God's Meal

God's Meal

The transport ship stopped.

With a teeth-grating hiss of hydraulics venting, the energy cages pinning Li Wei and Elena vanished.

Before they could react, the mechanical arms roughly seized them again and, like dumping garbage, threw them and several thousand other "Hollow Shells" through a massive opening in the bottom of the hold.

Whoosh— a brief fall.

They landed on an incomparably wide black conveyor belt that moved slowly onward.

The conveyor belt was made of some cold Blackstone material, its surface patterned like skin.

Like a black river, it carried tens of thousands of expressionless humans toward the space directly beneath the inverted pyramid ahead.

"Don't make a sound." Li Wei clamped a hand over Elena's mouth as she tried to scream, pressing her flat against the conveyor belt amid the rigid miners.

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

He raised his head slightly and surveyed their surroundings.

This was an underground space so vast it made people feel insignificant.

Above them hung the tip of the inverted pyramid, like a sword of Damocles suspended over everyone's heads.

Countless green energy conduits descended from its tip, connecting to gigantic machinery on the ground.

At the end of the conveyor belt lay an abyss.

The deep pit Li Wei had seen from the air, churning with black mist.

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

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

Necrons had no religion. They had no need for sacrifices.

Unless... they kept a "pet" that had to eat.

The conveyor belt moved slowly forward.

Several high-ranking Necrons floated on either side of it.

Unlike the burly lords from before, they had slender limbs and enormous jellyfish-like heads—Tomb Technicians.

They held strange staffs and were performing a final quality inspection on the "goods" on the conveyor belt.

"Soul reading: weak."

"Biomass: intact."

"Feeding sequence: activated."

A technician swung its staff.

The dozens of miners at the front slid off the end of the conveyor belt like unfeeling puppets and fell into the pit of roiling black mist.

Li Wei held his breath and stared fixedly at the pit.

There were no screams. No sound of bodies hitting the ground.

But the instant those dozens of people fell in—

The black mist in the abyss suddenly boiled.

Visible golden motes rose from the abyss. They were the final energy released when life faded—the sparks of the soul.

Then, something extended from within that mass of black mist.

It was not a biological tentacle.

It was a beam of light.

A "black beam" that was black, yet more dazzling than the sun.

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

The golden sparks of their souls were drained dry in an instant.

And the human bodies, the moment they lost the support of their souls, did not vanish. Instead, they instantly turned to sand.

They became gray-white powder and drifted through the abyss.

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

"Transmit to suppression node. Increase Stasis Pulse output."

Li Wei understood.

This was not merely slaughter.

It was energy conversion.

The Necrons were using the souls of living people to feed whatever was in that pit.

Then they extracted power from the fed creature to maintain the Dead Space of Exorcism that had turned the entire planet into idiots.

It was a perfect, vicious cycle.

"What exactly is... in that pit?" Elena trembled from head to toe, her teeth chattering.

Her instincts as a Sister told her that what lay in the pit was not a daemon, but something older, nobler, and crueler than any daemon.

Li Wei narrowed his eyes.

His Soulless Vision saw through the disguise of the black mist.

At the very bottom of the abyss—

Locked down by countless massive Blackstone obelisks carved with glowing runes—

Was a "god."

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

Thousands of energy chains pierced its body, nailing it firmly in the void.

It was wailing.

But its wail was soundless, because it had no vocal organs.

It was hungry. It was furious.

A C'tan Shard.

The C'tan were the former masters of the Necrons, ancient gods betrayed and shattered by the Necrons.

They were gods of the material universe, rulers of physical law.

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

"I don't like that thing." Li Wei felt an unprecedented pressure.

Though the C'tan Shard was bound, the "weight of existence" it radiated made Li Wei's bones ache faintly.

And as a Pariah, he sensed a strange... mutual repulsion between himself and that thing.

Like matter encountering antimatter.

"We can't fall in," Li Wei said in a low voice. "If you fall in, you'll be eaten. And I... might cause an explosion."

The conveyor belt kept moving.

They were less than fifty meters from the abyss.

The people ahead fell in one after another, turning to ash.

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

"If we jump off, the Technicians will spot us and kill us instantly." Li Wei looked at the Tomb Technicians floating in the air.

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

A mechanical arm there was picking out "substandard" products—such as mutilated bodies or corpses with completely drained souls—and tossing them into a waste chute beside it.

No one knew where the waste chute led, but it had to be better than falling into a god's mouth.

"Play dead," Li Wei suddenly said.

"We'll pretend to be 'broken batteries.'"

"How?"

"Relax. Don't resist. Imagine you're a stone." Li Wei took Elena's hand and intensified the release of his Void Field.

He even did something extremely dangerous.

Through their joined hands, he forcibly poured his own "emptiness" into Elena's body.

"Mm!" Elena groaned, rolling her eyes.

It felt as though someone had drained all the blood from her body.

Her vital signs instantly dropped to their lowest point. Her heart nearly stopped, and the spark of her soul was completely wrapped and suppressed by Li Wei's darkness.

To the scanner, she was now a worthless corpse.

The two of them arrived beneath the mechanical arm at the sorting station with the conveyor belt.

A red scanning beam swept over them.

[Scan target: biomass.]

[Soul reading: zero (completely depleted).]

[Assessment: waste.]

[Execution: reclamation sequence.]

Clank! Cold mechanical claws seized Li Wei around the waist, while another claw grabbed the unconscious Elena.

The tremendous force squeezed Li Wei's ribs until they hurt.

They were lifted up, hanging above the conveyor belt.

Below them were countless others still walking forward blankly, waiting to be eaten.

The mechanical arm turned.

It flung them toward the pitch-black waste chute beside it, which reeked of rot.

At the instant Li Wei was about to be thrown in—

He looked back at the abyss.

Just then—

The black mist in the abyss parted for an instant.

The C'tan Shard imprisoned by chains had no features on its face of starlight.

But Li Wei felt that it "looked" at him.

It was a god's glance.

In that instant, a voice sounded in Li Wei's mind.

Not language.

But a physical concept.

That concept was: [Entropy].

"...At last... the key... has arrived..."

Bang!

Li Wei was thrown into the waste chute.

Darkness swallowed him.

But the last voice he heard sent ice through his entire body.

The imprisoned god had seen him.

And it seemed... it had been waiting for him all along?

The chute was filled with mucus and fragments of corpses.

Li Wei held the unconscious Elena as they slid rapidly through the darkness.

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

"Why did that holy man say I was the key?"

Li Wei recalled the fake Psyker who had deceived him aboard the Black Ship—the one called the Door.

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

And now this C'tan had also called him a key.

Could it be... in this universe filled with Warp magic—psychic power—and anti-Warp technology—the Necrons—

That "nothingness" was the password that unlocked every ultimate seal?

The sliding stopped.

They landed in a massive garbage heap.

It was littered with severed limbs and broken bodies—the discarded human remains judged "unqualified."

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

"Wake up. We're at the dump."

Elena opened her eyes groggily. When she saw the scene around them, she nearly fainted again.

"Is this... hell?"

"No, this is backstage." Li Wei stood and looked toward the dump's exit.

There was a damaged maintenance door there, with a faint green light seeping through the crack.

"The front stage is feeding people to a god."

"We're backstage, which means we can..." Li Wei picked up a broken metal pipe and weighed it in his hand.

"Pull its power plug."