Entropy Anchor

The fall did not end with him being smashed to pieces.

Li Wei felt himself plunge into a pile of soft, dry ashes that still retained a trace of warmth.

The ash was piled several meters deep, like a vast gray ocean.

"Cough, cough, cough..." Li Wei struggled out of the ash heap and brushed the dust from himself.

But when he saw what those "ashes" truly were, he froze.

They were not wood ash, nor were they coal ash.

They were cremated remains. The residue left behind by countless Psykers who had died, been drained dry, or been burned for losing control during this Black Ship's millennia of travel.

They had been dumped here, filling this enormous abyss.

This was the Black Ship's trash bin, and also its graveyard.

Li Wei stepped on the remnants of those souls, producing dull rustling sounds.

Darkness surrounded him, with only a faint blue glow in the distance.

There were no guards, no fences.

Because this place needed no guards simply by virtue of existing.

He gripped his only weapon—the Shock Baton—and headed toward that blue light.

As he drew closer, he made out its source. It was a massive throne made of brass and black obsidian.

Someone sat upon the throne.

Or rather, a sheet of human skin did.

It was a shriveled old man, his skin hanging from his skeleton like dead bark.

His chest cavity was open, his ribs curling outward like a pried-open birdcage.

Yet there was no heart or lungs in that hollow chest.

There was a swirling nebula instead.

Blue and purple radiance intertwined within it, occasionally flashing with miniature lightning.

This was the "Alpha-level Psyker."

The one who claimed he could save Li Wei.

"You came..." The voice did not come from the old man's mouth—his mouth had already been sewn shut—but directly from the vibrations of the nebula in his chest.

The voice echoed through Li Wei's mind with a teeth-grinding overlap, as if a thousand people were speaking at once.

Li Wei stopped ten meters away.

As a Pariah, he instinctively felt revulsion.

The thing before him was a vast, leaking rift into the Warp.

This old man had died long ago. His body was merely a frame, a "doorframe" barely keeping the rift from widening.

"You're that 'door'?" Li Wei asked coldly. "That Teddy Bear said you wanted to use me."

"Use? What a crude word." The nebula in his chest spun faster. "This is... completion."

The old man's shriveled fingers twitched.

"You see, I am too 'full.'"

"The Warp's energy is infinite. It swelled inside me, ruptured my flesh, and burned away my soul. I am a balloon on the verge of bursting."

"And you... you are 'empty.'"

"You are a gap in the universe, a funnel."

"As long as I put you into my body..." The old man leaned forward, and the nebula glimmered greedily.

"Your Void will neutralize my overload. We will achieve perfect balance. The door will stabilize, and I will walk out of this damned cage and become a true god."

Li Wei understood.

It was like a pressure cooker about to explode. This old monster wanted a pressure-release valve.

And Li Wei was the perfect humanoid pressure-release valve, perhaps the only one in the entire galaxy.

"What if I refuse?" Li Wei asked.

"Refusal has no meaning here."

"I write the laws of physics."

The old man raised a finger.

Boom!

The sea of ashes beneath Li Wei's feet suddenly began to boil.

The ashes of the dead gathered together, turning into several enormous gray hands that clamped tightly around Li Wei's ankles.

This was not a psychic illusion.

It was telekinesis.

Pure physical force.

Even if Li Wei was immune to magical damage, he was not immune to a hundred pounds of ashes smashing into his face.

"Ugh!" Li Wei was dragged to the ground and rapidly pulled toward the throne.

"Damn it!" Li Wei swung the Shock Baton and scattered one ash hand, but more surged forward, binding him up like a rice dumpling and lifting him into the air.

He was delivered before the old man.

At such close range, he could even feel the terrifying heat radiating from the nebula in that chest—it was the heat of radiation.

"Come in... become part of eternity..." The old man's ribs spread open like tentacles, ready to wrap around Li Wei.

At that moment.

Li Wei did not struggle.

He looked at the rotating Warp nebula right in front of him.

Then he suddenly smiled.

"Old bastard, you got one thing wrong."

"What?"

"I'm a Pariah." Li Wei stared at the nebula. "My trait isn't 'absorption.' It's 'erasure.'"

"I'm not a pressure-release valve."

"I'm concentrated acid."

Li Wei suddenly released the Shock Baton in his hand.

But he did not let it fall to the ground.

With all his strength, he drove the baton—the still-sparking Shock Baton running at full capacity—viciously into the brass throne beneath the old man!

There was a network of complex life-support lines and psychic suppression runes there.

They were the physical mechanisms keeping this "flesh doorframe" from collapsing.

"What are you doing?!" the old man screamed in terror.

"Since you're a door," Li Wei roared, grabbing the lines shorted out by the baton and unleashing his Void Field at full power, "then I'll tear down the damn doorframe!"

Crackle—BOOM!!!

