Chapter 316: The C’tan Forge

…

At the boundary between the Warp and reality.

Within a stretch of the Webway.

After passing through the ring of roaring flame and slipping into the Webway, Qin Mo turned back to look behind him.

Beyond the burning circle, his research facility was still visible, its silhouette warped and smeared, as though observed through layers of refractive distortion rather than simple heat shimmer. The structure appeared flattened and fractionally misaligned, as if realspace coordinates no longer fully corresponded to the location he occupied, the image already half-consumed by the boundary’s radiance.

The boundary itself behaved like a pressure seal rather than a simple opening. It reminded Qin Mo of an airlock, one side hostile, the other protected. The Webway resisted intrusion even as it allowed passage, its structure actively separating realspace and the Warp so the two could not bleed together.

This separation was deliberate and absolute. The Webway did not exist within the Warp, nor did it border it in any conventional spatial sense. It was a sealed transit dimension constructed to run alongside reality while remaining isolated from the Immaterium entirely.

The Burning One already had one blazing leg stepped into the Webway.

This was Qin Mo’s first time entering the Webway, and he immediately began to look around with unconcealed curiosity.

The passage before him resembled a narrow corridor formed entirely of golden light. It was clearly a tunnel, with a floor beneath his feet and walls curving overhead, not an endless void or a psychic dreamscape. The walls were not solid stone or metal, but layered planes of refracted light, stacked tightly together like sheets of transparent crystal.

Those layers were the Webway itself. Each was part of a single containment system designed to do three things: keep the Warp out, keep reality stable, and prevent the two from interacting.

Some layers acted as barriers, preventing Warp energy from entering. Others fixed the passage’s position relative to realspace, ensuring that exits opened where they were meant to. Others constantly corrected distortions, sealing damage before it could spread.

They were stacked so densely that no single boundary could be identified, forming a continuous, reinforced shell.

It was nothing like the vast, cathedral-scale structure he had imagined, barely wide enough for two figures to walk abreast.

There was no wind, yet motion could be felt, an imperceptible drift suggesting the corridor itself was in constant transit.

“From a positional perspective,” the Burning One said, taking five steps forward and gesturing at the distance, “we were in orbit over Talon I. Now, after five steps, I’m already in the Beisu Star System.”

“Remarkable,” Qin Mo thought, recognizing that the Webway was not compressing distance, but bypassing it entirely by routing movement through a higher-order spatial framework.

The Webway did not transport travelers through intervening space. Instead, it shifted the exit point of the passage itself, effectively bringing the destination to the traveler rather than the reverse.

No wonder the Aeldari could appear and vanish like ghosts. No wonder the Emperor of Mankind had once dreamed of seizing control of the Webway.

It avoided Warp exposure entirely, rendered daemonic interference largely irrelevant, and permitted near-instantaneous strategic redeployment. From a logistical standpoint alone, it represented absolute supremacy over void travel.

If a Star God was unwilling to lend out its own dimensional domain, then the Webway truly was unquestionably the best method of faster-than-light travel in the galaxy.

“Hahahaha—!” The Burning One suddenly burst into mad laughter, as though recalling an old memory. “Those crawling lizards never imagined that I could force my way into the Webway. In their despair, they were burned to nothing by our flames.”

Qin Mo silently reflected that not even he could have imagined how the Burning One managed to intrude into the Webway, let alone the Old Ones. The Webway had been built to respond to psychic races, shaped by thought and intent. Yet somehow, the Burning One had learned to create gateways just like the Aeldari, despite lacking any psychic nature at all.

This pyromaniacal lunatic must have discovered that its flames could not penetrate the Webway, sliding harmlessly across its boundaries, like smoke without fire.  That instinctive frustration must have forced it to think, to adapt rather than merely destroy.

The technology the Necrons later used to intrude into the Webway had, in fact, been taught to them by the Burning One.

“To me, this place feels less like a passage and more like a shelter,” Qin Mo said as he reached the end of the Webway segment. His gaze pierced the golden veil ahead, revealing a region of illusion and roiling unreality beyond.

That space lacked direction or horizon, a pocket of stabilized false-reality nested between routes, sealed off from the greater lattice.

The Burning One stepped beside him and said proudly, “During the War in Heaven, I secretly preserved a number of those lizards. In exchange for sending them beyond the galaxy, I forced them to help me construct this isolated section of the Webway, one that connects to no established route. This is my treasury. Even the C’tan, all of them included, could never find it.”

Qin Mo almost asked what fate had ultimately befallen those “lizards” the Old Ones, but quickly realized the answer. They had certainly been destroyed, not spared.

