The Moment of Waking

Removing Divinity was a pain difficult to describe. If he had to put it into words, it was like having his bone marrow drawn out while he was still alive. No anesthetic. No means of easing the agony.

Only endurance.

Standing in the Land of Void, he kept his eyes tightly shut as tangled thoughts rose and fell like tides. Torn images flashed before his eyes once again, one after another.

From the sunrise over a certain garden world to the struggles of a planet ravaged by war. People wore smiles on their faces, clean clothes on their bodies, and possessed everything others could only dream of. And elsewhere, other people fought to the death.

With a thought of displeasure, both images scattered. Then came another. It came from thousands of years ago, or ten thousand years ago—or perhaps from right now. It did not come from the material universe, but from within the Warp.

It was a tall man, dying yet not dead—almost dead, but not yet. His hair was a shade between pale and gray, his expression hard as iron, his eyes calling to mind a towering, majestic fortress.

"No," he said.

With that abrupt, contextless sentence cast down, the image ended. Then came another, and more beyond it. In just a few short seconds, hundreds of thousands, millions of images swept past his eyes at a speed no mortal could comprehend.

How laughable. Mortals could not even comprehend The Void, let alone the truth hidden behind them.

This world had never been kind to humanity. Or perhaps no world had ever been kind to humanity. They styled themselves masters of the world, yet reality was often the complete opposite of that arrogant notion.

He Shenyan opened his eyes, and the Treefolk's voice rang out at just the