The Emperor's smile deepened a little, but soon faded again. His gaze grew distant, as though he were recalling an unimaginably remote past.
"I know this is deeply unfair to you."
The Emperor spoke softly. "You should have lived an ordinary life, working, falling in love, marrying, having children, and then growing old peacefully in a world at peace. You should never have been drawn into this war spanning ten thousand years, let alone endured so much suffering and sacrifice."
"But I... I had no choice."
"I watched helplessly as the Imperium rotted, as my sons fell, as countless worlds sank into despair. I tried countless ways to change things, to save them, but every attempt only made matters worse."
The Emperor slowly raised his hands, looking at his faintly glowing palms with bitter irony in his eyes. "Whatever I do is interpreted as a miracle; whatever I say is taken as divine revelation. The more I deny my divinity, the more fanatically humanity worships me. The harder I try to guide them to think for themselves, the more they treat my words as inviolable scripture."
"I became the very thing I hated most."
"So..."
The Emperor opened his eyes again and looked at Liu Zhipeng, his earnest gaze almost pleading. "So I needed a... me who wasn't me."
Liu Zhipeng's heart jolted.
"I stripped a portion of my humanity from my essence."
The Emperor slowly raised a hand and pointed at Liu Zhipeng's chest. "And you are that humanity."
"You are the only part of me that, through all those long years, still remembered that I was once just an ordinary human. But you are not my clone, not a fragment of me, and certainly not my tool."
His voice grew solemn, each word spoken as though he were