"Speaking of the Emperor, I just remembered something."
Qin Mo suddenly began rummaging through the laboratory.
Inside a storage crate, he found one of the things the Emperor had been unable to carry with him and had left here after arriving in the Maelstrom.
A box.
"What is this?" The Chronicler asked.
"Good question." Qin Mo weighed the box in his hand. "A carrot the Emperor prepared for the Eldar."
"A carrot?" The Chronicler's pages flipped. "Is that a metaphor, an idiom, or an allegory? Let me record it."
Qin Mo then satisfied The Chronicler's desire to document things.
The box in his hand was the Emperor's handiwork, and it contained Eldar souls.
Back during the battle to destroy Commorragh, aboard the flagship, the Emperor had proposed gathering the souls of all dead Dark Eldar and then tearing those souls apart and breaking them down.
As long as this box existed, Dark Eldar souls could be put to use. They could be infused into a body, allowing it to be reborn like a newborn and forget everything that had happened before its soul was torn apart.
The Emperor had hoped to use this to help Guilliman solidify the alliance between humanity and the Harlequins, even to restrain the Harlequins' actions.
This thing would be like a carrot dangled before a donkey on a fishing rod, luring the donkey onward obediently. That was why it was called a carrot.
If the alliance between humanity and the Harlequins showed even the slightest instability, the Emperor would use this thing to threaten the Harlequins.
They could either receive a tiny favor—obtain a portion of the souls in the box and reshape them into soldiers—or watch the box and its soul matter be destroyed together, leaving the Eldar with no chance to replenish their