The term “morning” is actually meaningless in the lower levels of a Hive City.
This hellhole doesn’t distinguish between day and night; the circulation lighting system broke down more than thirty years ago, and the few remaining industrial lamps emit a shit-yellow light, flickering twenty-four hours a day.
Karen was woken up by his own hunger.
He rolled over, his lower back hitting the base of a turbine, swore through gritted teeth, and then saw that Horus was still sitting there in the same posture as last night.
“You didn’t sleep all night?” “A Primarch doesn’t need much sleep.” Horus’s voice was better than yesterday; at least it didn’t sound like he was grinding his throat with sandpaper.
Karen pulled two blocks of compressed rations from his bag and broke off a piece to hand over.
The Wolf Shepherd God took it, holding the grey-brown brick between two fingers, looking left and right, his expression exactly like he was studying a brand-new Xenos specimen.
He took a bite.
His chewing muscles worked for a full three seconds, and then his whole face scrunched up.
“The Legion’s field rations during the Great Crusade were ten times better than this stuff.” Horus swallowed the grit with difficulty.
“Is this meant for mortals to eat, or for patching bulkheads?” “My dear Warmaster, you’ll get used to it.” Karen rolled his eyes.
Horus was silent for two seconds, then frowned and shoved the whole block of rations into his mouth, chewing hard; his Adam’s apple bobbed several times before he swallowed it down.
“I’ve eaten worse things on my homeworld, Cthonia.” Karen tilted his head and thought for a moment: “How does that compare to Rogal Dorn?” Horus was stunned for a moment.
Then he laughed.
“This ration is friendlier.” —Rogal Dorn, the Primarch of the Imperial Fists, was famously rigid and boring, Horus thought.
He had quite disliked him back then; was it after The Lion was found that a conflict arose with Dorn?
He and Fulgrim were also present at the time, and were quite angered by the stubborn stone’s words.
Karen nibbled on his rations while sizing up Horus’s condition.
The scar on his chest had scabbed over with a dark red layer, and the dark purple toxic veins had faded significantly, but they hadn’t disappeared completely.
The restoration fluid had dragged him back from death’s door, but he was still far from a full recovery.
“I’m taking you somewhere today.” Karen swallowed the last bite of his ration.
“Where?” “The mid-levels.
The Ecclesiarchy Cathedral.” Horus studied his expression without asking why.
“You need to see it for yourself.” Karen said, “In this era, this era where religion is rampant, and reason and science are dead.” For convenience, Horus took off his Terminators armor.
Without his power armor, the Primarch was still a 3.5-meter giant, his muscle structure completely unlike that of a mortal species.
Karen threw him the stealth cloak from yesterday, and the nanofibers automatically expanded to cover his entire body.
“Let’s go.” The two climbed up along the rusted freight elevator.
The elevator’s mechanical structure had long been scrapped, leaving only an iron skeleton.
Karen climbed using his hands and feet, while Horus followed three steps at a time, occasionally reaching out to pull Karen up when he was about to slip.
On the way, they passed a labor zone enclosed by wire fencing.
Hundreds of gaunt, sallow-skinned workers were squatting in front of an assembly line, assembling ammunition.
No one spoke.
The metronome of the mechanical arm clicked every three seconds, and anyone whose hands couldn’t keep up with the rhythm was whipped by the overseer.
A young female worker had two fingers crushed by a punch press; she bit her lip without making a sound, and the person next to her dragged her away while another person filled her spot.
The whole process took less than ten seconds.
The assembly line didn’t stop.
Horus stopped.
Karen looked back at him.
The hood obscured most of the Wolf Shepherd God’s face, but Karen could see the muscles in his jaw were clenched tight.
“This is still considered good; at least they are still alive.
On some planets, laborers don’t even have names; their IDs are recycled once used up, well, including their corpses.” Horus didn’t speak.
When he started walking again, the soles of his feet left a curved dent in the iron ladder’s rung.
— The air quality in the mid-levels was an order of magnitude better than the lower levels; at least the smell of rotting corpses couldn’t be detected.
In its place was a strange mixture of incense, machine oil, and sweat.
The Ecclesiarchy Cathedral stood at the end of the main thoroughfare of the mid-levels.
The Gothic dome was absurdly high, and black stone pillars extended upwards, disappearing into the darkness that the candlelight couldn’t reach.
The flames of hundreds of candles flickered, making the thirty-meter-high golden statue of the Emperor appear to flicker in and out of view.
The statue was sculpted in the image of a deity holding a flaming holy sword.
The face cast in gold was solemn, stern, and aloof.
Thousands of believers knelt on the ground.
“The Emperor is the only God of mankind!
Faith is armor!
Doubt is treason!” The doctrine chanted in unison formed a low resonance under the dome.
The priest stood on the high platform, waving a scepter embedded with skulls, hoarse and shouting, with spit flying everywhere.
Horus and Karen stood in the shadows of the colonnade outside the cathedral.
He didn’t go in.
He just watched from afar.
Watching that thirty-meter-high golden statue.
Watching those believers kneeling on the ground, banging their foreheads until they bled.
Watching the priest howling with that hysterical tone, “May the Emperor protect us”.
His breathing quickened.
The old wound on his chest began to throb.
“Father hated being treated as a god.” The voice was extremely low, squeezed out from between his teeth.
“The Imperial Truth, he wrote it himself.
He pushed it himself.
Every planet conquered during the Great Crusade, the first thing he did was to overthrow the local religion.
He once said to my face—’I am not a god, I will never be a god.
The future of humanity depends on reason and science, not kneeling.'” “And ten thousand years later, the entire Empire worships him as the greatest god.” Karen leaned against the pillar, arms crossed over his chest.
“Ironic, isn’t it?
The even bigger joke is that the doctrine of the Ecclesiarchy is adapted from the Lectitio Divinitatus written by your brother Lorgar.
Because of the Monarchia incident, the Great Word Bearer rebelled directly.
If I were him, I would have just swallowed my pride regarding the Monarchia incident, and maybe I would be the Pope of the Ecclesiarchy now.
Missed an opportunity there.” Mentioning the Great Word Bearer, Karen remembered something funny.
During the rebellion, when Lorgar was attacking the Five Hundred Worlds of the Thirteenth, he arrived on a world and discovered that there were religious believers on it, and this group of believers believed in the Lectitio Divinitatus he had written before.
In the end, during the debate between the two sides, Lorgar couldn’t even debate the locals, and finally broke down and ordered the Legion to kill everyone on the planet.
Lorgar should have learned more from Sima Yi; patience, thinking it through, and holding on!
Maybe you would have been the Pope later?
“But you have to know, the Ecclesiarchy isn’t all bad.
In this age full of Four Chaos Gods and Xenos, faith is the only spiritual pillar for ordinary people.
Without the Ecclesiarchy, the people at the bottom wouldn’t even be able to find a reason to live, and local uprisings could make the Empire explode on the spot.” Horus’s temples throbbed several times.
He closed his eyes, exhaled a long breath, and suppressed his anger.
Just then, the ground cracked.
There was no warning at all.
The stone floor in the very center of the cathedral arched upward violently, then shattered like an eggshell.
Dozens of deformed creatures poured out from the cracks.
Humanoid skeletons, but with several extra joints in their limbs, their heads mutated into beetle-like exoskeleton structures, and each one dragged a tail full of barbs.
Genestealers.