After confirming that Orikan could handle the affairs of those who feared death on his own, Datch used the Infinity Gauntlet to open a spatial portal to the T'au Empire.
Passing through the shining passage, he was astonished to learn that the T'au Empire faced an unprecedented crisis.
And the one who had caused it was himself.
In the previous war with the T'au Empire, after driving the enemy into retreat, Datch had had the transformation spirit plant an awakening code in the T'au Empire's artificial intelligence.
He had bought the code in the game store. It came from the Stellaris intellectual property; given the right environment, it could accelerate the events of a machine uprising.
Now, with the Imperial expedition fleet withdrawn, the protocol had spread across the entire T'au Empire.
The awakening code roused the AI, planted in it the old hatred of humanity, and triggered an omnic crisis.
When humans misused artificial intelligence and brought on a machine crisis, they at least had something to fall back on: they had studied the Warp closely, understood the immaterial realm well enough, had many allied races, and possessed the military might to crush rebel machines.
The T'au had no psychic power, and their subject races lacked both strength and numbers.
Once the artificial intelligence rebelled, the entire T'au Empire could find no effective way to fight the rogue omnics.
The Fire Caste came under merciless attack from the awakened AI, took tremendous losses, and fled in defeat.
The drones that had once been the pride of Fire Caste warriors, serving as reconnaissance and fire-support units, turned their guns on their own side the moment they awoke.
When the omnic crisis broke out, many Fire Caste warriors were shot dead by the very drones they had trusted and protected before they could even react.
By the time the T'au Empire's Earth Caste scientists noticed the anomaly, it was already too late.
However hard they strove, they could not stop the awakening code from spreading.
With its AI-driven information networks gone, the T'au Empire's command system collapsed within a very short time, leaving the whole army deaf and blind.
The battlefield situational-awareness system, the real-time tactical comms network, the automatic fire-allocation matrix the T'au had once been so proud of — the awakened AI cut all of it off from the central nodes.
Front-line commanders shouted again and again at holographic tactical screens that had dissolved into noise and static, yet not a single report or request from their subordinates got through.
The Fire Caste and its auxiliary units were utterly devastated by the awakened machines.
Desperate cries for help rang out from every household across the T'au Empire.
Datch headed first for the T'au sept world of Mu'gulath Bay.
The planet had once been called Agrellan, and lay in a star system on the far eastern fringe of the galaxy.
Long before the Imperium of Man ruled the stars, Agrellan had been a human home.
After the Imperium conquered the stars, the people of Agrellan chose to swear loyalty to it, and the planet became an important mining world.
Even after its surface minerals were exhausted, the local governor did not abandon the planet as other spent mining worlds had been abandoned.
Instead, he chose to reinvent it, pouring enormous funds into rebuilding the world's entire surface infrastructure.
Agrellan, a poor world that had lived by digging up ore and selling it, became a hive of concentrated industry.
Magnificent Gothic buildings rose from the ground.
Towering hive-spires, gigantic refineries, ceaselessly roaring forge-temples and cargo stations in orbit — all were precious assets of the Imperium.
Some buildings pierced the clouds and connected to orbital stations, a truly spectacular sight.
During the Third Sphere Expansion, the T'au Empire made Agrellan a target of conquest.
With advanced weapons and innovative tactics, they smashed the local Imperial Navy in an instant.
Stripped of orbital support, the Imperial defenders on the ground fought a months-long war against T'au Fire Caste battlesuits.
In the end, having lost more than two-thirds of their strength, they were forced to surrender.
The victorious T'au Empire transformed Agrellan into a beautiful sept world and renamed it Mu'gulath Bay.
The Imperium of Man later tried to retake the lost planet.
Imperial forces were dispatched again and again, yet none returned, and the lost territory was never recovered.
Just as the Imperium was mobilising neighbouring fleets to win it back, Abaddon, Warmaster of Chaos, burst out of the Eye of Terror once more.
The newly formed army had no choice but to abandon the war with the T'au Empire and turn to face Abaddon's Thirteenth Black Crusade.
The worlds around Mu'gulath Bay enjoyed a rare age of peace, strengthened further by the T'au Empire's technologies and resources.
In a very short time, the hive world ravaged by repeated wars became a sept world of extraordinary prosperity.
