Could He Have Come Back from the Dead?

The first card appeared before Zhou Yun,

It showed a lavishly dressed clown dancing on parchment, its slender body striking comical poses, its face caked in heavy makeup brimming with mockery and derision.

The Harlequin Card. Its archetype was the Harlequins devoted to Cegorach, the Aeldari laughing god.

Zhou Yun relaxed slightly. It seemed that depicting the corpse-emperor on the Golden Throne as Yellow Skin had indeed worked.

Back when he had still been a Diviner, Zhou Yun had drawn the "God-Emperor Card" thirteen times in a row, frightening Greyfax badly.

Had he not altered the God-Emperor Card, the first card Zhou Yun drew would almost certainly have been that card of cold hope.

Zhou Yun looked at the Harlequin Card.

This card belonged to Strife, one of the four suits. That suit represented enemies, hostility, and conflict.

The Harlequin Card represented schemes, deception, and conspiracy...

Sure enough, Cicero was playing some scheme against Zhou Yun.

But how was he carrying it out?

Zhou Yun turned over the second card.

It depicted an ugly man with a withered, decaying face, covered in shackles and collapsed upon the ground.

The Lost One, symbolizing corruption, indulgence, and entrapment in darkness.

Cicero was luring Zhou Yun into corruption, dragging him down into darkness. That was how he was carrying out his scheme...

So roundabout?

Zhou Yun's brows drew together slightly, and a strange expression crossed his face.

He turned over the third card, hoping it would answer his doubts...

A twisted, chaotic Warp, a formless dimension, and grotesque, hideous creatures lurking within it.

This was... the Demon Card...

It symbolized interference from those twisted, chaotic things within the Warp.

Zhou Yun stared at the card. The ink lines on its surface began to writhe on their own.

The grotesque creature on the parchment gradually changed shape.

The monster revealed a bull's head, exposed a hermaphroditic body, and snakes coiled around it.

Slaanesh...

At the Agate Baths, snake-headed statues continuously spewed pinkish-purple steam mixed with spices, shrouding the entire revelry in a hazy mist.

As far as the eye could see, people gambling, bathing, singing, dancing, and copulating had all become writhing shadows, tangled together like mating snakes in a nest. Only those sticky, cloying sounds could pierce through the pinkish-purple veil of mist.

Cicero's red leather shoes stepped across the damp floor as he walked deeper into the steam. He pushed open the narrow door at the end of the bathhouse corridor, inlaid with gold and gemstones, and entered the private chamber.

He heard a choked whimper.

A young girl's neck was gripped by fingers like withered vines. Her plump thighs, seated upon the Blind Witch's shriveled legs, trembled.

Yet the girl did not resist or show fear. Instead, she slightly stuck out her tongue, her face flushed and her eyes rolling white, as though immersed in immense bliss.

Meanwhile, the slave trader Tull licked the girl's delicate, trembling skin with his tongue, as if he wanted to lick through her flesh and suck her inner vitality dry.

Libo, priest of the Temple of Semuneta, sat with his legs crossed. Red leather shoes like Cicero's swayed gently to the girl's whimpers. Seeing Cicero enter, he raised his wineglass in greeting.

Cicero gave Priest Libo a slight nod, then sat beside him.

The girl let out a dying whimper and collapsed onto the Blind Witch, sliding from the witch's legs like a snake whose bones had been pulled out.

The slave trader Tull called for attendants to carry the girl's corpse away, while lightly licking his lips several times.

"A young lady of House Paulus?" Cicero glanced at the girl. "A gift from Lord Paulus?"

"No. Voluntarily offered. Her soul yearned to ascend to the garden and enjoy supreme bliss." The Blind Witch smiled, her voice dry and hoarse.

Killing the girl seemed to have granted her some kind of power.

Cicero had never liked this sort of suicidal pleasure-seeking. There were still so many joys and sorrows in the mortal world left to experience. How could one return to the metaphysical world so quickly?

"You should have confirmed it by now, shouldn't you?"

The Blind Witch twisted her head toward Cicero. Cicero truly could not understand how this woman "saw."

