Back when Guilliman was assassinated, the Word Bearers hermit loyal to the Emperor came to Macragge to pledge allegiance. He had mastered a great deal of the Word Bearers Legion's Warp sorcery and possessed an understanding of the Warp far beyond that of ordinary people.
It could be said that, when it came to the Warp, he was the undisputed expert in the entire Ultima Segmentum.
At the time, Lox and Guilliman had proposed a hypothesis: summon daemons from the Warp, then exploit the fact that Untouchables could completely kill Warp daemons to coerce and entice them into betraying Warp intelligence and serving humanity.
For a long time, humanity had harbored grave misunderstandings about Warp daemons. Many believed that these monsters born from the Sea of Souls did not fear death. In truth, however, daemons feared death as well.
Killing a Warp daemon in the material universe did not harm its essence. It merely destroyed the vessel through which it had manifested in the physical world, banishing it back into the Warp.
Once enough time had passed and the daemon had mostly recovered, it would once again possess both the ability and ambition to invade the material universe.
This was an astonishingly audacious idea. Even now, humanity's understanding of the Warp remained extremely passive and superficial.
How many factions existed within the Warp, what schemes they had laid against humanity, and how to effectively counter the Warp were all matters still being explored.
The rules for countering Warp daemons that Hill had once summarized were principles painstakingly derived from trial and error and battlefield experience. They might not apply to every situation.
Before the loyalists returned to defend Terra through the Webway, obtaining intelligence about the traitors in advance would undoubtedly give them an enormous advantage.
Interstellar warfare was, to