198: Chapter 202 Black Market Rules? My Macro Cannon is the Rule

Deep Space Blind Zone. The Unlit Abyss.

With no dazzling stars to illuminate it, this star system was shrouded in thick interstellar dark matter dust.

In the void ahead, a massive man-made wonder emerged.

It was a star ring over a million kilometers in diameter, pieced together from countless asteroids that had been completely hollowed out and forcibly lashed together with thick alloy chains.

The surface of the star ring flickered with various motley neon lights.

Giant holographic billboards projected coded messages in the vacuum, advertising slave trades, contraband arms, and high-end bionic implants.

This was the holy land marked on scavenger star maps—the Outlaw Black Market Trading Ring.

There was no suffocating moral censorship like in the Eternal Star Crown Federation here, nor was there mandatory control by a system host. All sorts of fugitives, interstellar smugglers, and alien mutants converged here.

The Exile Void Fortress shut down its main thrusters.

The massive hull, like a black giant whale lurking in the deep sea, glided smoothly along the gray navigation lane on the outer edge of the star ring, relying only on weak anti-gravity deflector waves.

The armor plates on the fortress surface were tightly closed, and those thick Macro-cannon barrels and barbs were covered by a layer of dull gray optical camouflage film.

It looked like an ancient large-scale mining ship that had been drifting in deep space for centuries.

Inside the command center, Li Cang sank into a soft, shock-absorbing leather chair.

The surroundings were very quiet.

Only the air circulation system emitted a regular, slight hissing sound.

He held a cup of freshly brewed, low-quality synthetic coffee, his gaze passing through the thick, explosion-proof transparent panel to lock onto the bird's-eye view of the star ring on the surrounding display screens.

"The undocumented outcasts that the big guilds don't want are all gathered here."

Li Cang took a sip of the bitter coffee and casually pulled up the supply price list on the great map.

During the past few days on the run, Number Fourteen's dreadnought mech and those three thousand mutated Astartes had been like tireless pulverizers, smashing all the previously seized elven warship wreckage, guardian mage staves, and even large chunks of high-purity spirit crystals into pieces and dumping them in the warehouse.

These things were difficult to integrate into Warhammer's heavy industrial assembly lines and could even cause rejection explosions.

But in the black market, these were top-tier god-grade items in the eyes of wild mages and cyber hackers pursuing magic and high-end computing power.

He needed to offload all these hot, stolen goods. He would exchange them for the cheapest, crudest iron-black sludge, and Warhammer's most indispensable consumable—human lives.

Just as he was calculating the exchange rates...

A piercing orange warning box suddenly flashed on the holographic radar panel.

[Warning: Illegal tractor beam lock detected.]

[Three local armed patrol frigates are approaching. The other party is forcibly patching into the public communication frequency.]

In the center of the large screen, the image jumped for a moment as a communication feed was forcibly popped up.

In the image was an alien pirate leader with blue-purple skin and half his skull replaced by a crude mechanical bionic eye.

He sat on a pieced-together large chair, with several mutated thugs holding high-energy plasma cutters standing behind him.

In the Exile Fortress's external monitoring, three pirate interceptors—sharp as blades and painted with garish red skull emblems—had already arrogantly pulled across the fortress's path.

The tractor beams from their bows unceremoniously struck the fortress's thick surface armor.

"Stop your ship, cut the engines, and lower your deflector shields."

The alien leader's mechanical eye spun rapidly, emitting a harsh, electronically synthesized voice.

"I don't care which graveyard you dug this ancient mining ship out of; once you reach the Outlaw Star Ring, you follow the rules." The leader's tone was laced with undisguised greed.

"Hand over thirty percent of your cargo as a berth clearance fee. Open your cargo hold doors for scanning. If you dare to hide contraband, my decomposition rays will peel your ship's hull off layer by layer."

The rules of this black market had always been thus: judge a dish by the diner's appearance. The dull, lifeless gray camouflage of the Exile Fortress led them to mistakenly believe it was just a slow-moving fat sheep.

Inside the command center.

Li Cang set down his coffee cup.

The bottom of the cup clinked against the metal tabletop, making a crisp sound.

He didn't shout back at the communicator.

Nor did he try to explain his identity as a wanted criminal whose reputation could alarm the entire server.

For a great warlord, bickering with a small-time highway robber was a serious degradation of his status.

"Scan me?"

The corner of Li Cang's mouth curled into a cold arc. His finger lightly swiped across the touchscreen of the control console.

"One. Rip off the camouflage film. Let these locals hear a little noise."

The calm command traveled along the neural direct-link bone cables, instantly reaching the weapons control center in the fortress's lower decks.

In space.

The alien leader was still counting down on the communication channel, preparing to order a forced boarding.

Suddenly, the ancient mining ship that looked lifeless and like a giant black brick began to ripple violently with spatial distortions on its surface.

The dull gray optical camouflage film instantly contracted and disintegrated.

The ferocious true form hidden beneath the fake shell was completely exposed under the neon lights of the star ring.

It wasn't a mining ship. This was an abyssal metal fortress covered in sharp ammunition hooks, with armor hundreds of meters thick, and even stained with dried blood and disgusting Chaos anti-magic black paint.

The alien leader's mechanical bionic eye emitted a harsh static noise and overload error because it couldn't calculate the other party's instantly skyrocketing threat index.

"Evade! Pull back!"

The leader roared hoarsely.

Too late.

The Exile Fortress didn't raise its shields. When a Warhammer star fort dealt with such light, small ships, it always spoke using only the purest gunpowder physics.

At the very front of the fortress, over a hundred thick armor plates simultaneously flipped upward with a boom.