"I assume that Scholar has already killed himself. By now, you should have learned to trust the gifts of the God of First Cry, yes?"

"Suicide?" Cicero sneered. "Zhou Yun looks quite alive to me."

As he spoke, Cicero pointed at his nose.

"Look. This was done by the dead man you spoke of."

"...Impossible!" The Blind Witch froze for a moment, then cried out sharply.

"Then I suppose my 'friend' came back from the dead." Cicero sneered.

"He is merely an ignorant mortal. How could he withstand the bite of the God of First Cry's venomous snake?"

The Blind Witch's voice was filled with disbelief.

"When you brought him to indulge himself, I unquestionably injected the poison of pleasure into his mind, making him sink ever deeper into it."

"When he fell into debt, I unquestionably injected the poison of despair into his mind, drowning him in despair's darkness."

"And yesterday, when the Father's Eye opened, when the heavens were closest to reality and the God of the Broken Lighthouse's influence was at its weakest, I truly made the venomous snake bite his soul and induced him to kill himself."

"But he is still alive." Cicero emphasized again.

The Blind Witch's expression darkened.

"Perhaps it was Lucretius. That old man is his teacher." Libo, the priest of Semuneta, drained his cup and smiled at the Blind Witch.

"If he had intervened, I would know." The Blind Witch retorted sharply.

"Then something must have gone wrong with the sorcery you were playing with!" Libo snorted two or three times.

"What I used was the God of First Cry's gift. Nothing could go wrong with the venomous snake's bite... He must have attempted suicide. Perhaps something else went wrong, causing his attempt to fail."

The Blind Witch hissed,

"Give me sixty-six willing sacrificial offerings, and I can curse him to death. I will have the God of First Cry's venomous snake directly bite his soul to pieces..."

"Sixty-six? Do you know how difficult it is to cultivate a believer willing to offer themselves? Do you know how much effort it takes to keep Conor's hounds from catching the scent?"

Libo immediately objected to the Blind Witch's proposal.

"Take that girl from House Paulus. I had to make the entire Paulus family believe in the God of First Cry, then give the girl time to cut off her other social ties, before I could send her into your mouth without drawing the hounds here."

"In my view, there is no need to worry so much. That Scholar has not escaped our grasp yet."

"After all, he still owes me money. If he cannot repay it next month, we can rightfully turn him into a debt slave."

Hearing this, the slave trader Tull nodded approvingly. "I said it before. You people kill far too freely. There is no need to kill him at all. A Scholar like him is highly sought after in the slave market. Killing him would be such a waste."

"I fear it will not be so easy."

Cicero pinched the bridge of his nose.

"The reason we had the witch make him kill himself in the first place was because we feared he might survive the first debt payment... His niece has a sum of compensation money, and if he borrows some more from that old man Lucretius, he should be able to make it through the first payment."

"Then it will depend on your silver tongue. If you can bring him to the baths, we will have plenty of ways to make him owe even more." The slave trader Tull shrugged.

"I need to find a chance when he is alone. That niece of his is rather troublesome." Cicero raised his head.

Just then, the private chamber's door was pushed open. The fragrance of grease and a young girl's body scent flowed into the room together.

"At a time like this," Tull said with a smile, "let us eat first. We cannot let the eldest daughter of House Paulus go to waste."

Inside the apartment, Zhou Yun looked at the tarot card displaying the form of a Slaanesh demon.

Cicero was indeed backed by cultists devoted to Slaanesh, and those cultists could use the Warp's power to a certain extent.

But why? Why go to such lengths against a Scholar?

Macragge's Veil was so dense that employing Warp sorcery here was no easy matter.

Was it truly only for the position of family tutor?

Zhou Yun looked at the final tarot card and slowly reached out to turn it over.

What this tarot card revealed was the true target of Cicero and the cultists behind him.

Zhou Yun—or rather, the Scholar—had never been their true target.

Zhou Yun had likely merely happened to stand in their way.

The fourth tarot card depicted a lord holding a shortsword, clad in ultramarine power armor, with short golden hair. Anger filled the lord's face, as though he would punish the heretics plotting their schemes in the very next moment...

The name of this card

was Guilliman's Wrath.