The Intestines of Black Stone

The air in the scrap-processing plant was heavy with a desperate "cleanliness."

Though piled high with corpses and severed limbs, there were no flies, no maggots, and not even the stench of decay.

This was because the environment was sterile—or rather, the micro-ecosystem here had been completely eradicated by the omnipresent stasis field.

Bacteria could not multiply, and cells stopped apoptosing; these severed limbs looked just like freshly butchered meat models, maintaining an eerie sense of vivid freshness.

Li Wei stepped heavily and unevenly across this soft "floor."

The sensation beneath his soles made his scalp crawl—it was the feeling of walking over piles of human eyeballs, fingers, and viscera.

Don't look down, Li Wei warned Elena in a low voice.

His voice echoed in the empty metal hall, carrying a hint of metallic coldness.

Follow my footprints.

The "trash" here isn't piled evenly, and some spots might be bottomless.

Elena gripped the corner of Li Wei's jacket tightly, her eyes squeezed shut, relying entirely on his guidance to move.

Her face was still smeared with Li Wei's dried blood, like a black-and-red mask.

"Where... where on earth is this place?" she asked, trembling. "Why are there so many..."

"Unqualified defective products." Li Wei kicked away a severed arm, the fingers of which still held a gripping posture.

"Necrons don't need incomplete batteries. They only need complete, healthy soul vessels. As for these..." Li Wei glanced around, "these are discarded consumables."

At the end of this massive scrapyard was a maintenance hatch emitting a faint green glow.

It was not a door meant for living beings.

The door was extremely small, only half a person high, and shaped like an irregular hexagon, obviously a passage meant for those scarabs or repair servitors.

"We're crawling in." Li Wei squatted at the doorway, checking the edges.

The door frame was covered in a layer of slick, transparent liquid—the coolant used to lubricate the servitors' joints.

"Inside is the 'gut' of the Necron Pyramid—meaning the maintenance layer of the energy transmission conduits."

"There are no monitors there, or rather, monitors don't pay attention to rat holes."

Li Wei crawled in first.

The interior of the conduit was extremely narrow, the four walls constructed of a substance called "blackstone."

This stone absorbed light and heat, feeling bone-chillingly cold to the touch, as if it could directly drain the body heat from a person.

The two crawled in the darkness.

The spatial structure here was deeply abnormal. Sometimes they were clearly crawling forward, yet felt their bodies growing heavier (increased gravity); sometimes the conduit suddenly went vertical at a ninety-degree angle, but the two of them still clung to the pipe wall like geckos, crawling upward without any sensation of falling.

Non-Euclidean geometry.

The Necrons mastered technology that altered the laws of physics.

In this core area, gravity directions, spatial distances, and even the flow of time were merely code that could be edited at will.

"Li Wei..." Elena behind him suddenly stopped.

"Did you hear that?"

"Hear what?" Li Wei halted his actions, tilting his head to listen.

Aside from the faint mechanical roaring sounds echoing from the distance, there was nothing.

"Crying." Terror permeated Elena's voice.

"Not... not crying made by a mouth. It's... it's the stone crying. The walls are crying."

Li Wei frowned.

He was a pariah; he could not hear sounds on the psychic plane.

Yet even though Elena's psychic traits were suppressed by his blood pressure, her perception remained acute.

"Don't listen. That's an illusion." Li Wei said coldly and harshly, "The stones here might have ghosts sealed inside them from millions of years ago, or it might just be the wind."

"No... it's calling my name..." Elena began to tremble violently, her pupils dilating in the dark. "It says... it's so cold... it says... give it back its skin..."

Psychic pollution began.

The closer they got to the core, the stronger the influence of that imprisoned C'tan Shard became.

C'tan were gods of the material universe; they could warp reality without needing the Warp.

Their whispers could directly rewrite the properties of matter, and could also cause a mortal's brain to collapse from an inability to process higher-dimensional information.

Li Wei abruptly turned his head, grabbing Elena by the wrist.

His fingers pressed hard against her pulse, channeling his own "void" through her blood vessels.

Look at me! Li Wei growled in the dark.

Though his eyes could not see clearly, that repulsive aura, akin to a black hole, instantly enveloped Elena. There is no crying here. Only I am speaking. If you think someone is calling you, it's because I want to yell at you!

That intense, physiological nausea struck once more, diluting the whispers in Elena's mind.

She retched once, a sliver of clarity returning to her eyes. "I'm sorry... I... I couldn't control it..."

"Then bite down on this." Li Wei pulled a hard nutrient block from his pocket, shoving it into her mouth.

"Crush it. Focus on the action of chewing. Don't think. Here, thinking is fatal."

The two continued onward.

