Warhammer: Empire Reboot

His physical body can be destroyed.

But his consciousness, his ego, will live on forever in the swarm network.

As long as the internet exists, he will not perish.

This is far cleaner than the chaotic immortality.

The immortality promised by the God of Chaos is essentially a form of enslavement; your soul is twisted, crushed, and reshaped into a strange being wearing your face.

Distributed storage provides true, complete, and tamper-proof self-continuation.

It took Lawson three seconds to process this information.

Then he clicked on the third notification.

[Core Functionality Restructuring: Psionic Awakening, Already Awakened.]

Lawson's finger hovered above the panel for a moment.

Psychic power.

In the Warhammer universe, these two words are the sharpest of all double-edged swords.

Human psionicists' power originates from the warp. Their souls resonate with the warp, receiving energy like an antenna and then transforming it into physical effects in the real world. They are capable of telekinesis, precognition, telepathy, firestorms, and much more.

But the warp is the domain of the four Chaos Gods.

Each time energy is drawn, it's like stealing something from the territory of the God of Darkness.

Stealing too little, the gods might not notice. Stealing too much, a line of vampires will appear at your door. Stealing too much, demons will crawl along the antenna between you and the warp and devour your soul for dinner.

This is the root of the Empire's contradictory attitude towards psykers: extreme dependence on them, yet also extreme fear of them.

Lawson continued reading, then raised an eyebrow.

[Psionic Awakening: Through a swarm network, the host gains preliminary psionic abilities. Energy source: Not externally extracted.]

Non-externally drawn type.

The explanation on the system panel is very brief.

When a thousand brains are connected in parallel through a swarm network, the weak bioelectric fields of each individual resonate and superimpose, converging into a psionic field powerful enough to produce observable effects at the physical level.

The energy originates from the biological activity of the bee colony network itself and has never passed through the subspace. Its use will not generate any ripples or signals in the subspace.

Lawson read the passage twice.

It's like finding a well that doesn't belong to the four dark gods in their territory.

The Tyranid Hive Will is also an endogenous psionic power, but it is a massive hammer. Trillions of insectoid organisms crush everything with sheer sheer size, lacking finesse, and its sheer scale creates a negative presence in the warp, making it a detectable anomaly in itself.

Unlike other forms of swarm energy, every wisp of bee energy operates under the precise control of the host.

Currently available abilities: Psionic Shield (low strength), Extended Perception, Psionic Resistance (passive). Improvement path: Increase the number of assassins, and the psionic strength will increase linearly accordingly.

Lawson read all three instructions.

He slowly closed the system panel.

Then he smiled.

Swarm intelligence and distributed consciousness storage gave him a true foothold in this universe where death is the norm.

These two abilities combined mean that Lawson is no longer an ordinary person who could be killed by a stray bullet at any moment.

It is a distributed, decentralized entity that is theoretically impossible to completely destroy.

At this stage, psionic power is indeed just icing on the cake.

Compared to those psionicists who can destroy a city with a single thought, they are like fireflies compared to the blazing sun.

However, the path to advancement is clearly stated: the more assassins there are, the stronger the psionic power becomes.

A thousand people is weak, but what about ten thousand? One hundred thousand? A million?

Chapter 50 A cat that catches mice is a good cat

Lawson didn't think any further.

The path beneath our feet is clear enough.

All that's left is to take it one step at a time.

The swarm intelligence begins operating the moment it awakens.

Lawson sensed the difference almost the instant he finished reading the instructions.

The sensory information from the thousand assassins continued to pour in, but it was no longer an unprocessed raw data stream.

Before information even reaches Lawson's consciousness, swarm intelligence automatically completes the filtering, classification, and prioritization.

It felt as if he had been reading through a thousand reports line by line with his naked eye, and now someone had arranged the core conclusions of all the reports according to their urgency and presented them to him one by one.

When the thought of continuing to hunt in Irontooth Territory crossed his mind, he could almost feel the swarm network vibrating in the background.

A thousand brains simultaneously accessed their stored terrain data, enemy intelligence, ammunition reserves, and physical condition, generating a detailed optimal execution plan containing more than seventy variables in less than a second.