“Come,” the Burning One said, turning toward empty space and raising a hand. “Help me merge.”

Space tore apart and reassembled itself. Two additional fragments of the Burning One appeared.

One crouched dumbly in the corner, idly playing with flickering flames, seemingly oblivious to everything else. The other, upon seeing Qin Mo and the Burning One, immediately spewed fire at them, screaming about burning this and incinerating that, its thoughts little more than raw, destructive impulse, pure, manic rage.

The Burning One showed no fear of the flames released by its fragment. With effortless control, it seized the incoming fire and turned it back, grievously injuring the berserk shard.

Qin Mo raised his hand. A floating spherical device manifested in midair.

This was the Time Forge, a construct created using a portion of the Forger’s own essence. It was capable of fusing shattered fragments of a C’tan into a single whole, forcing temporal consistency upon otherwise incompatible states of existence.

The Time Forge also incorporated a “feeding” function Qin Mo had designed for himself and for the Shapeshifter: a simplified analogue of the Necron device known as the Breath of the Gods, capable of drawing stellar energy from the past, present, and future simultaneously, though at a far more controlled scale.

“Hurry,” the Burning One urged impatiently. “I can’t wait any longer.”

Yet Qin Mo did not proceed.

As unease crept over the Burning One, Qin Mo finally spoke.

“Give me the method you use to enter the Webway.”

The Burning One froze for a moment, then tried to feign ignorance. “You want access to the Webway? I can assist you at any time.”

“Do you want to merge or not?” Qin Mo said coldly. “If not, then crawl back into the labyrinth and keep the Nightbringer company.”

Faced with Qin Mo’s unyielding attitude, the Burning One sighed inwardly at how the times had changed. It then shared a segment of its memories with him.

They were memories from when it had first studied how to intrude upon the Webway.

Within them, the Burning One dissected ancient Aeldari Webway gates, learning how to forcibly connect these gates, constructs that were never true extensions of the Webway, to the Webway itself.

A Webway gate, after all, was merely a kind of “key,” not unlike the relationship between a dimensional engine and a higher dimension.

What the Burning One had achieved was a brute-force method, forcibly cracking a psychic construct using pure science. There was no psychic component involved at all. As a result, the gateways it opened were fundamentally unstable.

They would open at random points along existing Webway routes. Worse, the Webway itself treated such intrusion as an infection, seeking either to eradicate the invader or collapse the affected section entirely. One had to reach the destination before instability set in, or be lost to dimensional collapse.

If the Talon Sector employed this technology, the resulting structures would not differ much from Necron Dolmen Gates. After all, the same “teacher” had instructed them both.

“Satisfied now?” the Burning One spread its arms wide. “Come. I’m ready.”

Qin Mo immediately activated the Time Forge. All three fragments of the Burning One were drawn into the internal space of the device.

Inside the Time Forge was a compressed dimensional pocket. Countless fluctuations space and time, large and small, emerged and vanished throughout its interior. The lines of the dimension stretched and contracted under these disturbances, searching for the fragments’ states at some point in the past, then crushing and reassembling them.

The principle was similar to a time machine, though far less omnipotent. Only a C’tan could endure the torment within the Time Forge, an experience akin to being cast into hell, experiencing all states of existence of their own being simultaneously.

As the Time Forge released energy and began the recombination process, Qin Mo retrieved the portion of the Burning One’s essence he still held captive.

Through prolonged study, Qin Mo had discovered that this essence functioned much like a voodoo effigy in archaic sorcery. If it was tortured, the Burning One’s main body would experience pain that reached deep into its very “soul.”

No one could know which fragment’s personality would dominate the newly formed greater shard. If the berserk fragment’s madness prevailed, the Burning One would have much suffering ahead.

“Fusion complete.”

The vast, surging energies within the Time Forge gradually subsided. Some of the excess power even destabilized the Webway itself. This section, born of a shameful bargain, stretched and contracted erratically before stabilizing once more, together with the Time Forge.

The newly merged, larger Burning One fragment emerged. Qin Mo could clearly sense its increased power, its presence heavier and more oppressive than before.

As for its personality, traits from all three fragments seemed to have blended together. It was no longer as agreeable as before, but neither was it consumed by lunatic fury or reduced to a fire-playing simpleton squatting in a corner of the Webway.

“It seems I am the first of our kind to begin approaching wholeness,” the Burning One said, admiring its arms and torso, though they looked no different than before.

“True,” Qin Mo replied, stowing the Time Forge and the captive essence away. “But you won’t become complete faster than the Shapeshifter.”

He paused, then added calmly:

“Your largest fragment is still hanging from the Silent King’s throne.”