If it really was a sacrifice,
Zhou Yun suspected it would be aimed at him.
He had no idea what kind it would be.
If it targeted the soul, then Zhou Yun could only say the cultists were in for a treat.
Zhou Yun's soul was not inside this body. There was only the will he had extended into it.
The cultists would either curse nothing at all, or curse their way straight to the Golden Throne.
If it was the second case, then the demon that took on this outsourced job would surely be grateful to those cultists.
But Zhou Yun was worried it would target the body instead—disease, plague, boiling blood, lightning striking people, that sort of thing.
Those could genuinely send Zhou Yun back to the Golden Throne.
He needed to make some preparations.
Thinking as he went, Zhou Yun pushed open the door and entered Lucretius's office.
Brass fragments from the lock littered the floor, some of them even embedded in the walls.
Picking a lock required delicate Telekinesis School psychic techniques. Though this body had a talent for Telekinesis School, Zhou Yun had never studied its techniques, so he could only use this crude method and blow up the lock through the door.
He walked behind Lucretius's desk, crouched down, and opened one of the drawers. Pieces of Blackstone, black as ink, lay inside the wooden drawer.
Ever since crossing into this Realm, Zhou Yun had felt his psychic power being noticeably suppressed every time he entered this room.
Sure enough, aside from the piece Lucretius had given him, he had hidden quite a few more.
However, there were fewer in the drawer than Zhou Yun had imagined. Lucretius had clearly taken several with him when he left Macragge City for Odin City. How cautious.
Zhou Yun picked out two pieces and slipped them into his pocket.
Then he stood and walked over to the bookshelf in Lucretius's office. More than ten of Lucretius's research notebooks sat on it.
Zhou Yun cast a thought-acceleration buff on himself with Telepathy School psychic power and quickly began flipping through Lucretius's notes.
"The Broken Lighthouse Cult claims that their Lighthouse god pierced Formakas with an obelisk, creating the spectacle known as Father's Eye. Astronomical observation shows that Father's Eye is formed by lava periodically erupting from within Formakas. Yet strangely, whenever Father's Eye appears, Macragge's spirituality also rises."
Spirituality... what kind of wording was that? Was he some occult aristocrat?
"If an obelisk truly pierced Formakas and created Father's Eye, then judging by the cycle of Father's Eye's appearances, this event should have occurred in the early hours of the ninth day of a certain month..."
The early hours of the ninth? Wasn't that tomorrow morning? And... nine...
"But I do not believe the Broken Lighthouse Cult's account. If an obelisk had truly fallen into Macragge's atmosphere after piercing Formakas, it should have formed an impact crater. Yet no such structure appears on the currently known maps of Macragge."
"Furthermore, sextant calculations show that the 'Lighthouse Star' spoken of by the Broken Lighthouse Cult is nearly a thousand light-years from Macragge. It is difficult to imagine that, during Old Night when the Warp ran rampant, such an obelisk could have crossed such a vast distance."
That meant it had not traveled through the Warp... some kind of faster-than-light technology unrelated to Warp principles...
Zhou Yun's gaze stopped on a line of text, and the corner of his mouth lifted despite himself.
His teacher did have some real skill after all.
"I consulted the star charts preserved in the Great Library from the former Golden Age and compared them with the current starscape, locating the Lighthouse Star's exact position. I can confirm that it is a planet half a sector away, near the edge of the galaxy. Records describe it as a habitable planet, though one that has not yet been developed."
Half a sector from Macragge, near the galactic edge, habitable but undeveloped, Lighthouse—and combined with the Blackstone fragments Lucretius had excavated, the name of that planet had already surfaced in Zhou Yun's mind.
Sotha.
On that planet stood a navigational Lighthouse built by the Necrons, the former rulers of the galaxy. It could largely replace the Astronomican's function on Terra and was even superior to the Astronomican in some respects.
Later, after the galaxy was torn apart, it was the Lighthouse on Sotha that illuminated Macragge, tore through the Warp storms, and guided the ships of the Second Imperium.
That Lighthouse was called Pharos.
This confirmed Zhou Yun's guess.
In the prophecy, he saw himself, Tita, and a blond man walking across Sotha, looking at the mountain range that concealed the Pharos Lighthouse.
That blond man... was most likely Robert Guilliman.
He, Guilliman, and Tita had gone in search of the Pharos Lighthouse.
