Warhammer 40k: Lust of Light.

Chapter 1 Court of Dawn
  The sound of rustling wind comes from the blowing among the leaves.

To all the hive civilians of the Empire, this is nothing less than the most beautiful music in the world.

They are not qualified to see the sky, and the steel dome will accompany them throughout their lives.

It has been twenty-six years since Rastraite was reborn in this hive world called Liting.

He is different from the ordinary people around him who work all their lives without seeing the light and eat monotonous and tasteless food every day.

Rasta has been witnessing their lives as a bystander.

He is the only person who is idle in the lower levels of Liting's nest without any suspicion of crime.

On the third day of every month, his aunt in another agricultural world would send him food for the next month, and every six months, she would buy him two new pieces of clothing.

But he had never met his aunt and uncle.

In his mind, he positioned these two relatives as people like Natsume's uncle and aunt.

At noon, there are children on the streets hurriedly going to pharmacies to buy medicines. They are unkempt, hungry, and have crude anti-noise earplugs in their ears.

Assembled by a large number of machines, the steel behemoth called industry can never stop roaring, which will destroy the eardrums of everyone who passes by the industrial area.

Rasta was wearing a slightly delicate white earbud - in fact, it was a headset, which played the white noise of the autumn wind blowing through the leaves.

After looking at the small clinic in the industrial area, he followed the outer wall of the industrial area and came under the covered bridge near the residential area.

"Hello, Mr. Rasta."

A foreigner temporarily staying under the covered bridge took off his hat and bowed humbly to pay respect to his young savior.

There were many belongings around him, but not much food or clothing.

He is a painter, and although he has never seen the real sky, ocean, or forest, he learned these indirectly from his father's albums.

When he touched those breathtaking colors with his fingers for the first time, he couldn't contain the true desire in his heart.

He wants to spread these paintings throughout every hive city in Liting, so that those who will spend their lives in dark metallic colors can feel even a glimmer of light that should not belong to them.

He is not very tall, skinny, slovenly, and looks a bit slovenly, but he takes good care of his painting hands.

Water in the hive world is a very precious resource. As a wanderer who refused to be recruited by the upper class, he didn't have much ability to take care of everything on his own.

The Hive City is an artificial mountain range of architectural spaces stacked on top of each other. It is constructed from a variety of solid rocks and metals and can stretch into the sky while occupying an entire continent.

Even from outer space, the first sight is this spectacular miracle. Only after being shocked by it for a long time will you notice the dead places on the planet that are polluted by industrial wastewater and garbage and have become uninhabited wilderness.

The population of a hive world can reach up to more than 100 billion, and is divided into thousands of hive cities.

Only a small group of these people live in a place where the stars can be seen from the nest, which is called the Spire.

Then, there is the upper level. The upper level of the hive is home to top manufacturers, hive officials whose status cannot reach the top, and some people related to the Spire People.

After that, there is the lower level where Rasta is. The lower level is where the civilians are. There are the most workers here, and they will prepare the most war supplies for the empire's expedition.

Liting does not have the lower level of other hive worlds. Most of the criminals, mutants and even heretics in the lower level can no longer be called human beings.

Food, clothing, housing, transportation, electricity, and even all kinds of enjoyment and art have been reduced from the top of the tower to nothing.

At the lower level, basically everyone is living for food rations and medical care.

Here, the number of people who die from gastrointestinal diseases is not much less than those who die from starvation.

This painter is rare. He has been appreciated by the upper class and hopes to live in an environment with free electricity and sufficient food.

But his desire for spiritual food made him give up his former middle-class family life and go to the lower floors of hive cities to show others his and his father's paintings.

Occasionally he could get new paper and paint from the upper class.

His food source has recently come from Rasta.

In his eyes, this was a very beautiful young man, possessing certain qualities that the lower classes of the hive city should not possess.

Although the other party repeatedly claimed that he was twenty-six years old, he still could not treat the man who generously donated food as a young man.

"Today's food, a bibimbap, and...pumpkin soup."

Rasta took out the two boxes and placed them in front of the painter.

There were not many passers-by around here, so they tried to avoid this place to prevent their eyes from falling on the precious food and becoming greedy.

Their food, water and even air circulate in large quantities unless a material provider is born in the hive city where they are located.

"Thank you for your generosity, Mr. Rasta. I have been taking care of you for more than three months. I..."