The plan was directly written into the consciousness of the relevant suicide squad members.

Without receiving any specific instructions from Lawson, the fifty hunting squads automatically adjusted their patrol routes, redistributed ammunition, and updated their rules of engagement.

The improvement in efficiency is visible to the naked eye.

On the first day after swarm intelligence took over the tactical level, the total kill count of the fifty hunting squads increased by nearly 40 percent compared to the previous day.

It wasn't because we encountered more enemies, but because swarm thinking optimized the location selection and firepower configuration of each ambush, reducing the proportion of ineffective firefights from 15% to less than 3%.

Ammunition consumption rate actually decreased by 20%.

Lawson looked at the data and nodded in satisfaction.

Then he began testing his psionic abilities.

In the isolation chamber of the forging outpost, a one-meter square target was painted on the steel plate wall five meters in front of Lawson.

He focused his mind on his right palm.

At first, nothing happened.

Then he felt a warm force rising from inside his body, like a thousand extremely fine threads being pulled at the same time and then twisted into one.

A semi-transparent, circular energy shield, about thirty centimeters in diameter, condensed and took shape in front of the palm.

Lawson looked at the light membrane in his palm, which was less than the size of a washbasin, and felt the mental exertion required to maintain it.

It's roughly equivalent to doing three different math problems in your head at the same time.

The assassin standing to the side raised his laser gun and pulled the trigger.

The moment the laser beam hit the shield, the pale blue light film flickered violently. Then the laser beam was deflected by about fifteen degrees and hit the bulkhead next to it, leaving a shallow scorch mark.

The shield shattered after the deflection attack.

The pale blue specks of light, like shattered thin ice, dissipated into the air.

It can be shattered with a single laser gun shot.

Lawson was not surprised.

With a psionic strength of a thousand nodes, this shield is barely enough to withstand a basic laser gun shot. Against a bomb gun, it probably wouldn't even be able to slow the enemy down.

But it deflected the laser beam.

This means that the shield's defense mechanism does not rely on brute force to counterattack, but rather on changing the trajectory of attacks to achieve protection.

If the intensity is increased to a sufficiently high level, it could theoretically deflect the shots of any energy weapon.

Lawson noted this characteristic.

Next is extended perception.

Lawson closed his eyes and extended his thoughts outward.

At first there was nothing, only a warm darkness.

Then the darkness began to take on texture, like touching the contour lines of a huge map with your fingers while your eyes are closed.

His vision was expanding, and his consciousness, like an invisible hand, was spreading outward from the forge stronghold along the nodes of the swarm network.

One hundred meters... two hundred meters... when it reached three hundred meters, the expansion speed slowed down significantly, and the edges began to blur, like ink spreading to its limit on rice paper.

Ultimately, his perception covered a spherical area with a radius of approximately three hundred meters centered on the stronghold.

Within this range, he could sense the presence of every living being.

Three hundred meters is insignificant on the scale of a wrecked ship.

But Lawson's lips twitched slightly.

Three hundred meters is the limit of one thousand nodes.

Psionic resistance is passive and cannot be actively tested.

Lawson sat on the metal floor of the isolation pod, his eyes closed, his brain racing.

Psionic Shield, Extended Perception, Psionic Resistance.

Of the three abilities, extended perception is the most practically valuable at the current stage.

It gave Lawson a means of detection that transcended physical senses.

As his thoughts continued along the keyword "perception," an idea suddenly popped up from somewhere.

The little devil feeds on human negative emotions: fear, despair, and pain.

They can smell these emotions from afar, just as sharks can smell blood at a concentration of one ten-thousandth in the water.

Psychic energy can amplify emotions.

This is one of the most basic applications of psionic energy.

When interrogating heretics, Imperial psionicists often use psychic powers to amplify the fear and pain of prisoners in order to speed up the interrogation process.

Conversely, Chaos Psionicists also use psionic energy to amplify their negative emotions, using them as bait to attract and feed lower-ranking demons.

Lawson now possesses psionic powers.