11-18

Words are hard.

Surprisingly the scroll isn't too long, barely the size of four A4 pages and from what I gathered only contains a very brief summary of the history of the planet called Follax 4 which I'm assuming is this one. Several of the previous scrolls containing the transportation data also had 'Follax IV' next to the date at the bottom so I'm quite sure of that assumption.

Rediscovered during the great crusade, settled soon after and transformed into a hive world nine thousand years ago. Ever since then, it has mostly been here without any apocalypse grade event happening to it surprisingly.

The described history only goes up to two thousand years ago, so it didn't give me any cue about what has happened here in the end but it also fits snugly into the Warhammer setting, making me both irritated and relieved.

Humans like the known even if it's dangerous above the mystery of the unknown, I'd rather know some of the dangers out there than none even if there weren't any in reality. My alien instincts would also be pleased with more knowledge about my potential prey and competition.

It writes about minor rebellions, cults and even a minor xenos invasion that have 'All been vanquished by the grace of the Emperor with little effort'. It doesn't go into too much detail about either, go figure.

I was surprised it even mentioned anything about these at all but I guess you need to tell about your victories to your population for them to obediently become meat shields in the Imperial Guard.

This also contains more than three-fourths of random bullshit for a historical document. The writer talks more about how important it is to keep information for later generations for the good of the Imperium than the damned history he is supposed to. Like I get it but this is ridiculous.

After gleaning through it once more to make sure I didn't miss any part that might hide something informative I put this scroll away too and stare gloomily at the remaining shelf full of other scrolls.

I don't know what I suspected to find here but it was more than this, I couldn't even manage to figure out where in the galaxy this planet is supposed to be. That shouldn't be confidential information even though 99% of Imperials in Warhammer never leave their birth-planet and thus don't need to know anything about galactic geography or stuff like that.

Do they even call that geography or is that astronomy at that point?

I began searching for something like that, this was a small library but it seemed to have one or two scrolls on most major topics like politics, history and planetary geography being among the ones I've noticed the title of among the rest.

I began throwing any useless-sounding ones behind me and gathered the previously mentioned ones plus any that caught my interest. In the end, I managed to find a few that might help me find out where I was.

Jumping back onto the couch, kicking my feet up onto its armrest and got back into the tedious world of translating and reading. My enthusiasm lasted until I was half a scroll into my binge but I battelled through the boredom and managed to find some actually useful information after finishing up with all of them.

Could have been worse, is the only positive thing that I manage to come up with. After all, I could have been transported straight into the Ghoul Stars or the Eye of Terror, not that I think any self-respecting Imperial wouldn't try to burn me to death if they saw my eldritch form. Not the most fitting name but I'm keeping it that for now, it's much better than the tentacle-y form or white form. Xenoform sound cool too but it reminds me of the Alien movies and their Xenomorphs, not that those are too creative, it literally means 'alien form' in English.

Whatever.

I pushed myself off the couch and sent a last annoyed look at the room before making my way out of it, this took far too much time for how little information I got but I guess even that was worth it from a pragmatic standpoint.

One of the scrolls contained a crude galactic map with a few important planets plus this one depicted on it which was much better than I'd hoped.

The map showed both Ultramar and Terra so I could kind of place the location of this planet in my head even though I wasn't much of a Warhammer lore nerd my brain was always annoyingly good at remembering random trivia I found interesting while I forgot anything I learned for my exams right after I was done with them.

So I knew that above Ultramar, towards the Galactic north was the Tau empire and a bit northwest of that was the Sautek Dynasty of the Necrons. I think Follax IV happened to be a bit to the east from where the two empires bordered each other, when the whole galaxy is depicted on a map that I can cover with my two palms it can't exactly be accurate. I'm hundreds if not thousands of light years away from either but it's not those two that I'm worried about at the moment.

If I remember correctly sometime in the late 41st millennium a huge ass Tyranid hive fleet decided that this section of the galaxy looked tasty and went on a taste test, only being fragmented when it split and the Smurf marines messed up one splinter fleet while the space elves got the other.

Unfortunately for me, the word 'fragmented' is important here as there were still small splinter fleets popping up by the time Papa Smurf woke up, which should also be around now.

Alright, enough thinking let's get back to exploring. I still have four floors of this building left to walk through before going back to my sci-fi parkour on the rooftops.

I left the small library behind me with a spring in my steps and turned down the hallway, away from the direction I came from before.

After a few twists and turns, I found myself in a larger room with something that looked like an elevator at the other end of it but that wasn't the most important now as the floor was painted red with dried blood. Not as much as the ritual room but I don't think even three humans had that much blood in them combined if you drained it all.

Wish I had something like a dog here to eat so I could get a good enough nose to follow the trail of blood to where the corpses were taken from here.

The room wasn't even too scorched, so they didn't use the flame weapons here just massacred a few people.

I wasn't even surprised by now that I only thought about finding where the corpses had gone for some easy energy. I still felt sympathetic towards whoever probably got bisected here based on the amount of blood but that paled in comparison to my need to survive and gather more energy.

Still, it's comforting for my human self to feel even that much, I'm not a total monster yet.

I shook my head and tried to find out whether I could see any blood trail going from the dried pool but I couldn't, did they wait with transporting the corpses until the blood has dried up?

I frowned, how did they paint the ritual circles with them then?

I shook my head again, doesn't matter. I wasn't anything close to a doctor so fuck me if I knew how blood worked and dried, plus space wizards are supposedly a thing here.

I consciously didn't think about the infinite dark sea my soul was languidly levitating above and decided that this conveniently placed elevator might as well be my way down to the next floor.

I already had more than enough things to get used to and make my peace with.

Even though I was presumably alone on this planet for several days by now I still found it unnerving.

It wasn't totally silent as one would imagine a ghost city, the wild blowing between the buildings in the straight, kilometres-long alleys made a ghostly, shrieking sound that I couldn't quite get used to.

The smell of mould, stale air and dried blood combined with the occasional gory remains of what was once a person don't make it any better. Glancing at once of the latter I can't help but grimace and turn my head away as tendrils extend from my fingers to make use of whatever was still salvageable of it.

I've seen a bunch of these by now, I think whoever killed these people didn't quite care too much about preserving the corpses for the ritual and just went about slaughtering them however they wished. Afterwards, it proved to be too much of a pain to collect these parts too so they were left laying around here.

Lucky me?

Not that it was too nutritious or numerous enough for me to give a considerable amount of energy but beggars can't be choosers.

I was now on the last floor I resolved myself to explore before continuing my travel for the central spire.

It was tedious getting here after the initial excitement of finding human remains and possible clues about my situation. Along the way, I found several other stuff that only reinforced the validity of this being the Warhammer universe or I was in an extremely well-made Warhammer museum or something.

Now that I was looking for it I noticed the skulls, the Aquilas and other iconography I knew of before.

I didn't find another library or anything like that but I doubted I'd see one until I reached one of the important government buildings. There should be an Administratum building here, along with an Arbites and an Echlisiarchical at the very least, any one of those should have useful stuff but the Governor's palace should still be the best for me.

However I tried to still doubt the reality of my situation my mind defaulted back onto my Warhammer knowledge to make assumptions, I guess my subconscious desperately wanted to cling to this illusion of knowledge and more importantly control. If I knew the past, along with forgotten and well-kept secrets of the main powers of the galaxy, combined with my short-term knowledge of the near future I could gain a form of control over my future.

I sighed heavily and kicked in a surprisingly intact door.

It didn't fly off its hinges like the rest did when I did the same but it did smash against the wall next to me as I entered the room.

The resulting loud thud got lost in the sound of howling wind and I narrowed my eyes at the large section of missing wall on the right side of the room. It was a considerably large one, maybe a hundred meters in length and fifty in width.

The large hole wasn't blown but broken through, with little to no rubble next to it. From the inside then.

