The Feeding of the Gods

Chapter 40: The Feeding of Gods

The transport ship stopped.

Accompanied by a teeth-setting hiss of hydraulic pressure, the energy barriers pinning Li Wei and Elena vanished.

Before they could even react, the mechanical arm grabbed them roughly again, dumping them out like garbage through a giant opening in the bottom of the cargo hold along with several thousand other "Hollow Shells".

Whoosh—A brief fall.

They landed on a tremendously wide, slowly moving black conveyor belt.

This conveyor belt was constructed from some sort of cold, blackstone material with a skin-like texture on its surface.

Like a black river, it bore tens of thousands of expressionless humans toward the direct underside of an inverted pyramid ahead.

"Don't make a sound." Li Wei grabbed Elena, who wanted to scream, pressing her hard against the conveyor belt and blending her in among the stiff miners.

"Play dead. We're on the assembly line."

He raised his head slightly, sizing up his surroundings.

This was an underground space so grand it made one feel insignificant.

Above them was the apex of the inverted hanging pyramid, suspended like a sword of Damocles over everyone's heads.

Countless green energy pipelines hung down from the pyramid's tip, connecting to the giant machinery on the ground.

At the end of the conveyor belt lay an abyss.

It was the deep pit Li Wei had seen from the air, roiling with black mist.

Like a feeding tongue, the conveyor belt continuously delivered these humans into that deep pit.

"Is this... a sacrifice?" A chill welled up in Li Wei's heart.

The Necrons had no religion; they had no need for sacrifices.

Unless... they were keeping a "pet" that had to be fed.

The conveyor belt moved forward sluggishly.

On either side of the belt, several high-ranking Necrons floated.

Unlike the previous lords, they were not bulky, possessing slender limbs and huge, jellyfish-like heads—Tomb Technicians.

Holding bizarre staves, they were conducting a final quality check on the "cargo" upon the conveyor belt.

"Soul reading: faint."

"Biomass: intact."

"Feeding sequence: initiated."

A technician waved its staff.

The dozens of miners at the very front fell away like a flock of unfeeling puppets along the end of the conveyor belt, plunging into the black-mist-roiling deep pit.

Li Wei held his breath, staring fixedly at that pit.

No screams. No sound of impact.

Yet the moment those dozens of people fell in, the black mist in the deep pit suddenly boiled.

A visible cluster of golden light spots rose from the abyss—the final energy burst forth as life faded, the spark of the soul.

Immediately afterward, something reached out from that mass of black mist.

It was not a biological tentacle.

It was a beam of light.

A "black beam" that, though black, was more blinding than the sun.

Like a greedy tongue, it instantly swept across those falling humans.

The golden soul sparks were sucked dry in an instant.

As for the flesh of those humans, the very moment it lost soul support, it did not vanish but instantly turned to sand.

It transformed into grayish-white powder, drifting within the abyss.

"Energy capture: 0.04%." The Tomb Technician recorded the data indifferently.

"Transfer to suppression node. Increase static pulse power."

Li Wei understood.

This was not merely slaughter.

This was energy conversion.

The Necrons were using the souls of the living to feed the thing in the pit.

Then, they extracted power from that well-fed entity to sustain the "Dead Space of Exorcism" that turned the entire planet into fools.

This was a perfect, vicious closed loop.

"What on earth... is in that pit?" Elena trembled all over, her teeth chattering.

Her inspiration as a battle nun made her sense that what existed in that pit was not a demon, but something older than demons, more noble, and far crueler.

Li Wei narrowed his eyes.

His "Soulless Vision" allowed him to see through the camouflage of that layer of black mist.

At the very bottom of that abyss, locked down by countless huge blackstone obelisks carved with glowing runes, was a "god".

It possessed the rough outline of a human, but its body was composed of flowing starlight and dark matter.

Thousands of energy chains pierced its torso, pinning it dead in the void.

It was wailing.

Yet its wail was silent, for it lacked vocal organs.

It was hungry. It was furious.

A Star God Shard.

Star Gods were the once-masters of the Necrons, ancient deities betrayed and shattered by the Necrons themselves.

They were gods of the material universe, wielding dominion over physical laws.

And now, this god that had once devoured stars had been reduced to a battery for the Necrons.

