By Your Grace, You and the Demons Behind You May Behold the Golden Throne

Father's Eye hung high in the sky.

This satellite was called Formakas, one of Macragge's four moons. Lava periodically burst through its surface, creating the spectacle known as Father's Eye. The people of Macragge believed it was the Heavenly Father of the divine realm gazing down upon the land, and that on this day, Macragge's Veil was at its thinnest.

Yet Zhou Yun could not quite understand why the divination had instructed him to enter his new body at one in the morning today, when Father's Eye reached its highest point. Was there some Numerological significance to it?

As he pondered this, Zhou Yun calmed himself. He took several deep breaths and slowly began returning his will to the Golden Throne...

"Begin."

The Blind Witch spoke in a hoarse, hollow voice. White, snake-like aphrodisiac mist swirled around her, coiling around the necks of the sixty-six believers.

Sakofi Paulus's heart pounded wildly. The arousing smoke had opened every pore on her body. Her expression was dazed, her mouth hung open, and she breathed like a beast.

She was nervous, yet she also anticipated what would happen next. She would receive true joy and be welcomed into the courtyard of the God of First Cry... Her father and sisters had all told her so. Her second eldest sister had entered the God of First Cry's feast before her.

But she also knew what she was about to experience: shedding her mortal flesh and ascending into the courtyard as a spirit—or, in other words... death.

Whenever she thought of that, Sakofi felt ashamed. She was still afraid, still frightened, still worried. It was proof that her faith was not devout enough.

Or perhaps she simply remained attached to the pleasures of the mortal world.

She liked the way her father used to tell her stories by the warm stove, even though he had not done so in a long time. These days, he preferred inflicting pain and receiving it.

Her eldest and second eldest sisters seemed to have forgotten those days as well. Compared to stories, they now preferred the sounds of pained moans, whether from their own mouths or someone else's.

She also somewhat missed her classmate, Tita. She was a very interesting person, always suddenly doing something neurotic that startled people, only to leave them pleasantly surprised.

And Tita's uncle... Recently, that grammar professor seemed to have become increasingly charming. Sakofi had little resistance to mature men like him.

Sakofi did not actually like pain very much either. She did not understand why her sisters could enjoy it. She could not... She only grit her teeth and endured because she did not want to disappoint her father.

She realized she did not like those extreme thrills or that exaggerated indulgence, either. She seemed to prefer having an ordinary romance with a mature, steady man on a warm afternoon. She simply lacked the courage to tell her father that.

She still remembered what her mother looked like before she died. A high concentration of drugs had taken her life, and those vacant eyes, nearly bulging from their sockets, had stared at Sakofi... Sakofi became afraid. She realized that she truly was still afraid of death, afraid of all this. She could no longer deceive herself.

But she no longer had the chance.

Pale mist tightened around her neck. A fierce, terrifying sense of suffocation swept over her. Her eyes widened. She was flying. She was rising. She was...

Sakofi let out a pained wail. She saw that the other sixty-five people had also been strangled by the smoke and suspended in midair, like her broken wooden puppet carved by her father's own hands.

The blind witch spread her arms atop the platform. A shrill song, sticky and nauseating, as if it meant to vomit out her soul, surged from her throat. Its savage tones and violent rhythm struck Kefina's body directly.

Her body twisted in exaggerated poses. Her bones snapped, her blood vessels burst from her body, and the notes drove her senses to an extreme sensitivity.

Every single devotee writhed to the music, dancing a fervent aerial ballet. The sounds of their shattering bones merged into the melody, becoming the instruments that played this piece.

Sakofi saw it—the courtyard, the sixfold courtyard surrounding the bedchamber of the God of First Cry. Eternal, cruel revelries were being held within, and Sakofi's soul was ascending into one of them.

She saw a pitiful woman suffering brutal punishment, every nerve in her body pulled out and made into strings.

That woman looked exactly like the statue in Semuneta Temple. She gazed at Sakofi with sorrowful, agonized, and pitying eyes...

A bull-headed monster seized Sakofi's soul. Mocking laughter poured into her ears as the creature ridiculed her stupidity. Pain beyond the limits of sensation began flooding into Sakofi's body.

The Blind Witch let out a piercing shriek. The brilliant storm raised by the sacrifice of sixty-six souls lifted her own soul into the heavens.

This sacrifice would strengthen her gifts, allowing her to advance to a higher level and receive more blessings from the God of First Cry.

The form of her soul began to change. Within the Warp, she became a shrieking witch, six pure-gold venomous snakes burning at her side as they swept toward her target with boundless agony. She was going to kill the pathetic sorcerer called Zhou Yun. Following his scent through the Warp, she sought him out...

Then, she saw him.

She saw Zhou Yun rising as well. His will hung within the Sea of Souls, and his eyes blazed with psychic fire as they stared at the Blind Witch. Astonishingly, that psychic energy was golden.

Zhou Yun looked at the Blind Witch. He noticed the boundless agony coiling around her and the extreme emotions raised when the sixty-six sacrifices had been offered. He saw the scene of the ritual.

The Blind Witch sensed Zhou Yun's emotions. They were... disgust and contempt...

Contempt directed at the Blind Witch... disgust directed at that sacrifice...

+A sacrifice of sixty-six people, sixty-six currents of pain.+

+And all this was just to pull your soul out of your own body and throw it at me like a brick?+

+Didn't you think this was dangerous? What if your soul couldn't beat me? Or what if some Warp turbulence scattered your soul?+

+Didn't you consider outsourcing it to a Warp entity? Holy shit, you've believed in Slaanesh for so long and don't even know a single daemonette? Do you have no connections at all?+

+Well, if that wasn't possible, you could have just projected pure psychic energy!+

+Why did you throw out your own soul along with it? Why?+

+Damn, how was this any different from ripping out your own heart in a fistfight and throwing it at someone?+

Zhou Yun's voice rang beside the Blind Witch's ear.

There was no mockery in that voice, only pure incomprehension.

But the Blind Witch broke. She had endured boundless pain and suffered countless tortures. Through the blessings of the God of First Cry, she had lost an unknown amount of life force and could only survive by draining the lives of young girls.

Yet the power she had gained through so much sacrifice, even bolstered by sixty-six offerings, was no different from that of a clown in Zhou Yun's eyes.

Screaming, she lunged at Zhou Yun—but before she could touch him, she saw it.

She saw the thing behind Zhou Yun.

The Golden Throne, towering into the clouds, and the mummified Emperor seated upon it.

+Ordinarily, someone at your level—including the demons behind you—would not be qualified to see the Golden Throne.+

+But today, by your grace, you and the demons behind you may behold the Golden Throne.+

Zhou Yun's voice descended from the Golden Throne and entered the Blind Witch's ears.

Then, she began to burn.