The worrywart Kroot emissary sufficiently mollified, I got back to what was actually important: cuddling my beautiful lover.

  In the meantime, as there were still days until the Tau could remake their pns on account of me throwing all their timeline predictions out the window, I decided to try my hand on a new pet project.

  Seeing the Emperor’s designs, examining the Custodes, Lion, and Fulgrim temptes had been … humbling. He was an artist, weaving genes together like a virtuoso; not a single thing was out of line, there was no wasted molecule in his designs. It was utterly ridiculous. Worse, everything was unique and purpose-made from the ground up, custom-fitted for the specific design.

  My own works were horrid abominations in contrast, patchwork monstrosities that looked more like a child tore apart a bunch of toys, then stuck them together with duct tape and superglue. Sure, they worked. The pieces I’d stuck together were synergistic to an extent, and I’d become good enough of a biomancer to blend the edges a bit, but it was still night and day when I had the Emperor’s perfection to compare it to.

  I never would have thought it would be Kroot who helped me take another step towards closing the gap. I mean, I knew they had this quirk where they mutated based on what they ate, but I’d thought the result would be even worse than my stuff.

  It wasn’t. The Kroot DNA was inherently mutable, and extremely receptive to realignment, or having alien gene-strains added in. Their genetic immune system was extremely advanced, guiding their mutations along a beneficial path instead of giving them the mother of all cancers. It also passively worked to blend the new gene-strains together, incorporating them into the Kroot’s own DNA passively, over time.

  It was fascinating, and I was suddenly very gd I’d given the Kroot my permission to stick around on Ravacene. I had a vast library of gene temptes and an ever-expanding list of prototype monsters and modified animals. Now then, what would happen if I released a whole bunch of the most interesting half-baked beasties on Ravacene? How would the Kroots’ handle digesting them? Could their bodies naturally refine parts of my designs?

  I mean, I could very easily make a bunch of lobotomised Kroots of my own — and I most certainly will — but it’d be interesting to see how the originals react to my unique brand of monsters.

  Could I make a Drake that would turn any Kroot that consumed its flesh into kobolds? The lizard-man kind, not the dog-furry-thing kind.

  There was not much in the way of rewards, but it could be a fun side-project: see how many and how cool Kroot strains I could make by feeding them weird shit.

  And I’d use my own vat-grown Kroot drones to streamline my genetic temptes a bit, if it worked like I thought it would. Even if it didn’t, I would probably learn much just by watching how Kroot digested flesh and mutated according to the genetic information therein. Perhaps I could even learn something from how they deciphered DNA and selected useful genetic features, how they filtered out the useless fluff and incorporated only the useful bit.

  The Kroot I’d met, some ‘Master Shaper’ — which was apparently their equivalent of a high chief — seemed intrigued by the idea at least when I briught up the possibility of me turning Ravacene into a world lush with beasts from a hundred worlds. Though I might have left out the fact that those would be Death Worlds, and that I might modify some of them myself.

  Well, I did promise him that it would still be his choice as the ‘Shaper’ to decide whether or not they would actually eat the stuff I let loose. He’d probably noticed my enthusiasm at seeing what’d happen if they ate all kinds of weird shit, if his tangible relief at that promise had been anything to go by.

  I only extracted a single promise in response.

  “Very well,” Master Shaper Khorek had said, his bestial eyes blinking at me suspiciously before he gave me a nod. “I can promise that. I lead all the kroot who wish to stay behind in your domain. In their name, I agree that we shall view you as our … ‘liege lord’. We are still members of the Tau Empire, but it is you who we will serve directly, and you will be able to call upon the services of our mercenaries free of charge for giving us a home.”

  I also did some preliminary work — actual work — on Ravacene itself. I made sure none of the volcanoes were in the mood for erupting in the near future, then hastily calmed a super-volcano the size of Australia from kicking the pnet into a new Ice Age with an ash cloud that would have blotted out the sun around the globe for years. It still had a decade, maybe a bit more of time until the big kaboom, but while I was no geologist, I knew predicting when volcanoes will erupt is never 100% accurate. Plus, a random earthquake, or a shithead daemon throwing a wrench into stuff, could very easily cause a premature eruption when the volcano was this close to going boom.