The hungry painter remained restrained and shy.

"This is what you deserve after you gave up something. It should belong to you." Rasta took off the headphones and put them in his pocket.

The painter thanked him again and finally picked up the box of bibimbap. He had many doubts, but in the end he could not speak. The taste buds were only left with the taste of lard, soy sauce, eggs, vegetable leaves, sausage pellets and rice.

"I personally have a lighter taste, so I added less salt. It's probably not very salty, but there is plenty of salt in the sausage."

Rasta introduced his work. He knew very well how bad his cooking skills were, but people in this world are quite tolerant of food and are not very picky.

However, the painter used indecent eating to praise this delicious delicacy very highly.

On the drawing board behind the artist, the landscape painting was too distorted and unrealistic. It was already somewhat different from the scenery Rasta remembered from her previous life.

But he did not attack the far traveler who still wanted to spread the light. This was already everything the other party had that was both indestructible and extremely fragile.

These supported him against hunger, cold and displacement, as well as the ostracism and beatings of the next city guard, and occasionally faced the trial process of whether he was a heretic.

Saying goodbye to the painter, Rasta walked deeper into the residential area and finally came to the end of the residential area, where there was a hidden church.

In the thirtieth millennium, that is, in the early 30,000 AD, the empire was promoting truth, promoting atheism, and at the same time embarking on a vast expedition to strive for the eternal glory of mankind.

There is no doubt that the church should not exist, but it belongs nominally to the Mechanicus, a church recognized by the Emperor of Mankind himself.

The Mechanicum believes in the God of All Machines, the god of technology and machinery. Members of this church advocate mechanical ascension and have a crazy love for most machines.

They will even replace certain parts of their body tissues with machines to transcend their weak flesh and blood.

There was no one inside or outside the church.

Every Monday, Rasta might come here. The bishop in the church, who had not praised Om Messiah for twenty-six years, would quietly wait for his arrival behind the curtain of the confessional.

It was as if this church existed only for this lost man with black hair, black eyes, an indifferent expression, and the appearance of a young man.

Entering the church and arriving at the confessional, Rasta sat down.

The bishop behind the curtain seemed even more nervous than he was.

"Hello, Mr. Rasta, Osiris wishes you a happy afternoon."

Rasta let out a soft "hmm" and then mentioned a change.

"You have abandoned your former name, Mr. Bishop."

"Twenty-six years ago, the Mechanicus Bishop who arrived in Liting from Mars is dead. Now, there is only Osiris."

"What do you want to judge?"

"Mr. Rasta, I can't judge anything. I only act according to the Lord's will. The objects of my judgment depend on the Lord's attitude towards them."

These heretical remarks, which are treasonous to the Mechanicus and even the entire empire, have been made too many times in this small confession room.

"Okay, Osiris, I'm starting to remember some things, but I don't want to accept them." Rasta began to recall a past life that she didn't want to have.

"This is your freedom, Mr. Wei... Rasta."

The Bishop held back his praise for a certain being.

“I have done many wrong things in my past life, I have made wrong choices due to illness, and I have diverted my pain away from the horror of stress.

I saw a group of stray kittens. I was short of food at that time, but I tried to save some money to buy cheap fish, some sausages and biscuits for them.

I don’t know who uploaded the footage of me feeding to the Internet, but I was quickly met with accusations and abuse. They said I shouldn’t feed cats that kind of food, but I have tried to avoid giving them starch to satisfy their hunger.

Amid the harsh words, the hunger and the pain, I refrained from replying with equally harsh words, and I showed them my food.

It was a bowl of cold rice with two cabbage leaves scattered on it. This was my food for the whole day.

They were quiet for a while, and then came the even worse abuse.

They said I was lying and insulting, some said why a poor guy like me would feed cats, and there were even more uglier and more disgusting remarks.

That's beyond your imagination.

I endured all this, even though my heart was not strong, I still boiled a few eggs for several kittens and fed them egg yolks.

But one of them bit me, I didn't have the money for the vaccine, and I'm still in pain.

From that day on, I stopped feeding them, and the instigator uploaded this picture online, and I received more accusations and abuse.

In the end, they won, and I starved to death several innocent and cute little creatures.