I frowned as I strode into the room but kept my distance from the large hole lest the wind caught onto me and dragged me through. The rest of the room proved no less interesting even if it wasn't the first room covered in gore like this.

What was different was that a bunch of corpses were still here, uncollected.

I barely smelled the stench of death thanks to the brutalized wall but I still grimaced at the state of the corpses. They were ripped apart, some had their entire torsos torn into chunks and spread across the room while others had more normal wounds looking like the results of small explosions.

They all wore some sort of shitty military uniforms if I had to guess about the few mostly intact ones. I think that was the insignia of the Arbites, an organization mostly like the police of Earth dealing with most civil problems that don't need fuck loads of Imperial Guards to solve.

Those guys weren't too good at solving problems that went beyond shooting said problem.

As I knelt next to one of the corpses with a mostly whole upper body I noticed its head was messed up. It had a few smaller and two wrist-width holes in it.

I don't know what got into me but I glanced through one of the holes and barely caught myself before I gasped.

It was empty, the brain was mostly gone. I only found a bit of it smashed into a mushy goop that dripped out of the hole on the side of the head facing the floor.

I decided to check out the rest of the corpses as these wounds tickled at my mind in alarm, but only two of the others had similar wounds.

With that done I got to quickly absorbing them while I thought about where I heard about wounds like this.

By now the practice made the process somewhat instinctive. To spare myself the nausea I didn't transform my whole body just extended my hands and morphed the end of those into tens of tendrils that branched out into many more like some sort of horrid tree.

The small tendrils went about piercing through the skin and expanding inside the body of the corpses.

I could use the energy I had to expand the tendrils wherever I wanted, I didn't need to make more mass inside my body and make it travel through the larger tendrils to the tip of the small ones. The energy raced through the whole network in a blink and got to transforming into biomass at the end, just where I wanted it to.

This was what gave me some interesting possibilities, like when I was back jumping rooftops I could launch a single tendril over the gaping depth between the buildings and reabsorb my mass on one side which only left the small tendril that I launched before. Afterwards, I could quickly remake my body on the other side.

I was thinking about other similar tricks to add to my repertoire when a glass-shattering screech blew into me, clearly audible even over the howling wind.

I nearly stumbled from the sheer pressure of the scream but I steadied myself a moment later, the biomass already absorbed and the small tendrils along with them.

I cautiously swept my gaze around the room, searching for the source of the sound, my nerves early calm in the process. My mind already making multiple predictions.

Following my first idea, most of my head transformed into a white dome, getting rid of my blind spot at the back of my head and also making sure that nothing leapt onto me from above without my knowledge. It was also much better at detecting sounds and smells than my human organs.

I kept steady and lowered myself into a more mobile position, ready to leap out of the way should I sense anything. Alas, only the annoyingly loud wind and the now clear smell of blood and leftover gore were noticeable.

For a moment I thought it was a bust, maybe something metallic got torn apart by the shitty building collapsing from the centuries of abuse and neglect. I could have maybe mistaken that for a screech.

Such a thought instantly got wiped from my mind as a sound like nails on a chalkboard but thousands of times louder reached me.

My head instinctively snapped in the direction even if I didn't need to do so to see it.

On the metallic concrete wall that I swore was mostly untouched before was a large tear. Uneven and savage, it made an unwelcome addition to the 'ferrocrete' wall in all of its three-meter-long glory. The name of the stupid material the Imperium used in nearly all of its buildings just now popped into my mind.

Another shriek resounded in the room, sending a shiver through my body and making me feel a bit weird. I felt like I'm losing one of my senses but I couldn't tell which just that I suddenly felt blinded even though my sight has never been clearer.

My mind spun furiously and my eyes would have widened if I had one as I realized which of my senses got blinded.

My soul sense The great dark see below my soul was darker than ever, it was murky and still like no natural water could be.

This should be the warp, the ever-present stars and monsters swimming through it were nowhere to be seen, I could barely make out what was immediately under me.

As my mind tried to make sense of all of this my whole body suddenly stiffened as I suddenly saw something.

It faded into existence like some sort of sickening ghost but now it was far too real to be that. It stood hunched and still reached four meters high as it towered above me, Its sickly white carapace shone in the weak light and I noticed it stood still in front of me like a statue.

Its lower pair of two arms held at the ready near my throat to rip it apart with its ten clawed fingers while its two upper appendages which sported serrated chitinous scythes as long as I was tall were held back, ready to strike at me faster than I could react.

The worst was by far its head and 'face'. Two beady black eyes stared at me full of malice, hunger and maybe a bit of interest but I've had to imagine that. At where its nose should be its face turned into a mass of writhing tentacles covering its jaws like a beard.

All in all, it had a head that would make Cthulhu blush.

In that moment I finally realized what those wounds reminded me of and this monster just proved that I was right with its ugly face.

A Lictor

I didn't dare move a single muscle as I tried to come up with a possible way for me to survive this, I was nearly panicking so I consciously reabsorbed my human brain and substituted it with a mass of my eldritch flesh.

I noticed before that I could 'think' with it just like my human brain but its capacity was heavily dependent on the mass of eldritch flesh I had currently and not on my energy reserves.

This calmed me down significantly as my mind slipped into a cold and calculating state.

My biggest weaknesses were fire, atomization, explosion and acid. As far as I knew Lictors didn't have either but I couldn't be too sure about the acid.

After all, this was an Apex Predator, the result of endless and proactive evolution guided by a god-like consciousness hell-bent on consuming all life in the universe. If there was a perfect hunter then the Lictor was it.

Why I wasn't already in several pieces by now while my liquified mind is being absorbed for my memories is beyond me. I didn't take Lictors for beings that played with their food like felines but here we were.

My eyeless gaze bore into its dark stare.

It was coiled and ready to strike, if I moved but a single muscle I was sure it would rip me apart faster than my shitty senses could register it. Maybe my alien white sight and hearing could pick up on it a moment before it happened but I sure as hell couldn't react to it.

I was fast with those tendrils but not as fast as this monster and let's not even talk about how it stalked me while invisible for who knows how long without me even realizing before it decided to play with me a bit.

Right now my biggest concern was whether it knew about my ability to recover from nearly all damage and that made it observe me for longer or just my absorption of the corpses.

If it was the first then it might be testing my reaction speed which I quite spectacularly messed up by not even moving a single muscle. It shouldn't be able to sense my mind though, as far as I could tell I was somehow 'disconnected' from the warp.

That should make it so its psychic bullshit powers don't have any effect on me.

If it didn't know that it wouldn't be able to kill me without submerging me in acid. I still had a chance.

I wasn't willing to risk striking at its exoskeleton with my tendrils, I might be able to reach it before it reacted, those were fast as fuck but I wasn't so sure about eating through its armor.

It was a Tyranid after all and not one of the grunt biomorphs either. Its carapace should be able to withstand anything less than a Heavy Bolter or a Meltagun.

I would only get one chance at it underestimating me on the account of this being my first run-in with the Hive-Mind. God fuck, I hope it didn't meet whoever controlled this body before, that would be a shame, though Tyranids couldn't shapeshift like I could so it shouldn't have managed to absorb anything like me.

I took a deep mental breath, not letting anything show in my body language before I jumped back with all my strength. My body being at the limit of what a human body could naturally be didn't stand a chance against the monster before me.

My sight surprisingly managed to keep track of the being as it didn't bother to cloak itself again.

It reached forward with one of its clawed arms and grabbed my body roughly mid-jump without taking a single step. Its other arm steadied itself as it caught me with the other but now it once again stood in its original hunched stance.

I don't know if I disappointed it or if it was just done playing with its food but it tore out my throat with its other and stilled again.

It observed me with those dark beady eyes that spoke of barely restrained hunger in favor of fulfilling its purpose. Collecting information. Reporting back bioforms that could prove to be problematic to the Swarm.

I hope I was not proving to be one of those as that would mess with this moronic plan of mine.

