I Think the Emperor and Tzeentch Were a Pair of Star-Crossed Two-Headed Eagles Too

If this really was a sacrifice,

Zhou Yun suspected it would be aimed at him.

He did not know 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. It contained only the will he had extended into it.

The cultists would either be cursing nothing at all, or they would end up cursing the Golden Throne.

If it was the latter, then the daemon who had taken on this outsourced job would surely be grateful to those cultists.

But Zhou Yun worried that it would target the body instead—disease, plague, burning blood, lightning strikes, and that sort of thing.

Those really could 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 embedded in the walls.

Picking a lock required precise Telekinesis School psychic techniques. This body had a talent for Telekinesis School powers, but Zhou Yun had never learned such techniques, so he could only use this crude method and blast the lock apart through the door.

He walked behind Lucretius's desk, crouched down, and opened one of the drawers. Pieces of Blackstone, dark as ink, lay within the wooden drawer.

Ever since Zhou Yun had crossed into this Realm, he had felt his psychic power being noticeably suppressed whenever he entered this room.

Sure enough, apart 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 expected. Clearly, Lucretius had 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 rose and walked over to the bookshelf in Lucretius's office. More than a dozen of Lucretius's research notebooks sat upon it.

Zhou Yun used Telepathy School psychic power to give himself a thought-acceleration buff and swiftly began leafing through Lucretius's notes.

"The Broken Lighthouse Cult claims that their lighthouse god pierced Formakas with an obelisk, creating the wonder known as Father's Eye. Astronomical observation indicates that Father's Eye is formed by periodic eruptions of lava from within Formakas. Yet strangely, whenever Father's Eye appears, Macragge's spirituality also rises."

Spirituality... what kind of ridiculous wording was that? Was he some occultist aristocrat?

"If an obelisk truly pierced Formakas and created Father's Eye, then based on Father's Eye's cycle of appearance, this should have occurred in the early hours of the ninth day of some 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 created an impact crater. Yet no such formation appears on any currently known map of Macragge."

"Furthermore, calculations made through sextant observations show that the 'Lighthouse Star' spoken of by the Broken Lighthouse Cult lies nearly a thousand light-years from Macragge. It is difficult to imagine that, during Old Night when the Warp ran rampant, an obelisk could have crossed such an immense 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 writing, and a smile crept onto his lips.

His teacher really did know some useful things.

"I consulted the star charts preserved in the Great Library from the Golden Age and compared them with the present starfield. I found the Lighthouse Star's exact location. I can confirm that it is a planet half a sector away, near the edge of the galaxy. Records describe it as a habitable world, though one that has yet to be developed."

Half a sector from Macragge, close to the galactic rim, habitable yet undeveloped, a lighthouse, and the Blackstone fragments Lucretius had excavated—Zhou Yun already knew the planet's name.

Sotha.

On that planet stood a navigation lighthouse built by the Necrons, the former masters of the galaxy. To a great extent, it could replace Terra's Astronomican, and in some respects it was even superior to the Astronomican.

Later, after the galaxy was torn apart, it was the lighthouse on Sotha that illuminated Macragge, tore open the Warp storms, and guided the ships of the Second Imperium.

That lighthouse was called Pharos.

This confirmed Zhou Yun's suspicions.

In the prophecy, he saw himself, Tita, and a blond man walking across Sotha's soil, looking at the mountain range that concealed the Pharos Lighthouse.

That blond man... was almost certainly Roboute Guilliman.

He, Guilliman, and Tita were going to search for 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 within just a few years,

that meant Zhou Yun and the others would, in the near future, use some non-Warp method of travel to cross more than a thousand light-years in one go.

If such a method really existed, it could only lie in... that obelisk from Sotha that had crushed the Sorcerer King to death.

Where was that obelisk?

In the future, he had gone to Sotha together with Roboute Guilliman. Was the key still Guilliman?

He still had to get that tutoring position.

After finishing the records concerning the Broken Lighthouse Temple, Zhou Yun found the notes on the Sorcerer King.

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 Sorcerer King's reign, eagle worship was quite common. It is said that one of the Sorcerer God's titles was 'Supreme Eagle,' and ornaments expressing this eagle worship were often made from translucent crystal. All crystal eagle-head statues unearthed so far are covered in cracks. This is well worth noting."

Zhou Yun examined the crystal eagle-head statue in his hand. There were no traces of psychic power left... The psychic power within the statue had completely dissipated.

Still not entirely reassured, he lightly pinched the eagle-head statue and sent a stream of golden psychic power into it. Yet the statue did not change at all.

After confirming that it was harmless, Zhou Yun nodded slightly and stuffed every artifact resembling the eagle-head statue into his pockets.

Although he knew they were harmless, Zhou Yun remained cautious. He planned to toss them all into the donation box at the War King Temple later.

After all, Zhou Yun was now completely certain who that Sorcerer God indicated by the eagle-head statue was.

Skilled in sorcery, fond of deception, and marked by an eagle... It had to be that old fossil who strapped a dead eagle to his chest and played around 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 Imperial eagle. Up close, it was Kairos.

Zhou Yun could not help mocking inwardly. He thought Tzeentch and the Emperor were a pair of star-crossed two-headed eagles too.

As he thought, Zhou Yun reached toward the table once more.

But he was not planning to keep pulling a 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 brought by his Precognition School psychic power, Zhou Yun began searching through the artifacts. He found a small silver-gilt cross.

Zhou Yun held the cross in his palm and brought it close to his eyes, allowing himself to take in every detail upon it.

"I bless it," Zhou Yun whispered.

Pale golden psychic power slowly flowed from Zhou Yun's fingertips and gathered within the cross.

This pale golden psychic power came from his students' reverence. It was a power somewhat different from his own psychic power, more akin to that which surrounded the Golden Throne. Zhou Yun suspected that this was "faith."

After studying it, Zhou Yun had gained a rudimentary grasp of several ways to use it. 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 when infused with this psychic power. This hypothesis had yet to be verified.

Zhou Yun had accumulated only a tiny amount of this "faith" so far, and he infused very little of it into the cross. If used as ordinary psychic power, it might only have been enough to lift an egg.

But this faith pointed 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 believed this thing could at least scare off Warp daemons and the like—put bluntly, even if the Emperor merely pissed on this cross, it could still frighten a whole pack of lesser daemons to death if someone carried it.

Ah, he really was too generous.

Of course, while Zhou Yun did mean it partly as compensation, his main reason was to prevent himself from one day looking up and discovering that his teacher had turned into a bird-headed man.

Zhou Yun nodded in satisfaction and placed the cross pendant in a conspicuous spot on the desk. As long as Lucretius was not a complete psychic idiot, he should be able to sense the power within it.

At the instant he set down the cross, Zhou Yun's body stiffened...

He had found it...

His gaze suddenly returned to the Golden Throne and fixed upon a flame of soul within the vast sea of the Warp.