…
Once the final design for the Star God shell had been approved, Qin Mo did not waste time with ceremony. The trial began immediately.
The Leviathan, a massive replica voidship built to serve as both mobile fortress and experimental platform, translated into a remote star system beyond the outer fringes of the Talon System. It emerged into silence, far from settled routes, Imperial charts, inhabited worlds, or anything likely to complain if two C'tan-class entities began dismantling local physics.
This was the system where the Shapeshifter had once been imprisoned. Later, a fragment of the Nightbringer had arrived here as well, only to be sealed away after a battle that had left the system scarred beyond recovery.
Because of its total isolation, with no nearby colonies, no stable warp lanes, no stations, and no strategic value except distance from everyone else, it had long ago been given a simple name: the Solitary System.
The only planetary body within it had been obliterated during the war against the Nightbringer's shard. Qin Mo had never restored it. There had been no reason to. The shattered world had become a dead field of broken mantle, blackened crust, and drifting planetary debris. Now that desolation served a purpose. It was the perfect arena for a test that no ordinary battlefield could survive.
Inside the Leviathan, Qin Mo and the Shapeshifter stood upon one of the ship's internal assembly platforms. The chamber around them was enormous, a hollow industrial cathedral once intended to house dormant Iron Men constructs. Vast restraint gantries hung from the ceiling. Maintenance arms rested folded along the walls like the limbs of sleeping insects. Cold spectral lights washed over polished metal, exposed power conduits, and the dark silhouette of the shell lying at the chamber's center.
The final preparations were underway.
The Shapeshifter adjusted itself with visible impatience. Its body flowed through potential war forms, testing each configuration for balance, surface density, weapon projection, and response time. One moment it resembled a blade-limbed predator. The next it became a floating armored sphere, then a four-armed humanoid warform with a featureless face and joints that did not follow human assumptions. Each shape lasted only long enough to be evaluated and discarded.
Qin Mo, meanwhile, focused on the Star God shell.
The warform rested before him like a dormant god-machine stripped of superstition and built for function. It stood five meters tall when fully upright, sleek and predatory in outline, its living-metal surface reflecting the chamber lights in muted silver-black bands. No ornamental skulls. No devotional carvings. No gold trim. Its authority came from precision, density, and the quiet threat of systems waiting to awaken.
It was no simple construct.
The shell had been forged from an enhanced form of necrodermis, refined far beyond the standard living metal used by the Necrons. Its regenerative properties had been strengthened, but regeneration alone was not enough. Qin Mo had embedded neurally adaptive control nodes through every layer of the frame, allowing the entire body to reconfigure at the molecular level in response to will, stress, and combat need.
In principle, it could grow, reshape, and adapt like flesh. In practice, it remained as hard and unyielding as the most advanced Necron alloys Qin Mo had studied, stolen, improved, or insulted into better performance.
The most important feature, however, was not its strength. It was its control system.
No Star God could be allowed to simply seize the shell. That risk would have made the entire project worse than useless. To pilot the warform, a consciousness had to pass through the Forgemaster Dimension first. The shell would not accept direct possession, psychic intrusion, dimensional hijacking, or any crude attempt by another C'tan shard to slip inside and wear it like stolen skin. The access route existed only through Qin Mo's private dimension, and the shell's internal beacon would recognize only him.
"Are you ready?" the Shapeshifter asked.
Its unstable visage shimmered as it finally settled into a battle-ready form: a tall knight of mercury and obsidian, lined with quicksilver veins and layered reflective armor plates. The shape was elegant, but not decorative. Every edge had purpose. Every curve suggested stored violence.
"One moment."
Qin Mo sat cross-legged before the shell and closed his eyes.
The chamber faded from his awareness. He separated his consciousness from his flesh and sent it inward, then beyond inward, passing through dimensional strata only he could properly perceive. The process was no longer painful, but it still felt wrong in the way all useful miracles tended to feel wrong. Matter, thought, energy, and information became different expressions of the same structure, stitched together by rules that belonged to him alone.
He searched for the beacon embedded in the shell.
It shone inside the Forgemaster Dimension like a miniature star suspended in a lattice of black glass and silver thread. Impossible to miss. Impossible for anyone else to reach without first passing through territory Qin Mo controlled completely.
He locked onto it.
His consciousness descended.
The shell accepted him.
Physical sensation returned all at once, but not as a human body understood it. He felt mass distribution before weight. Heat gradients before warmth. Radiation pressure before light. His limbs were not limbs so much as coordinated volumes of living metal waiting for intent. His vision opened across multiple spectra, then narrowed when he forced it back into a form his mind could interpret without becoming distracted by every vibrating atom in the room.
