"Fuck you... Yellow Skin..."
Zhou Yun's consciousness rose from beside the Hive City Diviner's body.
As Greyfax prayed that his soul would return to the Golden Throne, Zhou Yun's consciousness rose higher and higher, passing through the Corpse Grinder Cult's church, passing through the Hive City, passing through the Veil of reality.
Blazing golden light, like chains wreathed in fire, engulfed Zhou Yun's consciousness and dragged him down toward the Astronomican shining within the Warp, toward Terra, humanity's homeworld, toward the palace in the Himalayas, toward the holiest sanctuary...
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 to Zhou Yun, it was reality.
He was pinned firmly upon this throne of machinery and cables, like a mechanical mountain range.
Pain beyond anyone's imagination struck almost in the next instant, like a prison guard impatient to torment a mortal, punishing Zhou Yun, a prisoner who had briefly escaped his cage.
Zhou Yun felt his skin being stripped away inch by inch by scorching heat. He felt his nerves burn to ash. Ten million unimaginable things prowled through his consciousness like blades scraping across his brain. His spine felt as though it were being trampled by the most savage, furious beast, while every bone was crushed into atoms.
Yet strangely, even beneath such intense agony, Zhou Yun's soul remained whole, and his mind remained clear.
It was as though some unseen force protected Zhou Yun's soul and consciousness, forcibly keeping him awake, rational, and capable of thought.
The pain sweeping through every cell reminded Zhou Yun of something.
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.
The first was the body he currently inhabited.
The good news was that he had transmigrated—and had become the ruler of a galactic hegemon-level civilization.
His rule was incomparably stable. A million planets were governed in his name, and all their inhabitants devoutly believed in him.
His lifespan was incomparably long. He was an immortal who had lived from the dawn of human civilization into humanity's fortieth millennium, and would continue living far longer still.
He also possessed the greatest combat power in this world. He could stand alongside the gods, or even defeat them.
He was in an absolutely safe place, guarded by nearly ten thousand extraordinary Custodes 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 terrors of Old Night ravaged world after world, when once-glorious human civilization was cut into lost fragments scattered across the stars—
The immortal human known as the Emperor set out from the ancient planet called Terra, or Earth. He launched the Great Crusade, leading 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. Horus led 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 toes had been stepped on, but his eyeballs had long since been scorched dry by the Golden Throne's heat. He could not shed a single tear.
Zhou Yun truly did not understand.
In his previous life, he had been a Warhammer fan, but he had never been particularly loyal. His most loyal act had been choosing the Emperor over Slaanesh when faced with their lewd pictures.
Why?
Why the fuck had Yellow Skin dragged him in as a scapegoat!?
Why not drag in those people who talked about loyalty but never went when asked?
Calm down. Think. At least he had not been reincarnated as one of the even more unfortunate, even more miserable people in the Warhammer universe...
Were... were there people like that?
Even in all of Warhammer 40,000, there seemed to be no one more unfortunate or miserable than the Emperor?!
Compared to the extreme pain inflicted by the Golden Throne, even a Slaanesh daemon that loved pain and abuse most would have said that the throne had scared the soul out of Slaanesh. I'm staying out of this.
The only thing that gave Zhou Yun some comfort was that he could occasionally "escape prison" from the Golden Throne.
His consciousness could extend outward from the Golden Throne and inhabit the corpse of someone who had just died, allowing him to escape this golden torture device and walk among the living normally.
Zhou Yun could not say whether this had always been an ability possessed by the Emperor, whether Yellow Skin had grown a conscience and left him a little vacation time, or whether it was his transmigrator's cheat.
Zhou Yun could not explain any of it, but he did know exactly what to do, as though it were instinctive.
It simply 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 survived there for barely more than a month by drinking stream water and eating wild fruit, only to be killed by a gigantic beast that suddenly appeared.
The second time was just now. He had transmigrated into a Diviner in the Hive City—his extended consciousness 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 from the forest hunter.
The torment from the Golden Throne left Zhou Yun with no desire to continue pondering his abilities. That bone-deep pain lashed him like whips, urging him to quickly use his power and escape the Golden Throne's torment.
He focused his mind and gazed upon 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 reflections of mortals in the Warp. Nearly all sentient creatures with souls had reflections there, though some were dim while others burned brightly.
Mortals were like sparks, psykers like torches... while Zhou Yun—or rather, the Emperor—was a black sun.
Zhou Yun's gaze swept over those countless sparks, searching for an opportunity to escape the Golden Throne.
The Golden Throne's torment and the Warp's nature had blurred his perception of time.
After an unknown length of time, he finally sensed a pull from reality upon a dying ember.
That pull grew stronger as his gaze lingered upon it, as though reality had extended its tentacles, attempting 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 of 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 baked by intense heat.
He also felt the temperature of his flesh drop, moisture returning to it as blood began flowing through his veins.
His shriveled, raisin-like eyes filled with aqueous humor, and his lenses began catching light once more.
Zhou Yun slightly opened his mouth. Specks of golden light emerged from his throat, and scorching golden flames flowed from within his body, tearing apart every cell in his body, burning away every inch of flesh, destroying everything in the corpse.
In an instant, Zhou Yun became ashes.
Then, in the next moment, flames that seemed not to belong to the material universe dragged those ashes together and reshaped the body exactly as it had been. Only the consciousness within had been replaced by Zhou Yun's.
Zhou Yun guessed that those flames had been transmitted from the Golden Throne—the Emperor's psychic power.
But that psychic power could only reshape the corpse, restoring it and removing fatal injuries so that Zhou Yun's consciousness 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 noticed that his viewpoint was very high. At first, he thought the corpse he had entered this time was simply exceptionally tall.
But now, feeling the rope tightening around his neck, Zhou Yun understood how the guy whose body housed his consciousness had died.
He had been playing tug-of-war with the ceiling using his neck.
Before you continue