“This is it!” I said to the small crew up on the and deck. “We are finally here!”

  We stood on the and deck, a rge s spreading from wall to wall before us showing the sery as if we were standing on the nose of the ship. Out there, in the vast darkness of space stood a small green listening like an emerald uhe rays of a nearby yellow star.

  Vallia.

  As, even though it was this close, it wasn't our first destination. The Tau anding officer who’d been pced in charge of all Non-Tau auxiliaries had shot down my idea of building our headquarters on the Death World faster than an Imperial issar a deserter.

  I rolled my eyes at the memory, at the agog look on his long face when I suggested he let us not only first set up a base somewhere in Tau space, but that he let us do so on a p as lethal as Vallia.

  Instead, he directed us towards … that even tinier greyish thing in the vague shape of a ball orbiting Vallia itself. The moon was quite rge holy, the size of Earth itself if my memory wasn’t pying trie, but it certainly looked droll when pared to the lush p just below.

  As for why I didn’t just ighe order, built a fake base on the moon and the down to the pself to build the real one? Well, being a dangerous world and all, bined with the fact that the entire damned sector was at war, there was a whole ass Battleship in Vallia’s orbit and another five rolling around the System’s edges, patrolling for ining foes.

  sidering that only with Alvash putting his own neck out for me did the ander even allow us to go a up base before even making any tributions to their Greater Good, I was quite happy even with this setup. If there was ohing I could do, it was breathing life bato a barren k of space rock.

  The only thing I couldn’t do just yet was making the p dense enough to have the right gravity and to give it an atmosphere. Well, perhaps with Valenith’s extensive help I might throw together some gigantic ritual to aplish it, but that would be an enormous waste of good soul energy when there were thousands upon thousands of ps fitting what I need just uhe Tau Empire’s trol, then a million more uhe trol of some other power.

  “Let’s head down,” I said, grinning as I looked left and right. Selene, Val and the two lovebirds were up on the deck with me, as was Throgg and even Zedev. Apparently, what I had pnned souhrilling to the old Magos, though he didn’t show it. “Who’s ing with?”

  Alvash was over at the battleship orbiting Vallia, envoying with the Captain there and such, so we were blessedly free of his nosy ht for the moment. Sure, the Envoy was ied in helping us, but I trusted him only as far as I could throw Khorh anything … touchy.

  If he learned everything I could do, I’d have a whole bunch of Tau too ing after me and trying to lock me up in a b. I mused, then shrugged. They were going to learn some of my abilities today either way. But I was going to py it off somehow.

  Ideas were already springing into my head, diplomatic solutions ing along with more forceful military measures. My two new sub-brains were doing work. I wasn’t sure how long I was going to keep them, but for now the oh the Water Caste Tau tempte and the Fire Caste tempte based sub-brains were proving to be useful. They gave me internal sed opinions, alternatives to doing things with either acute diplomatic solutions or with more thought out tactical stuff.

  It was basic for now, since I had none of the education or experieher had, but the geed instincts were there. That intuition was useful, and barely cost a dime in bio-energy.

  I’d used the Earth Caste versions to study the knowledge I downloaded from Zedev’s sub-brain a while befetting a more intimate uanding of it. The old Magos was irely willing to just … give me all of his knowledge, but he did give me everything a generic Tech Priest would have known, along with some of his own generic teowledge.

  Sharing his own personal experiend expansive biologist knowledge, though? That was a no-go from the Magos, which he veyed by saying I’d have to pry it out of his cooling, dead grey matter if I wa. With how many encryptions and scrambling algorithms I saw activating in his head as he said that, I thi least partially expected me to really go ahead and rip the knowledge out of his head.

  I wasn’t a mohough, not that kind anyway, not to my crew.

  “I’ll stay and keep order,” Val said, sounding like the moon’s overall droll state had more to do with his unwillio e with.

  “I request my presence be permitted on the surface when you terraform the poid.”

  “Granted,” I said easily, making Zedev’s unnerving dead gaze slide off of me and turn towards the small ball of rock. “Anyone else?”

  “Me?” Selene said, shrugging like she didn’t know whether that was a bygone clusion in my head or not.

  “Throgg?” I asked after giving a nod.

  "I fink I should stay so da boyz don't wreck da ship while boss is away."

  I shrugged in respohen stepped forward with a circur portal already f before me. I had to keep the air oher side from flowing through, as it was quite … lethal.

