Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Lin was a transmigrator.

In an era where isekai web novels were practically growing on trees, that kind of identity might not seem particularly remarkable — but what if the world in question was Warhammer?

Lin, at least, had never once entertained the thought of transmigrating into Warhammer. He'd loved all manner of hard and soft sci-fi, knew his way around the lore, had painted miniatures, and had even laughingly agreed to some Warhammer recruitment clause buried in a user agreement while playing one of the games. But when the dump truck actually delivered him to Warhammer in person, the only thought that crossed his mind was: get out.

Joke's on me — who in their right mind would voluntarily jump headfirst into a sewer?

But getting in was easy. Getting out was something else entirely. Once he confirmed there was no log-in/log-out system like in a video game, and once he accepted that he had absolutely no idea whether dying would send him back to his old world, Lin had no choice but to make peace with the fact that he was here, and Warhammer was home now.

Fortunately, his starting location wasn't a complete disaster. It wasn't some primitive backwater planet with nothing but medieval technology and zero prospects. On the contrary, he had landed on one of the famous Forge Worlds — the hive city of Forge World Huangquan VIII, no less. And the timing was perfect: the aftermath of the Horus Heresy, when the Forge Worlds and the Imperium of Man as a whole were rebuilding from the ground up.

It wasn't exactly the most epic era in history, but for Lin it suited him perfectly. The post-Heresy Imperium was in a golden age of reconstruction, hungry for technical talent of every kind, and while the environment was relatively safe, there was no shortage of room to climb.

Armed with the golden finger that every self-respecting transmigrator apparently comes equipped with, Lin wormed his way into the Adeptus Mechanicus and started from the bottom as a Tech-Acolyte, steadily rising through the ranks contribution by contribution. Once he earned the rank of Magos, he didn't hesitate for a single second — he liquidated every asset he owned, bought a lunar-class cruiser, retrofitted it into his own budget-tier Mechanicus Ark, and set off across the galaxy on an archaeological dig.

This sort of behaviour was hardly unusual among the Adeptus Mechanicus, where the pursuit of ancient STC templates was practically a religious calling. But Lin's motivations were fundamentally different from those Magi chasing STCs. His expeditions served a very specific purpose: feeding the golden finger — that entire brain of his crammed full of knowledge that had no business existing in this universe.

After arriving in Warhammer, Lin had discovered that the design schematics for all the technology he'd obsessed over in his old world's science fiction had somehow materialised inside his head. Things that had once been fictional concepts existing only within stories had become real, manufacturable objects.

Lin had at one point suspected that this bizarre knowledge was a 'gift' from some blue bird-headed individual, but his innate nature as a Blank had more or less put that worry to rest.

After joining the Adeptus Mechanicus, Lin immediately set about using the resources at hand to directly reproduce what those schematics described. Every single attempt ended in failure. As the failures piled up and experience accumulated, Lin gradually came to understand the problem: the rules of different universes were different. Design schematics from other fictional works didn't translate directly into the Warhammer universe. But by mastering analogous science and technology that already existed within Warhammer, and adding a healthy dash of gut-feeling intuition, Lin could reproduce the technologies and equipment of other universes into the Warhammer setting — done the Warhammer way, through his own two hands.

Once a production line was established, anyone could operate it normally. But the process of first reproducing a schematic from another work into Warhammer absolutely had to pass through Lin's hands. He had tested it once — drawn up the blueprints, prepared all the materials, and invited another Magos to follow the schematics and build the device. No matter what the man tried, he simply could not grasp the underlying logic. Even following the diagrams step by step to the letter, he would inevitably fail. Only after Lin personally completed 'a design from another world' and then taught it to others could anyone else learn the craft.

It was deeply strange — as though, until Lin had made something with his own hands and given it conceptual existence, these designs and schematics simply did not exist within this world at all.

This discovery also served as a warning. While the knowledge in his head was in principle protected before he personally fabricated it, the moment he built something with his own hands, the concept of that object could propagate normally throughout the Warhammer universe.

This reality forced Lin to apply his golden finger with far greater caution. He kept his human brain intact, ensuring the knowledge stored inside it couldn't be 'assimilated' and erased by augmentation. For the weapons and equipment he had already personally manufactured, he enforced strict controls on the spread of production knowledge, leaving behind at most production lines that were difficult to reverse-engineer. And he had to be careful about which schematics he 'developed,' making sure no truly revolutionary designs got reproduced wholesale into the Warhammer setting.

The last concern could wait for now — he hadn't yet accumulated enough knowledge to reproduce the schematics that could truly reshape the balance of the Warhammer universe. But when he looked at designs like warp drives or stargates, how could he not lay down his principles early and prepare for the future?

