Warhammer: The Time Traveler

Chapter 398 Primal Space Marines (Fourth Update)
For Chen Yu, performing surgery to replace the missing organ was merely a clumsy repair along existing, and in his view, flawed, technical paths.

He approached these Imperial Fist conscripts and delved into their physiological and genetic problems caused by organ loss, with a goal that went far beyond treatment.

His gaze pierced through the current technological predicament and turned to a more distant and grand goal—Ms. Astartes' original design blueprint.

As the original core designer of the Space Marine program, Lady Astartes envisioned an Astartes that was far from what the Empire sees today.

In her perfect design, the current Space Marines are merely an imperfect, transitional, half-finished product.

However, this grand plan was abruptly interrupted when its collaborator, Primarch Ilda, stole the Primarch still in development and scattered it throughout the galaxy.

Without the uncontaminated, purest genetic material of the Primarch as the final "key" and "stabilizer," Lady Astartes could no longer complete her final work of perfecting the Space Marines.

This unfulfilled dream and immense frustration ultimately led her, in despair and anger, to participate in a failed coup d'état launched by the Marshal of the Ministry of Justice against the Emperor. In the Emperor's presence, she committed suicide in the Emperor's genetic laboratory, ending her talented yet tragic life in the most tragic way.

However, her most crucial research data was not completely destroyed.

This invaluable technological legacy, containing the potential for the true perfect form of the Space Marines, was secretly preserved by the ancient biological gene cult that Chen Yu belonged to at the time.

When the sect was later purged, this priceless treasure, along with the last pure sample of the genetic material of the Twenty Primarchs preserved by Lady Astartes—the most original and flawless design templates of all twenty Legion Geneseeds—fell into the hands of Chen Yu, who was of low status but had survived by chance.

For centuries, Chen Yu had carefully guarded this secret, which was enough to overturn the foundation of the empire.

Now, faced with Roger Dorn's request and these conscripted soldiers suffering from various defects, he believed the time might have come.

The proposal he submitted to Dorn was ostensibly aimed at completely fixing the physiological defects and genetic mutations of the Expeditionary Forces, with the goal of "resetting" them to their optimal state under current technological conditions.

However, deep within the technical details of this plan, some theories and fine-tuning parameters derived from Ms. Astartes' original blueprint are subtly incorporated.

He intends to use this treatment as an opportunity to conduct a cautious "validation practice".

He not only wanted to repair these soldiers, but also wanted to take this opportunity to reactivate and test that long-forgotten, truly perfect design concept.

The original gene seed template in his hand is the ultimate guarantee for achieving all of this.

Chen Yu's ambition goes far beyond simply healing a group of warriors; what he wants to do is to pick up the unfinished dream of Lady Astartes and try to complete the ultimate blueprint for the "perfect warrior" that should lead humanity to a brighter future.

This is undoubtedly walking a tightrope; once its deeper purpose is exposed, the resulting shock will far exceed that of a warp drive.

But in Chen Yu's view, if humanity is content with merely patching up the existing, inherently flawed system, it will never be able to break through the current predicament. In order to cope with the potentially darker challenges of the future, he must take the risk and touch that original glory buried by the dust of history.

According to Lady Astartes' original design, the complete transformation of the Space Marines should be divided into three phases.

The first stage, namely the implantation and adaptation of the gene seed, has an ideal process that is fundamentally different from the current empire's approach.

In the initial, idealized concept, the transformation did not rely on complex and risky surgeries involving the implantation of pre-made artificial organs one by one.

Instead, it involves directly implanting highly purified gene seeds corresponding to a specific legion into rigorously selected modified individuals.

This genetic seed will serve as a complete biological blueprint and power source, guiding the growth of all necessary artificial organs directly within the modified subject through a sophisticated process that blends genetic engineering with mysterious bio-alchemy.

The biggest advantage of this "endogenous" modification method is that it can perfectly solve the problem of rejection reaction.

Since all organs are differentiated and cultivated from the patient's own cells under the guidance of genetic seeds, they are essentially homologous to the host's body at the physiological level, which greatly reduces the surgical failure rate and long-term adaptive complications.

This was originally intended to be a safer, more efficient, and more effective solution that would ensure the overall integrity and potential of the transformed warriors.

However, because the technical solution was not thoroughly perfected and standardized in the early stages, and because the Primarchs were dispersed, the state and integrity of the "templates" on which each Legion relied to cultivate the genetic seed—that is, their Primarchs—also varied, making it impossible to stably implement this ideal direct implantation solution in the vast majority of Legions.

Ultimately, in most Astartes legions, such as Imperial Fist and Ultramarines, the modification process degenerated into the more cumbersome and riskier model we see today due to technological limitations.

This means that individual artificial organs must first be pre-cultured in special cultured organs using gene seeds, and then these "foreign" organs must be implanted into the body of the modified person one by one through a series of complex surgical procedures.

This not only increases the risk of failure at each step, but also sows the seeds of long-term rejection and poor organ synergy.

According to the information Chen Yu had, among the twenty founding legions, only the Holy Blood Angels Legion, due to the exceptionally stable and near-perfect genetic structure of its progenitor Saint Gilles, successfully inherited and maintained this first-generation technology of "directly implanting gene seeds and autonomously generating organs within the body".

The advantages of this technical approach are not only reflected in the higher success rate of modification and the greater coordination between the warrior and the original body, but also bring a huge advantage that other legions can hardly match - a significant relaxation of the requirements for the quality of recruits.

Because the core of the modification lies in the endogenous guidance and adaptation of the gene seed within the host body, rather than the forced implantation of multiple independent external organs, the Blood Angels modification program exhibits astonishing inclusiveness and adaptability.

Its gene seed seems to possess a powerful "assimilation" and "correction" ability, which can, to a certain extent, be compatible with and integrate some of the host's original non-standard gene sequences.

For this reason, the Blood Angels Legion has far fewer requirements and restrictions on those who have been modified than other legions.

(End of this chapter)