The corridor was breathing. It was really breathing.
Li Wei leaned against the wall, the Shock Baton in his hand crackling with electricity.
He could feel the metal wall behind him rising and falling rhythmically, like sheet iron stretched over a pair of enormous lungs.
With every rise and fall, warm steam smelling of rust and formaldehyde hissed from the cracks in the wall.
"Something's wrong with this route." Li Wei stopped.
According to the signs on the wall—though the High Gothic letters were crawling about like insects—the D-4 Deck heavy cargo lift should have been ahead.
But he had already been walking down this corridor for twenty minutes.
The corridor seemed endless. Or rather, it was a Moebius Strip.
A corpse appeared before him again—the guard strangled to death by his own intestines, whom he had stepped over five minutes ago.
"A ghost wall?" Li Wei frowned.
In the world of Warhammer, this was called a Warp Labyrinth.
The structure of real space had been folded into a closed loop.
An ordinary person would never find a way out in their lifetime. They could only keep walking until they starved to death or went mad.
But Li Wei was a bug.
"I don't buy it."
He walked up to the wall that appeared to stretch on forever.
In his Soulless Vision, there was no endless corridor here.
What he saw was a chaotic mist of multicolored light blocking the way—a deception created by Warp energy.
Behind that mist was a solid wall, with an inconspicuous ventilation shaft set into it.
"Who are you trying to fool?" Li Wei reached out and grabbed the mist.
Sizzle!
The moment the mist touched his fingers, it burst like a soap bubble.
The straight corridor instantly vanished, revealing the cold, real wall of a dead end.
Reality returned.
Li Wei kicked open the vent grate and crawled inside.
In this magic-filled maze, only this "blind man" could see the straight road.
Crawling through the narrow duct, Li Wei heard something.
Not screams. Not wails.
But... chewing.
And not just a little chewing. It was massive, rising and falling in waves, as if thousands of mouths were eating at once.
At the end of the duct was D-5: the Special Containment Level.
What was held here were not ordinary Psykers meant for sacrifice, but "xenos objects of immense research value" and "cursed relics."
Li Wei poked his head out of the duct and looked down.
Even after seeing so much hell, the sight before him still made his stomach convulse.
This entire level had been transformed into flesh.
The floor had become a massive gumline, while countless crimson tongues dangled from the ceiling.
And in the middle of the corridor stood a squad of Sisters of Silence.
There were five of them, holding a standard defensive formation, back to back, their greatswords raised.
They did not move.
And they would never move again.
Because they had become salt crystals.
They remained in fighting poses, but every cell in their bodies had been replaced with translucent white salt.
Around them gathered a group of... things.
They were neither daemons nor xenos.
They were walking clothes.
Prisoner uniforms, empty within, yet moving as if transparent people wore them, surrounded the "salt statues" and licked them madly.
Rustle, rustle, rustle... Invisible tongues scraped across the salt pillars, making a skin-crawling sound.
Sisters of Silence were Pariahs. They should have been immune to magic.
But this was not magic. It was reality alteration.
Something had changed the very concept of their existence from "people" 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. If he went down there as a half-baked amateur, he would only be throwing his life away.
He had to go around them.
But the stairs leading down were behind those "Hollow Clothes."
Suddenly, the communicator in Li Wei's arms—the one he had pried off that dead Servitor—crackled again.
It was still that hoarse, mad old man's voice.
"Don't take the stairs, kid."
"The stairs have become an esophagus. If you go up them, you'll be digested."
"Look to your left. That chute marked 'hazardous waste.'"
Li Wei turned his head and indeed saw a rusted metal chute.
"That person... or that voice, is watching me?" Li Wei felt a chill crawl through him.
In a place where even the walls lied, could this guide really be trusted?
"Hurry... they've smelled your 'emptiness.'" The voice in the communicator became urgent.
Below, the Hollow Clothes licking the Sisters' salt pillars suddenly stopped.
Their empty sleeves all pointed upward at once—toward the ventilation shaft where Li Wei was hiding.
They had no faces, but Li Wei could feel countless greedy stares.
They did not hate Li Wei.
They craved him.
To these monsters sustained by an excess of Warp energy, Li Wei's "void" was like a well in the desert. They wanted to fill him.
"Fuck!" Li Wei stopped hesitating.
Rather than be filled by a bunch of invisible ghost things, he would rather jump into that unknown chute.
He sprang out of the vent, arcing through the air, and dove headfirst into the chute marked "hazardous" before the Hollow Clothes could pounce.
Thud!
Crash!
The chute was steep and slick. Its walls were covered in slimy moss and some kind of congealed grease.
Li Wei slid downward at terrifying speed, too fast for him to breathe.
The fall through darkness lasted a full minute.
At last, the path began to level out.
He was flung out and landed on a... gigantic web.
Li Wei struggled to his feet.
It was dark here, with only faint phosphorescence flickering in the distance.
He tried moving and discovered that the web beneath his feet was elastic, and... sticky.
"Where am I?" Li Wei pulled out his Shock Baton and switched on its flashlight.
The beam lit up.
It illuminated the surroundings.
Li Wei's pupils constricted violently.
He had not reached the lower level.
He was suspended in midair.
This was an enormous cylindrical shaft: the Black Ship's core Psyker Reactor Shaft.
And the web beneath his feet was woven from countless human arms and legs.
Tens of thousands of naked humans clasped hands and hooked feet, stretched, twisted, and fused together into a gigantic flesh web that covered the entire shaft.
All their eyes were open, staring at Li Wei.
All their mouths hung open, producing a monotonous ticking sound like a mechanical pendulum:
"Tick... tock... tick... tock..."
They were not dead.
They were the ship's biological components.
And at the center of the flesh web sat a small figure.
It was a little boy who looked only seven or eight years old.
He wore a spotless white hospital gown and held a battered Teddy Bear in his arms.
His head was lowered, as though he were talking to the toy.
Li Wei felt all the blood in his body freeze.
The aura emanating from the boy made even Li Wei, a Pariah, feel tightness in his chest.
It was not psychic pressure.
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 beautiful.
But he had no eyes.
Two rotating mechanical eyeballs had been stuffed into his sockets—probes from the warship's targeting system.
"No." The little boy spoke.
The voice was not that of a child, but the hoarse voice of an old man.
The voice came from the Teddy Bear in his arms.
"I'm not him."
"I am this ship's... caretaker."
"And the one who called you..."
The little boy—or rather, the embodied form of this ship's Machine Spirit—raised a finger and pointed into the bottomless darkness below.
"He isn't human."
"He isn't a Psyker either."
"He is... a door."
Boom!!
A thunderous crash erupted from the depths below.
A visible black shockwave surged upward from the bottom of the shaft.
The flesh web made of human bodies began to shudder violently. The people forming it started screaming and breaking apart.
"The door has opened." The Teddy Bear let out a despairing sigh.
"Soulless one, you came too late."
"He tricked you down here not to save you."
"He wanted to use your 'emptiness' as the key to... lock the door."
"Or... force the door open wider."
Li Wei had not even had time to process it all.
The flesh web beneath his feet snapped.
He fell again.
He plummeted straight toward that so-called "door," toward the Alpha-level monster that had tricked him down here.
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