In the prophecy, Tita was not much older than she was now.
Setting aside the nearly impossible possibility that Macragge would develop Warp engines and find Navigators in just a few years,
the only explanation was that Zhou Yun and the others would use some means of non-Warp travel in the near future to cross more than a thousand light-years in one go.
If such a method truly existed, it could only lie in... that obelisk from Sotha that had crushed the God of Sorcery to death.
Where was that obelisk?
In the future, he had gone to Sotha with Robert Guilliman. Was the key still Guilliman?
He still had to get that tutor position.
After reading through these records on the Broken Lighthouse Temple, Zhou Yun found notes concerning the God of Sorcery.
Holding the notebook, he walked over to the table where Lucretius had piled up his artifacts. After rummaging around for a while, he found a cracked eagle-head statue carved from crystal.
"During the era ruled by the God of Sorcery, eagle worship was extremely common. It is said that among the God of Sorcery's titles was 'Supreme Eagle,' and ornaments expressing this eagle worship were often made from clear crystal. The excavated crystal eagle-head statues are all covered in cracks. This is worthy of attention."
Zhou Yun examined the crystal eagle-head statue. There were no psychic traces left... the psychic power within it had completely dissipated.
Still not entirely reassured, he lightly gripped the eagle-head statue and sent a strand of golden psychic power into it, but nothing changed.
After confirming it was harmless, Zhou Yun nodded slightly and stuffed every artifact similar to the eagle-head statue into his pocket.
Though he knew they were harmless, Zhou Yun remained cautious and planned to toss them all into the donation box at the War King Temple later.
After all, Zhou Yun was now completely certain who the God of Sorcery indicated by this eagle-head statue was.
Skilled in sorcery, fond of deception, marked by an eagle... it had to be that old dried-up bastard who tied a dead eagle to his chest and played with sorcery!
It couldn't possibly be some stupid bird in a crystal labyrinth squawking, "Everything is going according to plan," could it?
From afar, it looked like the Imperium's eagle. Up close, it was Kairos.
Zhou Yun could not help but mock them inwardly. Tzeentch and the Emperor were a pair of ill-fated two-headed eagles too.
As he thought, Zhou Yun reached toward the table again.
But he was not planning to keep being Trazyn. Though he was behaving like a Blood Raven, Zhou Yun bore no ill will toward his teacher and intended to give him a little something as compensation.
Relying on the intuition granted by Precognition School psychic power, Zhou Yun began searching through the pile of artifacts. He found a small silver-gilt cross.
Zhou Yun held the cross in his palm and brought it close to his eyes so he could catch every detail upon it.
"I bless you," Zhou Yun murmured.
Pale golden psychic power slowly flowed from Zhou Yun's fingertips and gathered within the cross.
This pale golden psychic power was something Zhou Yun had obtained from his students' reverence. It was a force somewhat different from his own psychic power, more akin to the power surrounding the Golden Throne. Zhou Yun guessed this might be "faith."
After studying it, Zhou Yun had gained a simple grasp of some of its uses. One was blessing objects like this. His Emperor's Tarot had also been blessed with this "faith," though Zhou Yun had not realized it at the time.
Besides that, Zhou Yun believed that objects tainted by Warp corruption should react somewhat when infused with this psychic power, though this guess had yet to be verified.
Zhou Yun had accumulated only a tiny amount of this "faith" so far, and he infused very little into the cross. If used as ordinary psychic power, it could probably only lift an egg.
But this faith was directed toward Zhou Yun... or rather, toward the Emperor. No matter how little there was, it was equivalent to a blessing from the Emperor himself. Zhou Yun figured it could at least scare off things like Warp demons—put bluntly, even if the Emperor had just pissed on this cross, holding it would still scare a whole pack of lesser demons to death.
Sigh, he really was too generous.
Of course, Zhou Yun was doing this partly as compensation, but the main reason was to prevent himself from one day looking up and finding that his teacher had turned into a bird-headed monster.
Zhou Yun nodded in satisfaction and placed the cross pendant in a conspicuous spot on the table. So long as Lucretius was not a complete psychic idiot, he should be able to sense the power on it.
The instant he set down the cross, Zhou Yun's body stiffened...
He found it...
His gaze abruptly shifted back to the Golden Throne, toward a flame of soul within the vast sea of the Warp.
Before you continue