How can a retired savior be considered retired if he drops to 40,000?

(End of this chapter)

Chapter 126: The Sub-God of the Subspace is not a Kitten

"This is wrong." Prophet No. 10 shouted nervously in the bridge.

No one paid attention to him, everyone's attention was focused on the broadcast signal. All the children of the night on the ship, whether they were stranded here from the distant past or born at a moment closer to the "now", were all fascinated by the sounds and images converted from electronic data.

None of these rabble had ever seen their gene father in the true sense, and of course they could not identify the authenticity of the speaker from a broadcast message that could obviously be forged - in theory, that was the case, but there was obviously some supernatural power at work: the gene seeds in all the children of the night sang in this voice, and the rushing blood joyfully declared submission the first moment they saw the image. They should have questioned everything they saw, or even denied it, but no one could do it.

Even Prophet Ten himself, who was yelling “this isn’t right!”

"This isn't supposed to happen like this!" Even so, his nervous voice still shouted, "This has nothing to do with what I had expected. Something must have gone wrong!"

No one paid any attention to him, even the body of the slave worker hanging beside him remained silent. Perhaps it was a gift from the gene seed, or perhaps it was his own talent. For Prophet No. 10, "talking to the dead" was not a strange thing - just like his predecessor, or his gene father.

This might be because the uncontrollable psychic energy oppressed his physiology, making him prone to hallucinations in such situations, or something in the warp wanted to convey some information to him through the corpse beside him, and deliberately prolonged the time when they were talking. But now, he could not feel anything.

There were no sudden troubles, no crazy omens, even the warp calmed down obediently, and the chattering disappeared. This made the Tenth Prophet very uncomfortable for a while, as if those cursed talents suddenly decided to leave him, and his world became the same as those of his less "spiritual" brothers. Only himself, the material universe, and the voice of the Gene Father echoing in the bridge, transmitted by the radio.

He should have convinced himself to focus on the rare words that everyone had longed for, but this feeling of "something was wrong" made it impossible for him to do so. He couldn't help but compare neurotically what he had seen in his original foresight with what was happening now: something was wrong from the beginning, he had not foreseen such a speech.

He would have seen the Plague Lord's fleet wreaking havoc in the Ultima Segmentum, and they would have found the Gene-Father on a planet called Parmenio. Konrad Curze would have stood at the forefront of the battle against the Death Guard and the Daemon Primarchs, fighting for the Imperium alongside Robouti Guilliman.

This was already a ridiculous prophecy. All the warband leaders who heard this prophecy thought he was joking, and some even wanted to kill him in anger. Number 10 himself also thought this prophecy was too ridiculous, but out of trust in the abilities passed down in the gene seed, he did not completely deny the possibility that this event would actually happen in the future.

Under his strong insistence, the news was eventually passed to all the warbands through the secret communication network of the Night Children. Because even the most groundless rumors about the Gene Father would easily touch the nerves of the bats, the Night Lords finally went out in full force, gathering the entire "Legion" of about 60,000 people - after the 13th Dark Expedition, they only had this few people left - as a whole, they pressed on Mandeville Point in the Parmenio system.

They wanted to know if this prophecy was true, whether they could really find their genetic father on this planet. If not, it didn't matter, the fishermen would benefit from the quarrels between the snipe and the clams, and while the Imperial Regent was struggling with the attack of the Plague Soldiers, they could also make a fortune in this rich little kingdom.

Of course, if the prophecy went wrong and they didn't find their genetic father, then it was hard to say what would happen to the prophet No. 10 who had "tricked them all". No. 10 himself knew this, but out of trust in his own ability, he was willing to take the gamble.

But now, this thing happened in a strange way: his prediction was wrong, but the Night Lords did confirm the existence of Konrad Curze on the edge of the Parmenion system.

This may have saved Prophet No. 10 from being killed (of course, in the concept of the Night Lords, the actual performance of this word will always be a million times worse than simple "death"), but it also plunged him into great confusion and bewilderment.

This emotion did not last long, because the content of the broadcast was not very long: after the image and audio were played once, the receiver showed obvious lag, and after such a short few seconds, the speech obviously began to be played in rotation. Even though it was completely predictable that the next content was just a repetition of the previous one, none of the Night Lords present shifted their attention away from it - except for Prophet No. 10.

A certain inexplicable terror suddenly seized his mind, and in that split second, he suddenly understood why his talent, which had been haunting him like a thorn in his flesh, had strangely quieted down just now:

The Lord of Night has arrived at this moment.