Someone is going to reveal my real address, and they're going to have an orgy of judgment. "

From the other side of the curtain, the sound of gnashing of teeth could be heard. The entire confessional space seemed to be shaking, and the bishop felt the unbearable blasphemy.

He asked about the next development in discontinuous words: "Mr... Mr. Rasta, where are you coming next?"

"Not long after, I was lucky enough to die, escaping their justice."

The atmosphere in the confessional became depressing for a time.

“I have experienced a lot of similar things in my short life.

I have made many mistakes, some more serious than starving a cat to death, some less serious, but like a nightmare, they have always been evidence of my violence, torturing my disease-like empathy.

At the last moment before closing my eyes, I hypnotized myself and said that I was a bad person. Then, I just responded to an online abuse with the same ugly words. "

Rasta is immersed in a painful time in her past life.

Dark attics full of dust, painful lungs and more, eyes blinded by conjunctivitis struggling to see glowing screens, stinging eyeballs seeing only sharp words.

The bishop's throat was choked and he didn't know what to say. He could only act as a quiet listener.

I don’t know how much time passed before Rasta mentioned the purpose of coming here.

"So, I can't believe something that says that I am a collection of these feelings, that I am this symbol, and they keep asking me to step up and officially take over such power, and I...can't do that."

Raste felt a kind of suffocation, and his chest was rising and falling, fighting against certain emotions and instincts.

"I accept that I was unable to obtain salvation at the last moment. When I first started, I hoped that everyone could have a perfect world, without pain or sin.

I have lived in a world like that with a bunch of words. It is difficult for me to watch kind people suffer. It would make me extremely tortured.

In my previous life, this seems to have been called the Holy Mother, and that almost became a derogatory term.

Many times I want to suffer for those kind people, but I am also in a seemingly endless state of sadness, anger and resentment, but then...

I found that many people were not worth saving, and my bottom line was lowered again and again, until in the end...

I feel that even people like me are not worthy of being saved.

I don’t know how many people in the world are more ‘Mothers’ than me, but I feel that I am neither qualified nor willing to be that kind of emotional aggregation.

Whether it's because of the sins I've committed that I can't forgive myself, or because...

There are too many kind people who died in different miseries but were helpless at the last moment, but the world turned a blind eye to them and even treated them with malice.

Even if they finally got help, they were cut off and converted into a fraction of someone's wealth. "

True confession, mixed with confusion, echoed in the small room.

The Bishop's fingers curled into his palm, and he sorted out his thoughts and words of comfort amid the complex and painful emotions.

"The fact that you can tell me this means that you have already made a choice in your mind, right? You should have planned to stop escaping and become a bystander.

Of course, I... am not qualified to make a choice for you. "

For the next thirty seconds, the entire confessional was eerily silent.

The anxious bishop waited for the gospel of God.

"I think I know what to do, thank you, Osiris."

"It's such an honor to be able to serve you...!"

Osiris was somewhat at a loss for words for this acknowledgment.

The person behind the curtain stood up, and the footsteps gradually faded away.

The kneeling Archbishop Gao stood up.

His body, which had been modified by various machines, had recovered almost like a normal person.

"Twenty-six years have passed, and I have finally waited for this moment. The Lord's deception of myself has ended. Then, it is time."

After Osiris came to the church, more people were kneeling here.

Twenty-six years ago, these people from different places received a guide and gathered here. They witnessed new life amidst complete destruction.

Osiris came to them, clenching his fists with great excitement.

“His glory began to fall to the earth before the 30th millennium was approaching, and at the beginning of the birth of the material provider, we heard his gospel and guidance.

We are gathered here from different places, across the warp, and the demons pour out of the rift to destroy the world and prevent His birth.

The hive world Akami was destroyed in our war with the demons. At that time, I, along with forty-three of you, were the last survivors, which corresponds to His holy number.

We are missing limbs and dying, living under the order of extermination because of a dim light.

Then, He came! The world begins to resuscitate, the dead rise to life, the broken world returns to before the devil set foot, and you and I gain new life.

The destroyed planet Akami was reborn in the name of Li Ting, just like you and me.

The world was once again discovered by the Empire and brought under its rule again, as if nothing had changed.

Great Lord, He has been immersed in the pain of his own power and is unwilling to acknowledge his authority.

Now He breaks free of His chains and embraces His power.

it's time to……

Give Him your allegiance! "

(End of this chapter)