Warhammer: Striving to Be a Grinding Man

Chapter 179 Mortals and Original Casting

The adamantine doors of the Gate of Eternity reflected the golden light overflowing from the throne room, illuminating the long wait below the steps. The doors rose high, disappearing into the darkness of the dome, their edges extending beyond sight. The facade was etched with the image of the Emperor, who, in the Great Crusade, stood atop his shattered enemies, sword tip pointing to the ground.

The walls of embalmed skeletons on both sides of the steps are piled up. The gaunt human figures wear faded Imperial military uniforms, their fingers still tightly gripping rusted explosive guns. These are the loyalists who have been martyred for the throne for thousands of years. Their bones remain in their final posture before death in the dry air, like a row of sentinels frozen in time.

Arek stood before the door. The Hall of Heroes stretched behind him, its walls flanked by battle banners, from the time of the Emperor's unification of Terra to the most recent expedition, each hanging in the dim light. He had been waiting for a long time. Two steps to his right, Rellano stood.

After a long while, the door slid silently into the wall on either side. Dark golden light poured out from the crack, falling onto the floor before the threshold and spreading across the metal surface. Trajan stood behind the door, his gaze sweeping over Arek, lingering for a moment on Rellano. "The Emperor grants permission. Enter." Arek stepped forward, and the door closed behind him again.

The passageway was long, its walls covered in etched patterns older than any standard Imperial decoration, their edges worn and gritty—as if slowly eroded by some unseen force over millennia, some sections worn smooth to mere faint protrusions. The air was dry, the temperature constant, there was no wind, no sound of any circulation system. Arek passed through three psionic gates—secondary barriers surrounding the throne room, each sliding open automatically as he approached and closing afterward, each increasing in thickness until the edge of the final gate was thicker than his arm.

Then he stood on that edge. Light seeped from the throne, from within his body, a constant, warm light emanating from between the armor plates, falling on his skin with weight, unlike the light emitted by any lighting array. He sat there, no visible entity beneath the armor plates, no muscles, no bones, only light and will. Arek couldn't discern the boundary of that outline—the sleeve was like a crack suspended at the edge of reality, from which light seeped, filling the entire space.

A deep burning sensation began to engulf his brain, spreading from the inside of his skull as if something were tracing along his nerve fibers. He tried to look directly at the Emperor's face, but couldn't make it out. The silhouette was constantly shifting, like a coin engulfed in flames, repeatedly switching between melting and solidification. The weight of the light pressing on his skin seeped into his bones. His knees began to tremble uncontrollably, like a bowstring stretched to its limit.

He tried to think of Gologosa, attempting to anchor his consciousness with hatred, but the thought was like a piece of paper thrown into a furnace, burned away before it even had a chance to rise. He knelt down, his knees slamming into the floor, his forehead pressed against the adamantite ground, blood dripping from his lips onto the dark red surface, quickly evaporating in the golden light. He didn't wipe it away, nor did he look up. He didn't know how much time had passed—perhaps minutes, perhaps hours. A will passed through his consciousness, like a breeze across water, without lingering, without probing, simply confirming his presence, and then withdrawing.

A guard stepped forward, took a sealed box of fine gold from his side, laid it flat on the floor, and then stepped back. The door reopened. Arek was helped to his feet, and someone led him through the passageway, through the three doors, back into the gray sky.

He remembered walking down a long corridor, the metal steps of the gangway vibrating beneath his feet, and a crew member leading him toward his cabin. The rest of the details were blurred, like a relief shrouded in mist.

He sat in the cabin of the official ship. It was a standard crew cabin on a Sword-class frigate, undecorated, unmarked, and without any other markings. A crew member led him to the cabin, saying, "The ship is heading to Armageddon," and then closed the door. He was alone in the cabin. He unsealed the wax seal on the sealed box. The parchment was old, the edges worn from repeated handling, and the paper had a rough, loose feel to his fingertips. He recognized some words but couldn't read the complete sentences; the content wasn't written in standard High Gothic. But he recognized the signature and seal at the end—

The signature was deeper than any he had ever seen on any document, each stroke pressed into the fibers of the parchment, as if written with something heavier than ink. The seal was clearly defined, its edges bearing the marks of millennia of wear. He stared at the parchment for a long time, then rolled it up again, placed it back in the box, and resealed it with wax. When the guards handed him the box, they had said, "A reward from the Emperor." No explanation, no description. He didn't need to know the contents, he only needed to know that it was there. The cabin door was closed, and outside the window was the receding, greyish-brown landscape of Terra.