  I may have gone mind-diving, very gently, I might say, into the mind of the nearest Earth Caste Tau I sensed in System who had experience with such things. He was apparently a guy obsessed with alien geography, geology, and the extreme environments that existed on strangely habitable, but extremely hostile pnets. As it was, he knew quite a bit about how to go about calming down a volcano.

  Now, the first idea I had was to open a massive portal in the magma chamber and vent the pressure into space. I mean, I knew from high school geography that it was these super-pressurised chambers of magma underneath volcanoes that caused the eruption. When the rock above couldn’t bear the push of the pressure, it gave way and stuff exploded, then came magma and superheated ash clouds. The End.

  As it turns out, that idea would have kick-started the eruption faster than I could regret my stupid decision. Volcanic eruptions were chain-reactions, apparently, where the escaping pressure caused magma and rock to boil over, building the pressure even more and making even more ‘stuff’ join in on the wild ride up to the surface. Or something. Just cause I took a short look through the memories of an expert doesn’t make me one. I’d have had to take apart his mind and carefully deconstruct each memory, then parse it all before integrating it into my own knowledge base. Which wasn’t workable on someone whose mental stability and well-being I gave even the slightest fuck about.

  Maybe I’d find a suitably abhorrent Magos in the future who had a knack for terraforming and geology.

  The first thing I did was spread out my network of eldritch flesh through the pnet, like I’d done on Vallia prime and then I used it to reinforce the walls of the nastiest volcanoes across the globe with my purpose-made bio-materials. That would push back the eruption a few centuries at least, since I’d eliminated the rapidly weakening stone wall that would have given way in the near future.

  Next, I stuck a bunch of my heat-sinks into the rock around the magma chambers. With the heat slowly draining out of the half-molten walls, they’d be reinforced even more and lessen the likelihood of an eruption. I had them on a rather low rate of absorption for now, as rapid-cooling the molten magma would just reduce the space the pressurised gases could occupy, thus increasing the pressure even further.

  Now, technically, that would probably push the problem back by centuries, maybe even by more than a millennium, the super-volcano was a colossal, slumbering beast that’d been preparing to erupt since before humanity learned how to use fire, it could wait a few more centuries with just a little bit of calming before it went apeshit … but there was a perfectionist in me that just couldn’t be satisfied with ‘good enough’. I’d need to make sure the super-volcano was a non-threat. I want the eruption predictions to count the years till the inevitable in the tens of thousands of years. That should also make the job of any cultist or daemon trying to take advantage of the votile geology much harder, likely too bothersome to even try. Hopefully.

  So next up was venting out the super-pressurised gas, not all of it though, just enough to push back the eruption far enough. Still, this would be the riskiest part of the whole thing. I needed the gas vented at a steady, slow rate and rgely at an equal rate across the whole network of underground magma chambers that covered an area the size of Australia.

  Then also came the question of where exactly I should vent it to. The high atmosphere or some deep ocean trench would have been good, but both would have caused an ecological disaster down the line with how much CO2 and SO2 (sulfur-dioxide) I’d be venting. That tter especially was what caused the nuclear-winter style scenarios in eruptions, along with the ash clouds, which it was usually a part of.

  Space was a no go, not without some modifications as the nonexistent counter-pressure in the void would have made moduting the venting rate much harder. But what if I took a chunk of the atmosphere and pressurised it in a bubble of telekinesis up in high orbit? That could work. I could just throw the waste out into deep space afterwards and be done with it.

  That was exactly what I decided to do, after delegating the mind-numbingly complex calcutions to my mind-cores to pn out where, how rge, and how many micro-portals I’d have to open without fucking things up royally. The level of physics, thermodynamics and other fringe sections of natural physics involved in those calcutions made me shudder, and supremely thankfully that I could delegate it all to mind-cores who couldn’t compin.

  I scattered a legion of Psyker-drones across the pnet to focus my powers, and allow for a more precise channeling of it across the continent-sized area. It eased the strain, and that would be pretty helpful for maintaining perfect control.

  I opened thousands of tiny portals all at once, some smaller than the human eye could see, others just tiny pinpricks. They were all close to the roofs of the magma chambers, since I wanted to vent only the gases and vapour, not the magma itself. Any one portal only let through a minuscule amount of gas every second, but with thousands funnelling it all into the pressurised sphere I held within my telekinetic grasp, I saw the clear air within rapidly turn murky and dark.

