Chapter 123 Could This Guy Be Any More Ridiculous?

“I think you all need to focus on the here and now,” the Emperor interjected, cutting his old friends’ tangent short. “Thanks to the traveler’s help, we currently hold an unprecedented advantage. Give it enough time, and we’ll wipe out the four Chaos Gods and forge a brand-new world.”

“You want us to do your dirty work, don’t you?” Alivia knew the Emperor’s shtick all too well. Every time he started giving these grand, sweeping speeches, it was a hundred percent guaranteed he was trying to hustle somebody.

“I swear, this is the very last time,” the Emperor promised, crossing his heart. “We’re absolutely going to succeed this time.”

“You said the exact same thing when you told me to guard Molech,” Alivia sneered with open disgust. “Not a single word that comes out of your mouth can be trusted.”

“It’s real this time, I swear it.” The Emperor raised a hand as if taking a solemn oath.

“If you tried to take out a bank loan using your credibility, they wouldn’t approve you for a single cent,” Oll scoffed at the Emperor’s oath.

Watching this unfold, Vane couldn’t help but click his tongue. So the joke about the Emperor’s credit score being too low to rent a public bicycle wasn’t just a meme—it was a cold, hard fact. If even his fellow Perpetuals didn’t trust him, you could only imagine the kind of god-awful, bridge-burning stunts this guy had pulled in the past!

“If you don’t trust the Golden Geezer, then trust me. As a traveler just passing through, I have absolutely no reason to lie to anyone,” Vane said. “I’m going to eliminate the four Chaos Gods, end all this madness, and restore peace to the galaxy so everyone can live a quiet, stable life.”

Vane’s guarantee clearly carried way more weight than the Emperor’s. Oll, Johnny, and the others huddled up, whispering amongst themselves. After a brief discussion with the other Perpetuals, Malcador looked a bit apprehensive but still braced himself and stepped forward.

“Respected traveler, may I ask you a question?”

“Shoot,” Vane said, turning to look at Malcador.

“Why are you willing to do all of this? From where I’m standing, doing all this doesn’t seem to offer you much of a benefit.”

Hearing the question, Vane chuckled. “Because I need to jump twice, and then fly.”

Malcador scratched his head, completely failing to understand what that meant. The other Perpetuals standing nearby were equally baffled.

“Anyway, there’s a massive payoff for me. You’ll all see when the time comes,” Vane added. “So beating the Chaos Gods is a win-win for everyone involved. And with the Pantheon established, the souls of the dead finally have a home.”

At that moment, Vane received a notification from his system.

[Quest Completed: Construct the Human Pantheon and establish a new order in the Warp. Reward: Conquest Progress +10%. Title Unlocked: The True Minecraft Creator God]

As of right now, his conquest progress in the Warhammer universe had officially crossed the halfway mark. All he had left to do was purge the traitor Primarchs and Chaos, fend off the Tyranids, and defeat the Necrons and the C’tan. Once those quests were checked off, the entire conquest would be complete.

—

Vane originally planned to deal with the Necrons and C’tan first, then figure out a way to stop the Tyranid hive fleets from invading the galaxy.

But while hanging around the city walls to catch a few daemons as collectibles and playthings, Vane accidentally discovered something incredible. Certain behavioral mechanics of these daemons functioned remarkably like the Villagers back in the Minecraft universe—making them the absolute perfect raw materials for redstone automation.

As long as you fed the daemons despair, fear, and other negative emotions, you could program them to execute specific tasks, almost like writing a line of code.

Vane tried trapping a daemon inside a wall. Through a cycle of feeding and torture, he realized they could actually animate the wall, causing it to grow jagged maws and spikes. It even forced the wall to grow at an absolutely insane speed, expanding rapidly into a towering, spiked barricade.

“Using this mechanic, I can totally use daemons to build a massive living wall wrapping entirely around the galaxy to block out the Tyranid swarms.”

Vane had been playing around with this idea for a while. Warp energy allowed for the construction of megastructures that would be nearly impossible to build in realspace, making it the perfect material for building a Galactic Great Wall.

After some tweaking, the living walls generated by torturing daemons contained absolutely zero biomass—they were nothing but pure stone and steel. Because of that, the Tyranids wouldn’t be able to extract a single drop of sustenance from the structure.

Faced with a giant, barren pile of rocks, the hyper-efficient Hive Fleets definitely wouldn’t waste their time and resources. They would simply detour around it or leave entirely.

“Traveler, what exactly are you doing?”

The Emperor, having just finished assigning tasks to Malcador and the other Perpetuals, walked over and happened to catch Vane in the middle of torturing a daemon.

“I’m figuring out how to use daemons to build a living wall that can shield the entire galaxy.”

Hearing Vane’s words, a massive question mark essentially popped into existence above the Emperor’s head.

“Isn’t that idea a little bit… completely insane?!”

“But it looks like it’s actually viable.” Vane turned to look at the Emperor. “Go catch me a few more daemons. I need them to run some experiments and verify the proof of concept.”

A flash of sheer helplessness crossed the Emperor’s eyes. He’s literally treating me like a pack mule.