When Rellano stepped through the door, he stood in the open space before the throne, much closer to Biarik, close enough to see the details of the etched patterns on the golden armor. He saw the Emperor. Just like the figure he had seen ten thousand years ago, unchanged. Light seeped through the gaps in the armor plates, falling on his skin, the exact same weight he remembered. He knelt on one knee, his right hand on his kneecap, the titanium alloy plate on his forehead facing the source of the light. "Father." The voice was soft, but not swallowed by the silence of the hall. Trajan stood to his side and slightly behind him; the moment Rellano uttered the word, his body tensed for a moment, then returned to normal.

The mental barrier module on his forehead began to heat up. He felt that gaze fall upon him, like a space compressed for millennia slowly unfolding, covering his entire being. Memories were turned over layer by layer, as if an invisible hand were flipping through pages. The scorched earth of Istvaan reignited in his mind; he stood in the ranks of the Third Legion, watching the Emperor himself walk across the platform, his boots crushing the rubble. The explosion threw him to the ground, fragments embedded in his shoulder armor. Those memories were flipped through quickly, as if someone were verifying their authenticity, then tossed aside.

Then He turned to Cohen. A blank space appeared in His memory. The surface wreckage of Istvan III was intact—

Collapsed bunkers, armor fragments, molten metal frames. But as the memory moved toward Cohen, the silhouette vanished. He remembered seeing Cohen, remembering what Cohen said, remembering the gust of wind as he was pulled from the iron coffin. But the Emperor could not see Cohen himself. That will repeatedly pierced through that memory, like a hand groping along a wall for an unseen crack.

The Emperor's will did not cease. Cohen himself was invisible, but what he had done was. Rellano's memories held a wealth of information related to Cohen—the Web Project, Fortress Wangshu, the expansion of Garros, the deployment of the Titan Legion, the formation of the Phoenix Legion. As the Emperor perused those fragments, it was as if he were piecing together a faceless portrait. Rellano could sense those images being extracted from his memory, examined, and archived—Cohen's actions, the things he shaped, the traces he left behind, all surfacing from his memory. Then, something deeper was unearthed: the ability to decompose matter and reshape bodies, boundaries he had never shown to anyone.

Rellano's own assessment of Cohen emerged as the Emperor reviewed the documents: a person, or a being, disguised as a mechanical sage, capable of transforming ruins into a functional industrial world in the shortest time, establishing network nodes on the edge of chaos without being corrupted, and anticipating Gologosa's traps and preemptively taking precautions. A person who doesn't belong on the chessboard, yet has already placed a piece.

The Emperor didn't delve deeper; he had already seen enough. Rellano felt his consciousness being ripped out by an invisible force—as if someone had taken something from his body, leaving only an empty shell. A blurry, scattered fragment of information seeped from the Emperor's consciousness, like a soliloquy, or a forgotten notebook in a corner. Rellano couldn't discern what it was, only feeling a cold, emotionless confirmation. Then he lost consciousness.

In the instant his consciousness sank into darkness, on the other side of the galaxy, tens of thousands of light-years away, under the cold white lights of the Garros underground industrial zone, Cohen's fingers, gripping the data tablet, suddenly paused for a moment. He sensed a brief, inexplicable fluctuation in the rate of matter decomposition at the edge of the field, like an echo compressed to near imperceptibility from an extremely distant place. He didn't delve into it, simply turning to the next page of the Phoenix Legion's battle damage report.

When Relano awoke, he smelled a mixture of disinfectant and metal. He lay on a cold operating table, his limbs restrained by straps. The ceiling was grayish-white, with curved metal surfaces, and light bulbs arranged in parallel lines along the seams. He tried to feel his body. The second heart beat steadily and powerfully, like a synchronized pump inside him. He remembered that feeling—and he also remembered how shallow his breaths had been after it was gone. Now it was back, the pulse of that second heart pressing firmly against his chest, like a door that had been locked again. He didn't immediately clench his fist, but stared at the back of his hand, at the new, newly given skin, as if looking through it at something far away.

A few meters away, a tall, slender figure stood with his back to him among a row of instruments. Beneath his deep red robes was a complex of dozens of robotic arms and sensor arrays. Half of his face was metallic, the other half withered human skin, optical lenses slowly extending and retracting at his eye sockets. Six robotic arms were simultaneously connected to different interfaces, and a probe at one end hovered above a cultured blood sample, its tip gleaming with a dark golden light.

"A reverse engineering masterpiece spanning millennia." Kaul's optical lenses swept quickly across Relano. "From the degenerated biomass in the Dreadnought Coffin to a functional mortal prototype, and now restored to the original casting's execution standards. The logic chain of this series of operations—is illogical. This is the power of the Om Messiah, the code that pre-wrote the entire path." His robotic arms continued operating other devices while he spoke, as if his attention was being distributed across multiple independent threads. The probe at the end of one of the robotic arms swiped across the data panel, then turned towards Relano. "You're awake." The restraints loosened automatically, and Relano sat up.

