Blackstone's Intestines

The air in the waste processing plant carried a despairingly "clean" smell.

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

Because the environment here was sterile. Or rather, the microscopic ecosystem had been completely killed by the omnipresent Stasis Field.

Bacteria could not reproduce, cells stopped dying, and these severed remains looked like freshly cut models of raw flesh, retaining an uncanny sense of vitality.

Li Wei trudged across these soft "floors."

The sensation beneath his feet made his scalp crawl—it was the feeling of stepping on heaps of human eyeballs, fingers, and internal organs.

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

His voice echoed through the hollow metal hall, carrying a cold, metallic hardness.

"Follow my footprints.

The 'garbage' is piled unevenly here. Some places might be bottomless."

Elena clutched tightly at the hem of Li Wei's clothes, her eyes squeezed shut as she moved entirely by following his lead.

Li Wei's dried blood still covered her face like a dark red-black mask.

"Where... where is this place?" she asked shakily. "Why are there so many...?"

"Defective products that failed quality inspection." Li Wei kicked aside a broken arm, its fingers still curled in a grasping pose.

"Necrons have no use for damaged batteries. They only need intact, healthy soul vessels. As for these..." Li Wei looked around. "These are discarded losses."

At the far end of this enormous dump stood a maintenance hatch flickering with faint green light.

It was not a door meant for living creatures.

The hatch was extremely small, only half a person tall, and shaped like an irregular hexagon. It was clearly a passage intended for Scarabs or repair Servitors.

"We're crawling through." Li Wei crouched at the entrance and inspected its edges.

The frame was covered in a slick layer of transparent liquid—the coolant used to lubricate Servitor joints.

"Inside is the Necron Pyramid's 'intestines'—the maintenance layer for its energy transmission conduits.

There are no cameras there. Or rather, the cameras don't care about rat holes."

Li Wei crawled in first.

The interior of the conduit was incredibly narrow, its four walls made from a substance called Blackstone.

The stone absorbed light and heat. It was freezing to the touch, as though it could suck the warmth straight out of a human body.

The two crawled through the darkness.

The spatial structure here was deeply abnormal. Sometimes they were clearly crawling forward, yet their bodies felt heavier and heavier as gravity increased. Other times, the conduit suddenly turned ninety degrees straight upward, but they continued crawling along the wall like geckos without feeling as if they might fall.

Non-Euclidean Geometry.

The Necrons had mastered the technology to alter the laws of physics.

Within this core region, the direction of gravity, spatial distance, even the flow of time itself were all code that could be edited at will.

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

"Did you hear that?"

"Hear what?" Li Wei stopped moving and listened closely.

Apart from the faint mechanical rumble in the distance, there was nothing.

"Crying." Elena's voice was filled with extreme terror.

"Not... not crying from a mouth. It's... the stones are crying. The walls are crying."

Li Wei frowned.

He was a Pariah. He could not hear sounds on the psychic level.

But although Li Wei's blood had suppressed Elena's psychic signature, her senses remained keen.

"Don't listen. It's an illusion," Li Wei said coldly. "There may be ghosts from millions of years ago sealed inside these stones, or it may just be the wind."

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

The mental contamination had begun.

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

The C'tan were gods of the material universe. They did not need the Warp to twist reality.

Their whispers could directly rewrite the properties of matter, and could also make mortal minds collapse from their inability to comprehend higher-dimensional information.

Li Wei abruptly turned around and grabbed Elena by the wrist.

His fingers pressed hard against her pulse, transmitting his own Void through her veins.

"Look at me!" Li Wei snarled in the darkness.

Though his eyes could not see clearly, that repulsive, black-hole-like aura instantly enveloped Elena. "There's no crying here. Only me talking. If you think someone's calling you, it's because I want to curse you!"

That intense, physiological nausea surged through her again, drowning out the whispers in Elena's mind.

She dry-heaved, and a trace of clarity returned to her eyes. "Sorry... I... I can't control it..."

"Then bite this." Li Wei pulled a hard nutrition block from his pocket and shoved it into her mouth.