Knowledge should be spread. Truth should be proclaimed. That's what his old life had taught him. But times had changed. Lin's reasons for hoarding knowledge were different from those cogboys who kept discoveries to themselves purely to climb the Mechanicus hierarchy, but when it came to outward behaviour, the result was the same.

In a universe that was essentially one giant sewer, no matter what ideals you started with, the world would eventually grind everyone down to the same shape. Even if Lin nursed ambitions of changing this universe, any such dream had to be built on a foundation of first gathering the knowledge that already existed within Warhammer.

So in practice, he behaved no differently from any ordinary cogboy. And as the designated method of 'technological advancement' within Warhammer, he naturally picked up the two great hobbies of every cogboy — stealing things, and digging up graves.

Armed with his knowledge of the Warhammer universe and the peculiarity of his era, Lin had quietly plundered a great many ruins during this period when Chaos had gone quiet, the Necrons were still slumbering, and the Aeldari were largely inactive — and he'd walked away clean every time.

But as the saying goes: walk along the riverbank long enough and your shoes will get wet eventually. During one expedition, Lin had stumbled onto the hiding place of Fabius Bile himself, and had immediately started eyeing the old surgeon's priceless experimental materials and forbidden biological knowledge with very unconcealed greed.

Knowing his history, Lin understood this was a critical window: Abaddon was consolidating his forces, crushing rival Chaos warlords, and preparing for the Second Black Crusade. Grab it and run, and Lin figured he could be long gone before Fabius Bile even called for help — well before Abaddon could show up to respond.

What he hadn't anticipated was that Abaddon, fresh off a string of campaigns and battles, would look at him and his Mechanicus Ark as a fat piece of meat that had walked right into his mouth. Abaddon the Despoiler led the pursuit personally.

The intelligence network from his old world that had served Lin so reliably had become the very chain dragging him under. Now, with the Mechanicus Ark destroyed, Lin piloted his escape craft through the churning violence of a Warp storm and reflected on his own choices.

"Not entirely bad news," he summarised to himself. "My actions can influence the decisions of key figures, making them act in ways that were never part of the original story. That means some things aren't set in stone. This universe really can be changed — by me."

Fate was an inscrutable thing. Legend had it that Tzeentch had inscribed everyone's ending in his book of destiny long before it happened. Lin, who had only ever played at the margins, had now proven firsthand that this was not so — and that fact sent a genuine thrill of excitement through him, a man who had never believed in fate. But before he could shape anyone else's destiny, he had to hold onto his own and survive the raging currents of the Warp.

Demonic faces twisted and churned against the faltering veil of the Geller Field, their expressions cycling through every shape of horror imaginable. Realising the Geller Field was about to fail — starved of the power needed to hold the barrier between realspace and the Warp — Lin resignedly pulled the power cables from his own body and fed his personal energy reserves into the Geller Field.

He was a Blank. Daemons had no interest in him. But this was the daemons' home turf, and if the Geller Field dropped, Lin was fairly confident they'd happily tear both him and his ship to atoms out of sheer spite.

A miniaturised Warp drive and a miniaturised Geller Field — it sounded like a miracle of engineering history. And of course it was, in the same way that the Energy Shield and the solar war-axe were: borrowed wholesale from somewhere else and reproduced by Lin's hands. But unlike weapons, the miniaturised Warp drive, though technically more sophisticated, was in practice almost completely useless.

Using the miniaturisation schematics from Starcraft — a work that shared many parallels with Warhammer — and combining them with the mature Warp drive fabrication techniques already existing in Warhammer, Lin had effortlessly reproduced the faster-than-light engine that even a small shuttle could carry in Starcraft, translating it into Warhammer as a miniaturised Warp drive. But once it was built, Lin discovered to his embarrassment that FTL travel in the two universes was not even remotely comparable in difficulty.

Warp travel in Warhammer required tearing the veil between realspace and the Warp. It required a Geller Field to maintain a bubble of reality in the ever-shifting madness of the Warp. It required a Navigator to use psychic senses to find a course through the Warp. These three things, along with the energy required to run them, meant that any ship carrying them could never be truly small.

The Imperium had tried to miniaturise Warp drives before. But when advanced miniaturisation technology resulted in more ships going missing and more vessels falling to corruption, the Imperium and the Adeptus Mechanicus had quietly shelved the concept. Realising that being able to build something didn't mean it was actually usable, Lin had tossed his own experimental shuttle into the Ark Veritas's cargo hold and left it there.

And yet, as fate would have it, that discarded shuttle was now his only hope — and he was experiencing every one of its incompatibilities with the Warhammer universe in exquisite personal detail.

"Energy reserves critically low…" Lin watched the power index on his body tick steadily downward, feeling quietly helpless.

The miniaturised Warp drive couldn't store much energy to begin with. Lin had originally calculated he only needed a single short-range Warp jump along a clear trajectory — the kind that, in theory, could be completed without a Navigator. But a Warp transit not entered from the Mandeville Point had dragged him straight into a Warp storm.

