Yellow Skin! You Made Me Your Scapegoat!

"Fuck you... Yellow Skin..."

Zhou Yun's will rose from beside the hive city diviner's body.

As Greyfax prayed for his soul to return to the Golden Throne, Zhou Yun's will rose higher and higher, passing through the Corpse Grinder Cult's church, through the hive city, through the veil of reality.

Blazing golden light, like chains wreathed in fire, engulfed Zhou Yun's will and dragged him down toward the Astronomican shining in the Warp, toward Terra, humanity's homeworld, toward the palace atop the Himalayas, toward the sanctum...

Toward the shriveled corpse upon the Golden Throne.

To others, returning one's soul to the Golden Throne was faith, a blessing, a prayer.

But for Zhou Yun, it was reality.

He was pinned firmly upon this throne of machinery and cables, like a mountain range of steel.

Pain beyond anyone's imagination struck him almost in the next instant, like a prison guard impatient to torture a mortal, punishing Zhou Yun, a prisoner who had temporarily escaped his cage.

Zhou Yun felt his skin being peeled away inch by inch by searing heat, his nerves burned to ash. Ten million unimaginable things prowled through his will, like blades scraping across his brain. His spine felt as though it were being trampled by the wildest, most furious beast, every bone ground down into atoms.

Yet strangely, under such unbearable agony, Zhou Yun's soul remained whole, and his will stayed clear.

It was as though some unseen force protected Zhou Yun's soul and will, forcibly keeping him awake, rational, and able to think.

The pain sweeping through every cell reminded Zhou Yun—

After arriving in the world of Warhammer 40,000, the first person he had transmigrated into had not been that hive city diviner.

In fact, that diviner had already been his third body in this world.

His first body was the one he currently inhabited.

The good news was that he had transmigrated, and had even become the ruler of a galactic hegemon civilization.

His rule was incomparably stable. A million planets were governed in his name, and their people all worshipped him devoutly.

His lifespan was incomparably long. He was an immortal, having lived from the dawn of human civilization to humanity's fortieth millennium, and he would live even longer.

He also possessed the greatest combat power in this world. He could stand alongside gods, even defeat them.

He was in an absolutely safe place, guarded by nearly ten thousand extraordinary Custodians created through biological alchemy.

And throughout the galaxy, millions of enhanced warriors were loyal to him...

The bad news was—

He was the Emperor of Mankind.

Ten thousand years ago, when humanity's Golden Age ended and the horrors of Old Night ravaged countless worlds, when the once-glorious human civilization was carved into lost fragments scattered between the stars—

The human immortal known as the Emperor began from the ancient planet called Terra, or Earth. He launched the Great Crusade, leading his twenty children who had inherited his extraordinary genetic sequences, known as the Primarchs, along with the Astartes who had inherited the Primarchs' genetic sequences, to conquer the galaxy once more.

But the Four Chaos Gods, lurking in the Warp behind reality, corrupted the Primarch Horus Lupercal, driving Horus to lead half the Primarchs and Astartes in launching the Horus Heresy. After his final battle with Horus, the Emperor of Mankind had no choice but to sit upon the Golden Throne for humanity's continued survival, enduring the torment of this horrific instrument for ten thousand years...

Zhou Yun had transmigrated into that Emperor of Mankind.

He desperately wanted to cry like a Gretchin whose toe had been stepped on, but his eyeballs had long since been scorched shriveled by the Golden Throne's heat. He could not shed a single tear.

Zhou Yun truly couldn't understand.

In his previous life, he had been a Warhammer fan, but he had never been particularly loyal. His most loyal act had merely been choosing the Emperor over Slaanesh when faced with lewd art of both.

Why?

Why the fuck did Yellow Skin have to make him the scapegoat!?

Why not drag in those people who kept talking about loyalty but refused to go when asked?

Calm down. Think. At least he hadn't been reborn as someone even more unlucky and miserable in the Warhammer universe...

Were there... people like that?

Even in all of Warhammer 40,000, there seemed to be no one more unlucky or miserable than the Emperor of Mankind?!