-

Yago Sevitarion, who was "on duty" in the Cathedral of Tyros, suddenly shut his mouth at the same moment.

This was unusual, because at this moment, he clearly had half a sentence of sarcasm left to say. No one present would think that he was suddenly at a loss for words at this moment - firstly, Digris and the Ever-Victorious Army generally believed that this word probably did not exist in the dictionary of the Captain of the Night Lords; secondly, he really looked a little strange.

The next instant, the Iron Knight Terminator power armor on his body visibly shut down all weapon systems, followed by the power system, and then, even the joint movement and broadcasting functions were completely locked. In an instant, the armor went from being an indispensable and powerful aid in combat to a solid cage for prisoners. The director of the Ultramarines think tank seemed to hear a female voice faintly penetrate the curtain, shouting angrily, asking everyone to stay away from him.

Then, blood seeped out from the gaps in the power armor that should have been completely locked and sealed. This should not have happened. After the power armor was locked, everything about Yago Sevitarion, his body, blood, and even his voice should have been firmly locked inside - but this is what happened.

The captain's screams of suffering were carried by the psychic energy he could not control, penetrating the locks of the power armor and echoing between the carefully designed walls of the preaching hall. Diglis raised his staff at the same time, and with quick reaction and superb skills, he blocked the painful psychic impact for everyone else present - but then he found that this was not the end, but just the beginning.

In places he had not seen, in various hidden places in the Cathedral of Tyros, the Midnight Sons who had been hiding in the shadows and darkness also experienced almost the same experience at the same time. The only difference was that they were not psykers, so the damage they caused in pain was not as threatening as their captain. In the empty cathedral, their abnormality would not attract too much attention.

In the void farther away, on the Lion's Mane, which was sailing towards Mandeville Point, the Night Lords who had been stripped of their armor and imprisoned also experienced the same fate. The Dark Angels who were in charge of guarding them thought that they had been mentally prepared for similar scenes after Curze's advance disclosure, but when they actually saw what was happening in the cell, they realized that what was happening was far beyond their inherent cognition.

In the Night Lords' battered, patchwork fleet, this happened to every Nightborn on every ship. Only Konrad Curze himself and the 18 Night Lords around him who had already passed the same test were able to escape this torture and walk leisurely in this horrible living hell.

The Primarch of the Night Lords chuckled amid the howls of pain: That's it.

He is such a hateful and horrible monster. Apart from pain and torture, he can't give anything else.

Even if the other party is his genetic son.

Meow (six o'clock)

Everyone may have forgotten that the prophecy No. 10 occurred when the Jestal instance had just ended, and the impact caused by Guda's reorganization caused ripples in the subspace. He used this to predict that Shell would be resurrected and would be active in the real universe.

However, Guda could not be retrieved due to its own characteristics (a visitor from another world) and the joint cover of the two great powers in the subspace (Old T and Old E). Even Shell himself felt that all related futures would be disrupted if Guda took action. So the scene that No. 10 saw was the conclusion drawn from the situation at that time, excluding all the influence of Guda (of course it was wrong).

In fact, I feel that the Night Lords in 40K disappeared after Brother Dun went to attack the Eldar Ark in the th Dark Crusade, so the current situation of NL is made up by me.

It may also be that I have not done enough research. If there is any mistake, please throw the original text in my face as soon as possible. Thank you very much.

(End of this chapter)

Chapter 127 Who doesn’t know how to work in multiple threads?

Very interesting. Conrad Coates observes everything around him with a detached attitude.

This kind of "withdrawal" is not just the "withdrawal" in the usual sense, just as his current "surroundings" are not the "surroundings" expressed in the daily context.

On the one hand, he was indeed walking on this tattered, patched, seemingly unsustainable ship, but still lingering in the void. Amid the wailing of his descendants, he watched other descendants quickly "dealing with" everything that needed to be dealt with at the moment - the few mortal crew members, the confused slaves, who needed to drive these things that were not much better than servitors to operate the ship itself, so that it would serve its master's master while its masters fell into painful delirium.

Theoretically, Curze didn't need an escort, but he still brought 18 people with him on this trip just for this matter. He didn't really want to waste his time communicating with mortals. Of course he could do it, but he didn't have the patience, and the soldiers of the legion existed for these trivial matters.