Gripes aside, the Emperor still dutifully scurried off to catch daemons just as Vane ordered.

His efficiency was off the charts. Within a few days, he had wrangled up a massive pile of shivering, weak-kneed daemons. You couldn’t exactly blame them for being cowards, though. What kind of daemon wouldn’t go weak in the knees the second they laid eyes on the Anathema?

Even if the Greater Daemons serving under the four Chaos Gods showed up, their legs would turn to absolute jelly, too.

Vane stuffed the captured daemons into the foundation of the wall, siphoning Warp energy and negative emotions to feed them. Under his manipulation, the living wall expanded at a breakneck pace, growing into a colossal barricade tens of millions of miles high and billions of miles long. Compared to this titanic mega-wall, a battleship over a dozen kilometers long looked like a mere speck of dust floating before a towering mountain range.

Thankfully, Vane had the foresight to play it safe before starting the experiment, using his linking book to teleport out to a highway tunnel platform on the outer edge of the Sol System. By running the test out in the fringes, he ensured the daemon-fueled mega-wall wouldn’t completely destabilize Sol. If he had pulled this stunt near Terra, the rapidly expanding wall would have easily crushed countless ships and orbital stations, causing astronomical casualties.

“Looks like it actually works. We can just round up a ton of daemons and use them to build a wall that’ll keep the Tyranid swarms out of the galaxy.” Vane smiled as he looked up at the towering barricade. Once he checked the Tyranid defense off his list, wrapping up his last two quests would be a walk in the park.

“Let’s move out. We’re heading to the Eastern Fringe of the galaxy. That’s exactly where the Tyranids will kick off their invasion.”

Vane yanked the daemons back out of the living wall. The moment he did, the galaxy-spanning barricade shattered like fragile glass. The sprawling debris instantly ignited in eerie flames, burning away into drifting ash. In the blink of an eye, the majestic mega-wall vanished without a trace, as if it had never been there in the first place.

“Man, the Warp really is magical,” Vane marveled. “When we don’t need the wall anymore, we won’t even have to bother tearing it down. It’s incredibly convenient.”

Oll, Malcador, Trazyn, and the rest of the onlookers had their jaws practically glued to the floor the entire time. Using literal daemons as construction materials? Not even the Old Ones were that unhinged.

Meanwhile, the Primarchs—currently up to their necks in Imperial bureaucracy, troop deployments, and prepping for the new Great Crusade—immediately noticed the massive disturbance on the edge of the Sol System. When they found out it was just the Forefather running an experiment, casually planning to use daemons as mortar to build a galaxy-spanning wall to block the Tyranids, massive question marks essentially popped out of their heads.

Could this guy be any more ridiculous?!

—

Once the experiment was done and the concept proven, Vane grabbed Oll, Malcador, and Trazyn, boarded a warship, and set a course for the Eastern Fringe.

Utilizing the surviving stretches of the Webway, the fleet smoothly arrived at the easternmost Webway gate. This exit was hundreds of lightyears away from the nearest planet on the galactic rim, marking the absolute frontier of the Old Ones’ Webway system. Beyond this point, the Webway ceased to exist.

Out in the vast, freezing void, far beyond the edges of the galaxy, Vane tracked down a Warp rift. Right next to the tear in reality, he constructed a colossal, utterly indestructible prison out of bedrock to house the captured daemons.

These fiends were chained to torture racks, subjected to unimaginable agony every single second of the day. Naturally, he also hooked them up to feeding tubes specifically designed to pump negative Warp energy and emotions directly into their bodies.

Once the setup was complete, Vane fused the daemons straight into a foundation wall, animating it and triggering its hyper-growth.

Driven by the agonizing shrieks of the daemons, the living wall expanded faster than the speed of light. In a matter of seconds, it transformed into an endless, towering barricade.

“With this wall, we can completely stonewall the Tyranid invasion.” Using his linking book to pop back onto the warship, Vane looked pretty damn pleased with himself. “I am an absolute genius.”

“Hey, Golden Geezer,” Vane called out. “Warp daemons are incredibly useful resources! Why do you guys treat them like horrific plagues and world-ending monsters? That is a shameful, prejudiced waste of perfectly good raw materials.”

The Emperor, Malcador, Trazyn, and the rest of the crew just exchanged helpless looks when they heard that.

Does he really think everyone can just casually crush daemons like they’re popping bubble wrap?

Completely oblivious to their internal griping, Vane continued his impassioned speech, occasionally waving his hands to emphasize his points.

“Starting today, we need to protect daemons, farm them, and establish a fully automated daemon assembly line. We’re going to build a comprehensive industrial supply chain!”

“On top of that, we need to form dedicated daemon-hunting squads! Use every trick in the book to capture them alive and ship them straight to this prison. We’ll let them burn off their excess energy and contribute to the defense of the galaxy!”

Hearing all of this, the daemons that hadn’t yet been stuffed into the prison genuinely wanted to burst into tears.

Who the hell is the real heartless monster here?! He actually wanted to farm them! He was literally treating them like disposable batteries!