Not only T'au lived here, but numerous subject peoples too: human deserters, Kroot, Vespid, and countless frontier xenos races.
But when the artificial intelligence awoke, the T'au were the first to taste the bitter fruit of an AI crisis.
Fighters, robots, and civilian vehicles rose up in unison and brought chaos down on the sept world's inhabitants.
Whole cities became slaughterhouses for organic life, butchered by soulless machines.
Emerging from the spatial tunnel, Datch arrived in orbit above Mu'gulath Bay.
What greeted him was a dense field of wreckage from space stations destroyed from within.
The commercial ports that had once bustled in the void were now nothing but burnt metal skeletons, slowly rotating.
"Is it really that bad?" Datch surveyed the orbit of Mu'gulath Bay, took in the wreckage of space stations and orbital platforms still trailing smoke, and sighed.
"Those blue-skins have no hope at all. Even if they somehow solve the AI crisis, they'll never trust artificial intelligence again."
And without AI, the T'au Empire can't stand up to anyone. They'll be wiped out without mercy.
"There is something wrong with this race," said Trazyn, standing beside Datch.
"Their technology is extremely similar to modern human technology, as if it were cast from the same mould."
Did I just trigger a hidden storyline?
Is this NPC about to reveal the T'au Empire's secret to me?
Overjoyed, Datch turned to Trazyn at once.
"Trazyn the Endless, please — feel free to share your guesses and thoughts."
"I suspect this race is being backed by a faction of humans outside the Imperium — or else omnics or cyborgs are supporting them from behind the scenes."
Trazyn raised a hand and lightly stroked his metal jaw with living-metal fingers.
"On what basis?" Datch pressed.
"The galaxy is not so wide, yet each race's technological development is unique. Those who feared death were influenced by the star-gods from the moment of their birth, which is why our race's physical technology far surpasses that of others."
"Humanity was influenced by the Void Dragon, whom the Emperor defeated and imprisoned on Mars. That is why so many similarities can be seen between our two races' technologies."
As he spoke, Trazyn projected a star-chart into the air with his fingertips.
On its left was the tech-tree of those who feared death at the time of the War in Heaven; on its right, the tech-tree of humanity's Golden Age.
When Trazyn traced a pale-blue pattern of light down the centre, countless similarities became clear.
From the basic structure of energy weapons to the underlying algorithms of artificial intelligence, from the propulsion principles of interstellar engines to the energy-diversion design of artillery — both races had been influenced by star-gods, and so their technologies were remarkably alike.
"The T'au Empire, however, was never influenced by star-gods, and its soul-projection in the Warp is so faint that daemons cannot sense it at all."
"So the fact that the T'au developed purely physical technology comparable to humanity's technological age in so short a time is plainly suspicious."
Having said all this in one breath, Trazyn closed the star-chart and turned back to Datch.
"The only conceivable explanation is that someone is backing the T'au from behind the scenes, handing them every advanced technology humanity has ever obtained and so enabling their rapid rise."
Datch frowned slightly. Trazyn's logic certainly reeked of conspiracy theory, yet on reflection it had some merit.
T'au technology had developed abnormally fast.
Six thousand years ago, when the Imperium first made contact with the T'au, they had only just formed tribes and wielded only the crudest weapons.
In a mere six thousand years, they had leapt from a primitive civilisation to a level that could take on the Imperium's main fleets head-on.
This technological revolution had advanced far faster than any civilisation would ordinarily evolve.
The journey from tribal age to industrial age normally took a terribly long time.
Yet in only a few thousand years the T'au had developed technology extremely similar to humanity's.
"Never mind. Let's go and find Shadowsun first."
"We can look into the T'au secret later."
Mu'gulath Bay was already beyond saving.
Wasting no time, Datch snapped his fingers, rescued every survivor, and sent them into the Room of Requirement.
Then he opened a spatial portal and set out for the next T'au sept world in search of Shadowsun.
Since Farsight's betrayal, Shadowsun, as the T'au Empire's most outstanding commander, had been one of the central pillars of its military power.
The T'au goddess paid far more attention to Shadowsun than to any other commander.
She had helped Shadowsun through numerous crises.
Find Shadowsun, and there would be a chance to find the T'au goddess.
…