I was heavily bleeding out through my half-missing throat, not that it would kill me but I made it look like it was working. I tried working my brutalized throat but only gurgling sounds managed to come out of it and my whole body spasmed in the monster's ruthlessly tight grip.

A second later I morphed my head back into my original human head like it was a temporary thing I was failing to hold now that I was dying.

I put as much horror and dread into my now human gaze and face as I could before I went limp in its hold, my body no longer receiving neural instructions.

I sat, encased in my own skull as a mass of eldritch flesh waiting for the next move of the Lictor.

I didn't have to wait for long as in a few seconds three tentacles bore through my fragile skull. One through my left eyesocket and the rest through each side of my head, around my ears.

The tendrils secreted some sort of substance that would liquify my brain if I remembered right and I simulated its effects while absorbing the secreted stuff. Surprisingly without much trouble, it was a sort of bacteria maybe? I don't know for sure, Human words were inadequate to describe the complexity of this simple fluid.

It waited for a moment and I mimicked the effect the stuff should have on a human brain and turned my flesh into a liquid state, mostly just incredibly small tendrils interconnecting with each other.

The being sucked somehow, similar to how I would absorb biomatter through my skin but it had small tunnels in its tendrils for this purpose and I graciously went along with it.

I could only control a single, connected biomass and the shithead was sucking with three tendrils but that wasn't much of a problem. I was still connected to all three as I controlled them all simultaneously.

The moment I reached the end of the fleshy tunnel and I found myself inside the soft, flesh body of the Lictor I struck. I reconnected my separated parts and withdrew myself from my previous shell and left it for the monster to do with it as it liked.

Not that it had long to do anything now.

I used as much of my energy as I had to expand myself in a single fragment of a second. The flesh and muscles of the Lictor didn't give any resistance as they were ruthlessly absorbed into me much to my delight. A part of me was already imagining the possibility that even its insides would be resistant or even immune to my powers but that fear proved to be unfounded.

I made sure to analyze every single cell that made up the body of this being down to atoms.

I heard it shriek once but it cut off quickly as I made sure to tear my way to its head and feed on its brain as soon as possible to make sure it couldn't make use of any sort of safeguard it might have against beings like me.

I wasn't arrogant enough to think Tyranids didn't have some sort of protection against parasites or something that would try to eat them from the inside out.

Its brain if you could still call it that was huge, several times the size of a human's and much more advanced but it didn't make it last much longer than a human's would against my ruthless tendrils. Not before it managed to activate some sort of immune reaction to me though or maybe that didn't have anything to do with its brain at all.

Flesh-melting acid splashed out of thousands of pores through its massive body making me lose some of my hard-earned energy but it didn't matter much. It was far too little far too late to save the already dead apex predator.

The acid ate through my flesh but I could absorb it and toss it out of my body outside the Lictor even if it took some energy to constantly heal myself throughout the process. It took away weeks from my total lifespan, not that it mattered to me at the moment.

A few moments later the only things left were its skeleton and its hardened carapace which both proved to be a bit more of a challenge to absorb.

Still, the only thing it took was time, I could feel both being corroded away at noticeable speed through my senses.

I could still absorb the stuff as it was, letting it dissolve inside my body instead of having my tendrils spread across its surface from both sides. It didn't make any difference.

I just now realized that I could have done the same thing to its carapace as I did to the walls before, that sort of eating without absorbing stuff didn't seem too physics accurate but who was I to judge?

No, it could have reacted in time and torn me off of itself before I could invade its body so this was still a better alternative.

A mere ten seconds after I first entered its body I now stood alone in the room, the howling wind once again making itself noticeable as I reformed my human body.

I grimaced at the chill in the room a bit and swept my gaze over my previous body, lying dead on the floor.

Its one remaining green eye still reflected the horror it felt at its last moments but the once vibrant glow of it gave way to a hollow and lifeless gaze. I felt a bit uncomfortable staring at my own corpse and I also kinda needed its clothes so a few tendrils made quick work of it and slipped my trusty body glove over my body much more efficiently than human hands ever could.

I fixed my tactical belt once again around my waist which also somehow survived all of my previous activities, unlike my coat.

Poor coat got torn to shreds days ago while I was still getting used to my high-rise parkour routine.

I felt a grin forming on my face even though I just got through an experience many would call traumatic or horror-inducing and yet I couldn't school my facial expressions. I didn't even want to, who was here to judge me if I grinned like a maniac while letting maybe even a few giggles escape me?

The Lictor was perfectly analyzed and its unnaturally nutritious body extended my lifespan by years even though I lost a few weeks due to the acid.

The monster that could terrorize entire planets, slaughter space marines and sneak up on some of the strongest people in the galaxy was now all mine.

Eons of tireless work went into making this biomorph. Random mutations, guided evolution, testing and rebuilding. All of it done by a Hive Mind that devastated galaxies.

And I stole it all in less than half a minute

I knew taking on the form of a Lictor fully wasn't the most pragmatic thing to do in my situation.

It took fuck loads of energy to remake it and it burned more energy to keep it running than a human. I was curious how it kept going without feeding for so long in the lore but as I learned it stored nutrients in a much more effective and compact way than humans did through fat.

With all that said I didn't regret it a single bit.

My energy reserves even expanded greatly in the last three days since I managed to kill the bug. The vastly superior senses of this predatory form allowed me to track down six nearby ritual sites just like the one I found myself in before.

Since these surrounded the original location in the shape of a rough circle I had to backtrack a bit but I didn't feel the time wasted, on the contrary. Even if I only stayed in this form I'd be able to keep it alive for two decades if my instincts were right and my human form for one more.

You would think that a body as superior to a human as this one would consume several times the energy but it used up the energy or more accurately to store nutrients in its body much more efficiently.

All in all, I was very satisfied.

With the last bunch of human remains absorbed just an hour ago, I was already back on the skyline and ready to make a beeline toward the city center.

I didn't bother using the chameleon skin as there wasn't anyone to notice me and it burned more of my precious energy stores to do so.

My strong legs propelled me over to the next rooftop almost fifty meters away without much effort, even as I landed I barely felt the impact of the fall. It was effortless, instinctive. I weighed about a thousand kilograms in this form but my steps were silent and as light as a feather, never even making a single crack on the ground when I didn't want to.

This was the combination of my managing to analyze the thing's brain perfectly while it was still sort of alive, while also almost all of its muscle memory.

On that note, I decided not to replicate some select parts of the brain. I knew that it was a one-in-a-billion chance but I didn't want to leave it to luck.

The brain had to be altered a bit and even though it hurt me I decided to remove most of the organs corresponding to its psychic abilities. No fear-inducing scream or anything like that for me. The brain was obvious but the rest of its abilities relied on that part of the brain feeding them the energy so with that gone and me being unable to do its work myself those had to go for now.

Maybe when I understood these things more in the future I could look into those psychic organs once more but until then they were useless wastes of both space and energy in my body.

On my next jump, only my right-clawed feet touched the ground as I immediately bounced forwards again onto the next building. Still, this was mostly just a jog for this body, I could run circles around any human athlete even at this speed but that isn't saying much.

It's hard to say specifically how fast I was but it seemed at least eighty kilometres per hour and I could push myself further than that with burning additional energy.

At this speed, I reached my goal faster than I expected. I was enjoying the speed and the thrill of the adrenalin-inducing travel I'd been doing which was one of the personal modifications I'd done to this form. Thanks to analyzing both this form and hundreds of human ones even if those were somewhat rotting I had an understanding of the biology of both to such a degree that both earth doctors and Xenobiologists here could only blink.

Doing simple modifications to fit my needs better was quite easy and I even designed a human form that looked the same but was made up based on the Lictor in most parts.

Unsurprisingly one of the hardest parts to do was the brain but I managed that too after a handful of failed tries. Making it subconsciously control and regulate the alien body parts was a bit of a challenge but it took my conscious mind off of my tedious task of tracking down and eating corpses.

