Warhammer: Empire Reboot

"Three families, seven suspicious locations."

Duan Yu handed over the data panel, saying, "I need you to confirm the nature and scale."

Ash took the data panel, glanced at it, and smiled slightly.

“Lord Jia Fourteen, it is a waste of your talents to entrust this kind of work to the two of us.”

The Keeper of the Secrets said lazily, “I could smell the Slaanesh cultists from ten kilometers away. There are at least 147 deep cultists and more than 600 shallow contacts in the apex of this planet. Three families? Far more than three.”

Duan Yu asked.

"Specific location".

“Let’s go.” Ash stepped forward, her high heels clicking crisply on the marble floor. “I’ll show you what these cute little mice have hidden in the cellar.”

The first family, Medici House.

The meditation room is on the third basement level, with the entrance hidden behind a wall disguised as a wine cellar.

It took twenty minutes to find the mechanism.

The room was large, and the dome was painted with the six-pointed star runes of Seneca.

At the center of the ground was an altar, which was filled with exquisitely crafted Slaanesh relics: ivory-carved pleasure instruments, sensory amplifiers infused with spiritual energy, and corrupted scriptures bound in human skin.

Seventeen nobles dressed in fine clothes were kneeling before the altar.

They are performing some kind of ritual.

As the Bi'an battle group's combat assassins burst through the door, all seventeen men turned their heads simultaneously. Their pupils shone an unnatural purple in the candlelight, a typical sign of Slaanesh's deep corruption.

An elderly nobleman with gray hair, the patriarch of the Medici family, was the first to speak.

“You can’t come in! This is the Medici family’s private property…”

His words stopped abruptly the moment he saw Ash.

The old nobleman's face first showed confusion, then disbelief, and finally a near-collapse of fear.

"The...the Keeper of Secrets?"

Deep followers of Slaanesh have seen the image of the Keeper of the Secret in rituals; he is the most elegant and dangerous high-ranking demon in Slaanesh’s palace.

The old nobleman prayed countless times to the illusory image of the Keeper of Secrets in his dreams and hallucinations, asking for power, beauty, and eternal pleasure.

Now, the object of his prayers stands before him.

They brought the imperial army to arrest him.

“Impossible…” the old nobleman’s voice began to tremble, “You are the messenger of the Lord of Pleasure… how could you…”

Ash crouched down, gently lifted the old nobleman's chin with one finger, and whispered in his ear.

"Honey……"

The Keeper spoke as gently as if soothing a child to sleep: "How many years have you prayed to the Lord of Pleasure? Twenty years? Thirty years? How many sacrifices, how many souls, how many things you once cherished have you offered?"

The old nobleman's lips trembled.

Ash straightened up, the gentleness on her face vanishing completely, replaced by a condescending pity. "You're just a mouse gnawing on a candle in the dead of night. The Lord of Pleasure has trillions of such mice. She won't even blink when you die."

The last glimmer of light in the old nobleman's eyes went out.

His faith, his sacrifices, and all the sins he committed to please the Lord of Pleasure were worthless in the mouth of the Lord of Pleasure's true messenger.

He was deceived.

Qianxian peeked out from behind Ash and gave a bright smile to the seventeen believers kneeling on the ground.

Don't be too sad.

Qianxian laughed lightly, "Your despair is also a delicious experience. If you ask me, the feeling of being deceived is actually more exciting than the feeling of being pampered. That weightless feeling of falling from the clouds, that tearing feeling of your entire worldview collapsing, ah, just smelling your emotional fluctuations makes me feel that today was worthwhile."

Three of the seventeen believers suffered a mental breakdown on the spot when they were taken away.

The two great demons had no psychological burden at all throughout the entire process.

Slaanesh has no concept of betraying his own kind.

In Slaanesh's logic, believers are merely containers for providing emotional energy; if the container breaks, it breaks, and a new one is simply replaced.

The despair, the pain of betrayal, and the sense of shattering faith that erupted when the believers were arrested were, on the contrary, a rich emotional feast.

Ash and Qianxian considered capturing Slaanesh followers a perfect job that combined fun and work.

They even developed a standardized procedure that worked seamlessly together.

Ash is responsible for revealing the identities of the believers, using his role as the keeper of secrets to shatter their foundation of faith.

Qianxian is in charge of reaping the rewards, savoring the emotional fluctuations of believers at the moment of their mental breakdown.

It would take three days for the prison to uncover a cult network through torture, while two great demons could compile a list of the names, addresses, and levels of corruption of all Slaanesh believers on the entire planet in just half an hour by sniffing around.

Moreover, their abilities are not limited to Slaanesh.

Contamination in subspace is interconnected.

