Chapter Summaries

Liu Zhipeng awakened in the dying body of the priest Enoch on Colchis and followed a newborn’s life signal to the nomadic Bonecrusher tribe. After Van Mogar named the rapidly growing child Lorgar, Enoch took him into the desert to protect and guide him, leaving the tribe to keep his existence secret.

• Liu Zhipeng awakened in a dying old priest’s body and set out across the desert toward a newborn’s signal.
• Van Mogar found a baby in a crashed incubation pod and named him Lorgar, meaning Raincaller.
• Lorgar grew rapidly, learned the tribe’s dialects, and drew Van Mogar’s concern that the Holy Covenant Church would discover him.
• Enoch arrived at the Bonecrusher camp and asked Van Mogar to entrust Lorgar to him so he could protect and teach the child.
• Enoch told Van Mogar to claim Lorgar had died in a sandstorm, then led Lorgar into Colchis’s Forbidden Zone of the Living.

Lorgar traveled with Enoch across Colchis, where practical knowledge saved a village from sacrificing a child and led Lorgar to question prayer and blood offerings. They later reached plague-stricken Valach, where the Holy Covenant Church exploited the dying instead of helping them.

• Enoch urged Lorgar to seek answers by experiencing the lives and suffering of Colchis's people.
• At a drought-stricken oasis, a Holy Covenant cleric called for a child sacrifice to appease the rain god.
• Enoch guided Lorgar to dig into an underground waterway, and the spring they uncovered saved the village and the girl.
• The villagers hailed Lorgar as a deity, but he concluded that action and knowledge were more powerful than prayers and blood.
• Lorgar and Enoch arrived in Valach, where the Church sold costly Atonement Writs and contaminated water while the plague's victims died in the streets.

After witnessing religious leaders exploit plague victims in Vharak City-State, Lorgar learned from Enoch that there were no gods and fell into despair. Enoch began to show him the stars through science and humanity’s ancient knowledge, leaving Lorgar poised to hear more about the Dark Age of Technology.

• Lorgar and Enoch treated plague victims with distilled water, quarantine, and herbal medicine, while people relying on holy water and indulgences died.
• Outside Vharak City-State, Lorgar demanded to know why a god would allow the suffering, and Enoch told him that no gods existed and temple leaders were merely exploitative mortals.
• Lorgar spent months in silence, losing his faith and struggling with the meaninglessness of human suffering.
• On a desert night, Lorgar challenged Enoch over the point of helping people when so many still died.
• Enoch led Lorgar up a sand dune, showed him astronomical charts, explained the physical laws governing the stars, and began telling him about humanity’s Dark Age of Technology.

Enoch’s words led Lorgar to reject gods and dedicate himself to human reason, so he began teaching knowledge and critical thinking across Colchis. His growing movement drew the wrath of High Priest Kofarlun, whose army surrounded Lorgar’s followers at Wailing Canyon as Lorgar asked Enoch how to defeat them.

• Enoch urged Lorgar to find meaning in human reason and knowledge, and Lorgar resolved to serve truth rather than seek gods.
• Lorgar began teaching wanderers, slaves, and outcasts practical skills and ways to recognize the Church’s deceptions.
• More people joined Lorgar and Enoch, and villages and tribes increasingly stopped making offerings to the Holy Covenant Church.
• High Priest Kofarlun assembled a vast religious army to destroy the movement he considered blasphemous.
• At Wailing Canyon, Kofarlun’s army surrounded Lorgar’s mostly elderly, infirm, female, and child followers, and Lorgar called on Enoch to teach him how to win.

Lorgar used Enoch’s teachings to defeat the Theocracy Army and awakened his psychic power when he destroyed a Warp Daemon with his shovel. After routing the enemy, he lost Enoch, who urged him to liberate Colchis and follow his own path.

• Enoch guided Lorgar in using the ruins, smoke, traps, and echoes to inflict heavy losses on the larger Theocracy Army.
• Kofarlun sacrificed ten thousand people to summon Warp Daemons, terrifying the Wanderers and shaking Lorgar’s faith in reason.
• Enoch told Lorgar that the daemons fed on mortal fear, helping him awaken his psychic power and shatter a daemon with his shovel.
• Lorgar led the Wanderers in a countercharge that routed the Theocracy Army, while Kofarlun escaped under the Royal Guard’s protection.
• Lorgar returned to Enoch, who had been wounded by a poisoned bone spear, and grieved as his teacher died after urging him to liberate Colchis and remember that he was a person.

After Enoch’s death, Lorgar founded the Word Bearers and led a three-year war to overthrow Colchis’s theocratic rulers. He defeated High Priest Kofarlun and rebuilt the planet as a secular world devoted to reason and science.

• Lorgar buried Enoch beneath an unmarked granite headstone and declared his followers the Word Bearers.
• Lorgar led the Word Bearers in a three-year counteroffensive, toppling temples and establishing schools and hospitals in liberated cities.
• Lorgar led more than a million Word Bearers in an assault on Urizen, the Holy Covenant Church’s last stronghold.
• High Priest Kofarlun sacrificed the city’s fanatics and transformed into a monster empowered by the Three Gods of the Warp.
• Lorgar killed Kofarlun by striking the unstable core in his chest with Apocalypse, ending the theocratic rule over Colchis.
• Lorgar made Colchis a secular fortress world, replacing temples and scriptures with schools, libraries, laboratories, and scientific education.

