The Gallery of the Blind

The corridor was breathing. Truly breathing.

Li Wei leaned against the wall, the shock baton in his hand hissing with electrical current.

He could feel the metal wall at his back heaving in a rhythmic pulse, like a sheet of iron stretched over a pair of massive lungs.

With every heave, a warm puff of steam laden with rust and formaldehyde vented from the seams of the walls.

"This route is wrong." Li Wei stopped in his tracks.

According to the directional sign on the wall (though those High Gothic letters were crawling around like bugs), the heavy freight elevator on D-4 Deck should be right ahead.

Yet he had been walking down this corridor for twenty minutes.

The hallway seemed endless, or rather, it was a Moebius Strip.

A corpse ahead—the one he had just stepped over five minutes ago, strangled to death by its own intestines—had appeared before him once again.

"Ghost-wall trap?" Li Wei frowned.

In the Warhammer universe, this was called a Warp Labyrinth.

The spatial structure of reality had folded, forming an infinite loop.

An ordinary person could spend their entire life here without ever escaping, doomed to walk until they starved to death or went insane.

However, Li Wei was a bug in the system.

"I don't believe in superstitions."

He walked up to the seemingly infinitely extending wall.

In his Soulless Vision, there was no endless corridor here.

What he saw was a clump of chaotic, colorful light mist blocking the way—an illusion generated by Warp energy.

And behind that mist stood a solid wall, featuring an inconspicuous ventilation vent.

"Who are you trying to fool?" Li Wei reached out to grab the light mist.

Zzzzt!

The light mist touched his fingers and burst like a soap bubble.

The previously straight corridor vanished instantly, revealing the cold, real wall of a dead end.

Reality returned.

Li Wei kicked open the grille of the vent and crawled inside.

In this magic-filled maze, only a "blind man" like him could see the straight path.

Crawling through the narrow duct, Li Wei heard a sound.

It was not a scream, nor a wail.

It was... a chewing sound.

Moreover, it was a massive, overlapping chorus of chewing, as though several thousand mouths were eating at the same time.

The end of the duct led to Sector D-5: Special Containment Level.

What was imprisoned here were not ordinary psykers meant for sacrifice, but rather items of extreme xenos research value or cursed holy relics.

Li Wei poked his head out from the duct opening and looked down.

Even though he was already accustomed to hell, the sight before him still caused his stomach to churn.

This level had completely turned into flesh and bone.

The floor had transformed into a giant set of gums, and countless bright red tongues hung from the ceiling.

In the center of the corridor stood a squad of Sisters of Silence.

There were five of them in total, maintaining a standard tactical defensive formation, standing back-to-back with their greatswords held high.

They did not move.

Nor would they ever move again.

Because they had turned into salt crystals.

They maintained their combat postures, but every single cell in their bodies had been replaced with crystalline white salt.

Surrounding them was a crowd of... things.

They were neither demons nor xenos.

They were a collection of walking clothes.

They were prisoner uniforms, completely empty inside yet acting as though worn by invisible people, swarming around the salt statues and licking them frantically.

Scratch, scratch, scratch... The unseen tongues lapped against the pillars of salt, producing a blood-curdling sound.

The Sisters of Silence were Pariahs, and they should have been immune to magic.

Yet what they faced was not magic, but reality-warping.

Something had altered the concept of their existence from "humans" to "salt."

"Is this the power of an Alpha-level Psyker?" Li Wei held his breath, not daring to make the slightest sound.

Even the Sisters of Silence had fallen to their knees; a half-baked amateur like him would just be serving himself up on a platter.

He had to go around.

Yet the stairs leading to the lower level were directly behind that pack of hollow clothes.

Suddenly, the walkie-talkie in Li Wei's pocket (which he had pried off the dead servitor) rang out again.

It was still that raspy, crazed old voice:

"Don't take the stairs, little one."

"The stairs have turned into an esophagus. Walk up them, and you will be digested."

"Look to your left. The chute marked 'Hazardous Waste'."

Li Wei turned his head and indeed spotted a rusted metal chute opening.