Previously I was wondering when I'd find a living human to observe their brain functions to understand how they worked more but then realized I was a moron. I could just look at my own, even if my soul was able to think on its own and me being only a replica of a human, it was enough. The brain worked just as it would have without those other things so it made my job much easier.

Once I neared the giant spire I opted to forgo going through the other buildings that might have something interesting in them. From that close it wasn't too hard to notice the obnoxiously giant crests on the sides of some of the buildings. I didn't recognize most of them but a few did ring a bell.

The winged skull of the Imperial Guard and the weird scale in the shape of an ' I ' with a fist in the middle standing for the Adeptus Arbites were the two that might prompt a visit after the Palace.

It stood obnoxiously at the very center of the city, extending more than a hundred meters above the second-highest building to show both the authority and narcissism of the Governor who was residing here only weeks ago. I would have thought he was overcompensating for something if I didn't already know that this was the norm in the Imperium.

I was quite sure this was the grimdark galaxy I knew of by now, if the Lictor didn't make it sure the giant fucking golden statue of the Emperor did quite well. Unfortunately, he was currently lacking his gloriously shiny head and his upper body was a bit molten but he had three others of him on either of the four sides of the Palace.

I jumped a few buildings to get a view of another of the statues and realized that this one was somehow cut down in the middle but both sides still stood there steadily. Someone must have had a grudge. So petty.

I held back a giggle as I already knew how that would result in my current body. I had the extendable jaws of a xenomorph from the alien movies and a good forty tendrils for a beard, well not quite as my tentacled beard was as much my mouth as were my jaws. It was weird but kind of cool, I could sell the eldritch horror vibe far better now than before as a white mop.

It wasn't what I would have picked if I had the choice and I might whine but this was by far the best outcome of a Transmigration into the Warhammer universe that I could think of. Yeah sure I could have been the Big E or a Primarch but they had their own shit to deal with and having to deal with four evil gods that want to eat your whole race's soul wasn't something I envied.

Neither did I want to give my soul to any of those assholes, turning into a demon was a scam, even a Demon Prince. The only good part of that was that they were immortal as long as their demon daddy liked them. There was a downside at the end. As soon as they didn't like them they were nothing more than snacks.

Eh, too much thinking again.

The vastly increased brainpower was making me overthink and go on endless tangents, sometimes on several simultaneously. I didn't even notice it at first but I was sometimes thinking about multiple things at once but then I caught myself.

I shook my head, making my tentacles flap around and smack against my hard carapace.

I readied myself, lowering my body onto the ground to steady myself with my clawed arms. I set my gaze on my targeted location, an aerial landing pad just under the feet of the molten statue, and without any need for extra preparation or overloading my muscles with energy, I leapt.

For a few seconds, I swam through the air and then effortlessly made my landing just where I wanted. My claws dug into the ground to halt my momentum faster and then I quickly bounded towards the already vandalized gate.

The place was so disgustingly luxurious even on a floor this far from the top that it was nearly incomprehensible to my human sensibilities. Carved marble walls seemingly from single giant tiles extending several meters with gold running along it shaping into intricate forms. So much damned gold.

Golden frames for paintings, golden sculptures looking like they were halfway into the wall and all of them depicting some battle of historical significance.

I had to be prepared for more, the topmost floor was usually the personal residence of the Governors while the few below were for his family and servants and the ones below even that were for social events and stuff like that.

Those halls and hallways would be even more disgusting than this.

I flailed my tentacled beard in what accounted for smell for Lictors as the composition of the air and its many different contaminants were made clear to me. Smog, dried blood, metal, machinery, wood, and the list went on and on until I recognized the smell of old paper along with wood in considerable quantities.

The ugly wastes of both space and money sped past me as I rounded corners, sped down hallways and ran through rooms faster than some cars. The floors went by quickly as I relied on my trusty super-advanced senses to lead me to my target.

I knew that they had some sort of a computer here but I wasn't a tech priest so I didn't have the faintest idea how I would have to caress that thing or something to make it tell me what I wanted to know. Paper and books were much more reliable, those wouldn't need dumb things like passwords or lighting incense while I fingered their ports to satisfy its spirit.

Soon enough I was right at the entrance of the library which blessedly escaped the wrath of the vandals who fucked up the planet. The door was broken through and a few bookcases were blown up but beyond that, the rest was mostly intact.

Even if this place wouldn't have some of the probably extremely classified stuff I'd want like where is what in the galaxy, including every alien empire, I'd have to go through some of it just to make sure that I wasn't in some sort of Alternative Universe of Warhammer.

As my chitinous body morphed into my soft human one, I looked on in horror at the seemingly endless library.

I jogged through the hundreds of parallel alleys made up of intricately carved bookcases.

The smell of leather and ageing wood was prevalent throughout the whole library and I smiled as I enjoyed the refreshing scent. After all weeks of only smelling smog mould and rotting corpses, this was a more than welcome change.

My gaze leapt from sign to sign, searching for the section where they kept the useful stuff.

Once again I was astonished by the size of the section under which resided the various religious texts. They had different parts for official Ecclesiarchy documents, religious tales and things like that.

With a small shake of my head, I ignored those and searched for history or geography with a focus on anything that might contain stuff not available to the public. I thought there might be some of that in a library this far up in the palace but those might be kept in a private library or even locked up in a vault. I wouldn't put anything past one of the elite of the Imperium.

I didn't quite know what I was searching for, maybe military history or some sort of astral map but I didn't know where that would be. I didn't hold out much hope for finding out about relevant threats this planet faced in the near past.

Likely those latter ones would be somewhere more secure which made me wonder why did I even bother going through this library in the first place.

Yes, a map and history, that might be useful. Oh well.

I was gonna read at least a few books here even if they are useless. It'd be a great change of pace.

With that idea in mind, I grabbed a few books as I passed them by even if they didn't hold much significance just because their title sounded interesting.

Soon enough I had both of my hands full with books and I plopped down into a comfy armchair that was hidden away among the many alleys of bookcases. With a slight smile, I opened the book titled 'The Great Angel's Sacrifice' and breathed in deeply to savour that nostalgic scent of ink on paper.

I always liked the smell of books, I of course had an E-reader for most of the books I read but when I had the money to waste I liked to buy the real physical books instead. It was good to just hold a book in your hand and flip the pages and while these books didn't have that authentic new book smell thankfully neither of them was mouldy.

It would have been embarrassing for the person who owned this place if his books were like that after all.

I flipped the first page open, blinking my eyes in surprise as information blasted into my mind as soon as my eyes took in the page. I somehow managed to forget that I upgraded my brain with the Lictors for a moment there.

With that upgrade my cognitive speed was inhuman and my mind translated the letters my eyes saw into usable information in an instant. I could think faster and more now and let's not even talk about my new reaction speed in my upgraded human form. That was somewhat dragged down by my slow eyesight at first so I had to upgrade that too, as a human it would have been incomprehensible how quickly a visual image turned into information in the mind of a lictor.

Before a human would register that something was in front of it the lictor would have already reacted. To replicate this I had to scrap my whole neural network along with my eyes and recraft both with my new understanding of biology.

I blinked again, reorienting myself.

I flipped to the second page, then the third, fourth, fifth, and then before I noticed the next page to turn was the leathery backside of the book.

Huh.

This would make reading through these books quite a bit faster. I think that book which was more than a thousand pages only took twenty or so minutes and that was only because turning the pages any faster would have had me ripping them by accident which I didn't want to do.

Even if the book was filled with bullshit it didn't deserve ripping. I liked books, they were a great escape from my normal life back home.

By the way, the book was as I'd assumed about the Primarch Sanguinius and his heroic sacrifice at the end of the Horus Heresy. I read through it as I was interested in how people remembered that time almost ten thousand years later.