"I don't like this thing." Li Wei sensed an unprecedented sense of oppression.

Although that Star God Shard was locked down, the "weight of existence" it radiated made Li Wei's very bones ache faintly.

Moreover, as a Pariah, he felt a strange sense of mutual repulsion between himself and that entity.

It was much like positive matter encountering antimatter.

"We cannot fall in," Li Wei muttered. "Fall in, and you'll be eaten. As for me... I might trigger an explosion."

The conveyor belt kept moving.

Less than fifty meters remained until the abyss.

The people ahead dropped one by one, turning into flying ash.

"What do we do? Jump ship?" Elena asked.

"Jump ship and the technicians will spot us, instantly vaporizing us." Li Wei watched the several Tomb Technicians floating in the air.

At that moment, the conveyor belt passed a sorting chute.

There, a mechanical arm was picking out "unqualified" products (such as those with mutilated bodies or entirely withered souls), tossing them into an adjacent waste chute.

Where the waste chute led was unknown, but it surely beat falling into a god's mouth.

"Play dead," Li Wei said abruptly.

"We need to pass as 'ruined batteries'."

"How?"

"Relax. Don't resist. Imagine you're a stone." Li Wei gripped Elena's hand, once more maximizing the release of his own "Void Field".

He even did something extremely risky.

He forcibly channeled his own sort of "emptiness" through their joined hands, pouring it directly into Elena's body.

"Ngh!" Elena groaned softly, rolling her eyes back.

The sensation felt akin to having one's blood drained dry.

Her vital signs instantly plummeted to a minimum, her heartbeat practically ceasing, and the spark of her soul completely enveloped and suppressed by Li Wei's darkness.

To scanners, she now registered as a valueless corpse.

The two of them drifted with the conveyor belt beneath the sorting chute's mechanical arm.

A red scanning beam swept over them.

[Scan target: Biomass.] [Soul reading: Zero (completely withered).] [Determination: Waste.] [Execution: Reclamation sequence.]

Clack! Cold mechanical claws gripped Li Wei's waist, while another claw seized the unconscious Elena.

The immense force made Li Wei's ribs ache.

They were hoisted up, suspended above the conveyor belt.

Below them were countless kindred still moving dazedly, awaiting consumption.

The mechanical arm rotated.

It flung them toward the pitch-black, putrid-smelling waste chute nearby.

Just the instant before Li Wei was tossed in—

He glanced back at the abyss.

Coincidentally.

The black mist within that abyss parted for a single moment.

That Star God Shard imprisoned by chains possessed a face formed of starlight, devoid of facial features.

Yet Li Wei felt that it "saw" him.

It was a glance from a god.

At that exact moment, a voice echoed in Li Wei's mind.

It was not language.

It was a physical concept.

That concept was: [Entropy].

...Finally... the key... has come...

Bang!

Li Wei was thrown into the waste chute.

Darkness swallowed him whole.

Yet the final voice he heard left him thoroughly chilled.

The imprisoned god had seen him.

Furthermore, it seemed... to have been waiting for him all along?

The chute was filled with mucus and fragments of corpses.

Clutching the unconscious Elena, Li Wei slid downward at high speed through the dark.

"Damn it..." I'm a Pariah, an insulator.

Why did that god-botherer call me a key?

Li Wei recalled the fake psychic who had scammed him on the black ship (that door).

He had said he wanted to stuff Li Wei into the door.

Now this Star God, too, called him a key.

Could it be that... in this universe filled with Warp magic (psykers) and anti-Warp technology (Necrons)—

"Nothingness" was the password to unlock all ultimate seals?

The sliding stopped.

They tumbled into a gigantic heap of refuse.

Severed limbs and broken arms littered the place—the rejected residues of humans deemed "unqualified".

Li Wei crawled out from the pile of corpses and shook Elena awake.

"Wake up, we've arrived at the scrap yard."

Elena opened her eyes in a daze, took in the surrounding sights, and nearly fainted all over again.

"Is this... hell?"

"No, this is backstage." Li Wei stood up, looking toward the exit of the scrap heap.

A damaged maintenance door stood there, a faint green light leaking through its seams.

"Up front, they're feeding people to a god."

"In the back, we can just..." Li Wei picked up a fractured metal pipe, weighing it in his hand.

"Unplug its power source."