Warren, a blind corpse collector newly inhabited by Liu Zhipeng, continued surviving in Nostramo’s Underhive while seeking to save the young Curze. When Curze pursued three street children, Warren intervened and stood between them and the Night Haunter.

• Liu Zhipeng took control of Warren’s body after the old corpse collector died and resumed pushing his wheelbarrow through the Underhive.
• Warren recognized Curze as the Primarch he needed to save and continued his work among Nostramo’s dead.
• Warren heard three street children fleeing from Curze in Dripping Alley and hurried to intercept them.
• Warren called the children toward him and shielded them as Curze approached.
• Curze stopped before Warren and said that the children were guilty.

Warren used his knowledge of the underground passages to save three children from Curze and lure Curze into a trap. Curze was sealed behind a massive blast door, while Warren listened to the pain and loneliness in his roars.

• Warren blinded Curze with steam, led the children through a maintenance passage, and lowered them into a ventilation shaft to escape.
• Warren distracted Curze with a metal clatter, hid in a narrow pipe, and slipped away while Curze chased the sound.
• Warren appeared in a dead-end passage and lured Curze onto a weakened section of floor, which collapsed beneath him.
• Warren knocked a toolbox onto the blast door’s control lever, causing the heavy door to fall and trap Curze.
• Curze furiously battered the sealed blast door while Warren listened to his roars.

Warren freed Konrad Curze from his cell and embraced him, helping the lonely, tormented Primarch find comfort and a home. Konrad began learning to live alongside Warren, but their brief peace was not destined to last.

• Warren opened the blast door and embraced Curze, who broke down sobbing as Warren comforted him.
• Warren brought Curze to his hut, shared his Nutrient Paste, and named him Konrad.
• Over the following months, Konrad grew to his full size and learned to help Warren gather supplies and improve their home.
• Konrad quickly mastered Warren’s practical lessons and used his abilities to make the hut sturdier.

Konrad foresaw Leo murdering a family and being killed by the Iron Hook Gang, then resolved to stop him through violence. Warren blocked him, challenged the certainty of his prophecy, and insisted the future could change, leaving Konrad stunned.

• Konrad suffered a vision of Leo robbing and killing a family in Section Seven before the Iron Hook Gang killed him.
• Konrad decided to find Leo and kill him before he could commit the murders.
• Warren stood in Konrad’s way and said he was protecting Konrad from becoming a killer himself.
• Konrad insisted his prophecies could not be wrong, but Warren argued that a new variable could change the future.
• Konrad stood stunned as Warren challenged his belief in fate.

Warren took Konrad to meet Leo, whose crushing debt and desperate circumstances differed from the violent future Konrad had foreseen. After learning about the exploitation that trapped Leo, Warren opened his lifetime savings, leaving their fate unresolved.

• Warren led Konrad through the Underhive to Leo's shack in the Porters' Camp.
• Konrad and Warren overheard Leo weeping about his debt to Iron Hook and the threat of being maimed if he could not repay it.
• Leo explained that his foreman had forced the porters into gambling, passing their losses up a chain that reached the noble lords.
• Konrad grew furious at the nobles whose rules enabled the exploitation of the Underhive's poor.
• When Leo said he owed five hundred credits, Warren opened the bundle containing his savings.

Warren used his life savings to save Leo and urged him to live decently, showing Konrad that the future could be changed through kindness. Konrad and Warren began preventing disasters across Nostramo, but Konrad’s growing visions revealed atrocities committed by the city’s nobles and powerful officials.

• Warren gave Leo his six hundred credits to pay his debt and warned him to stop gambling, avoid harming the weak, and help others in need.
• Konrad waited for the murder he had foreseen in Section Seven, but Warren reported that the family of three was alive and well.
• Konrad realized that his prophecies were warnings of preventable disasters and began working with Warren to avert them.
• Konrad and Warren prevented escalating violence and disrupted gang deals by introducing small changes before events turned bloody.
• Konrad’s heightened senses revealed nobles and officials torturing people, endangering miners, and selling civilians into slavery.
• Konrad recognized that their efforts could not end Nostramo’s suffering without rooting out the powerful sources of evil, and his instincts awakened again.

Konrad proposed ruling Nostramo’s nobles through fear, but Warren taught him that lasting order required law, evidence, and justice that people could scrutinize. After rapidly mastering legal and investigative principles, Konrad set his sights on replacing Nostramo’s corrupt system of edicts with law founded on equality.

• Konrad told Warren he planned to terrorize and kill Nostramo’s nobles to force the city into order.
• Warren rebuked Konrad, warning that an order sustained by fear would collapse and lead to worse violence.
• Warren explained that lasting order depended on shared laws, evidence, and fair procedures that constrained rulers as well as ordinary people.
• Warren began teaching Konrad jurisprudence, including chains of evidence and procedural justice.
• Konrad rapidly mastered law and investigative methods, then resolved to replace Nostramo’s corrupt edicts with a system based on evidence, reason, and equality.