He had no idea where the storm would spit him out or when. All he could do was shut down his systems one by one, siphoning energy from his own body into the ship's equipment, buying every second he could.

"Whoever published that paper claiming Warp transit stability correlates with vessel mass — if I make it out of this alive, I'm going to skin them," Lin muttered, his very human capacity for aggression fully intact. "This tiny thing gets caught in a Warp storm? Where exactly is the stability in that?"

Time was meaningless inside the Warp. The only metric he had left was his own dwindling energy reserves. First he deactivated his weapons systems. After a while, he shut down his onboard computational systems. Later still, even his Warp-observation equipment went dark. And yet even after all that, with nothing left but the bare minimum to sustain biological life, Lin still could see no way out of the Warp.

He pressed his flesh-and-blood eyes to the viewport and stared out. Beyond the churning, ever-shifting turbulence of the Warp, there was only one other thing visible: a cold, distant sun, hanging suspended in the immaterium like a pale ghost.

There was no energy left to maintain the Geller Field. Lin knew exactly what came next — even though he had never believed in fate.

Perhaps this was where his life ended. But rather than regret, what he felt, surprisingly, was something closer to peace. He stopped feeding energy to the Warp drive, dropped the Geller Field, and gathered the last of his power back into himself.

"At the very least," Lin said, "I held on to the end as a human being." He brought his blade down and took a daemon's head clean off its shoulders. Facing the tide of daemons surging toward him in wave after endless wave, he raised his ion pistol and stood his ground. "There is no Emperor here. There is no Omnissiah! But personal resolve has never needed anything outside itself to justify it! Let me show you, then — the true greatness of Mankind!"

The solar war-axe in Lin's hand blazed suddenly to life, driving back the daemons pressing in on all sides. But this was the Warp, and the daemons who fought on home ground felt no urgency to finish him. Their faces wore leers and mocking grins; they crowded around him from every direction, like cats toying with a mouse, treating the act of killing as a particularly nasty game.

And then, without warning, their expressions shifted — from amusement to terror. A cold radiance that had nothing to do with Lin burst outward and wrapped around everything. The daemons screamed and scattered in all directions, fleeing in blind panic.

Lin felt it too — wrapped within that force, the creeping void of the Warp around him began to recede, replaced by something he had not felt in a long time: the solid, tangible weight of realspace, pressing back into his senses. But rather than relief, what he felt was a sudden, plummeting dread. Gravity — real, physical gravity — had him in its pull. His heart lurched into his throat. He threw himself to the viewport of the escape craft and looked out.

A pale blue planet hung below him. A planet that could only exist in realspace.

Good news. Excellent news, in fact. But he didn't even need to run the calculations — he already knew. Both he and the escape craft were well within the planet's gravitational capture envelope, and accelerating toward it fast. He had just realised exactly what had happened. His eyes went wide, and he opened his mouth and let fly: "Emperor's bloody—this old bastard just threw me—"

Atmospheric friction ignited the escape craft's armour plating and swallowed the rest of Lin's words whole. At that moment, every person on that planet who happened to glance upward noticed a brilliant streak of light burning across the sky — a dazzling meteor.

Among those watching were a group of warriors, two and a half metres tall and humanoid in shape. Their physiques recalled those of Astartes, yet they wore none of the iconic power armour. Signs of augmentation were unmistakable on their bodies, but vital areas were covered by nothing more than crude metal plating and animal hides clumsily stitched together. They looked, to put it plainly, utterly wretched.

"Lieutenant Admir, some of the brothers got a clear look at it." One of them addressed the man who seemed to be in charge. "They're reporting it's a small craft, no bigger than a Stormbird, coming down onto the planet. We don't yet know whether it's of human manufacture, but it's the only piece of technology we've seen since we arrived on this world."

The man called Lieutenant Admir nodded. "I understand. Whatever it is, we can't afford to miss this chance. But if it's a technological craft, any survivors inside will have the means to resist us. And if we want to leave this planet, we'll need to commit everything we have."

"First, establish the approximate landing site, then bring our power armour. Even without the power pack, the armour's protection is enough to withstand standard-level attacks." Admir gave his orders with easy authority. "If their firepower is light, have the brothers don the power armour and advance by pushing through it with sheer physical strength. If their firepower is heavy, use our numerical advantage to encircle them, and we'll adapt from there."

The adjutant nodded and carried out the order, waving over a handful of men to start moving the stacked suits of power armour. As the dust was brushed away, the armour was revealed: ancient MkII Crusade-pattern suits, their breastplates covered in bullet craters and claw marks, speaking without words of what they had endured. On the left pauldron of each suit, a bold Roman numeral was stamped — Ⅱ — worn nearly to nothing, but still unmistakably visible.