Chapter Summaries

Angron learned to endure the emotions of the dungeon’s slaves from an old gladiator who shared his bread and counsel. Over the next two years, he became a famed undefeated gladiator who spared his opponents, until the High Lords decided to implant the Butcher’s Nails in him.

• Angron endured the pain of his wounds, rapid growth, hunger, and the emotions of the enslaved people around him.
• An old gladiator shared half his bread with Angron and taught him to feel others’ pain without becoming its slave.
• Over the next two years, Angron won one hundred consecutive gladiatorial fights while refusing to kill his opponents, earning the name “Angron the Unkiller.”
• The High Lords grew angry at Angron’s mercy and approved a plan to implant the Butcher’s Nails in him.
• The old gladiator learned of the High Lords’ decision through his underground intelligence network.

Liu Zhipeng and the gladiators rescued Angron from the Surgery Tower before his lobotomy, then led the group into the Arena Underworld to escape the High Lords’ forces. As the pursuers entered the tunnels, the gladiators prepared electromagnetic traps and the first tank hit one.

• Liu Zhipeng and the gladiators broke into the operating room and freed Angron from the restraint frame.
• Angron killed the remaining guards, and Liu Zhipeng smashed the Butcher's Nails.
• When the High Lords' mechanized forces surrounded the tower, Liu Zhipeng stopped Angron from charging alone and led everyone through a maintenance grate into the Arena Underworld.
• Liu Zhipeng directed the gladiators to spread coolant and magnetic metal shavings across tunnels to make Electromagnetic Quagmires.
• Three Razor-class Anti-Gravity Assault Tanks entered the tunnels, and the first tank hit an Electromagnetic Quagmire.

Angron used his empathy to guide the gladiator rebels through the underground battle and led a strike that captured the enemy commander. After the rebels won, he understood that victory came from fighting together and realized he had found his path.

• Liu Zhipeng's gladiators ambushed the High Lord's tanks in the tunnel and destroyed the lead tank.
• Angron sensed danger through the gladiators' emotions, rescued Marcus's squad, and helped them overturn a riot-control mech.
• Angron aided the rebels across the battlefield, then sensed the enemy commander and led the push toward the command post.
• Angron tore open the command vehicle, captured its commander, and left the High Lord's forces leaderless.
• Angron recognized the rebels' shared effort as the true meaning of victory and understood that he had found his path.

Liu Zhipeng left Angron after the rebel leader prepared to attack Nuceria’s last fortress, and Angron led the former slaves into their final assault. A second glimmer descended onto Olympia and appeared as an old man in the mountains, looking toward a snow-covered peak.

• Liu Zhipeng told Angron he was leaving, and Angron embraced him and thanked him for teaching him how to be a person.
• Liu Zhipeng urged Angron to use his strength to protect others, then walked away into the darkness.
• At dawn, Angron led hundreds of thousands of former slaves in an assault on the Crown of the Firmament.
• Liu Zhipeng’s glimmer returned to the golden star in the Warp, and a second glimmer descended onto Olympia.
• The second glimmer appeared as an old man in a remote forest clearing and looked toward the planet’s highest northwestern peak.

Liu Zhipeng rescued the infant Perturabo from a crashed gestation pod and raised him in Creek Valley Village, where the boy's extraordinary intelligence quickly emerged. With Liu Zhipeng's help, Perturabo built a mechanical music box and discovered the joy of creating something beautiful.

• Liu Zhipeng found the infant Perturabo in a crashed gestation pod on a snowy mountain, named him, and carried him away before Damekos's soldiers arrived.
• Perturabo grew at an astonishing rate and showed exceptional talent for numbers, geometry, and mechanical design while Liu Zhipeng gave him patient companionship.
• At two years old, Perturabo dismantled Liu Zhipeng's workshop tools to study their mechanisms, and Liu Zhipeng suggested they build a toy together.
• Perturabo designed and assembled an intricate brass music box with Liu Zhipeng assisting him.
• Perturabo listened to the music box play an Olympian Folk Song, embraced Liu Zhipeng, and experienced the joy of creation and unconditional affirmation.

Perturabo overcame his contempt for mortals when a drought forced him to use his engineering gifts to save Creek Valley Village, and he discovered purpose in protecting the people who helped build the solution. After a year of improving the village, its prosperity began drawing refugees fleeing Olympia’s wars and taxes.

• Perturabo criticized the villagers for struggling to repair a house without using pulleys, and Liu Zhipeng told him not to overlook the real earth beneath his feet.
• When a four-month drought threatened Creek Valley Village with mass deaths, Liu Zhipeng urged Perturabo to use his gifts to solve the crisis.
• Perturabo designed and built a waterwheel and aqueduct, while villagers weakened by the drought joined the work and showed their resolve.
• After spring water reached the village, the villagers offered Perturabo their remaining food, and Liu Zhipeng taught him that wisdom should spare the weak from suffering.
• Perturabo spent the next year improving the village’s bridges, roads, tools, and irrigation, helping triple its grain yield.
• Refugees fleeing wars between Olympia’s warlords and crushing taxes began arriving in the prosperous village.

After learning of Olympia’s oppression, Perturabo wrestled with how to use his power without becoming a tyrant. When Damekos’s troops threatened Creek Valley Village, Perturabo chose to protect its people and confronted their commander.

• Perturabo told Liu Zhipeng he feared using violence to change Olympia, and Liu asked him to decide what responsibility he was willing to bear.
• Damekos’s armed force surrounded Creek Valley Village and demanded that the villagers surrender Perturabo and Liu Zhipeng.
• The village chief and villagers refused to betray their protectors, even as the officer ordered his soldiers to burn them.
• Perturabo, wearing armor he had forged with Liu’s help, blocked the flamethrowers and shielded the villagers.
• Perturabo understood what his strength was for and told the commander that he had crossed the line.

Perturabo used advanced technology and careful tactics to overthrow Olympia’s warlords and unite the planet without sacrificing civilians. Ten years later, Olympia had become a peaceful society, and Perturabo still returned each evening to Creek Valley Village and Liu Zhipeng.

• Perturabo defeated Damekos’s army and sent its officer back with a warning that Damekos’s reign was over.
• Perturabo told Liu Zhipeng he would end Olympia’s wars, and Liu agreed to help him.
• Perturabo and Liu built advanced weapons and equipment, then began a liberation campaign focused on protecting civilians and their own forces.
• Perturabo disabled Damekos’s fortress defenses, enabling an uprising that captured Damekos and united Olympia.
• Over the next ten years, Perturabo transformed Olympia, abolished slavery, and built a prosperous society.
• Perturabo continued to leave his palace each evening and return to Creek Valley Village to see Liu Zhipeng.

Perturabo stayed with his dying adoptive father, Liu Zhipeng, who died peacefully after telling him to remain a person and protect Olympia. Liu Zhipeng’s consciousness returned to the golden star in the Warp, where his renewed power prepared him to find another child.

• Perturabo carved toys with Liu Zhipeng and heard his father praise the life he had built.
• Liu Zhipeng refused Perturabo’s offer to prolong his life and told him he was proud to have raised him.
• Liu Zhipeng urged Perturabo never to become a cold instrument and reminded him that he was Olympia’s guardian and a person.
• After Liu Zhipeng died, Perturabo mourned quietly and promised to keep the world safe for him.
• Liu Zhipeng’s consciousness returned to the golden star, strengthening it against Khorne, Nurgle, and Tzeentch.
• Liu Zhipeng sent glimmers toward other parts of the galaxy to meet the next unlucky child.

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.