  They cooled quickly, the chill of the void between pnets seeping into the air-ball I held. I kept careful attention on the whole process, but with hundreds of my mindcores chained up into a mental network, I could micromanage every portal and not get overwhelmed.

  The sphere of air grew, now appearing like a massive grey orb filled with swirling grey ash clouds. It seemed almost solid at times. The predicted time of eruption zily slumbered forward on the timeline, the estimated time till the eruption growing rapidly, decades upon decades adding up every second.

  I slowed only when the number crossed the 1,000-year mark. Slowly, I started firming my grip on the vents, tightening the portals. The eruption crept back another century before I fully stopped.

  After which I promptly threw my sphere of ash and ecological horror into a portal leading into deep space, patted myself on the back for a job well done and Blinked back to get a nice massage from Selene to reward myself.

  After some much-deserved rexation, I went about beginning some subtle terraforming across the globe. Nothing visible, and nothing the nearby nosy Tau could make out with their sensors.

  Just looking for pces which would make for good sites for arcologies, close enough to volcanoes that the arcology’s base could have built-in heat sinks to power all its functions. I then strengthened those sites, making sure the weaker volcanic basalt would hold the weight of the super-construct.

  I held off on making an artificial Shadow in this system, half as an experiment to see whether a daemon would come along to mess with my stuff, and half because I didn’t want to expin why I had thousands of lobotomised tyranids on life support spread out across the System in the event that they found some.

  I also gathered a variety of samples from across the globe, pnts, fungi, animals, bacteria and viruses. There was nothing unique, or truly outstanding as far as biology went. I already had a vast library of samples, and everything I found was within expectation. No exploding nuclear frogs, no venom that rewrote someone’s genes and induced super cancer. Just strange animals and pnts.

  Finally, after three days, the Tau managed to come to a decision on where I should be heading next after they rectified and reworked their overall battle pns according to the showing I’d given them in this system. I had been considering just going ahead and heading for the next nearest warzone and screw the Tau, but that would have projected the wrong image.

  I wanted to be seen as reliable and someone they could work with, tempered by a healthy respect for my power and stubbornness. If they saw me as an uncontrolble, arrogant and headstrong warmonger who couldn’t bear waiting three days between mass murders, that would probably be rather counterproductive to our continued alliance.

  Curiously enough, their choice did not fall on the only other world which was actively contested by the Tau and the Imperium. Veren, that is, a Feral World with not much in the way of civilisation or value that the Tau are nonetheless defending with an outwardly undeserved fervour.

  Very suspicious. Or, maybe, it was a ruse to divide Imperial attention between it and Ravacene. A ruse which had outlived its usefulness.

  I’d find out sooner or ter either way. Right then, I was on my way to Dakinor, a gas giant orbited by a number of space stations and mining outposts attached to huge asteroids, the rgest of the thousands stuck in the gas giant's gravitational pull. More importantly, there was a promethium extraction facility in low orbit. The refinement and enrichment of the stuff was happening elsewhere, turning the versatile fiery liquid into fuel or explosives.

  I finally had a chance at ciming a System that had some actual resources worth extracting. Not that Ravacene was worthless, the pnet sat at the mouth of the Bck Reef and had a stable Warp-ne going towards both the Velk’Han sept and the Jericho-Maw Warp Gate. It was basically sitting on the space equivalent of the sector’s rgest highway.

  If the whole Jericho Reach, or at least a rge part of it beyond the Bck Reef, fell under Tau or my control, nearly all void-based commerce going in and out of the Sept worlds would be flowing through Ravacene.

  Alternatively, if this crusade went no further, that would put me right between the Imperium and the Tau Sept worlds, which is probably exactly where the Tau want me. It was a bit of a win-win-win situation for them, now that I think of it. Crafty Tau. Not that it mattered. They gave me the opportunity, now I would have everything I needed to make a Void-Ship fueling station in the system too, when I got my hands on that promethium extraction facility, hopefully in a retively intact state. After that, I just had to get my grabby paws on the refinement method that was no doubt jealously guarded by the Ad-Mech priests.

  Oh well, it was time to add corporate espionage to my steadily growing list of crimes anyway.

  P3t1