat may be tough, but it's filling."

Li Cang reviewed the Pure Essence extraction report sent back by the system. This bottomless plunder was far more efficient than honestly trading in the center of the great map.

But his gaze did not linger long on those conventional resources.

A full warehouse was merely a ticket.

He focused his attention on the very edge of the skill tree, on a dark gold entry that had been locked behind high-level permissions since the full-power deduction on Mars.

Under the forced infusion and flushing of this massive wave of energy and native waste ore, the chains sealing that entry showed cracks of loosening.

Several characters were marked there in the system's cold font.

[Super-heavy God-Machine Vehicle Incubation Terminal: Knight-class Embryo].

Li Cang leaned back into his chair.

Only the regular armies of those large guilds liked to line up massive fleets of battleships in space to play at 'line of battle' warfare.

But he intended to quietly forge a super-sized ground war machine that shouldn't belong to this level within this mobile fortress gorged on the blood and marrow of the natives.

The next time he ran into those high-and-mighty mage lords from "The Chess Player."

He would use a truly sky-blocking hunk of iron to crush their fragile, Elegant Matrix.