It was impressive in a way how much they remembered. For context back on earth ten thousand years ago was 8000 BC and Mesopotamia was the most advanced community of humans back then with their use of the wheel and pottery and agriculture. The wheel would only come in another 4 millennia.

I gently put the book down onto my right into my soon-to-be 'read' pile and got back to reading.

Some books I discarded once my bullshit-o-meter was close to blowing up and for others I read through every line, absorbing the information like a sponge.

After a time I made a small game out of trying to find where some catastrophe was glossed over or covered up by some sort of bullshit in the history books. It was funny how gaslighted the whole human species was in this galaxy.

Sooner than I wanted I got to the end of the final book and threw it onto the top of the towering 'read' pile.

By now night was setting on the planet and the last lingering rays of the local star were lost behind the ever-present smog covering the city. I couldn't help but wonder, would this planet that looked utterly devoid of any flora or fauna recover now that humans seemingly got eradicated or was it beyond even that?

I was done with this library, on my first round I saw a bunch of other books that might be interesting to read but none of them were a must-read. I found a few books with more or less detailed astral maps and made sure to memorize them down to the smallest drop of ink.

The history books were utterly disappointing. There wasn't a single battle or war recorded in them where the Imperium lost.

When I realized that after the fifth I was somewhat upset and as the target of my annoyance the book had most of its pages turned into origami to help me calm down, it was at least nice to look at it like that.

I left the library behind myself with a disappointed shake of my head, after hours of reading the only useful stuff I had was the map I'd memorized. The rest were giving me the context of the galaxy at best and useless at worst.

I stuck close to the side of the tower as I took my time ascending the floors this time instead of rushing through it like before. The walls on the side of the spire had many panoramic windows on them through which I looked down on the hive city below.

It was somewhat addicting and when I imagined the billions of small, inconsequential humans scurrying along down there I thought how the nobles would have done the same from up there. Feeling so superior and self-important.

I smirked as I thought how they probably ended up just like the rest in those piles of corpses, used up as sacrifices.

The Imperium of Man was a fun setting to read about but an utter shithole to live in. Living in a hive world like this was hell, you had no worth, no dignity and no rights. You only lived as long as you served your role as a tiny little cog in this malfunctioning machine.

I felt thankful that I wasn't dropped down here as a normal human, even with the way I was right now I had doubts about my chances of surviving this hellish galaxy.

Annoyingly I couldn't even look at the stars from here due to the shitty smog. I was curious how different it would look with my upgraded vision, I knew they used telescopes with ultraviolet or infrared or other light filters back on Earth to observe the galaxy more accurately and with the help of that generous Lictor I could do that too but without the telescopes.

Soon enough I could barely make out the skyline of the city far below me as I neared the top of the spire. The lights were still up and running here which made me realize that they weren't before this floor.

It was obvious, looking back on it but with my night vision, the dark night didn't look any different than a rather cloudy day back on Earth. Even with it though the smog made it hard to see the city from up here with the sparse light.

The lights meant security might be up too.

I didn't slow my steps but my attention was now back on my surroundings instead of drifting through memories. I was trying to make sure I didn't forget the stuff I remembered from Earth while climbing the stairs.

Thankfully this building was designed by a single architect and its stairs were right atop of each other, making it easy if a mindless task to make my way upwards.

I strode through the obscenely luxurious hallways, I kept myself alert even though I hadn't seen nor sensed anything that might have been a security system or something like that. I knew the Imperium was backward and had a hard-on for archaic technology while anyone who wanted to invent new stuff soon found themselves at the wrong end of a bolter. Still, the lack of automatic stuff was staggering to my 21st-millennium self.

I knew they had sensors, radars and tech like that but in the books as far as I knew all of those needed a human to directly control and interpret them.

By the way, the spire was suspiciously clean, unlike any of the previous buildings I've been in this one had not a single drop of blood. I could still smell the blood in the air along with the stench of rotting human remains so there were a few unfortunate victims here but it was far from how many I'd have assumed.

I raised my alertness that bled out of me a bit on the way once I reached the third floor down from the top. The last few floors had huge halls capable of hosting thousands of guests and many smaller guest residences along with very compact servant quarters.

I found most of the poor servants in a bloody pile. They barely showed any signs of resistance and many of them had small burn wounds on their backs or even on the back of their heads.

I consumed them all the same but couldn't help but feel a bit of pity for them.

It didn't help that most of them were beautiful young girls, the oldest barely twenty.

The wounds were distinctly different from the ones I found on the many other corpses before. These spoke of efficiency and pragmatism that I wouldn't associate with people that ripped people to shreds and tore them in half.

Laser weapons were the most common ones in the imperium if I remember correctly. A las-gun or rifle could blow a limb off with a single shot while a las-cannon could obliterate a human. The smallest laser weapon was the las-pistol, a small sidearm.

These wounds would match those made by a las-pistol I think.

Even though this left a sour taste in my mouth I already tried to untangle this mystery in my mind.

Hmmm, maybe there would be something even more interesting here than military history.

I felt an expectant smile form on my face as I left the room behind me.

I jogged slowly through the building, following my inhuman sense of smell to any room that might be interesting or one of the personal rooms of the governor.

Although I didn't hope for much I was still underwhelmed by the automatic defences put in place here. Yeah I know, abominable intelligence and all that but a simple if(sensor=1) trigger explosion; couldn't be that hard? Right? This was still a science fiction universe with humanity 38 thousand years later than my own.

I knew they regressed rather hard and had the dark age of technology with killer AIs running around but damnit. I kicked the latest object which caused my irritation to spike. This grotesque piece of crap dropped on my head when I opened a door.

I was initially ecstatic that they could make an automatic sensor but then realized after looking through it that it was this moron. I kicked the grotesque mix of machine and lobotomized human still trying to grab onto the lasgun next to it despite missing all of its limbs for good measure and to make myself clear.

"Please tell me they at least have a skitarii stuffed in here somewhere," I looked pleadingly at the foaming servitor but it just flailed around, "Yeah I thought so," I nodded and patted its ugly ass head.

"I'll put you out of your misery," tendrils extended from my arm and pierced through the ugly hideous thing, ravaging its body and then expanding to absorb it. The cybernetics left behind were mucky and far below the standard of what I would put into my body but they were at least clean of blood.

My soul vision which was superseded above my real one saw a single slight light blink out of existence in the dark waters below me, my sight cleared right after the Lictor died by the way but I still wasn't willing to mess with this thing. As long as I didn't fuck with the disturbing ocean it shouldn't fuck with me.

I knew I was a rather high grade in the physical department, with my biomatter replication and biomanipulation which gave me absurd healing but I didn't know anything about how my soul would fare against the abominations hiding beneath the veil of reality.

There were a few options I thought of though, firstly I could be a Blank, a person with a negative soul which repelled the warp from itself but I didn't think that was likely. The others were the different grades on the psychic scale, it went from being a psychic amoeba, like those blue weirdoes with vaginas on their foreheads, to a psychic rat like average humans that were somewhat useful for being food (for demons) but they'd rather find something tastier and this was the same with low-grade psyker. They had shit powers, were hated and sometimes fed to the emperor but demons found them a bit more tasty than the average human.

Then came the ones that were like an open invitation for any and all demons to soul-rape you for a few millennia for fun before eating you like Alpha and Beta-level psykers, there was also a brief gap between the two where most of the most well-known psykers were at. Just below greater demons going out of their way to eat you while also having rather potent powers.

Most of the people in this category were still fed to the emperor or just killed as controlling psychic power while a horde of demons gnawing at your soul can be rather hard and most people fail at it.

I wasn't sure which one I'd be but I'm perfectly happy with the way I am, though I wouldn't say no to becoming a blank. If one of those uglies in the water could reach out and grab at me I was probably fucked no matter how powerful my material body is.

