At the edge of the Milky Way.
In the void.
"—How long is life going to be like this?"
Adam raised his head.
Before him, the dead remains of the Tyranid hive fleet parted like a falling curtain of rain.
Trillions of biomass carcasses floated in the vacuum, forming a thick, viscous, silent wall of flesh that stretched across dozens of light-seconds. Under the residual glow of distant stars, the shattered chitinous shells cast eerie shapes of horror, yet held a certain grand splendor.
Only, Adam wasn't looking at them right now.
To tell the truth, he had grown thoroughly sick of seeing this sight over the recent period.
He slowly raised his right hand and placed his palm against his ear, making a phone gesture.
The action itself was childish to the extreme.
Yet, bolstered by his reality-warping ability, it actually worked.
There was no medium for sound to travel in the vacuum, but a far more fundamental connection was established.
The call went through.
"Reporting to Lord Adam."
Endymion's calm voice came through the empty void, as clear as if the Custodian Tribune were standing right beside him.
His voice was as steady and restrained as ever: "The Primarch Lion El'Jonson has stepped into the Webway at this very moment. He has completed his first Forest Walk and entered the mission sector within the Webway. The other Primarchs have not been informed yet, but I will convey this good news to them shortly."
Endymion paused briefly before adding: "Your plan is progressing smoothly."
Adam nodded in satisfaction.
"That's good. I have no other objections."
He said.
Regarding the Lion's awakening, the Emperor had naturally informed him as well.
The Primarch who had slumbered for ten thousand years had finally crawled out of his sarcophagus, donned his armor once more, gripped his sword, and used those hunter-like eyes to size up this unrecognizable galaxy.
It had to be said that this was a wise decision.
environmental conditions inside the Webway were intricate and complex, akin to a multi-dimensional labyrinth woven on a galactic scale.
Passages intersected, folded, and branched off. Uncounted unknown corners harbored xenos ruins, Warp anomalies, and traitors who had been hiding there since ten thousand years ago.
To conduct efficient searches and strikes in such an environment required a seasoned figure whose mobility and response speed were fast enough.
As for Adam himself at this moment, it was genuinely a bit difficult for him to pull away.
The sheer number of Tyranids was simply overwhelming. Although they couldn't harm him, the sheer deluge of biomass was enough to temporarily keep him bogged down.
Therefore, awakening El'Jonson was a completely natural step.
The Lion's Warp essence offered virtually flawless mobility.
Just as in the original timeline's future, the awakened Lion El'Jonson would use his Forest Walk to continuously move across the Imperial Nihilus frontiers—areas where the Astronomican could not reach on the other side of the Great Rift—jumping from one planet to another, bringing hope and victory to countless Imperial worlds.
That kind of speed and efficacy was something no other Primarch could match.
Furthermore, to maximize this mobility, Adam had arranged for the Aeldari and all manageable military units to plant forests inside the Webway as their very first task upon entering.
Genuine Caliban ancient trees, grown using fragments of the Ouroboros, would serve as teleportation anchors for the Lion's Forest Walk.
With this, the old Lion's speed would truly soar.
He could teleport everywhere, vanishing from one anchor and appearing at another, operating with top-tier efficiency.
The corners of Adam's mouth curled up slightly.
If one day a traitor Primarch stirring up trouble deep inside the Webway opened his eyes, only to see a fully armed thunderous giant lion pop into existence right before him with a 'swish', that would be quite amusing.
As for why he was doing this, the reason was obvious.
Adam had already begun writing his absolute formula for victory.
The dawn of victory was waving at him.
And the critical step he had to take now was to do everything possible to prevent the Chaos Gods from causing trouble, allowing himself to devour all the C'tan shards on the chessboard step by step, and ultimately crush the enemy into the dirt.
Thus, right now, he had to aggressively interfere with their actions. Even if he couldn't completely succeed, he had to create the illusion that he wasn't entirely confident about the final moment.
This would also force them into making various miscalculations.
This could be considered something Adam had learned from the Emperor.
Or rather, a reverse takeaway summarized from the Emperor's appallingly terrible communication strategy.
The Emperor's godlike blunder was, in his view, completely undesirable.
Adam's approach was different.
The Chaos Gods knew nothing about it.
The Webway was fundamentally a creation of this universe itself—though exquisite, the Chaos Gods had long grown familiar with its existence over ten thousand years of conflict, and they could make reasonable guesses regarding potential strategies humans might employ upon entering it.