Three layers of attack erupted at once:

Physical short circuit: The life-support system was destroyed.

Psychic disruption: The suppression runes failed beneath Li Wei's touch.

Void Annihilation: When Li Wei's hand touched the edge of the nebula, Warp energy and anti-Warp matter underwent a violent annihilation reaction.

"NO!! PAIN!! EMPTY!!!"

The old man's scream tore through space.

His previously shriveled body began disintegrating at terrifying speed, melting like ice cream under the sun.

Freed from the restraint of the "doorframe," the nebula in his chest instantly lost control.

It no longer rotated steadily.

It collapsed.

Hummm— A black dot formed in the old man's chest.

It was a miniature black hole created by torn reality.

"Run!" Li Wei was hurled away by the blast wave and slammed heavily into the ash pile.

But he had no time to feel the pain.

That black dot was madly devouring everything around it—ashes, the throne, even light itself.

The Black Ship began to shake violently.

An alarm rang out: "Warning! Structural collapse on the lower deck! Gellar Field failure across all systems!"

"Activate emergency jettison procedure! Activate emergency jettison procedure!"

The ship's Machine Spirit—the Teddy Bear—was carrying out its final survival measure: severing the ruined lower deck, along with the collapsing Warp rift, from the ship's hull!

Crack—Rumble!

A thunderous sound of tearing metal came from overhead.

Li Wei saw a massive fissure split open in the ceiling, exposing the Warp currents beyond, filled with vivid colors and maddening geometric shapes.

The section he was in broke away from the main body of the Black Ship.

Like a stone thrown into the sea, it was abandoned within the raging Warp.

"It's over." Li Wei clung to a broken pipe and watched the world around him collapse.

Without the Black Ship's protection, an ordinary human could not survive even one second in the Warp.

But then, the collapsing black hole generated an immense pull.

It did not draw Li Wei in.

Because it repelled Li Wei's Void nature, it instead generated a tremendous repulsive force.

Like two identical magnetic poles pushing each other apart.

Bang!

Li Wei felt as if an invisible giant foot had kicked him hard.

His entire body became a shooting star, launched away from the disintegrating wreckage.

He passed through that thin bubble of reality.

He fell into the Warp.

By all rights, he should have mutated instantly, gone mad, or been devoured by daemons.

But in this ocean made purely of psychic energy...

Li Wei was a drop of oil.

He did not dissolve in water.

The daemons saw him.

The indescribable things drifting through the Void, the whales with a thousand eyes, the storms made of screams.

They all saw this tiny human.

But they all avoided him.

Because he smelled too bad.

He was too disgusting.

Like seeing a lump of toxic matter floating in a swimming pool, still spreading black ink through the water.

Li Wei floated in the bizarre, dazzling Void.

He did not breathe—the Warp did not require breathing—nor did he freeze to death.

He only felt incomparably lonely.

The entire world glowed, while only he was black.

"Is this... the world after death?" Li Wei looked at the magnificent sight beyond the limits of human comprehension, and his consciousness began to blur.

Just as he was about to lose consciousness.

He saw a fissure appear ahead.

It was not a rift in the Warp.

It was a rift into the real world—as if someone had cut open this rag of Warp fabric with a knife, exposing the gray physical universe beneath.

An immense gravitational force came from within the fissure.

Li Wei could not resist and was sucked inside.

Thud!

A hard surface.

A piercingly cold wind.

And... the smell of dust.

Li Wei suddenly sucked in a breath and began coughing violently.

Air. Real, cold air carrying the scent of earth.

He had survived. He had "leaked" out of the Warp.

Li Wei painfully rolled over and looked at the gray sky above him.

There were no stars, no sun.

Only thick, eternal gray clouds.

He struggled into a sitting position and looked around.

It was a boundless wasteland.

The ground was planted with rusted swords and piled with enormous skeletons.

The wind carried weeping.

And at the end of the horizon stood a towering black obelisk that pierced the clouds.

Green flames burned at the obelisk's peak.

"Where is this?" Li Wei picked up a broken sword from the ground and used it to support himself as he stood.

In the distance, several swaying figures emerged from the mist.

They wore tattered ancient armor and dragged rusty axes in their hands.

They had no faces.

Only clusters of plague-green fire burned where their heads should have been.

Nurgle Walkers?

No, that wasn't right.

Li Wei narrowed his eyes.

Those things carried none of that rotten stench.

There was only a kind of... dead silence.

He glanced down at the ground beneath his feet.

A shattered stone tablet lay half-buried in the soil, carved with a line of ancient writing.

Li Wei couldn't read it.

But he recognized the symbol.

It was a black sun.

Li Wei's heart suddenly sank.

He knew where this was.

This wasn't the Imperium.

It might not even lie within the known borders of the galaxy.

This was a Dead World, or some forgotten ancient xenos battlefield.

Or worse.

This was a Necron Tomb World.