It was a constant worry in the back of my mind that I was failing to suppress and my thoughts went spiralling like they'd just done, not that I could do anything about it. I was scared okay? I've liked reading horror short stories and more than a few involve soul-vore, I was hoping by being a nice little soul just sitting outside of the water they'd opt for easier food.

I hoped, but the worry remained, fucking demons. This galaxy was so fucked up, no the whole universe was fucked up, the other galaxies are supposedly filled with flesh-eating bugs and loads of meathead orcs.

Well, I couldn't say that the appeal of it to me personally was lost on me, both were rather fond of direct melee fighting while not wearing too much armor so they might as well post a sticker saying 'free meal' on their foreheads.

Maybe I should just leave this galaxy the first time I get the opportunity to, fuck fighting Necrons, space elves, blue assholes, and whatever you could call the imperium.

No, I can't give up before even trying. At the very least I have to get a sample of each species, I was sure an Eldar would give me some idea about how to upgrade my human form further, I might as well give myself ears like theirs in this for, I think it'd look cool on me.

My daydreaming came to an end as I poked my head inside a room stinking of iron, mold, rust and oil, so much fucking oil.

Yep just as I thought, it was the room housing a bunch of machines. I wasn't a mechanic or an engineer but I knew I'd be crying if I was, these things were so horrendously ugly and impractical that it hurt to look at. The human obsession with circumventing using AI and their technological degradation left them with this mess.

If I remember right only tech priests could even interface with machines so I had no chance of getting information out of these, no monitor, no mouse and keyboard just a bunch of blocky machines covered in holy oil so their machine spirits won't throw a fit.

It worked somehow and shitty machines like this carried a galaxy-spanning human empire on their backs. If they were as shit as they looked humanity would have fallen long ago so they can't be that bad.

I narrowed my eyes at the thing, it had gears, why did a computer have gears? Anyway, I couldn't associate this with the tech needed to run this planet even but these people could make working spaceships. We couldn't make those back in my time, how could these weirdoes with a toaster fetish manage it?

I pulled my head back and headed for another room, this one was giving me a headache, good to know I could still get those.

I disregarded dozens of rooms only giving a few minutes to one or two which had some books in them but I only found a recipe book and other similar things. I only glimpsed at a few of the recipes and even my alien stomach was recoiling.

These people were crazy, just putting all the spices you could buy on your food that didn't make it good or luxurious and that was disregarding the fact that they ate parts of animals that were better left unnamed. So all in all it was a weird mix of Indian and Scottish cuisine.

"Okay, let's head up a floor, I learned more than I wanted on this one," I murmured to myself, I wasn't sure if it was my narcissism enjoying the sound of my newer voice or if I was just going crazy from being alone for so long.

I expected many things to be used as a defense in a building as important as this, automatically locking doors being among my guesses. What I didn't think was that they would use two-meter-thick reinforced ferrocrete doors that were more like walls that dropped down from the ceiling.

I wasn't bothering to hide by now, fully relying on my Lictor form to take the beating should I step into a trap but this was just plain annoying. I had to spend the next hour digging through the walls as there was one every fifty or so meters, sealing off my way forwards.

I wasn't even to blame for these being here as they were already down by the time I got to the floor. not that I think they did much based on the molten one leading to the next floor.

It was grating and monotonous and it didn't help that it was fruitless in the end as the whole floor was just luxurious bedrooms, swimming pools, massage rooms, saunas and everything you could imagine.

I made sure to test the strength of my lictor from all of the shitty marble statues that depicted the same man, the governor, based on the obnoxious title written on the base of each and every one of them. I felt a bit better about my own budding narcissism, compared to this dude I was the epitome of humility.

I made my way up, through the molten drop--door and headed up to the next floor. If I remember right this was the second to last one, with the governor's personal living space being either here or on the top floor.

If I was a betting girl I'd bet on his office being right on the top of the spire, allowing him to be on the top of the world both in power, prestige and physically.

Once I got to exploring the floor I realized I wouldn't be finding much of use here, this was evidently the place where the people guarding the governor made their heroic last stand and the scene I saw the moment I entered was quite evident of that fact.

Bodies were strewn around, ripped, clawed, and chewed apart with those being just a few of the many grotesque ends the unfortunate humans here had to endure. The furniture was gone, the walls were demolished and she'd have questioned how the floor still had the structural integrity to hold up the rest of the building were it not for six huge pillars still standing strong.

Blood, vomit and entrails covered the brutalized interior of the floor and I had a difficult time trying to figure out what kind of floor this could have been.

I was a bit confused about why the bodies were left unmolested after their deaths unlike all of the other bodies I found so far. I thought they would have collected them all for those rituals.

While it was surely interesting this was also a fine meal that has been left behind just for me so I wasn't going to let it go to was despite it being a bit rotten. Unlike with the bodies down a few floors, I had a hard time empathizing with patches of blood and scattered entrails, the remains didn't even resemble humans in any way so I was only sure they were humans once I absorbed them.

My whole body recoiled in disgust as everything was absorbed into me, what was this? I felt like someone just shoved the most disgusting piece of dung straight into my nose while shoving a sock down my throat that hasn't been washed in years.

The worst part was that I wasn't feeling it through my nose or my mouth or even my body, the disgust resounded throughout my whole being and I felt sick for the first time I'd arrived here.

It was my soul, along with the biomass I had absorbed a small part of the dark sea also floated up towards my soul. It was darker than the water and it carried a feeling of uncontrollable chaos with a tint of blood and death.

It wasn't a soul and neither was it a demon, I knew how those looked, I'd spent that much time staring into the Abyss but it was unmistakably corrupted by demons of the blood god if my feelings weren't tricking me.

The murky water that I knew to be warp energy spread over the skin of my soul form, I was still unable to do much else than flail in panic but unlike how I expected it to seep into me and corrupt my soul, slowly driving me insane or worse it was the opposite.

It slowly lost its disgusting tint and along with it I regained control of myself, I realized barely a few seconds had passed but it felt like minutes to me and yet when I refocused on my soul self the small patch of energy was coating it like a second skin but it didn't have any of the feelings I'd associated with the warp.

It was clear and pure, an energy of the soul and nothing else, left unmolested by the infinite monsters of the immaterial. I marveled at it a bit but I was snapped back into my material body by my instincts telling me I had absorbed something new, it had traces of humanity in it but it was both more and less.

It had faint signs of the greatness that once was but it was buried under many millennia of degradation.

It wasn't much and it was far from a full sample, with this small one being once a few liters of blood mixed in with all the gore.

"Now let's see what the hell I'd just eaten," I growled out, I delved into the information collected from it and felt my frown dissolve into a grin.

"Thanks for your donation," I giggled a bit.

The genetic sample was worse than shit. It was degraded by the ravages of time over many millennia and the parts that seemed to be just missing or 'clawed' out didn't help.

I didn't gain much but the basic principles that went into designing it long ago were somewhat discernible. Boosted growth, enhanced organs, strength and endurance were the simple ones to find but I could feel fragments of others too but those parts were far too damaged to discern.

Annoying but not much was lost, it would have been nice to have what I assume is Astartes genes but even from this fragment I could tell that the Lictor's physiology was comparable if not superior to this. I was curious about the organ they had to absorb knowledge through eating the flesh of their enemies but even that just so I could use my similar ability better.

Most other capabilities of regular space marines weren't too tempting for me, my current body could already do most things they could but better. Now that that's taken care of let's consider the elephant in the room, I don't think I can push it much further.

The Warp. The chaos corrupted ream of the souls, the home of some of the most terrifying and dangerous beings in this universe.

I sat down on the floor and crossed my legs, I'd like to have as much of my focus on what I'm doing if I doing this. I closed my eyes and number my senses connected to my body, I could still feel it clearly in the back of my mind but like this, my soul sense was much cleared.

My soul as I call it looks like the humanoid form I'd constructed instead of my original body from before. Huh, that was interesting, I raised my arm in this state and watched the weird energy it was made of. It was different from the other souls down there, they were dim and glowed in a whiteish colour while my soul looked more solid and instead of white it was closer to gold.