Compared to the extreme agony brought by the Golden Throne, even Slaanesh daemons, who loved pain and masochism most, would say the throne had scared Slaanesh's soul to pieces. This daemon was out of her league.

The only thing that brought Zhou Yun any comfort was that he could occasionally "break out of prison" from the Golden Throne.

His will could extend beyond the Golden Throne and inhabit the bodies of those who had just died, allowing him to escape this golden instrument of torture and walk among the living like a normal person.

Zhou Yun could not tell whether this was an ability the Emperor had always possessed, a little vacation Yellow Skin had left him after growing a conscience, or his cheat as a transmigrator.

Zhou Yun could not explain any of that, but he knew exactly what to do, as though it were instinct.

It merely required time and luck. Since transmigrating here, he had succeeded only twice.

The first time, he woke up in the body of a forest hunter. His memories were fragmented, and he found himself in a pitch-black forest filled with bizarre beasts. For a time, he thought he had transmigrated a second time. He barely survived there for over a month by drinking stream water and eating wild fruit, until he was ultimately killed by a gigantic beast that suddenly appeared.

The second time was the one just now, when he transmigrated into a hive city diviner—his extended will seemed unable to carry away the Emperor's psychic power.

Yet it seemed that abilities belonging to bodies other than the Emperor's could be used by the new body. When Zhou Yun acted as the hive city diviner, he could still use the stealth and hunting skills he had learned as the forest hunter.

The torment from the Golden Throne left Zhou Yun in no state to keep thinking about his abilities. That bone-deep pain lashed at him like a whip, urging him to use his power quickly and escape the Golden Throne's torture.

He concentrated and looked toward the Sea of Souls known as the Warp.

Pure energy rippled through the Warp, and Zhou Yun could see countless sparks reflected within it.

They were the projections of mortals in the Warp. Nearly all intelligent beings with souls had projections in the Warp, though some were dim while others shone brightly.

Mortals were like sparks, psykers like torches... while Zhou Yun, or rather, the Emperor, was a black sun.

Zhou Yun's gaze swept across the countless sparks, searching for an opportunity to escape the Golden Throne.

The Golden Throne's torment and the Warp's nature had blurred his sense of time.

After an unknown period, he finally felt a pull from reality upon a dying flame.

That pull grew stronger and stronger as his gaze lingered upon it, as though reality had extended its tentacles, trying to drag his consciousness from the Warp back into reality and bind it once more within a material body.

Zhou Yun did not resist the pull. He followed its gravity and fell toward reality. The pain gradually receded from around him, while both the weakness and power brought by the Emperor's shriveled body were left behind upon the distant Golden Throne.

He felt his bones become hard again, rather than brittle from being roasted by extreme heat.

He also felt the temperature of his flesh drop, moisture fill it once more, and blood begin flowing through his veins.

His shriveled, raisin-like eyes filled with aqueous humor, and his lenses began catching light again.

Zhou Yun parted his lips slightly. Flecks of golden light emerged in his throat, and blazing golden fire flowed from within his body, tearing through every cell, burning away every inch of flesh, destroying everything in this corpse.

In an instant, Zhou Yun became ashes.

Then, in the next moment, flames unlike anything born of the material universe dragged those ashes together and reshaped the body exactly as it had been, except the will within it had been replaced by Zhou Yun's.

Zhou Yun guessed those flames had been transmitted from the Golden Throne, psychic power belonging to the Emperor.

But that psychic power could only reshape the corpse, restoring it and removing fatal injuries so Zhou Yun's will could enter it. Beyond that, it had no other effect.

Zhou Yun opened his mouth, wanting to take a deep breath and feel his lungs fill with air again—

But he failed.

The moment Zhou Yun opened his eyes, he realized his viewpoint was very high. At first, he thought the corpse he had entered this time was simply extremely tall.

But now, feeling the rope tight around his neck, Zhou Yun understood how the guy housing his consciousness had died.

He had been playing tug-of-war between his neck and the ceiling.