After the celebration of his return, Guilliman once again carried out sweeping reforms of the Imperium's civil administration and the Departmento Munitorum.
The Imperium's responses remained sluggish, but he was gradually speeding them up.
Guilliman consolidated hundreds of different versions of its decrees, discarding every provision that no longer suited the Imperium's current circumstances and merging the rest into a new Codex Imperialis.
Many old regulations now required officials to consult the new Codex Imperialis before enforcing them. Where it offered no explicit guidance, the old decrees would remain in effect.
Over more than ten thousand years, the Imperium's regulations and enforcement procedures had accumulated thousands of versions, drastically slowing its operations.
Most absurd of all, no High Lord had ever undertaken a large-scale consolidation of these legal codes.
This also meant that all those thousands of versions remained valid in their own right, even though many of their individual provisions had ceased to function.
As hundreds of thousands of corrupt officials had their crimes read out before their executions, and tens of millions of Imperial officials across the Milky Way were dismissed or reassigned, decrees once mired in obstruction were enforced as fully as possible.
If the Inquisition had merely made many corrupt parasites more cautious, the Officio Assassinorum's actions this time sent a chill down everyone's spine.
No one knew whether someone they lived and worked beside every day might be a Callidus Assassin of the Inquisition.
An Ordo Xenos Inquisitor arrived in the outer orbit of Antares III, bearing official documents.
When the Inquisitor saw the two hive cities, both almost completely overrun by Orks, there was scarcely a moment's hesitation.
An Exterminatus order was signed.
A Cyclonic Torpedo was released from the launch bay of an Imperial Battlecruiser.
The tremendous explosion set the whole world of