The distinction between myself and everyone else was rather clear combined with that my soul shone much brighter than any of the souls I could see through the dark ocean, no, the Warp.

When I was staring at my arm I suddenly realized that I had moved it, something that I couldn't do when I was floating listlessly 'up' there before transmigrating here...or was this reincarnation?

I recollected myself and quickly checked over my range of motion and I found that I could move my body just as easily as I could outside of here but now came the less certain tests. I willed myself to move, not with any part of my body I just told my soul with my force of will to move.

It obeyed and with a feeling of detachment I floated away, I panicked at first but I realized that I'd just removed my soul from my body, sort of like an astral projection. I left behind a tether to the body I'd left behind and I could still feel what my body went through with that but it was getting harder to feel anything the further I went.

I reattached myself to my body to check the other stuff I wanted, now came an interesting one, could I use the powers of my new body as just a soul? If I could it would prove that I wasn't just a soul inhabiting the body but that it was my body and that it in turn was affecting my soul.

From what I knew, in this universe, the soul should be the reflection of the person in the immaterial universe but that was a dumbed-down description. After all, Tau were people and they barely had a soul, blanks had 'negative' souls because of their genetics and Necrons didn't have souls despite being sentient beings.

Yes, I knew they had once long ago but it was ripped away if it was just the reflection of who they were then it should have reformed if they stayed the same people and yet it had not, they were soulless beings inhabiting living metal bodies and were steadily going insane one after the other.

I didn't know what it told people about me as a person that they were my favourite faction but I liked my crazy sci-fi weapons and the Necrons had the most overpowered, bullshit weapons imaginable. They stuffed stars into wrist-mounted launchers for fucks sake and their Silent King's dais was powered by the broken fragment of one of their gods.

I recollected myself after promising myself to get some toys from the Necrons once I was confident enough to do so. I stared down at my arm and guided by the familiar instinct I forced it to morph and to my astonishment my soul obeyed.

My regular human arm transformed into dozens of white tendrils glowing with the same golden light I was. Right, this was my soul, I should have full control of it just like my body, it was so human to not even be able to control your own body and I was beyond that now.

This thought didn't disturb me in the slightest, I knew it should have, humans have a natural distaste for change but I accepted it wholeheartedly. If becoming something more was my reward for struggling in this universe until the end of my who knows how long life then so be it.

Now came the part I wasn't too sure about, the clear water that I knew was pure soul energy was coating my soul like a second skin, it flowed in small streams along my skin like it had a mind of its own but the moment I thought about one particular stream going up between my breasts being annoying it shifted sifted in an instant, now going around it.

I was astonished but with a few more tests I realized that it obeyed my thoughts, no that wasn't quite right, I didn't have to command it. I just had to express what I wanted and it rushed to please me as fast as it could which put a smile on my face. It was cute, like a cat I had before dying.

When he was being nice, that little shit could be the most vicious ball of fur on Earth if he wanted. He died before me, having grown up alongside me he was getting very old by the time I turned 13 and he passed soon after that.

I wasn't sure what to use this water for though, it was nice and all but it was neither a lot of energy nor did I know how to use psychic stuff. I wasn't sure I wanted to get more of it now, that wave of disgust that hit me before was disturbing and considering how little of the stuff actually touched my soul, I'd rather die than take a dip in the endless ocean of the stuff.

Little by little could work but for now the only way I knew how to do that was by absorbing chaos-tainted biomass. The genetic template was probably so messed up because I pulled the chaotic energy out of it as I absorbed it not that it would have been much better when whole.

I needed to set goals for myself for the time when I got off this barren rock,

I need someone who would be willing to teach me how to use Psychic stuff.

I need to learn how to get the memories of people I absorb in case 1. is a bust.

Stock up on as much energy from biomass as I could, having a foreseeable expiry date on myself was rather disheartening.

I want to get some Necron toys plus I might be able to incorporate necrodermis into my body which would be cool. (optional)

Get some other cybernetics to see if I can interface with it in case 4. is a bust.

Maybe help out in places so the galaxy doesn't go to shit. (optional)

Yeah, that was a great list. I'd like to keep to it for the foreseeable future.

For the last test, I tried extending the clear water towards the dark sea below me. Let's call it soul energy from now to stay less confusing, so the soul energy as eager as it was to fulfil my wishes extended down from my feet and reached halfway down towards the Warp's surface.

Well, I clearly miscalculated how far down it was, the soul energy was unwilling to detach fully from me so I didn't force it too lest I lose it all and instead I morphed my leg to extend down like I was some poor Mr Fantastic imitation.

When the thin thread of soul energy touched the surface of the warp I felt my blood run cold as for a single moment I felt like I sensed the entirety of the Warp and the entirety of it sensed me. The thread of clear water diluted and thickened as it slurped up large quantities of warp energy.

I started to feel disgust setting in but I held on, keeping the thread now as thick as my thigh connected to the Warp. I didn't even need to pull on the Warp energy as it came at me like a torrent, I wasn't sure if it was eager to be purified or if it just wanted to corrupt me that much more for my ability to purify it.

As it turns out my soul is much more resistant to human feelings such as disgust, I felt it just as heavily as I did before but it didn't stop me from focusing on the task at hand, collecting as much of this stuff as I could. I knew that while I was connected I could sense through the warp energy for a distance but the things inside could also sense me.

The revulsion threatened to overwhelm even my soul but the warp energy was also getting purified along the way, it was far slower than the rate I was pulling warp energy into me but it helped me pull more.

I felt several of the things swimming in this disgusting ocean close in on me like they were sharks circling a bleeding prey. I forced the connection to snap but to my irritation, the still contaminated warp energy was clinging stubbornly onto the connection.

As I felt the demons getting closer and closer to the still holding bridge I was starting to panic a bit, I didn't know how to protect my soul from demons and I most certainly didn't want them chilling in my purified pond of soul energy.

"Break!" I ordered with as much of my will forcing the command to be as I could manage and blessedly with the combination of my purification weakening the warp energy the thing snapped.

The mix of warp and soul energy coalesced around me like a protective bubble as the two fought for the right to be closer to me. Despite the warp energy being more vicious and its natural ability to corrupt the pure soul energy, with me purifying it at a much faster rate than that corruption it lost out.

Slowly but surely the whole mass of energy got purified and now my soul floated in what could be a lake's worth of pure soul energy.

I then noticed that my body was twitching on the ground with its eyes rolled back into its head, it seemed the experience was a bit much to it.

I slipped back into it and with the full strength of my soul now behind my will I easily fought through the lingering waves of revulsion.

Well, that was certainly an experience

999.M41 Undetermined time || The Warp; Imperium Nihilis ||

"Anything yet?" asked Selene Voss, Rogue Trader extraordinaire and the Captain of The Wanderer.

"...no..." said the navigator, wheezing and panting in exhaustion as he focused his powers, his eyes were bloodshot and he was kneeling on the ground.

Selene sighed, it felt like they only engaged the Warp Jump a day ago but she knew time could get fucky in the Warp, the Geller field would hold for a bit more but she was losing hope. The emperor's light faded before they could leave this hellish space and now they weren't sure where they would end up if they left.

It wouldn't be so bad if she didn't know how perilous it could be to miss the mark by even a few hundred lightyears, those blue Xenos built their empire around here and so did the murderous robots she definitely shouldn't know about.

She'd order her men to disengage the Warp jump if the navigator couldn't find anything in the next few minutes. It was better to die at the hands of Xenos than whatever the Geller field was made to keep out. Her mind was in shambles, she knew many things most in the imperium didn't and would find rather heretical but she still believed the emperor to be a god.

And yet his light is no more, what the fuck happened?

The Navigator's eyes snapped, "I GOT SOMETHING!" he shouted, the machinery attached to his neck instantly sent the coordinates to the pilots.