  The damned moon we’d been allowed to set up base on was both barren, useless and had an atmosphere that was only barely less suitable for sustaining life than the void of space.

  Many things to fix. I thought, my armour flowing over me as I looked around the desote ndscape. Seleepped through , her own armour already over her and Zedev came st once his own protective tech thingy covered the fleshy bits of his body.

  The portal closed behind me and I held back a wince. I didn’t even bat a the soul energy cost of the portals ba Baal, but then again, I had almost a huimes more energy in my stores back then than I had left after that idiotic stunt I pulled with Ka’Bandha.

  I ged inwardly, resisting the urge to grimace. Why did I think pulling my soul and the entire Realm around it closer to realspace would be a good idea? If every single Daemon within this gaxy and the didn’t know of me already, they did now.

  Still, it was … satisfying to for once feel in syn body and soul. The moment my soul he veil and its power tore into my physical body felt divine, like I was a God. Like reality would bend and break if I as much as willed it, it was both terrifying and addig and then … I almost ran out of power. I barely mae up little bits of soul energy sihen, because some dickhead Bloodthirster who I won’t name — Ka’Bandha — had been camping right under my Realm ihe , waiting for the moment I tried to get a refill to make a nuisance of himself.

  And he did make a nuisance of himself, numerous times, 34 times to be exact. Yes, I kept t. Yes. He is that fug annoying. So I was living off of the little sips of energy I could get while I battered that pea-brained Daemon.

  In trast, my bio-energy stores were the highest they’d ever been. The trip over to the Jericho Sector had taken almost a month, and I’d been dutifully abs every single dead Ork on the ship. With there being at least a few hundred fatalities in their climb to the top floor per day, I wasn’t hurting for bio-energy at all. Though only the fact that there were almost fifty thousand of the Greenskin on my ship made that possible.

  I scried the p o time, having given preliminary scries to the pce along with Val before. We found nothing, and even with my feet pnted on its surface, that stayed the same. No Ne tombs underh the crust, over Tyranid creches, no hiddeh Watch strongholds. Nothing.

  It was mildly disappointing, it made my ‘quest’ of it much less fun, but as, sometimes things do indeed just go your way.

  I gnced up at the sky, behind the unfriendly beige c of it, and hidden behind dust clouds, I could see Vallia. The Death World really looked like an emerald from here with its deep dark green lustre. Well, it was time to make this droll little rock I got for myself match it.

  I didn’t even browse through my by now gargantuan library of geic temptes and just had my mind-cores assemble a list of flora and fauna that would fit well together and would be … fun. Fun for the Orks that I was going to be rearing here, ‘fun’ for any ihat came knog and most importantly, fun for me.

  Well, most were regur stuff. Grass, ferns, trees, bushes, the lot. But I had a se of the stuff that I guilliman, some stuff native to Cata and other Death Worlds known to the Imperium. I also grabbed that oss that liked to pretend to be a puddle of water before sug anything dumb enough to try drinking it dry of the life-giving liquid.

  ‘Thirstwater’, the Baal-ians called it. There was also that pnt that liked to shoot out spikes the size of my fingers which then mutated any living thing they impaled into another spe of their species.

  Fun stuff, all in all.

  The best of it was, that with the colossal quantities of bio-energy I had, I didn’t even have to take this slow. White tendrils flowed out of my body. Not many, only a couple dozen, but they quickly split and split some more until they looked like the mycelium work of a mushroom.

  My hundreds of mind-cores went to work and wherever the tendrils passed the pnt life grew at an astonishing pace. There was no need for serving my energy here, a single Ork body was so full of bio-energy that I could make aire forest out of just that if the trees were simple enough.

  The dreary grey ndscape flushed green in mere moments as a sizable forest sprung up around us, filling up a square kilometre before I evehe first of the trees starting to wilt.

  With the atmosphere being as inhospitable as it was, that was iable. If I was anyone else, I’d have had to wait years, if not decades to find some very specifit that could transform the atmosphere’s position into breathable for both us and other pnts.

  I didn’t want to wait though, nor did I want to bother with that lengthy process. My mind-cores khe ahe moment I stepped foot on the phey had the air analysed and had just the temptes I needed ready.

  More bio-energy flowed through my tendrils, revitalising all the wilting pnts in a blink and making minute modifications to how they photosynthesized or whatever other method each of the specific types of flora used to feed. Mosses, mushrooms and other, stranger pnts grew by the hundreds across the slowly spreading influeny tendrils.