"Chew it up. Focus on chewing. Don't think. Thinking is fatal here."

The two continued onward.

But after crawling for who knew how long, the conduit ahead suddenly opened up.

They had reached a vast, vertical cylindrical shaft.

It was no longer dark here.

It was full of light.

Countless streams of green energy poured down the shaft walls like waterfalls.

At the center of those energy flows floated countless transparent cubic cages.

Every cage held a "thing."

Li Wei lay at the edge of the conduit exit and peered downward.

When he saw what was inside those cages, even he felt a genetic chill.

They were not human.

Nor were they any known alien species.

They were slices of time.

One cage contained a burning bird.

It remained forever frozen in the instant the flames erupted, the fire suspended in midair, neither going out nor spreading.

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

Another cage held a falling droplet of water.

Within the droplet was a miniature universe, endlessly cycling from the Big Bang to heat death.

And in the cage nearest to them—

Was an Astartes warrior clad in ancient Power Armor.

But he wore neither the blue armor nor black armor of the Imperium.

His armor was unpainted Gunmetal, its design so ancient it looked like a relic from the Great Crusade.

He was frozen in the posture of roaring and swinging his sword.

But his face... half of it was skull, and half was flesh.

It was not an injury. Rather, his state between "life and death" had been extracted.

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

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

"Those metal cans don't just collect souls. They collect phenomena too.

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

"That's... a legendary... Legion?" Elena stared at the gray-armored warrior. She seemed to recognize some forbidden history and hastily covered her mouth in fright.

"Don't worry about who that is. That's ancient history from thousands of years ago." Li Wei pointed toward the center of the shaft.

A floating Blackstone bridge stretched there, linking maintenance doors on opposite sides of the shaft.

But something Li Wei least wanted to encounter patrolled atop that bridge.

Crypt Wraiths.

They were mechanical monstrosities with long snake-like tails, hunched humanoid upper bodies, no legs, and two enormous phase claws.

They had no eyes, only a single eye-like sensor on their heads.

Most terrifyingly, they did not walk on the bridge.

Their forms flickered in and out of sight, sometimes passing through walls, sometimes vanishing into thin air.

Phase Shifting. They could freely switch between reality and the Void; no physical obstacle existed for them.

"Three." Li Wei counted them.

"These things are invisible killers. If we step onto that bridge, they'll emerge straight from the floor, hollow out our guts, and we won't even be able to touch them."

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

"No." Li Wei's gaze fell upon the pipelines carrying green energy.

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

"We don't need the bridge."

Li Wei pointed at the massive clamps along the shaft edge that held the energy lines in place.

"We'll climb across on the pipes."

"Climb across?!" Elena glanced at the bottomless abyss below. "Those are high-pressure energy conduits! If they leak—"

"Necron energy transmission is one hundred percent efficient. They don't leak." Li Wei had already crawled out of the conduit exit and leaped onto the nearest thick black pipe like a monkey.

The pipe's surface was hot and vibrated violently, like riding on the back of a giant dragon.

"And..." Li Wei turned back toward the Phase Spectres patrolling nearby.

"Those Spectres' sensors are based on 'movement' and 'physical collision.' They'll ignore the vibration of the energy conduits themselves."

"As long as we stay pressed against the pipe and match its vibration frequency, then according to their Logic, we're just... grime on the pipe."

"Come here. Don't look down." Li Wei held out his hand.

Elena gritted her teeth, closed her eyes, and jumped over.

Li Wei caught her and pressed her against the pipe wall.

Like a pair of parasites, they clung tightly to the two-meter-wide energy conduit and inched toward the other side above this magnificent, terrifying "museum of specimens."

Below them was an endless abyss, and on both sides were cages of frozen time.

Above their heads, the Phase Spectres passed through the walls, releasing bursts of electrical crackling.

Several times, the tail of one Spectre even swept over Li Wei's head.

But just as Li Wei had expected, shielded by his Pariah nature and further obscured by the signal interference caused by clinging to the high-energy conduit, the killer that operated solely on logical programming failed to detect the two tiny intruders.