The shell's eyes ignited.
Qin Mo rose slowly. The platform groaned beneath the immense pressure of his five-meter body. Internal gyros compensated. Gravitic stabilizers settled. Adaptive musculature flowed into proper alignment beneath the necrodermis skin.
For a few seconds, he simply stood there and let the shell become natural.
"Now you are ready, I assume?" the Shapeshifter asked.
Qin Mo rolled one shoulder. The motion was smooth, heavy, and silent.
"Ready enough."
With a thought, he bent local space.
The Leviathan's chamber vanished.
Qin Mo and the Shapeshifter reappeared upon the largest surviving fragment of the shattered planet. The ground beneath them had once been part of a tectonic plate. Now it was an island of scorched crust drifting through vacuum, its surface fused into black glass by the violence of the Celestial Engine weaponry. Fracture lines glowed faintly with trapped radiation. Mountains had been sheared flat. Old impact basins overlapped one another like wounds cut into a corpse that could no longer bleed.
There was no atmosphere. No wind. No sound except what their own bodies transmitted through contact and field interaction. The silence was absolute, not peaceful but final.
Now it served as their battlefield.
Before the test began, Qin Mo turned his armored head toward the Shapeshifter.
"How do Star Gods usually fight?" he asked. "Do you throw raw laws of physics at each other, or does everyone eventually end up brawling with symbolic murder-tools like the Nightbringer's scythes?"
"Each Star God has its own style," the Shapeshifter replied. "The method is irrelevant. Only annihilation efficiency matters."
Without any further warning, the Shapeshifter raised one hand and attacked.
Qin Mo saw the projectile form before it moved. It was not plasma, not lightning, not a conventional energy discharge. It looked like a compact knot of unstable phenomena: light without a stable wavelength, force without a single vector, mass behaving as if it had become a suggestion rather than a property. Its surface shifted through colors his optical systems struggled to classify, and every meter it crossed left behind a different distortion.
Gravity spiked in one place and collapsed in another. Inertial values changed across knife-thin boundaries. Vacuum rippled as if invisible density gradients had been dragged through it by force. Loose fragments of planetary debris near the projectile were pulled inward, flung outward, crushed flat, and stretched into glittering dust within the same heartbeat.
Qin Mo did not move.
The attack struck him center mass.
The shell's right arm unraveled into spiraling threads of atomized living metal. His abdomen buckled inward, crushed into a localized singularity so small and brief that it should not have existed at all. Several layers of necrodermis lost cohesion. Internal adaptive nodes screamed warnings through his awareness. His left leg twisted out of alignment as the laws governing stress distribution changed around the impact site.
The Shapeshifter halted its next strike.
"Why are you not fighting back?"
"This is a test, not a duel," Qin Mo answered. "I'm measuring resilience."
He studied the damage while his body tried to repair itself. Direct energy puncture. Gravitic compression. Molecular shearing. Inertial inversion. Localized rule disruption. The attack had not merely damaged the shell. It had changed the conditions under which damage and repair were possible.
That was the problem.
If the strike had been physical, the necrodermis would already have closed. If it had been thermal or electromagnetic, the shell could have bled off the excess, restructured around the wound, and restored combat function in seconds. But the Shapeshifter's attack had rewritten the battlefield at the point of impact. Regeneration could not proceed cleanly while the wound existed under altered physics.
Qin Mo had to repair the rules first.
He forced each distortion back into alignment. Gravity normalized. Local inertia returned to sane values. Molecular bonds stopped behaving like unreliable witnesses. Only then did the enhanced necrodermis begin to flow, rebuilding lost mass, reconnecting adaptive nodes, and sealing the shell's damaged torso.
The Shapeshifter watched with genuine interest.
"Still necrodermis," it said, "yet far superior to what I have seen."
"I refined it by hand." Qin Mo lifted his restored right arm and tapped two fingers against the forearm plating. The sound did not travel through air, but both of them perceived the vibration through field contact. "There's a universal law even Star Gods might have missed."
"What law?"
"Handcrafted always beats mass-produced."
The Shapeshifter stared at him.
Qin Mo stared back.
"That is not a law," it said.
"It is if the craftsman is annoyed enough."
The Shapeshifter accepted that with the wary silence of something ancient enough to know that younger beings often created dangerous truths by insisting on them. Then it attacked again.