  Eat had a fun, a purpose. The stranger ones fed on the more toxic elements imosphere, and exhaled useful ones or at least transformed them to benighe process still would have been needlessly slow if I’d left it at that, but I supercharged every sitle thing from the smallest bde of grass to the t mushroom-tree that rivalled the empire state building i.

  Bio-energy made the already vibrant green forest nearly glow with power. I could feel the hum of it in the air, the little arcs of energy zappiween the leaves and energising every molecule anic matter. Just like with how it made my own body more powerful, resilient, durable, it did the same to the flora.

  My forest covered the tenth of the moon ihan ten minutes, in aen I had nearly a third covered and by the half an hour mark I had two-thirds of it. The rate of growth was expoial as my tendrils grew ih, size and he intricate web they made c every square metre of the p in forty minutes from start to finish.

  I waited then, plopping down on a newly moss-covered rod kept my mind focused. The pnts were fighting, wrestling with the dreadful ditions of the phere was no nutrition in the soil, no helpful gases in the air and the rays of the sun were blocked out by the ever-present dust storms more often than not.

  “This might take a while,” I said, my voice transmitting into the inner ears of both of my panions easily. “It’ll be quite b for a while, since I’m just waiting for the atmosphere to bee breathable for the phase.”

  Selene nodded, haviled down into a lotus position in the tre of a little meadow I made for her. Zedev just stayed still, his head swinging from side to side. His mechadendrites were more active though, and he had one poking at the ree, o a fern and a third burrowed into the ground.

  His aura was a mixture of wonder and amazement, mixed with a fair bit of … professional horror. I guess I’m going about this in some horrendously ineffit or straight up wrong way again. He didn’t bother including the information on how to terraform ps, so he’ll have to suffer through my amateurish brute force method.

  In the meantime, I went about fixing the ‘dead soil’ problem. The web of tendrils that mostly kept to the surface till now created new branches and those burrowed into the rocky ground. I broke up the rocks, created some strange, fertile mash of soil from bio-energy that my mind-cores swore — it was supposedly a mix of crushed pnts, ash and various types of manure I had the temptes to for some reason — by and filled the cracks and even covered the surfa the new soil-rept.

  Hours flowed by, and the position of the atmosphere slowly ged. The pnts were putting in good work, inhaling bad stuff and exhaling good stuff like they’d just ran a marathon arying to catch their breaths. Meanwhile, I burrowed deeper and deeper into the crust.

  Caves were scarce, but I’d found several mineral deposits on the way down along with even a few ks of ice here and there. Not that iron, copper and the ur metals would be of much use to me. Not yet.

  I held out hope for maybe a hidden piece of Adamantium deep beh the surface that the survey ships the Imperium sent here actally missed, or deemed too small to bother extrag, but I had no such luck. Instead, I at least found some of the rarer minerals that I knew would be at least mildly useful.

  Tuitanium, aluminium and just about every metal was in there even if only in small ks. It would have been a nightmare to mihese veins the old-fashioned way, or even with modern — 21st tury Earth teology — but I could cheat with my tendrils.

  Being bored out of my mind with the waiting and the repetitive task of keeping my p-sized forest alive as it wrestled the atmosphere under trol, I started digging up those minerals oer the other.

  While I was at it, I also burrowed several thick tendrils deep into the deepest part of the crust I dare to go. The temperature was scalding hot down there, threatening to melt my tendrils if I went any further.

  So, of course, I covered my tendrils in Ambull carapad pushed even further. I thihe tendrils, turning them into thousands of spikes covered in the heat-abs carapace. Almost instantly, the drain on my own bio-energy reserves to keep the forest alive lessened as the scorg heat of the molten crust of the p got transformed into more bio-energy by the peculiar biology of the Ambulls.

  It wasn’t enough to maintaiire forest just yet, but it would be in another few hours when the very air wasn’t trying to melt their leaves off.

  Progress.

  Ohe atmosphere was done, I’d go onto building up the fortress I had in mind as my headquarters for the near future and then I’d have to go about poputing the empty forests with life. Is, rodents and the lot. That’ll be fun, and ohat’s done I sneak by that nosy Tau ship and check out what that ‘malicious collective intelligehey say trols the p’s biosphere actually is.

  P3t1