The Slaanesh Archdeacon possesses an extremely keen sensitivity to warp fluctuations. While its ability to detect the followers of Tzeentch, Khorne, and Nurgle is not as precise as its ability to detect the Slaanesh, it still far surpasses any conventional psionic detection method used by the Imperium.

On Calandra-III, Qianxian not only uncovered the Slaanesh cult network, but also conveniently marked fourteen deep Tzeentch cultists and a Tzeentch cultist hidden within the Scholars Guild.

When this news reached the subspace, it triggered an unexpected chain reaction.

The high-ranking demons of Tzeentch were extremely dissatisfied.

Salamansi's traitors betraying his followers is Salamansi's own family matter, and Tzeentch is too lazy to concern himself with it.

But Slaanesh's traitors crossed over to undermine Tzeentch, thus touching upon the delicate power boundaries among the Chaos Gods.

Several treacherous demons attempted to retaliate against Ash and Chizuru.

Upon calculating the current physical positions of the two great demons, they all shrank back around Lawson.

Go find them in the real universe? First, get past Lawson.

The great demons have an accurate understanding of their own strength.

Thus, the Tzeentch archdemons could only grit their teeth and devise various indirect schemes of revenge in the warp.

Sending followers to sabotage Lawson's supply lines, planting knowledge traps on reclaimed planets, and using prophecies to mislead certain high-ranking officials of the Empire into becoming suspicious of Lawson...

Lawson's instruction was four words: Keep the dogs out.

There are two driving forces behind the two great demons' hard work.

The first type is positive reinforcement; if they perform well, Lawson will "pay attention" to them.

The forms of care vary; sometimes it involves removing their collars and letting them move freely for a few hours.

Sometimes they are allowed to consume the remnants of chaotic souls captured on the battlefield as snacks.

Sometimes, and very occasionally, it was Lawson who personally "taught" them a lesson.

For Slaanesh, the last one is the real grand prize.

The experience of being completely suppressed by an existence far exceeding one's own strength is an ultimate sensory feast for the Slaanesh entity.

When Lawson's psionic field swept over their warp origins, the feeling of being pierced from the depths of their souls was something they could never experience even after reveling in Slaanesh's demon palace for ten thousand years.

So they would deliberately make small mistakes to attract Lawson's attention, trying every possible way to get punished.

The second driving force is negative deterrence; if performance is poor, Lawson will implement real punishment.

That kind of punishment is called sensory deprivation.

Lawson only used it once, in the second month after Qianxian was subdued, when she tried to secretly remove a restrictive rune from Lawson's collar while she was sleeping.

Lawson used a black hole projection to trap Qianxian's head.

The moment the event horizon of the black hole enveloped her head, Qianxian lost all sensation.

Vision vanished, absolute darkness, a darkness deeper than closing one's eyes, because behind the eyelids there was at least the dark red glow produced by the flow of blood; inside the black hole, even photons were swallowed up.

Hearing disappeared, touch disappeared, smell disappeared, taste disappeared, psychic perception disappeared, and the subspace connection disappeared.

All sensory channels were completely severed at the same instant.

Qianxian was locked in an absolute void.

For humans, sensory deprivation is a form of torture.

Prolonged sensory deprivation can lead to hallucinations, anxiety, and mental breakdown.

For Slaanesh, this was ten thousand times more terrifying than torture.

Slaanesh is essentially a sensory experience.

Their existence is about experiencing everything: joy, pain, fear, ecstasy, humiliation, and anger. Even being tortured, humiliated, or violently suppressed is an "experience" for Slaanesh—a meaningful sensory input that can be savored.

But nothingness is not.

Nothingness is the opposite of the senses; it is zero, it is emptiness.

In that absolute nothingness, Qianxian could find nothing to experience.

She tried to feel fear, which requires perceiving a threat, but she couldn't perceive anything.

She tried to feel pain, which requires nerve signals, but the signals were cut off.

She even tried to feel boredom, which requires a sense of time, but in an absolute sensory vacuum, time itself loses its meaning.

For the first time, Slaanesh experienced an emotion that even her creator could not define.

It does not exist.

Lawson only wore her for thirty seconds.

Thirty seconds later, Qianxian was released.

She collapsed to the ground, her whole body trembling violently, and her purple eyes remained unfocused for nearly ten minutes before returning to normal.

From then on, Qianxian never tried to touch any of the runes on the collar again.

Ash later heard Qianxian describe how she felt during those thirty seconds.

The keeper remained silent for a long time, then whispered, "I'd rather be smashed a thousand times by him than be trapped by that thing for even a second."

This was Lord Lawson's ultimate method for taming the two Slaanesh archdemons.