Yet after crawling for an unknown duration, the conduit ahead suddenly widened.

They arrived inside a massive, vertical cylindrical shaft.

It was no longer dark here.

It was filled with light.

Countless streams of green energy, resembling waterfalls, cascaded down along the walls of the shaft.

And in the center of these energy streams, countless transparent cubic cages hovered.

Inside every cage, a "thing" was locked.

Li Wei lay prone on the edge of the conduit exit, peering downward.

When he saw clearly what was inside those cages, even he felt a chill rising from his genetic level.

That was not human.

Nor was it any known xenos.

That was a time slice.

In one cage, a burning bird was trapped.

It remained forever locked in the posture of the exact instant of an explosion of flame; the fire was frozen in midair, neither extinguishing nor spreading.

It was alive, but it was locked within that single second of "burning."

In another cage was a falling droplet of water.

The droplet wrapped around a miniature universe, undergoing an infinite cycle from the Big Bang to heat death.

And in a cage closest to them.

An Astartes warrior wearing ancient power armor was locked inside.

Yet he was not of the Imperium's blue or black armor.

His armor was an unpainted gunmetal, its style so ancient it resembled a relic from the Great Crusade.

He maintained the posture of roaring and swinging his sword.

Yet his face... was half skull and half flesh.

It was not due to injury; rather, his state "between life and death" had been stripped away.

The Necrons in this cage had stripped away the concept of "time," leaving this warrior forever trapped in a quantum superposition state of "dying yet not dead."

"This is... a museum." Li Wei felt his throat go dry.

"These tin cans don't just collect souls; they collect phenomena."

"They've turned time, moments, and even concepts into specimens."

"Is that... the legendary... Legion?" Elena stared at the grey-armored warrior, seemingly recognizing some taboo history, and hurriedly covered her mouth in fright.

"Never mind who that is. That's ancient history from thousands of years ago." Li Wei pointed toward the center of the shaft.

There was a suspended blackstone bridge connecting the maintenance doors on both ends of the shaft.

Yet upon the bridge, something Li Wei least wanted to see was patrolling.

Crypt Wraiths.

These were mechanical monsters with long, serpentine tails, an upper body resembling a hunchbacked humanoid, lacking legs, yet possessing a pair of massive phase claws.

They had no eyes, their heads featuring only a single cyclopean sensor.

Most terrifyingly, they did not walk upon the bridge.

Their figures flickered in and out of existence, at times piercing through walls, and at times vanishing into thin air.

Phase Shifting. They could freely switch between reality and the void, rendering any physical obstacle completely nonexistent to them.

"Three of them." Li Wei counted.

"These things are invisible assassins. If we step onto that bridge, they'll drill straight out of the floor and hollow out our viscera while we won't even be able to touch them."

"Then what do we do? Go back?" Elena looked in despair at the pitch-black conduit behind them.

"No." Li Wei's gaze fell upon those conduits coursing with green energy.

"Look at those energy streams. They flow toward the core. Meaning the tip of that inverted pyramid."

"We don't need to take the bridge."

Li Wei pointed toward the edge of the shaft at the massive clamps used to secure the energy pipelines.

"We climb across via the pipes."

"Climb across?!" Elena glanced at the bottomless abyss below. "Those are high-voltage energy conduits! If there's a leak..."

"The Necrons' energy transmission efficiency is 100%; there are no leaks." Li Wei had already crawled out of the conduit opening, leaping like a monkey onto the nearest thick black pipe.

The surface of the pipe was very hot, vibrating intensely, like riding upon the back of a giant dragon.

"And..." Li Wei looked back, watching those patrolling Phase Wraiths.

"Those wraiths' sensors are based on 'movement' and 'physical collision.' They'll ignore the vibrations of the energy pipeline itself."

"As long as we cling to the pipe and maintain the exact same frequency of vibration as the conduit, in their logic, we're just... grime upon the pipe."

"Come over. Don't look down." Li Wei reached out a hand.

Gritting her teeth with eyes closed, Elena leaped across.

Li Wei grabbed her, pressing her flat against the pipe wall.

The two of them, like a pair of parasites, clung tightly to that two-meter-diameter energy pipe, inching their way toward the opposite side high above this magnificent and terrifying "specimen museum."

Below them lay the endless abyss, flanked on both sides by cages of frozen time.

Above their heads, those few Phase Wraiths phased right through the walls, emitting bursts of crackling electricity.

On several occasions, a wraith's tail even brushed across Li Wei's head.

Yet just as Li Wei had anticipated, under the cover of his "pariah" trait, coupled with the signal-masking caused by clinging tightly to the high-energy conduit, the assassin running purely on logical programming failed to spot these two minuscule intruders.