However, what was a reality warper?
Forget the Chaos Gods; even Adam himself didn't know how terrifying he would become if he actually broke through to a Level 5 reality warper.
When even he didn't know what his trump card was, how could the opposing side guard against it?
With that thought, Adam gathered his mind.
He didn't ponder further, because something in front of him interrupted him.
Right before Adam, the Tyranid hive fleet that had just receded like a tide was now spreading back like ocean waters once more.
Their numbers were boundless. Dense Warp psychic fluctuations connected across the void, reaching a density so high it nearly warped space itself.
Their bodies formed a flowing tide of devourment. Huge hive ships slowly rotated their tentacles, advancing silently through space.
Truth be told.
Isn't this a bit too much?
Adam scratched his head, clearly troubled by the situation.
For a being like him, the only practical advantage the Tyranids could bring to the table was indeed just that single point—infinite, boundless numbers.
After crossing the Great Wall of Black Holes, the Great Devourer had finally learned its lesson.
It no longer concentrated all its forces in a single spot. Instead, it immediately scattered its armies in countless directions, infiltrating along every possible path, and successfully breached the Milky Way.
Right now, having penetrated deep into the galactic fringe, they spread rapidly, using their horrifying numbers to devour everything in sight.
Including this star.
In front of Adam, a star had been completely surrounded by tens of thousands of Tyranid swarms.
The bugs were like myriads of ants devouring an elephant—dense, layered, covering the star's surface so thoroughly that its light was barely visible.
They ignored the terrifying, extreme heat, using a biological adaptability that surprised even Adam to utilize that violent energy.
What was even more sickening was their feeding efficiency. The swarms were extracting the star's mass and energy at a staggering rate, turning it all into a means of reproduction.
Huge black craters constantly collapsed across the stellar surface, only to be filled and covered again by incoming waves of bugs. The star's brightness visibly dimmed; in a short span of time, this sun's lifespan had been artificially shortened by billions of years.
This was far more terrifying than a Dyson sphere.
Adam suddenly had a very unsettling conjecture.
Given this speed of devouring and reproductive efficiency, the extragalactic systems surrounding the Milky Way... hadn't they already been devoured clean by them?
It was just that, due to the limit of the speed of light, the imagery of those galaxies' destruction hadn't had time to reach the Milky Way yet.
This guess was quite logical.
However, Adam didn't bother using his reality-warping abilities to verify it.
He simply raised his hand and aimed at the sun being gnawed on by billions of bugs.
Then he clenched his fist.
Reality yielded.
The nuclear fusion balance that was supposed to last for billions of years was forcibly broken by an external force.
All the energy within the star's core exploded simultaneously. It was a supernova explosion compressed to the absolute limit, like a fire of judgment cast down by God.
A helium flash ten thousand times more terrifying than a normal stellar end surged forth.
Blinding white light engulfed the entire void, cloaking an area half the scale of a star system in destructive brilliance.
The light was so intense that within its light cone, every shadow was utterly erased.
Next came the shockwave—a massive ring-shaped wave composed of pure energy and stellar matter expanded outward at sub-light speed, annihilating every swarm along its path.
That's right!
This was Adam's method!
As long as I kill the hostage in advance, you won't be able to get any benefits out of it.
Didn't expect that, did you?
Violent flames devoured those bugs completely. Massive swarms perished right here; their biomass bodies couldn't leave behind a single trace of residue in the face of star-level destruction.
Looking outward from Adam's position, across several light-years of void above and below, that star's final swan song shone like a lighthouse, illuminating the entire battlefield.
In the eyes of all humanity, it was the light of hope.
Led by the Gloriana-class 'Queen', 'Unity', and 'Hope', the massive bulk of the 'Phalanx' advanced slowly like a moving fortress array. The Blackstone Fortress's terrifying anti-Warp field cast an indescribable shadow across the void, and every time the Planet Killer's main cannon charged, the entire hull emitted a deep rumble.
These immense war machines, whose names could usually only be heard in legends, were now exerting power together, pouring their wrath and the most terrifying weapons ever crafted by humanity into every corner of their vision.
The light from countless warship main guns firing in unison formed a flowing river of brilliance!
On a more micro level, the battle was equally fierce.
Through dimensional teleportation, Astartes veterans clad in Terminator armor stepped directly out, appearing inside the Hive Ships.
