Chapter 510: If the Eldar Can Walk This Path, Why Not Mankind?
The Dawnbreakers understood the weight of their station, regardless of how many decades they had spent in this reality.
To live within this galaxy, for those who truly understood its underlying mechanics, was a perpetual lesson in humility. Despite their unique "transmigrator's foresight" and their inherent metaphysical boons, they had watched the Imperium from the outside for long enough to know that arrogance was a death sentence.
They loathed the state of human existence, and they had utilized their knowledge to pivot the Imperial machinery toward a better future. They were now lords of vast sectors, wielding authority that rivaled the High Lords of old.
But they never forgot the baseline truth: the greatest "Protagonist" of this universe had been beaten into a quadriplegic state and was currently anchored to the Golden Throne.
The Emperor's ancient companions—the Perpetuals who had wreathed His path since the dawn of history—were gone. Ollanius Persson, the First Warmaster; Erda, the Mother of Primarchs; John Grammaticus, the Cabal agent; Malcador the Sigillite... every soul close to the Emperor had been hunted and extinguished by the machinations of the Four. None had been spared.
This reinforced a cold discipline within the transmigrators. They could no longer afford the casual optimism of their early days. Every decision was weighted. They sought a path that was not merely legendary, but strategically viable.
And their plan for the future was a simple one: The Grand Plagiarism.
As one of the victors of the War in Heaven, the Necrons had chosen a path of pure materialism. To the modern observer, that path was a catastrophic failure. Souls existed. The objective link between sapient life and the Empyrean was an undeniable law of physics. To ignore it was to be a biological computer; a lesson the Necrons had learned only after the C'tan had hollowed them out.
Then, there were the Eldar.
"I must once again offer My Lords my gratitude for Your clemency, and to Lord Huron for his decisive intervention. The Guardian of the Maelstrom is a consummate statesman; it is a tragedy that the circumstances of the war did not grant us the luxury of a more leisurely negotiation."
Thorgrim Grudgebearer, High King of the Votann, accepted the resettlement protocols from Yvraine. He watched the Eldar secretary—now seamlessly integrated into the Primarch's retinue—and noted that the xenos enjoyed a status identical to that of a baseline human official. It was a reality that sat uncomfortably in his gut.
But Thorgrim was the elected leader of a people who had been hammered by the Warp and lost ninety percent of their population. He could not afford a failure of etiquette. He surrendered his pride and bared his hand to the Primarchs.
"The opportunity before us is singular. The Kin shall respond to the Sires' directives with absolute fidelity."
He handed over a hardened data-drive containing the STC fragments and technical secrets remaining in the Thurian archives.
Beside him, Thorek Ironbrow made no effort to hide his scrutiny. The Brew-Priest stared at the young Eldar secretary with a mixture of suspicion and bewilderment. He could not fathom how the Aeldari had secured such a prestigious ecological niche within the human hierarchy.
The answer was simple: United Front Value. The Eldar provided a utility the Kin had yet to match.
It was a cold political truth for a race that had not yet evolved to the level of the Old Ones. Until Humanity reached a point where it did not need to count its losses, diplomacy was a survival mechanic. If the Orks ever managed to "fix" a Webway gate and walk out to offer a tech-sharing agreement, the Dawnbreakers would greet them with smiles and a stack of "Sanctioned Abhuman" mandates.
Ramesses, watching the negotiations from his post in "The Park," couldn't help but click his tongue at the history of the Aeldari.
Sixty million years.
An eon of absolute galactic hegemony. They were a natural psychic race with souls of iron and bodies of marble. Without a single modification, a trained Eldar could rival an Astartes. They were effectively immortal, their genome resistant to all but the most specialized rot. Their productivity was limitless, their tech-tree was a gift from the creators of the universe, and their Pantheon held dominion over both the Empyrean and realspace.
Behold the 'Chosen Ones.'
And then, there was Mankind.
Setting aside their fragile lifespans and biological limitations, the "Sanctioned" longevity treatments for humans topped out at five centuries. Beyond that, the flesh failed. Their physical baseline was a disaster—so much so that the Emperor had to engineer Custodes, Thunder Warriors, and Astartes just to make Humanity "competitive."
The Dawnbreakers had labored for a century. Excluding the Astartes, they had managed to raise the average human life expectancy by thirteen years. That wasn't even as long as the mandatory education cycles on Dawnstar.