Konrad gathered irrefutable evidence of the nobles’ crimes and, with Warren, distributed copies throughout Nostramo’s Underhive. As the lower classes began to unite and the aristocracy realized the threat was real, Nostramo’s Ruling Council sought to respond to the unseen source.

• Konrad stopped killing and secretly recorded the crimes of Nostramo’s nobles, then brought the evidence to Warren.
• Warren copied the records onto Data Cards and quietly distributed them through his Underhive contacts.
• Workers and low-ranking gang members began discussing their exploitation and questioning their divisions as the evidence circulated.
• Nostramo’s nobles tried to trace the Data Cards’ source, but arrests and torture failed to reveal it.
• After confirming the records were genuine, Nostramo’s Ruling Council reached a consensus in response to the growing threat.

As the nobles’ brutal purge devastated the Underhive, Konrad wanted to attack the guards, but Warren warned that doing so would provoke an even deadlier retaliation. Warren then locked Konrad in a blast-resistant conduit and surrendered himself to the guards as the “Ghost” who had distributed the evidence.

• Thousands of city guards sealed off the Underhive’s food, water, and ventilation, leaving civilians to starve amid widespread violence and disease.
• Konrad urged Warren to let him become the Night Wraith and strike the guards, but Warren warned that the nobles would escalate the slaughter and destroy the Underhive.
• Warren told Konrad that someone had to become the first flame, then shoved him through a concealed hatch into an underground conduit.
• Warren locked the hatch, disabled its controls, and left Konrad trapped inside despite his pleas.
• Warren walked into the guards’ searchlights and declared that he was the Ghost who had distributed the evidence.

Konrad watched Warren face immediate execution and nearly gave in to a violent rampage, but the lessons Warren had taught him restored his reason. He chose to act as Nostramo’s judge, while Warren was dragged onto the gallows in Central Square.

• Nostramo’s rulers announced Warren’s immediate execution and broadcast it across the planet.
• Konrad saw Warren on the broadcast and nearly surrendered to his rage and the Night Haunter’s savagery.
• Remembering Warren’s teachings about law and due process, Konrad regained control and chose to uphold order rather than unleash slaughter.
• Speaker Heimdall ordered Warren executed without a trial, and guards dragged him onto the gallows.

Warren publicly exposed Nostramo’s rulers’ crimes before his execution, but Konrad appeared and saved him. Konrad advanced through a hail of gunfire, evading every bullet as the square looked on.

• Warren recited evidence of Speaker Heimdall’s, General Marr’s, and other officials’ crimes before the crowd.
• Speaker Heimdall ordered Warren hanged, and Warren urged the people of Nostramo to stand up as the executioner pulled the lever.
• An invisible gust cut the noose, and Warren fell onto the platform alive.
• Konrad walked down the avenue toward the execution platform, ignoring General Marr’s order to stop him.
• Hundreds of guards fired at Konrad, but he evaded the bullets with tiny, precisely calculated movements.

Konrad defeated Nostramo’s guards without killing them, rescued Warren, and addressed the planet as its judge. He exposed evidence of the nobles’ crimes on the city’s billboards, leaving the population to see the truth.

• Konrad disarmed and incapacitated hundreds of guards without killing any of them.
• Konrad climbed the gallows, helped Warren to his feet, and removed the noose from his neck.
• Konrad told Warren that he would carry out the judgment and addressed the people of Nostramo.
• Konrad accused the nobles of plundering and abusing the population, then displayed evidence of their crimes across the city.

Konrad led Nostramo through a lawful mass arrest and open trial, then oversaw the planet’s renewal as its Lord of Law. After celebrating the new legal code, he knelt beside Warren and told him they had succeeded.

• The people of Nostramo rose against their rulers, and guards joined the revolt or laid down their weapons.
• Konrad kept the uprising orderly and established a People's Court to try the accused publicly using evidence and due process.
• The court convicted and sentenced the former rulers, while Nostramo established a new legal system and began purifying its polluted skies.
• Konrad became Nostramo's Lord of Law and used his foresight to investigate crimes and prevent them.
• At the celebration for the new legal code, Konrad found Warren in the crowd, knelt beside him, and said, "Father, we did it."

After Warren died peacefully in Konrad’s arms, Liu Zhipeng’s fifth glimmer descended to Barbarus and awakened inside the body of an elderly doctor. The old doctor stepped out of his shack into the poison fog, beginning Liu Zhipeng’s next life on the deadly world.

• Warren touched Konrad’s face and told him he had never doubted him before dying peacefully on the bench.
• Konrad knelt beside Warren, held his hand, and mourned as celebrations continued around them.
• Liu Zhipeng’s fifth glimmer traveled to Barbarus, a world ruled by xenos overlords and submerged in toxic fog.
• Liu Zhipeng awoke in the body of the old doctor, a mortal physician whose lungs had been ruined by the planet’s poison.
• The old doctor put on his handmade gas mask, took his cane, and stepped outside into the fog.