Kaul's optical lenses swept over Rellano's body again: "Genetic sequence completely rewritten. All twenty-two implanted organs in place, enhanced resistance to chaos erosion. Seventh iteration—" He had barely uttered those words when a mechanical arm suddenly stopped in mid-air, its transmitter switching to a series of rapid binary pulses—"Warning, warning, shut down. The various obstacles set up by the host are utterly irrational." The mechanical arm drooped, paused for a moment, then rose again, the optical lenses returning to their normal scanning frequency. "Seventh iteration, approaching perfection." He uttered the last few words quickly.

Relano looked around. It was a large laboratory, the walls riddled with instrument interfaces and data cables, with workbenches lined up along the walls. Further away, dozens of vertical culture tanks were embedded in the walls, each containing a complete, inactive humanoid silhouette wearing a gray liner, eyes closed, floating in nutrient solution. "Where did my gene seed come from?" Caul's optical lens flickered briefly. One of his robotic arms retrieved the data plate into a slot on his robe, while another probe hovered in mid-air, as if triggered by a pre-recorded response sequence. "Confirmed. Your gene seed is custom-made. Embedded with the Emperor's genetic blueprint, not any Primarch's genetic template. It has nothing to do with that thing anymore."

As the laboratory door slid open, a short metallic scraping sound rang out. One of Caul's mechanical arms paused in mid-air before resuming its movement. Trajan entered, clad in dark gold armor, his helmet tucked under his arm. He didn't look at Caul, his gaze landing directly on Relano, confirming he had sat up from the examination table and was conscious. "Relano Cyrus. The documents from the Highlords Council and Mars are ready. You will form the Phoenix Chapter, and you will serve as Chapter Master. The documents have been processed according to the standards for a newly formed Chapter—authority granted by the Emperor's will, without the need for the usual approval process." Relano glanced at the sealed cylinder. "Where will I form it?" "Gallos. Under the command of Cohen Severus, the Forge Master. You will guard the Nexus of Gallos. Obey Cohen Severus's orders and act according to his instructions."

Trajan turned to Caul: "What you prepared." Caul's optics flickered: "Confirmed, already delivered to the Imperial Guard's cargo hold. Two thousand MKX-type power armors. Two thousand Prototype Geneseeds. Seventh-generation, embedded with the Imperial Genetic Blueprint in a special design, unlike any existing Chapter standard. Stored." Rellano took the sealed container Trajan handed him, his fingertip tracing the adamantite surface. "When do we depart?" "Immediately. You've already wasted weeks. The Imperial Guard is already on track."

Relano stood up, took the sealed container, and walked towards the door. As he passed Caul, a probe at the end of Caul's robotic arm was tracing patterns on the data panel, the optical lenses not raised. His voice whispered a final murmur behind Relano: "Perfect genetic creation. My recording module will be pleased." The lab door closed behind Relano.

Trajan led the way, with Relano following behind, through the Lionsgate spaceport's passageway. At the end of the passage, three dark gold Imperial Guard ships stood in a row at their outer orbital berths. The gangways were already lowered. The entire formation gleamed with a silent, cold light in the starlight. He noticed the grey figures of the Silent Sisters filing onto the ships at the edge of the berths—enough to cover the psionic alert needs of the three ships during their voyage.

Trajan stopped at the gangway and turned to the side. "The fleet will set sail in three hours. The Emperor's will is conveyed by me personally." His voice was flat. "Not only do you know the importance of the position of Director General of the Garros Foundry, but he also needs to have an audience with the Emperor."

Rellano paused for a moment, then stepped onto the gangway. As he passed through the airtight door, his knuckles brushed against the edge of the frame—a surface worn smooth by the repeated friction of the Imperial Guards entering and exiting. He withdrew his hand, the cool touch still lingering on his fingertips. He looked down at his hand. This hand could crush terracotta, survive in a vacuum, withstand pressure that would kill an ordinary person instantly. But it wasn't his choice. He remembered Cohen saying that a mortal body could accomplish many things, and now the Emperor, with this new body, was telling him that path no longer led to his future.

No one asked him if he was willing.

The Imperial Guard warship glided out of Lionsgate Spaceport. Terra slowly shrank outside the porthole, transforming from a massive gray-brown sphere into a point of light enveloped by clouds, finally merging into the starlight backdrop. Course: Garros.

The appointment letter, Caul's modification records, and two thousand seeds based on the Emperor's genes—these were the things he took with him.

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