The human genome was a shifting mire. In the two millennia since the Kin had diverged, the physical differences between the two branches had become a chasm. During the Dark Age of Technology, the "Evolutionary Visionaries" of the human race had experimented so wildly that the result was a chaotic tapestry of sub-species that would have made a Haemonculus applaud.
The joke remains: there are no wolves on Fenris.
The Emperor's singular achievement during the Crusade was the "Normalization of the Human Form"—enforcing a genetic identity that the Imperium could recognize. This was the foundation of the species' survival.
Add to that the Cybernetic Revolt, the birth of Slaanesh, the isolation of the colonies, and the xenos incursions... it was no wonder the Imperial elite obsessed over "Unity." To drift away from the central authority of Terra was to descend back into the nightmare of the Old Night.
And the souls of men? A spectrum of chaos. From Malcador—a Perpetual of near-godlike power—to the wretches who were possessed the moment their psychic potential flickered.
And the psychic tech?
In the 41st Millennium, the Astra Telepathica's standard operating procedure was still organized superstition: choirs of blind men chanting to a dying sun in a cathedral.
You couldn't blame them entirely. The Eldar had turned the Warp into a toxic dump. Human psychic tech was a late-blooming science that had been denied the conditions to grow.
In the current Empyrean environment, no one short of a Dawnbreaker dared to dive in without a "cheat code."
CRACK.
A violent, rhythmic lashing echoed through the "Industrial Manse" of the Warp, followed by the agonizing screams of a daemon.
An Eldar "Dissector" swung a lash wreathed in psychic fire. With surgical precision, he struck the core of a bound daemon, exerting the maximum pressure allowed by the protocol.
The lash drew away a spray of fine, crystalline essence. The Dissector expertly rolled the particles between his palms, coalescing them into a cluster of glowing shards.
These were the raw, unadulterated memories of a Neverborn—the fundamental truths the daemon had sought to protect in its most animalistic state.
These memories were passed to the Seers of the "Knowledge-Line," where they were screened, filtered, and shared. Superior cadres then audited the data against the existing archives before final archival and integration.
Redundant data was moved to a sequestered sector, to be purged periodically. The Dawnbreakers were obsessive about "Empyrean Capacity"—they wouldn't allow "Trash Data" to compromise the security of their technical assets.
Once verified, duplicate entries were incinerated. The Seers in charge of this task were affectionately dubbed "The Cremators."
With the Eldar now fully aligned with the Dawnstar, the "Warp Park" was expanding rapidly. They had established a complete production cycle centered on the exploitation of daemons: Knowledge Extraction, Expansion of the Formless Hab-Zones, Pure-Warp Energy Harvesting, and the refinement of "Emperor-Engine" technology.
The requirements for the workers were simple: surgical psychic control, high trauma-resistance, and above all—absolute, unswerving loyalty to the Lords of the Dawn.
For the Eldar, this was a dream job.
Torturing daemons? They had no moral qualms about that. In fact, they found it cathartic.
As for "Latching onto Thighs"? They were masters of the craft. As long as their current master was better than Slaanesh, they would work until the stars burned out.
Ramesses, reviewing the status reports from his Eldar middle-managers, realized that they didn't care about being "Ruled." They cared about the "Thigh" they were hugging remaining solid.
The Aeldari were, at their core, a race without a traditional conscience. One could not let a few charismatic individuals blind them to the collective nature of the species.
If left to their own devices, they regress into the Dark City. We will not allow the moral standards of the Eldar to slacken.
But a massive bottleneck remained.
Ramesses' workforce was overwhelmingly Eldar. They were crowding out the "Human Employment Space."
The technology for uplift existed. Reliable deities were on the board. The framework of the Pantheon was being constructed—though the Emperor loathed the term, they would settle on a more "Secular" designation later.
But they lacked the Personnel.
The vast majority of Imperial psykers and Librarians were still stumbling through their "Remedial Eldar Tutoring." In professional terms, they hadn't even finished their foundational coursework. A "Thesis Defense" (Warp-Manifestation) was a distant dream. They weren't ready to lead.
Ramesses couldn't rely on the Eldar forever. What good was the tech extracted from the daemons if baseline humans couldn't operate it?
The Astartes were an option. Apart from Guilliman, the other Primarchs could effectively transform their Legions into "Loyalist Warp-Entities"—spirits that could shed their flesh like a husk to fight in the beyond.
But the Dawnbreakers wanted more. They wanted a path for the Common Man.