Another shifting blast of law-twisting force streaked toward Qin Mo, wider than the first and less coherent by design. It split, folded, and recombined as it crossed the distance between them, making any simple dodge meaningless. Unlike the Nightbringer, who had favored close combat, shadow, and the psychological weight of a killing icon, the Shapeshifter fought almost entirely at range. Its body changed form because its weapons changed function. It was not trying to overpower Qin Mo with one perfect strike. It was probing for the version of reality his shell handled worst.
This time, Qin Mo did not let the attack land cleanly.
He raised his right arm.
The limb reshaped before conscious design fully caught up with intent. Necrodermis split, rotated, and extended into a five-meter plasma cannon integrated directly into the shell's frame. Magnetic containment ribs formed along the barrel. Heat sinks unfolded across his shoulder and back. Internal power channels opened like floodgates.
Qin Mo almost laughed.
He had not deliberately chosen a cannon. His subconscious had simply handled the matter in the most direct way possible.
If you want to shoot something, use a cannon.
A sphere of compressed stellar fire formed inside the magnetic chamber. Not chemical flame. Not promethium. A dense, superheated plasma mass wrapped in its own containment field, fed by energy drawn through the shell until the entire arm glowed white beneath the living metal.
He fired.
The projectile crossed a kilometer in less than a blink, dragging a line of hard radiation through vacuum. The Shapeshifter responded instantly. Its humanoid form collapsed inward, becoming a dense reflective sphere with layered skins of living metal and force. It chose endurance over evasion, compressing itself to maximize resistance.
The fireball struck.
For one moment, the battlefield became brighter than the system's distant star.
The containment field ruptured against the Shapeshifter's outer layer, and the plasma expanded in a controlled catastrophe. A ten-kilometer circle vanished beneath a dome of white-orange radiance. The black glass crust liquefied. Ancient planetary stone boiled. Fragments of mantle trapped in the surface flashed into vapor. Even without atmosphere, the blast bloomed like fire because it carried its own heat, pressure, and matter. It was not combustion. It was a small, disciplined sun being allowed to misbehave.
Qin Mo was caught inside the outer edge of the explosion.
The shell endured.
Warning systems spiked. External layers softened. Radiant heat stripped a thin film from his armor before regeneration replaced it. Gravitic stabilizers dug into the fragment beneath his feet, preventing the recoil from throwing him into space.
When the light faded, the Shapeshifter remained.
It had not been destroyed, but it had been injured. Its spherical form sagged, cracked, and opened in places where the plasma had burned through outer layers faster than it could adapt. Then it transformed again, unfolding into a mechanized forge-like configuration. Internal cavities spun. Metallic ribbons fed through self-made assembly loops. New necrodermis poured from its own body, sealing wounds in liquid sheets.
While it repaired itself, its voice reached Qin Mo directly through controlled electromagnetic transmission.
"For a mere shell," the Shapeshifter said, "and not your true body, that output is sufficient."
Qin Mo did not answer immediately.
He stood amid the cooling glass and reviewed the data.
That shot had been the shell's maximum safe output. Switching to lightning would not exceed it. A melee strike would not exceed it. A precision beam might deliver energy more efficiently against a smaller target, but the total channel capacity remained the same. The shell had reached the limit of what it could sustain while drawing on C'tan-level power.
He could push beyond that limit. Theoretically.
The result would not be victory. It would be a very expensive self-destruct sequence wearing the shape of a warform. The shell would tear itself apart before the attack completed, and Qin Mo had not spent this much time refining enhanced necrodermis just to invent a five-meter suicide cannon.
Current output ceiling: approximately sixty percent of what his true body could wield.
That was not a failure. Not really. The shell was a prototype. A successful prototype, even. It had survived direct exposure to the Shapeshifter's reality-warping attacks, regenerated from localized law disruption, and delivered a strike powerful enough to injure a C'tan-class entity. Future iterations could be strengthened, widened, stabilized, and made more efficient.
But the result still bothered him.
The shell was purpose-built. It was living metal refined beyond ancient designs, reinforced by dimensional safeguards, tuned for his mind, and created specifically to carry the power of a Star God. By all engineering logic, it should have handled that power better than a human-shaped biological body ever could.
Yet it did not.
His original flesh-and-blood body remained superior.
That question stayed with Qin Mo long after the plasma glow faded from the broken world.
Why did his original body handle C'tan-level power better than this perfected vessel of divine engineering?
.....
If you'd like to support me and read a bit ahead, feel free to check out my Patreon. (https://www.patreon.com/c/Hemont).
Do you like this Novel? Then pls consider supporting me by Commenting or Rating it.
.....