On the other hand, he was not on the ship in reality. His consciousness was suspended somewhere in the vast ocean, looking down at his own body strolling leisurely on the ship, looking down at his descendants around him easily suppressing the almost non-existent resistance, and looking down at the cries and struggles of more Night Lords Astartes warriors - it was as if he was the king of the night, sitting high on the tower that symbolized power, looking down on all this.

He was walking on the road leading to the bridge of a ship, but he had a panoramic view of all the Astartes in the entire fleet; he reviewed the military appearance and discipline of the Night Lords, which did not exist at all at this moment, but at the same time he was judging all of them for the sins they had committed in the past.

This feels amazing, Coates thought.

Before he actually tried to do this, he had no idea that he could actually flip through the lives of 53,642 gene descendants at the same time. Of course, he cheated to some extent by taking advantage of the fact that the speed of time in the subspace was different from that in reality, but before that, he didn't know there was such a way to cheat.

It is interesting to note that the vast majority of the fleet believed that the total number of Astartes among them was more than 60,000. As the Primarch of the Night Lords, Curze knew very well how his descendants "operated" the entire legion. With just a little thought, he could figure out how this mistake came about:

The leaders of these war gangs look after all their own forces just like the dragons in fairy tales guard their property. They will not allow others to know too much about their true strength, and when they report themselves, they will deliberately inflate the numbers they report - this is often out of vanity or bluffing.

The Night Lords themselves all knew what kind of morals their colleagues had. After the warbands gathered and counted the number of people, no one believed the number of more than 80,000. But based on this, they generally believed that about 60,000 was a more or less true number. Unfortunately, the situation was a little more cruel than they thought.

Part of Curze analyzed and deduced these insignificant details indifferently, while part of him directed his body to absent-mindedly walk into the bridge of the ship. As he simply dealt with the crew members responsible for the work, the first death in this trial appeared; when he realized that those mortals who were still able to move regarded what was happening as another conflict between Chaos warbands and Chaos warbands, and surrendered without hesitation in order to save their lives, the second and third criminals were declared dead almost at the same time.

They have gone too far into the Warp, Curze thought grimly. Whatever their reasons, whatever their desire to claim power that was not theirs, they have gone too far. The end is certain, they must die.

Next, he watched himself use the comm to announce his presence to the entire warband that the ship belonged to, and demand their allegiance. This was not a statement made to the Space Marines, but to the mortals who were responsible for operating the ship. In other legions, perhaps the whole thing would not go so smoothly, but this was the Night Lords - so he was satisfied to hear the surrender messages coming in like snowflakes with trembling voices swearing allegiance on the comm link.

At the same time, he executed twenty-four of his own sons due to the unmistakable influence of the Warp.

Fifty-three thousand six hundred and forty-two, fifty-three thousand six hundred and fifteen, fifty-three thousand five hundred and seventy-five-fifty-three thousand five hundred and seventy-four.

When he finished all this and was about to leave the ship via the transport platform, he noticed that the number of descendants trapped in the Road of Judgment suddenly decreased by one, but this time the reduction had nothing to do with his will.

He glanced in that direction from the sky, and then came to the conclusion: it was Sevatar. In such a short time, he had successfully walked out with his own strength.

For a fleeting moment, Curze felt a little guilty. But then he felt a sense of satisfaction and pride because of this matter. He withdrew his attention from these marginal problems and made sure that his body could successfully pass through this subspace transmission.

——How could it not go smoothly? At this moment, the surrounding subspace was almost under his control.

He and his descendants who surrounded him walked in the corridor of another ship, fifty-three thousand five hundred and forty-nine, and took a quick look at the unoriginal "decoration" around them, fifty-three thousand five hundred and twenty-two, and then they spent about ten minutes redoing what they had done before, fifty-two thousand four hundred and seventy-four - during this period, except for those descendants who went too far in the warp, the Black Armor Guards and Red Gloves who were originally detained by the Dark Angels and stranded together since the 30th millennium also successfully left on their own.

Why do this to us? Cries of pain and resentment came from the warp.

Was this the echo of the souls of his children who had been executed? Or was it some kind of evil creature in the Warp that pretended to be these scattered energies and wanted to confuse him to say so? Curze was too lazy to distinguish, he just answered them all equally:

"Why?" He was rushing to the flagship of the third warband in the physical universe. He looked down at the shapeless energy that asked him the question in the empire. "Isn't my judgment clear enough? Isn't your own humble and dirty life enough to explain your fate? I came here not to forgive, but to correct the mistakes I made in the past."