If they initiated the "Great Insurrection" (the decoupling from the Emperor), would the masses be included? Or would they be left to rot in the material world while the "Transhuman Elite" ascended into the Warp-Citadels?
The transmigrators were committed to the species. If they managed a project, they managed it to the end.
If the Eldar can walk the path of species-wide psychic evolution, why can't Mankind?
They refused to believe it was impossible.
But the Astartes template was too specialized. It relied on a genetic lottery. You couldn't "uplift" a trillion people using gene-seed; it didn't scale.
And the baseline human genome was too unstable. To attempt a mass-uplift without a proven methodology was to court a racial catastrophe.
But the Leagues of Votann possessed exactly what the Imperium lacked: a technology capable of bestowing specific traits upon a massive population in a short window.
Within the Votann archives sat a "Semi-Psionic" technology: The Barrier Protocols.
These were systems designed to stabilize and amplify the Kin's naturally dim psychic potential, allowing them to cast spells with the reliability of a high-tier human psyker without the attendant risks of possession.
This was the source of the rumors that the Kin were "immune" to the Warp. It was also why early Inquisitors suspected the Votann had influenced the "Greater Good" ideology of the T'au.
For a Humanity that was already looking at the "Eldar Template," the Votann technology was the missing link. By neutralizing the threat of "Spontaneous Combustion" and "Daemonic Incursion" at the local level, the species could finally advance.
The former T'au territories—now the "Pioneer Zones" of northern Ultramar—were being reclaimed by human colonists. They were stable, the Warp-currents were predictable, and they served as the bridge between Macragge and Dawnstar.
Not every Kin was a psyker. But the Cloneskeins handled the logistics.
The Cloneskeins could manufacture psychic-capable clones on demand—like the revered Brew-Priests.
"Our Cloneskeins are operational. The genetic sequences and underlying technical matrices remain uncorrupted."
Noticing that the Dawnbreakers were focused on species-wide uplift rather than mere military gear, the High King pivoted instantly.
He set aside his briefing on the Ancestor Cores to focus on the preservation of the Cloneskeins. He offered a silent prayer of thanks that it was Huron who had been sent to save them.
Had the Imperium sent a standard Crusade fleet, the Kin would have been stripped of their secrets and left to die in the ash. But Huron had practiced restraint. He had secured the tech before Abaddon could tear it apart.
Management is indeed a divine art, Thorgrim thought.
Huron might not be the greatest warrior of the Astartes, but he was undeniably their greatest bureaucrat.
Under the corrective gaze of his partners and the strict discipline of the Dawnstar, the "Tyrant" had truly realized his value.
Romulus turned to Guilliman.
"I believe we can begin localized implementation. I will oversee the technical security. Warp-interference with realspace tech is a known variable. As long as I anchor the logic-stream, the risk is negligible."
Chaos had spent ten millennia trying to sabotage the Astartes surgeries. It had failed because the gene-seed was bound to the souls of the Loyalists. Uplifting the common man followed the same logic.
Guilliman pondered the proposal.
As a survivor of the Great Crusade, he held a conservative view of genetic manipulation. The Dawnbreakers hadn't seen the "Human Horrors" he had—mutants that blurred the line between Man and Beast.
When he had authorized Cawl to begin the Primaris project, he had done so with a heavy heart, knowing he held the only hand at the table.
I am the only one who can carry this burden, he had thought then.
But now? The Emperor was watching.
And the Dawnbreakers had laid out a roadmap that the Eldar had already walked—and broken.
With Arthur as the strategic backup, and the pursuit of a better future as the goal, Guilliman decided the risk was worth the potential gain.
"I agree," he stated.
He began running mental simulations, drafting a dozen different contingency plans for when the uplift hit a snag. He signed the executive mandate alongside Romulus.
The secretarial pool snatched the document.
Their job was to take the High King's technical specs and turn them into a "Pilot Program" for a designated world.
The Imperium had time now. They would move brick by brick. Solve the errors. Overcome the friction. They would not repeat the mistakes of the past by launching a "Total Revolution" that ended in anarchy.
This was why the Dawnstar's educational reforms had been so slow; Romulus was an artist of the "Grind."
Guilliman emerged from his calculations and looked back at the High King.
The genetic uplift was one thing. But the Votann possessed a second, even more provocative technology.
He swiped his display to the next data-block. A 3D-projection of a crystalline, skull-shaped logic-engine manifested before the council.
The Ancestor Cores.
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