Levi chased through the dense forest for a full three hours.
His psychic perception bit tightly onto that faint blue psychic trace, but whenever he was about to catch up, the trace would always vanish into thin air behind some inconspicuous rock or beneath an old tree.
He cleaved apart over a dozen seemingly ordinary boulders and dug up several areas of the ground, yet he didn’t even find the shadow of a Webway gate.
Those Eldar were like they had melted into the air, leaving only an indistinct psychic aftertaste to prove they had once set foot on this land.
It was not until the setting sun dyed the entire ancient oak forest red that Levi was forced to stop.
Looking at the last wisp of psychic trace gradually dissipating in his hand, his brows knotted together tightly.
The concealment of the Webway far exceeded his imagination.
As long as the Eldar actively closed the entrance, even if Magnus came personally, he might not necessarily be able to find that door hidden in the dimensional crevices from the real universe.
When he returned to the Holy Oak Castle covered in dust, the Thousand Sons’ search had already fully commenced.
Amon led the psychic scholars of the five great schools, using psychic detection arrays to sweep every inch of land within the castle and the surrounding hundred kilometers of dense forest; the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus activated the most advanced spatial detectors, not even sparing the rock strata a hundred meters underground.
Yet the result was nothing.
No abnormal spatial fluctuations, no hidden psychic beacons, as if that sudden attack had merely been an illusion.
“Perhaps this was just a coincidence, and they just happened to run into you.”
Magnus tapped the tabletop during the war council, his tone carrying a trace of relief.
“The Eldar temporarily opened a passage to search for the array and closed it after use.
Since the array has already been destroyed, they probably won’t come back.”
The core members of the Thousand Sons nodded in agreement one after another.
Only Levi did not speak.
His brows were tightly furrowed, still suspecting it was not this simple, yet he could not perceive where the abnormality lay.
Three days later, the Thousand Sons fleet weighed anchor and set sail.
The massive crimson fleet sailed into the Warp, continuing to advance toward the depths of the sea of stars.
Over the next ten months, the crusade went exceptionally smoothly.
They successively conquered four human colony planets and one xenos world, encountering no decent resistance, much less running into any Warp anomalies.
It was as if that heart-stopping moment on Varnum II was merely an insignificant interlude on the journey of the Great Crusade.
He was still that calm and self-possessed Chief of the Corvidae School, spending most of his time every day with Magnus, organizing ancient tomes, analyzing runes, and deducing psychic theories.
The two often stayed in the research room of the Photep for days and nights on end and would actively seek out Levi for discussion if they occasionally encountered a difficult problem.
His speech and behavior were normal.
He never brought up his dead brother Ohrmuzd again, nor did he mention that shattered resurrection array again.
As for Levi, he completely lived the life of the “head librarian” of the Photep’s library.
As the first and only Chief Librarian in the history of the Thousand Sons Legion, his duties were blurry and unclear from the very beginning.
This position was completely tailor-made for him by Magnus, with no precedent, no regulations, and not even defined subordinates.
Magnus only gave him a general order: “Take charge of all the books in the legion, and all the things that ordinary people must not touch.”
In plain words, it meant the Chief Librarian concurrently served as the Chief hazardous materials Custodian.
This perfectly matched the request Levi had initially made to Magnus—to focus on researching psychic knowledge.
Levi gladly accepted this.
As a Gloriana-class battleship, the Photep was originally a world-destroying behemoth of interstellar warfare, but in Magnus’s hands, it became a mobile galactic repository of knowledge.
The library, spanning a full nineteen decks, was piled high with all the documents the Thousand Sons had captured along the way from the Unification Wars on Terra to the Great Crusade.
Psychic grimoires of Prospero, technological manuscripts from the Golden Age of Technology, historical records of alien civilizations, and even several crates of stone tablets dug out from Necron tombs.
His daily work was simple and repetitive:
Holding a data slate, he scanned books deck by deck.
Useful psychic knowledge, lost runes, and alien technological blueprints were all scanned into the system in exchange for points; those manuscripts lightly polluted by the Warp, unstable psychic artifacts, and ancient seals that even Magnus did not dare to easily dismantle were directly thrown into the system to be sold.
[Detected Warp Engine Blueprints (Incomplete Fragment): Exchange Price 1200 points]
[Detected Soul Binding Ritual, Exchange Price 450 points]
…
The numbers on the system panel surged wildly all the way.
From over a hundred thousand previously, it broke through the five hundred thousand mark in just ten short months.
Looking at the huge sum of five hundred thousand in his account, Levi excitedly opened the system shop, wanting to exchange for a Third-Circle or higher wizard battle-axe to replace the standard power axe in his hand that he had used for almost a year. This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
But when he clicked the exchange button, the system popped up a cold prompt: [Insufficient permissions.
Only official wizards may exchange for Third-Circle and higher items].
Not giving up, he tried a few more Third-Circle wizard tools, but the results were all rejections.
Unreconciled, Levi clicked open the Wizard Forum, wanting to find a way to bypass the permissions, but unexpectedly scrolled past a thread: Don’t be a sucker!
The wizard tools in the system shop seem to have no restrictions, but they are all crippled, defective products.
Their power is not even as good as wizard tools of your own level.
Levi’s heart trembled, and he immediately clicked into it.
Before he could carefully read through it, the thread was deleted at lightspeed by the administrator, disappearing without a trace.
Only then did Levi dispel the thought of buying Third-Circle or higher wizard tools.
He actually knew that it was impossible for the system shop to truly sell completely unrestricted wizard tools.
Otherwise, wouldn’t those low-level wizards have the chance to overthrow the established power level order of the wizard world by relying on the highly powerful wizard tools they bought?
However, he still bought a Third-Circle wizard tool.
If he didn’t buy some good things when he had money, what motivation would he have to save points?
That wizard tool was an abyssal battle-axe forged from abyssal black iron, capable of amplifying his own psychic power to the maximum extent.
He also bought a pile of Third-Circle defensive wizard tools for self-defense but quickly discovered that the usefulness of these things on the interstellar battlefield was limited.
When a blast from an enemy lance struck, the Third-Circle defensive wizard tool shattered on the spot, and because it used his own mental power as an energy source, it even caused a throbbing pain in his brain.
Only then did he understand that in an interstellar war, ordinary wizards were fundamentally incapable of changing the course of heaven and earth.
I am afraid only by reaching the realm of a legendary wizard could one sway the victory or defeat of a campaign.
Afterward, he exchanged for a batch of high-tier, single-use, destructive wizard items and stuffed them all into his system space to serve as a mobile ammunition depot.
Levi firmly believed that the best defense was a good offense.
He also almost never returned to his own battle barge, the Crimson Tome.
Over time, the Thousand Sons warriors on that ship also grew accustomed to the days without a commander.
They handled all daily affairs themselves and would only send someone to find him at the library of the Photep if they encountered a problem they truly could not solve.
Thaniel_a_goodchild.