"That person... or that voice, is he watching me?" Li Wei felt a chill run down his spine.

In a place where even the walls lied, could this guide possibly be trusted?

"Hurry... They smell your 'emptiness'." The voice in the walkie-talkie grew urgent.

Down below, the hollow clothes that had been licking the sisters' salt pillars suddenly stopped moving.

Their empty sleeves pointed in unison upward—straight toward the ventilation vent where Li Wei hid.

Though they lacked faces, Li Wei could feel countless greedy gazes locked onto him.

They did not hate Li Wei.

They hungered for him.

Because to these monsters existing due to an overabundance of Warp energy, Li Wei's "emptiness" was like a well in the desert. They wanted to fill him up.

"Damn it!" Li Wei hesitated no longer.

Rather than being filled by a group of invisible monsters, he would rather jump down that unknown chute.

He lunged out of the vent, tracing an arc through the air, and dove headfirst into the chute marked "Hazardous" just as the hollow clothes lunged toward him.

Thud!

Whoosh!

The chute was steep and slick. The walls were overgrown with slimy moss and some kind of congealed grease.

Li Wei slid downward at a breathtaking speed, the velocity robbing him of his breath.

This descent in the dark lasted a full minute.

Finally, the path ahead leveled out.

He was flung out of the pipe, landing on... a massive web.

Li Wei struggled to his feet.

It was very dark here, save for a faint phosphorescent glow in the distance.

He tried to move and discovered that the web beneath his feet was elastic and... sticky.

"Where is this?" Li Wei pulled out his shock baton, clicking on its flashlight function.

The beam of light flared.

It illuminated the surroundings.

Li Wei's pupils constricted violently.

He had not reached the bottom.

He was suspended high in the air.

This was a massive cylindrical shaft, none other than the core Psyker Reactor Shaft of the Black Ship.

And the web beneath his feet was woven from countless human hands and feet.

Tens of thousands of naked human beings, hands linked and feet hooked together, had been stretched, twisted, and fused into a giant flesh-web covering the entire shaft.

Their eyes were all open, staring at Li Wei.

Their mouths were all agape, emitting a monotonous, mechanical pendulum-like ticking sound:

"Tick... tock... tick... tock..."

They were not dead.

They were the biological components of this ship.

And in the center of the flesh-web sat a tiny figure.

It was a little boy who looked to be only seven or eight years old.

He wore a pristine white hospital gown and clutched a tattered teddy bear in his arms.

He kept his head lowered, seemingly whispering to the toy.

Li Wei felt the blood freeze in his veins.

The aura radiating from that boy—even to Li Wei, a Pariah—caused a suffocating tightness in his chest.

It was not the oppression of psychic power.

It was absolute madness.

"Are you the one who called me?" Li Wei gripped his baton tightly, his voice trembling.

The little boy slowly raised his head.

His face was clean and pretty.

Yet he had no eyes.

His eye sockets were plugged with two mechanical orbs that rotated constantly; they were the targeting sensors of the warship.

"No." The little boy spoke.

The voice was not that of a child, but the raspy tone of an old man.

The sound emerged from the teddy bear he held.

"I am not him."

"I am the... keeper of this ship."

"And that fellow who called you..."

The little boy—or rather, the materialized incarnation of the ship's machine spirit—raised a finger, pointing toward the bottomless darkness below.

"He is not human."

"He is not a psyker either."

"He is... a door."

Rumble!!

A deafening explosion echoed from the dark depths below.

A visible wave of black shock energy surged upward from the bottom of the shaft.

The flesh-web made of human bodies began to shake violently, and the people comprising the net started to shriek and snap.

"The door has opened." The teddy bear emitted a despairing sigh.

"Soulless one, you are too late."

"He lured you down here not to save you."

"He used your 'emptiness' to act as the... key that unlocks the door."

"Or... to force the door open even wider."

Li Wei had no time to process this information.

The flesh-web beneath his feet snapped.

He plummeted once more.

Falling straight down toward the so-called "door," toward the Alpha-level monster that had tricked him into descending.