Revealing row upon row of deflection smoothbore defensive Macro-cannons with calibers large enough to accommodate a heavy hovercar. A pre-heating deathly red light flickered within the pitch-black barrels.

There was no waiting time for energy charging. No hacker skirmishes for high-dimensional locking.

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

A series of earth-shattering explosions, so heavy they created physical ripples in the surrounding space.

Over a hundred solid depleted uranium armor-piercing high-explosive shells, trailing thick smoke, slammed solidly into those three pirate interceptors at nearly point-blank range.

Energy Shields popped like soap bubbles in the face of such unreasonable, high-mass physical rounds.

The first interceptor was hit amidships by three Macro-cannon shells simultaneously.

It didn't even need the process of internal sympathetic detonation; the entire warship was snapped in half in the vacuum by the massive kinetic energy, its broken wreckage tumbling into its companion nearby.

The second ship tried to pull up in an emergency, but its command tower was shorn off by the ensuing dense barrage. The alien leader's shrill scream cut off abruptly in the communication channel as the screen turned to static.

In just fifteen seconds.

The three armed interceptors that had been lording it over the black market's outskirts were turned into a pile of scrap metal floating in the cold, silent deep space. The burning fireballs became the perfect backdrop for the star fort's advance.

Inside the main control room of the black market trading ring's external defense port, there was dead silence.

Those black market patrol officers, who lived their lives on the edge of a blade, watched the black fortress on the holographic screen—which had used extremely wasteful heavy Macro-cannons to vaporize others into molecular residue over a minor disagreement—and broke out in a cold sweat.

This wasn't a fat sheep coming to pay a toll; this was a man-eating shark coming to wreck the place.

The Exile Fortress did not slow down.

The massive hull crushed its way through the wreckage it had just created, its giant armored broadsides scraping against the star ring's outer docking guide supports as it arrogantly docked in a supreme VIP private berth meant for ultra-large capital ships.

The hatch at the bottom of the fortress emitted a long, metallic groaning sound as it slowly opened.

A senior deputy supervisor of the black market ring, leading several hundred fully armed and trembling mechanical mercenaries, hurriedly lined up outside the docking platform.

He had originally planned to activate all defensive fire nets to counter-attack, but he saw clearly that the fortress's fire control radar was still deathly locked onto the core reactor of the entire black market.

He swallowed hard and decided to put on his most humble smile.

"Res... Respected leader of the wandering legion," the deputy supervisor's apologetic voice came through the loudspeaker, "what happened just now was a complete misunderstanding. The stray dogs on the outskirts disturbed your vessel. The Outlaw Ring welcomes all major clients who bring wealth."

He was waiting for the other party's high-ranking officials to step out of the hatch, waiting for a round of hypocritical underworld negotiations.

Inside the command cabin, Li Cang didn't even stand up from his chair.

He would never take a single step out of this security door encased in thick adamantium. The danger of the great map lay in the fact that any exposure of one's physical body could be taken out by unavoidable curses or snipers.

"Negotiate? I have no interest in wasting my breath on you."

Li Cang pulled up a data panel on the console and flicked his finger.

"Drop it down. Let them see what real money looks like."

From the fortress's boarding ramp came a heavy sound of metal scraping.

What came out was not a haughty Commander, nor fully armed Astartes guards.

But a specially made, three-meter-tall vocalizing Servitor that was physiologically repulsive.

The lower half of this Servitor's body had been severed and welded onto an anti-gravity floating disk.

The flesh of his upper body was pale and decaying, his head completely encased in a giant brass loudspeaker, with over a dozen life-support tubes dripping with preservative fluid plugged directly into his spine.

This extreme operation of turning a living person into a tool made even the black market pirates, who were accustomed to killing, feel their stomachs churn.

Behind the Servitor, two heavy crawler cranes slowly drove out.

On the cranes' giant alloy trays, there was no concealment.

Piles of elven-exclusive Mithril Staff fragments, dozens of core host computers emitting pure arcane spectrums, and those high-purity Psionic Crystals bearing the royal seal of the Eternal Star Crown Federation directly erupted with an extremely dazzling glow of wealth under the black market's dim lights.

Thump.

The black market deputy supervisor's mechanical eye almost overloaded and burned out from high-frequency scanning of these out-of-print treasures. His knees slammed heavily onto the metal floor.

These were core contraband items that even the top ten guilds on the great map couldn't get their hands on!

To be able to throw out these things bound by elven royal genes to sell like scrap metal, just what kind of monster with heaven-reaching influence and ruthless methods was sitting inside this black fortress?

The brass horn atop the Servitor's head made a mechanical grinding noise.

Li Cang's cold, electronically synthesized voice, which sounded like sandpaper rubbing together after passing through a voice changer, boomed over the docking platform.

"For this scrap metal, I want three things in exchange."

"First. Enough low-grade crude raw iron and depleted uranium ore to fill ten high-density containers. The lower the quality, the better. I want them in stock."

"Second. Give me three independent, non-traceable radar wave instruments that can access the map-wide underground darknet."

The brass horn paused for a moment. A strange red light representing ambition and bloodthirstiness flickered deep within the electronic eye.

"Third. I heard you have the largest penal labor camp in the entire sector here?"

"I want to buy people."

Sitting behind the holographic screen, Li Cang looked at the deputy supervisor's pale face.

"Don't try to fool me with those noble slaves. I don't want decorative items."

"Death row inmates, felons, and interstellar refugees from the bottom of mines who can't even afford to eat. Regardless of species, regardless of disability. As long as their neural synapses can still generate electrical signals and they're alive."

"Starting at thirty million. Pack them up at full speed and deliver them to my cargo hold's bottom hatch."