The roar of storm bolters and the snarl of chainswords blended with the shrieking of the swarms. These transhuman warriors bred from gene-seed carved blood-soaked paths by force, planted black hole bombs in critical locations, and then withdrew via dimensional teleportation just the same.
Micro black holes manifested out of thin air at key nodes, their terrifying gravitational singularities dragging vast numbers of hive ships inside, where not even light could escape.
Giant Hive Ships let out dying wails that propagated through Warp ripples to every Tyranid consciousness node—yet in the end, they could not escape their fate of death.
This was the war between the Empire and the Tyranid swarms.
Boundless numbers pitted against extreme, terrifying quality.
At such intensity, even Necron dynasties that had personally lived through the War in Heaven would likely fall into a long silence upon seeing it.
Some Overlords who had just woken from the Great Sleep and were still somewhat addled had already begun to question whether they had awakened in the wrong era, cordially greeting the Silent King who had originally proposed the "Great Sleep" strategy: 'Has your brain gone soft?'
'This is what you meant by sleeping for sixty million years to dodge the Aeldari's peak, and then coming out to clean up the mess once we wake up—'
'You call this a mess?'
Regardless of what the Necrons thought, Adam also fell into a brief silence and contemplation.
How to put it? This was indeed a bit tricky.
The Tyranid numbers had completely become their greatest advantage—impossible to chop clean, impossible to kill off.
No matter what means he used to sweep the void, more hive ships always surged out from the dark depths of the star sea to fill the gap, reassembling lines, endlessly advancing like a rising tide.
What was even more troublesome was their adaptive evolution.
Adam watched with his own eyes as a certain weapon system that had just harvested entire fleets of bugs in a single blow lost almost all efficacy by its second broadside.
It was truly the worst kind of annoying enemy.
However, for a reality warper, this trick was ultimately ineffective.
Because the methods he could pull out far exceeded the upper limit of Tyranid adaptation.
Before a single attack pattern was fully adapted to, he could instantly switch to another.
The sheer variety of methods, the speed of variation, and the terrifying power were things no biological evolutionary mechanism could ever hope to match.
Of course, the Great Devourer probably didn't think so.
In the primitive perception of the Hive Mind, a humanoid entity like Adam was probably far past being simple trouble.
'What kind of monster is this? I want to report someone for cheating!'
Adam pulled his attention back from the battlefield.
He had to think of a way to expand his strike area.
Regardless, tearing through bugs by hand was cathartic, but the efficiency still wasn't high enough.
Wait, got it.
Adam's eyes suddenly lit up.
How about trying toxins?
This wasn't some groundless fantasy.
Using poison against Tyranids was something long documented in official Warhammer lore.
Whether it was the Imperial Deathwatch, the Tau Empire's Earth Caste, or the Plague Marines of the Chaos Death Guard, all had used toxins against the Tyranids with varying degrees of success, but it was at least viable.
In previous battles, Adam had used various large-scale physical law strikes.
He had never tried using toxins against these things before.
So there was no harm in giving it a shot.
No sooner said than done.
When Adam opened his eyes again, he had already appeared inside the Black Library.
This mysterious hall belonging to the Aeldari remained as quiet as a tomb.
"How may I be of service, my Lord?"
Cegorach quickly rushed forward to greet him. The Aeldari Laughing God bowed his head respectfully.
For the Cegorach standing here right now, he was indeed very happy.
Across all parts of the galaxy, Aeldari craftworlds were rapidly breaking free from Slaanesh's control and consumption.
Those Aeldari souls struggling on the brink of extinction now had a new home—the power of reality warping had carved out a safe virtual space for them within the Warp, where every deceased soul could return, precisely protected and intercepted.
And as long as those souls remained, they could rapidly return to the real universe under the protection of the God of Death to be resurrected.
This was practically an immortal army.
Those Aeldari once shrouded in the shadow of Slaanesh, those kin who had been frozen for tens of millions of years following the "Fall," were gradually regaining their vitality.
Nothing could make Cegorach more satisfied than this.
Adam waved his hand, signaling that pleasantries were unnecessary.
"I brought you here to ask about a specific situation," he said.
Cegorach immediately bowed his head once more, his posture bordering on devout: "I shall speak all I know, and leave nothing unsaid."
Adam asked his question directly: "Well then, you know the Aeldari goddess Isha, right? At this moment, are you able to perceive where within Nurgle's Garden she is located?"