Corpse Guild

After Zhou Yun stepped into the PDF garrison, his brows immediately furrowed.

Within the PDF garrison, several corpses lay beside the buildings.

They wore the uniforms of planet Asphodel's Planetary Defense Force, their faces gaunt and covered in bite marks and decay.

Most of the corpses were missing parts. It was easy to imagine that after the governor had ordered Old Sector Eight bombed years ago, the PDF soldiers buried beneath the mountains of rubble had likely resorted to cannibalism.

But that was not what Zhou Yun cared about.

Eating corpses in a hive city was not something that placed much psychological burden on people.

After all, some of the famed corpse starch was made from the bodies of the dead.

The Corpse Guilds responsible for producing corpse starch used hearse convoys and mobile factories to collect the dead and turn their bodies into corpse starch.

Quite a few hive residents had eaten this kind of corpse starch.

What truly made Zhou Yun frown was that these corpses had lain here for at least a century.

Yet they were merely rotting rather than reduced to piles of bare bones.

A hint of vigilance arose in Zhou Yun's heart. He extended a finger toward one of the corpses in the pile.

"Bang!!!" A syllable escaped his mouth.

The corpse's head burst like a watermelon struck by a hammer. Red, green, and white pus splattered across the wall behind it, forming a warped painting.

After the decay of so many years, the corpses' heads had become soft and rotten. The shockwave fired by the air pistol alone could shatter them.

Yet the other nearby corpses did not move, as though they truly were nothing but dead bodies.

This... this wasn't right, was it?

He frowned and extended his finger again.

"Bang! Bang! Bang!"

Three more corpses had their heads burst open, yet the remaining bodies still did not rise from the ground and turn into Ghouls as Zhou Yun had suspected.

He turned his head and glanced at Malkit and Monger behind him.

Malkit gave him a slight nod.

So this fellow really had done something.

Zhou Yun nodded at Malkit, then—

He swung his arm, and the mechanical hand above his head moved with it, sweeping over the corpses beneath the wall.

The heads of those corpses were crushed and burst one after another, leaving streaks of red, green, and white across the wall.

Only after clearing away every corpse within sight did Zhou Yun smile at Malkit and head toward the PDF warehouse at ease.

Watching this, Malkit could not help shaking his head and sighing. "He really is cautious."

"Was he worried I would awaken these Ghouls?"

"Brother, did he realize you used the incantation bestowed by the 'angels' to put the Ghouls to sleep?" Monger asked quietly.

Surprise colored Monger's voice. He seemed unable to understand how Zhou Yun had known these corpses were Ghouls.

"He understands us very well. Perhaps better than we understand ourselves," Malkit said in a low voice.

"Who exactly is he? Leman Russ—what a name that obviously sounds fake." Monger looked in the direction Zhou Yun had gone.

But Malkit fell silent, recalling the terrified screams of the "angels."

Most of the time, the "angels'" voices were filled with a cheerfulness that seemed never to fade.

It was the first time he had heard the "angels" sound so terrified.

And the information revealed by those horrified screams—

"Perhaps that name contains some truth."

Malkit said gravely:

"The 'angels' said that face of his looked like... looked like..."

Monger noticed the hesitation in Malkit's tone, as if he were weighing whether to say that name.

"Looked like whom?" Monger pressed.

"The demigod of the First Legion during the Great Crusade ten thousand years ago."

Malkit drew a deep breath and said:

"Lion El'Jonson. His face is almost identical to Lion El'Jonson's."

"But his build is wrong, and his personality is nothing alike."

"Leman Russ looks like a primarch?" Hearing Malkit's words, Monger sucked in a sharp breath.

He could not help considering countless possibilities, each one rather terrifying.

"Don't think about that. He did not pry into our secrets, so we should not pry into his."

"Finding traces of that relic is what matters most."

Malkit shook his head as he spoke. He looked around, turning his gaze toward the offices in the PDF garrison.

He patted Monger's shoulder, and the two headed toward the building together.

The Imperium used many media to store information, the most common being parchment and data-slates.

Important, valuable information was kept on more reliable, more secure parchment.

The rest was stored on data-slates.

Monger searched through the data-slates in his hands, looking for the information they wanted.

Malkit, meanwhile, sorted through the parchments.

"Found it." Malkit pointed to a sheet of parchment.

On it was a dense string of Low Gothic letters.

This was the PDF's detailed record of the plague from that year.

It clearly documented the plague conditions in Old Sector Eight.

Malkit waved at Monger. "Help me find a data-slate containing a map of Old Sector Eight."

Monger pulled one out from among the data-slates he had just searched through.

Because he had promised Zhou Yun to help him find a map, he had specifically set this one aside.

Malkit looked at the map of Old Sector Eight on the data-slate and used his finger to mark the locations where the plague had appeared that year.

The dots Malkit marked formed a patch that was sparse around the edges and dense in the middle.

Looking at the map covered in marks, Malkit fell into thought.

"The plague spread through half of Old Sector Eight back then. This half is very likely where it originated."

"According to the PDF records from that year, these were the earliest locations where the plague appeared."

Malkit looked toward the area where the dots were densest, where the plague had first begun spreading.

He reached out and connected the earliest plague sites, forming an irregular circle.

He examined the buildings within that circle and quickly found a suspicious target.

"The Corpse Guild."

Malkit pointed to the Corpse Guild's location.

The Corpse Guild was almost exactly in the middle of the sites where the plague had first appeared.

"So it seems that more than a century ago, the Corpse Guild spread the plague and guided the power of the garden where the 'angels' resided into the material universe."

"According to the 'angels,' that power was infused into an ancient ritual implement."

"But before that ritual implement could truly be completed, the governor noticed what was happening and bombed all of Old Sector Eight, burying everything beneath the ruins."

A trace of excitement entered Malkit's voice.

"But that nearly completed ritual implement is very likely still inside the Corpse Guild!"

"As long as we find that ritual implement, then locate that Warp engine in the underhive, we can save all of Asphodel."

In truth, not every hive city developed a monopolistic Corpse Guild.