"Target those coordinates," Selene ordered without any of her facial muscles displaying her elation, "Disengage Warp Drive as soon as we get there!"

She now turned her gaze on the Navigator, nearly passed out on the floor.

"Did the Astronomican return?" she asked the frail man.

"No..." he wheezed, "I don't know what it was, a bright light lit up the Warp for a moment but it disappeared soon after."

"Are we going towards a Xenos psyker navigator?" asked Selene, glaring down at the man.

"No, captain," his arms trembled, "I don't know what it was but it felt different from any other psyker I've felt, more clear and pure."

"Doesn't matter," Selene said, "We'll see what it is," she murmured to herself, "can't be worse than a Necron Crown World."

Now that the high from not getting my soul ripped apart by demons was mostly gone I had to think about the ramifications, I'd just connected to the Warp and I know that just my presence purifies the Chaos taint from in and returns it to how it was before the War in Heaven.

That was both good and bad, I didn't have to fear getting corrupted or possessed by demons although my existence would be an existential threat to them. Demons could be killed but only a very few select people could manage it, like the emperor for example with his flaming sword.

When their enemy could kill them it turned life from a game into a fight they could die in to the demons and I was more than certain that they loathed the notion of it. They fancied themselves as above mortals and dying was a mortal thing.

Purifying the Warp would be an impossible task for me, I could siphon off a bit and purify that for my own needs but that'd be it. I wasn't sure how this would affect demons but since the remains of one were demolished by this I was sure it'd hurt them, what I wasn't sure about was whether they could rip my soul apart before it does any substantial damage.

Psychic bullshit and Warp sorcery were always outside of my interests, I liked tech-oriented factions more, and as such I only knew a few things about them. This little knowledge made it apparent that what I was doing was different from how human psykers used the Warp, they had set powers like mutants from Marvel and could only use those, like pyrokinesis, telepathy, astropathy, and stuff like that.

I needed someone to learn from, someone that maybe knew how to make the most out of my powers and wouldn't scream 'Heretic' and call the black ships right after. There were ways to make sure they'd be more favorable towards me.

The easiest would be just ripping the knowledge out of them but if I could get my hands on a genestealer or a mind shackle scarab the Necrons use...that would be great too.

I still wanted to find the office of the governor if it wasn't blown to bits yet but I would also need to think about ways to lure a random ship to this planet. Anything less than a Astartes chapter would be manageable but I'd need to keep myself hidden or act like a human.

Even Lictors could fall to concentrated artillery fire but I think I remember a squad of space marines killing one too. Plus I've lost most of the Lictor's psychic abilities but I hope my own natural one stemming from my eldritch body will make up for those losses.

Now that I think about it, would the hivemind be able to reach me if I am disconnected from the Warp?

No, probably not but I wasn't willing to risk it unless necessary, a fear aura, weak mind reading, and psychic senses weren't worth it in my book. If I got a handle on my own psychic power it'd be easy to replicate those, I hope.

I banished those trains of thought to the back of my mind, it was time to get moving. The floor was fucked beyond reason and so was the stairway leading up to the final floor but that wasn't much of a problem.

I reached out with a tendril shot from my finger and pulled myself up like it was a grappling hook, I landed on the upper floor with a grin. I always loved doing that in games but it felt even better in real life.

The floor was surprisingly intact if you ignored the parts where explosions from the previous floor collapsed the floor of this one. The obnoxiously decorated walls, flooring, ceiling...well everything was covered in a faint layer of dust which would probably make the owner of this place seethe if he wasn't too dead to care at the moment.

I smelled no blood on this floor, though it did drift up here but I could tell it didn't originate here. There might still be something useful here then. I strode through the rather open floor, disregarding room after room, they had a bit of a personal feel compared to the rest of the floors but it was still the same ostentatious taste as the rest.

I personally preferred modern architecture or even the super clean and economical style people associated with sci-fi architecture. Did any of the species in this fucked up galaxy even build stuff like that? Maybe the Tau, they built to impress but they at least had taste, unlike the Imperium with their obsession with gold and skulls.

Necrons still had that Egyptian death robot vibe that while cool was intended to terrify people, not awe them. Maybe Eldar architecture would be somewhat alike too, Exodites liked to incorporate nature into their buildings like the good little space elves that they were but I wasn't sure how craftworlds looked from the inside.

The rest of the factions would be a waste to even think about, Orks and architecture in the same sentence was a contradiction in itself.

As I was walking leisurely I decided to try the only application of my newfound psychic energy that I could. I pulled on the tether connecting my body to my soul and a small stream of pure soul energy started dribbling into my physical body. It was a touch less recipient to my whims like this, making it evident that my soul must be what it likes and not my new body.

Weird but okay, though I wasn't sure what I did to achieve that.

The energy flowed through my body, being both there physically and not. I could feel it pass through my muscles and organs but it never hurt, I just knew it was there and it didn't cause any internal injuries as it passed through my cells.

For now, it did nothing, just following my whims about flowing from one part of my body to another. Making myself stronger and faster would be the most unoriginal thing to do, wouldn't it?

The energy latched onto that thought, drying into my body and doing just that. With my eldritch perception of my physical self, I could easily tell what it did, it infused my cells, connecting them together and strengthening them. It helped muscles contract easier and break harder, reinforced my bones, enhanced my organs so they wouldn't rupture under the increased pressure, and last but not least it strengthened my whole neural network.

I could feel my already fast mind race even quicker, thoughts that took half a second now took only a tenth of one and I could tell even my Lictor-based reflexes were enhanced. I used the neural network of the bioform in my human form too just to give myself an edge, I also enhanced my organs and bones with it as a template so I was only a human in looks and maybe in the brain.

I didn't want to lose my emotions and stuff, Lictors had no need for those but what use would all this new power be if I couldn't enjoy wielding it? Nothing.

I felt insignificant amounts of soul energy leak into my body to keep up the effect so I canceled it after a bit of testing, I could tell that the more energy I fed into this the stronger and faster I'd become. I'm really broken.

Isekai stories came with the MC being an overpowered cheat, after all, the only problem was that in this galaxy everyone has cheats. For all I knew the Necrons would explode the sun in this solar system because their diviner got annoyed with me in the future and decided to time-travel back and fuck me over.

Orikan would be a pain in the ass to deal with, probably the biggest in the galaxy. I should keep things amiable with Necrons if I can, let's not tell them about my ability to remake Necrontyr bodies if they gave me some samples.

Psychic stuff is easier than I thought.

I was under the impression that it required years of study and severe self-discipline to use any sort of psychic powers but that might be because most people also had to keep any unwanted assholes out of their bodies and stuff like that.

I began thinking, what other powers did I remember psykers having? Telepathy was the basic one but I couldn't test that without test subj- people around, next would be telekinesis and pyrokinesis, wouldn't it? And let's not forget the bread and butter of any warlock worth their name, Eldritch Blasts.

Would Psykers be Sorcerers or Warlocks? Most likely Sorcerers tapping into demonic powers or Warlocks for the Emperor? Nah, other species had psykers too.

With that distracting thought out of the way, I pulled on my reserves a bit and guided a small glob of energy into my fingertips. Burn! I ordered as I pushed them out of my body. I felt the heat before I saw it as the soul energy burst into white flames a little larger than my nails.

They remained there for a second before disappearing with a puff of white smoke. I was considering moving the 'find a psychic mentor' down my priorities based on how easily it came to me. It wasn't even instinctual, the energy just bent over backward to facilitate my wishes, I told it to burn and it did, as easy as that.

My initial objective got pushed to the back of my mind, no matter how much I tried to calm myself doing space magic was intoxicating. I loved sci-fi but I didn't hate fantasy either, quite the opposite actually.

In a sense, this galaxy was just perfect. A blend of things I love the most and a chance at being something far greater than I ever could have imagined.

Time to practice some magic.