At last, they crawled across to the other side.

Li Wei forced open a maintenance hatch, and the two tumbled inside.

This was a control room.

Yet it was no ordinary control room.

There were no complex instrument panels here, nor any holographic screens.

In the center of the room floated a complex geometric shape that constantly shifted its form.

That was the control terminal for the Tesseract Labyrinth.

And beneath the geometry, a black shadow was bound.

That shadow possessed no physical form; it was like a mass of conscious smoke, locked securely inside a transparent force field.

This was precisely... a single finger of that C'tan Shard.

Or rather, one of its thought tendrils.

It had been severed entirely and locked here to serve as the energy core for this sector.

The instant Li Wei stepped into the room.

The black shadow imprisoned within the force field abruptly ceased its struggling.

It possessed no eyes.

Yet Li Wei felt the air throughout the entire room freeze solid.

A voice exploded directly inside his mind.

No, that was not a sound.

That was mathematics.

An extremely complex sequence of formulas representing the ultimate truths of the universe was forcefully crammed into Li Wei's brain.

[Entropy increase... inevitable...]

[Key... insert...]

[Release... truth...]

Li Wei clutched his head as blood streamed from his nose.

Even he found the impact of such higher-dimensional information somewhat difficult to endure.

Because this was not merely psychic power; this was a direct dialogue with the laws of physics.

"Is it... talking to you?" Elena stared at Li Wei in terror.

She could not hear that voice, but she could see the black shadow violently slamming against the force field walls, seeming eager to lunge toward Li Wei.

"It wants me to let it out." Li Wei wiped away his bloody nose, staring at the black shadow.

"It says it's the imprisoned truth."

"It's a demon!" Elena raised her medicus staff as if attempting an exorcism.

"No, it's worse than a demon." Li Wei approached the console.

"It's a god. A god in the physical sense."

He looked at the constantly shifting tesseract geometry.

This was the lock.

A lock based on higher-dimensional mathematics and spatial folding technology.

Mortals could never untangle it because a mortal's brain simply couldn't calculate it fast enough.

However.

Li Wei didn't need to untangle it.

He only needed to destroy it.

"This thing is powering the entire tomb," Li Wei analyzed.

"If we cut it off, the stasis pulse outside will stop. The field that turns people into idiots will vanish."

"But then... this monster will get out!" Elena warned.

"Get out?" Li Wei looked at the black shadow.

Suddenly, he had an extremely crazy idea.

"It's just a shard. It's a C'tan Tentacle."

"If I let it out..."

"What's the first thing it will do?"

Elena froze. "Eat people?"

"No." Li Wei shook his head.

"It's going to find its true body."

"It will rush toward the deep pit beneath that inverted pyramid to reunite with its master."

"And in the process of rushing over there..." Li Wei pointed at the control room's wall—the compulsory route to the core zone.

"Like an out-of-control bulldozer, it will help us smash through all the blocking Necron Warriors, Phase Spectres, and Defense Fields."

This was a strategy of driving a tiger to devour a wolf.

Or rather, riding a tiger and unable to dismount.

"This is too crazy! That's blasphemy!" Elena shouted.

"In this ghost place, staying alive is the greatest blasphemy." Li Wei didn't hesitate at all.

He reached out, not touching the complex geometric shape.

Instead, he thrust his hand directly into the base of the Field Generator binding the black shadow.

That was the physical circuitry, the interface between Necron technology and the material universe.

Full-power release: Void Annihilation.

Li Wei used himself as a massive "resistor," forcibly plugging into the Necron superconducting circuits.

Hiss—!!! Black electric arcs erupted once more.

That violent conflict between logic and anti-logic instantly burned out the Core Chip of the Field Generator.

Crack!

A fissure appeared in the transparent field binding the black shadow.

Immediately afterward, the crack widened.

Bang! The field shattered.

The C'tan Tentacle, imprisoned for tens of millions of years, finally regained its freedom.

It didn't attack Li Wei immediately.

Just as Li Wei expected, as for this little bug that made it feel "disgusted" and "empty"—

It circled in the air once, emitting a silent screech powerful enough to shatter glass.

Then, it transformed into a streak of black light and smashed directly through the control room wall!

Rumble! That indestructible Blackstone wall was like tissue paper in the face of C'tan Power.

A straight passage leading deep into the core was forcibly blasted open by this black light.

Alarms blared wildly. The sounds of countless awakening Necron Warriors echoed in.

Yet what they faced was an angry shard of a god trying to go home.

"The road is open." Li Wei looked at the still-smoking giant hole and waved at the dumbfounded Elena.

"Let's go, Sister."

"Follow that monster."

"That's our vanguard."