Within the World Engine's Hypercube Maze.
The World Shaper had had its energy extracted several times. It had already been weakened to the extreme, but as long as the Necrons wished it, they could still squeeze a steady stream of energy from it.
The loss of energy brought only pain and a sense of weakness. It was not enough to drain this Star God fragment until it could not move, much less kill it.
The Necrons had conceived a plan long ago—a very long-term plan.
It concerned how the Necron species could continue to exist after the Real Universe reached Heat Death.
The answer was to use the energy of the C'tan.
The C'tan possessed an endless supply of energy. The Necrons would continue to exist smoothly even after the universe fell silent, until the impossible day a Star God fragment perished.
As for how much pain and torment the Star God fragments themselves endured, who cared?
Between every extraction of energy, the World Shaper contemplated its miserable fate. It calculated a probability.
The probability of how long it would have to remain imprisoned before another chance like its previous lucky escape might arise.
Naturally, the answer was unknown.
The World Shaper could hardly deny that its escape had had nothing to do with itself. It had merely been the result of a convergence of coincidences.
After being imprisoned for a while, the World Shaper accepted it. It simply stopped thinking about whether it could ever be free.
Until it suddenly realized that, from some moment onward, the World Engine was no longer extracting its energy.
Along with this anomaly came a breach opening in the Hypercube Maze.
A floating figure, surrounded by green lightning and streams of data, appeared beyond the breach.
The World Shaper displayed no emotion at