At last, they reached the other side.

Li Wei opened a maintenance panel, and the two rolled inside.

This was a control room.

But not an ordinary control room.

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

At the center of the room floated a complex geometric body that continuously changed shape.

It was the control terminal for a Tesseract Labyrinth.

And beneath the geometric body, a black shadow was bound.

The shadow had no physical form. It was like a cloud of conscious smoke, tightly imprisoned within a transparent force field.

This was the C'tan Shard's... finger.

Or rather, one of its thought-tentacles.

It had been cut off separately and locked here as the power core of this area.

The instant Li Wei entered the room—

The black shadow imprisoned within the force field suddenly stopped struggling.

It had no eyes.

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

A voice exploded directly inside his mind.

No, it was not a voice.

It was mathematics.

An incomparably complex formula representing the ultimate truth of the universe had been forcibly crammed into Li Wei's brain.

[Entropy increase... inevitable...]

[Key... insert...]

[Release... truth...]

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

Even he could barely endure the impact of such higher-dimensional information.

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

"It's... talking to you?" Elena stared at Li Wei in horror.

She could not hear the voice, but she could see the black shadow frantically slamming against the force-field wall, seemingly trying to rush toward Li Wei.

"It wants me to let it out." Li Wei wiped away his nosebleed and looked at the shadow.

"It says it's imprisoned truth."

"It's a demon!" Elena raised her Medicus Staff as though she were about to perform an exorcism.

"No, it's worse than a demon." Li Wei walked closer to the control console.

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

He looked at the Hypercube geometric body that kept changing shape.

This was the lock.

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

No mortal could possibly solve it. A mortal mind simply could not calculate that fast.

But.

Li Wei did not need to solve it.

He only needed to destroy it.

"This thing is supplying power to the entire tomb," Li Wei analyzed.

"If we cut it off, the Stasis Pulse outside will stop. That field that turns people into idiots will disappear."

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

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

Suddenly, an utterly insane idea came to him.

"It's only a fragment. A tentacle."

"If I let it out..."

"What will be the first thing it does?"

Elena froze. "Eat people?"

"No." Li Wei shook his head.

"It will go looking for its main body."

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

"And while it's charging over there..." Li Wei pointed at the walls of the control room—the only route into the core area.

"It'll be like an out-of-control bulldozer, smashing through every Necron Warrior, Phase Spectre, and Defense Field in our way."

This was a plan to make the tiger devour the wolf.

Or perhaps, riding a tiger with no way to get off.

"This is insane! It's sacrilege!" Elena shouted.

"In this hellhole, staying alive is the greatest sacrilege." Li Wei did not hesitate.

He reached out, but did not touch the complex geometric construct.

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

That was where the physical circuitry lay. The interface between Necron technology and the material universe.

Full-power release: Void Annihilation.

Li Wei used himself as a massive "resistor," forcibly connecting himself to the Necrons' superconducting circuitry.

Crackle—!!! Black arcs of electricity erupted once more.

The violent clash between logic and anti-logic instantly burned out the Field Generator's Core Chip.

Crack!

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

Then the fissure widened.

Bang! The force field shattered.

The C'tan Tentacle that had been imprisoned for tens of millions of years was finally free.

It did not attack Li Wei immediately.

Just as Li Wei had expected, to this tiny insect that made it feel "disgusted" and "empty"—

It circled once in the air and let out a soundless shriek powerful enough to shatter glass.

Then it became a streak of black light and smashed straight through the control room wall!

Rumble! That impregnable Blackstone wall was like papier-mâché before the C'tan Power.

A straight passage leading into the depths of the core was forcibly blasted open by that black light.

Alarms blared. The sounds of countless Necron Warriors awakening echoed through the chamber.

But what they faced was an enraged fragment of a god, on its way home.

"The way's open." Li Wei looked at the smoking hole and waved at the dumbfounded Elena.

"Let's go, Sister."

"Follow that monster."

"It's our vanguard."