Reasonable punishment, followed by forgiveness and enlightenment, maybe Fujimaru Ritsuka would do this. Coze thought indifferently. But he was different, he would choose the simpler option while ensuring it was effective.

Fifty-two thousand three hundred and seventy-nine.

But we have no choice! The voice is still shouting. In order to survive, we must do this! In order to survive, we must commit sins! We came here just to see you. You should know that in the eyes of ordinary people, this should be almost impossible, but we still came here with the humblest hope - but you only gave us cold judgment and cruel torture! We still have no choice!

Coates was unmoved. His tone was calm, but it was a calmness of indifference: "How interesting."

He looked down from the sky at the shadow formed by the energy that dared to question him, and said, "You said you wanted to see me, and now you have seen me."

Fifty-two thousand two hundred and seventy-one.

"You said you had no choice. I will tell you that you are wrong - of course you have a choice." The Lord of Night looked down at his sins. "You can choose to die, which is obviously easier. No punishment can punish you beyond death. You can just continue to be a deserter with all your sins."

In the warp, the passage of time suddenly froze. This might be Curze's own will, or it might be a natural phenomenon produced by the operation of the warp itself, but at least he did not show any surprise.

"Of course, you can choose to endure all this," he continued his statement, "face your crimes, accept the punishment, endure all the torture - I will not forgive you for this. You should have known from the beginning that I am a very strict judge. The word "forgiveness" does not exist in my dictionary. I repeat: I will not forgive you for this, but I will appreciate your will and allow you to continue to live and atone for your sins."

Fifty-two thousand two hundred and seventy-one.

This made Curze raise his eyebrows in surprise, but he continued: "Of course, you have to know that this is not a road that will lead to success as long as you keep going. You may die halfway at any time - after all, some of you have committed crimes that are really hard to describe, and the corresponding punishment will naturally be more severe. Even the body and spirit of the Astartes are likely to collapse because of this. This will be a painful and long journey to death with no guarantee of survival rate. If you have no confidence in yourself, then perhaps a faster and more peaceful end is more suitable for you."

After he finished speaking, he waited quietly for one second, two seconds, and three seconds. The shadow that had expressed dissatisfaction with him changed back into amorphous energy, still lingering nearby, but no longer expressing his opinion. After confirming this, Konrad Curze once again confirmed the number of his offspring:

Fifty-two thousand two hundred and seventy-one.

This unchanging data left the Primarch of the Night Lords speechless for a moment.

Miu (no more)

This is not the final number left...

(End of this chapter)

Chapter 128 Friendship is magic, but love is a miracle

Fifty-two thousand two hundred and seventy-one.

After staying at the same level for an unequal period of time, the number began to decline again.

During this period, Koz, who had been boringly repeating the mechanical actions of "boarding the ship-suppression-recapture" in reality, was touched by the change in numbers and glanced down from the sky: some of his descendants walked out of it.

Before he could even feel surprised, the answer was presented to him. The few people who had been freed from the Road of Judgment had not been Astartes and joined the Chaos Warband for a long time, at least subjectively speaking. Although most of them had already committed many crimes among their peers in their birthplaces, the length of their current lives did not allow them to accumulate too serious sins, so they had to go through less judgment here than others.

He looked down at the descendants who had woken up from the slowly ending pain, and for a moment he didn't know whether he should be happy about it. Then, he found that after the few Night Lord recruits struggled to wake up, the first thing they did was to try to show off meaninglessly to the veterans around them who were still barely able to accept information from the outside world - this made Curze reconfirm that they were just another type of little bastards.

He in the Empyrean used the blood link to stop these things, and ordered them to work from their own ships - uniting all ships in the fleet to pledge allegiance to him, the Primarch of the Night Lords, the Gene-Father of all the Night's Sons.

These people have not yet fully adapted to the changes in themselves: the "red gloves" imposed on the criminals by the Primarch with the power of the warp make them feel pain like a knife cutting when they move their fingers or touch any other objects. But they still happily began to execute the first order they received from the Primarch, as if this ever-present torture was just a trivial matter.

Originally, Curze would have thought that this was natural, because the Legion soldiers should follow every order of the Primarch. But now, after experiencing everything in his second life and realizing that the Primarch's identity could not be the final answer to all behavioral logic, he began to think: Why would they do such an "illogical" thing.

Before this, Curze had never met his offspring. Even after he established a subspace connection with all of them through the base contract brought by the gene seed, he only conveyed power, violence, pain and torture to them through this connection.

There were no greetings, no praise, and no positive connection between him and his offspring, but his offspring were still happy about his appearance, felt happy about the pain he inflicted, and would even obey the orders of him as the abuser - not out of fear, but out of another emotion that he could not fully understand: love.

When Curze noticed this problem and tried to understand it, he couldn't help but wonder: Is his genetic son mentally normal after drifting in the subspace for ten thousand years?

He once again looked down at all his descendants, and at the same time realized that some of the sinners were already unable to withstand this torture and were broken and died.

Fifty-one thousand four hundred and fifty-two.

He had already said that his judgment might cause the Astartes to collapse both mentally and physically due to their numerous crimes. In his heart, Curze laughed at these overconfident offspring, but at the same time, his instinct was to grab their stubborn souls with the thin thread of the base contract, and in the midst of their continuous wails of pain, he cruelly annihilated their wills, breaking them up into pure energy in an instant and merging them into his own essence.

If they consciously choose to die before this, then Curze will also generously let their souls go. However, the defendants did not have the slightest thought of "stopping" when they died, so the trial will continue after their death. This is completely an instinctive behavior that is not subject to Curze's will. Just like a person cannot control himself from absorbing oxygen after breathing, Curze cannot stop his essence from digesting the prey he captured with "judgment".

He also understood that doing so would make him bear the karma and obstacles created by these descendants, but - what sin could be greater than becoming an accomplice in pushing the entire galaxy into a sea of ​​fire? Therefore, he did not care about these "small things".

——Look, he is also a "sin drinker" in some way, Coze thought with self-mockery.

He continued to look down at his still-suffering descendants, realizing that the number of people who had been consumed by their own sins, or tortured to the point of physical collapse by his unrestrained "judgment", was still there and would continue to increase.

This made him feel somewhere between annoyance and disappointment, but he himself could not define it very well, nor was he very clear where this emotion originated from. In the end, after a few microseconds of thinking, he attributed it to the irritating and foreseeable future of "after this matter is over, the young warden will definitely give a long speech again", and continued his work of "destroying waste" in a frustrated manner.

That part was not his original intention, 50,678, the number of his descendants who were carrying out the mission of recovering the fleet with him increased to 67, 50,000 in total, Galatan Star Fortress had already shaken off the Plague Fleet, and in one hour and twenty minutes it would become their reserve force - 49,764.

He began to feel some unexplained anxiety. In his trials, only a few passed, and only a few chose to die consciously. Among the gradually decreasing number, more than 90% of his offspring were devoured by him instinctively.

Koz had a vague feeling that his decision was very arbitrary, and the standard and intensity of the "judgment" could not be said to be completely reasonable, but he originally thought that his descendants were just a bunch of wimps and should know when to give up, instead of - insisting on doing so and making things what they are now.

At the beginning, he didn't expect that he would "eat" so many offspring.

The judgment of Curze's essence might have symbolized a certain degree of "justice" in the beginning, but the highly toxic environment of Nostramo had irreversibly distorted his mind in a bad direction. His poisoned will had deviated from the Emperor's original idea. Even with the help of various external forces in his second life, he still could not perfectly control his own essence.

He was in high heaven, but the part responsible for judging was almost entirely based on instinct. Now, the so-called "judgment" was nothing more than his arbitrary, excessive, harsh, and indefinite punishment that would never consider the human rights of the person being judged. He knew how quickly people would succumb under such inhumane torture, even Astartes. He carefully prepared the most horrific torture for his offspring, but he didn't expect that -

——Why don’t they give up? Is it because of the so-called “love”?

Coze has always known that there is such a feeling in the world, but he has never successfully experienced or analyzed what "love" is. He can roughly and mechanically understand this feeling through basic inference and fitting, and then make basic use of it - just like farmers can predict whether it will rain the next day based on the clouds in the evening, and then decide how much water to irrigate the fields - but the current situation is really beyond his cognition.

In his first life, he had taken his offspring's love for him for granted. But after realizing that this was not the case, he realized how absurd these things were, even to the point of being absurd and terrifying.

Love is supposed to make people weak. That's how it should be.

"Why do you persist?" he asked his sons. "Why do you refuse to give up when you know that there is only endless pain and humiliating death ahead?"

A broken sob came from the connection of the base contract, and 46,372 answers gathered in Coze's mind at the same time:

Because you are there.