Rowan opened his eyes.
The experience of crossing between different universes was not nearly as agonizing as he had imagined, or perhaps there was simply no sensation to perceive at all.
With only a montary lapse in consciousness, the scenery surrounding him underwent a massive transformation.
He looked around, finding himself standing within a room forged entirely of steel alloy, its furnishings starkly spartan, consisting of nothing more than a tal desk and a single bed.
The double-headed Aquila of the Imperium of Man was deeply engraved upon the wall.
The air was heavy with the suffocating scent of burning tallow candles and sacred incense, and resting upon the desk was a thick to, its cover bearing the title of the Lectitio Divinitatus.
All available evidence indicated that he was no longer within his previous universe.
Rowan laughed.
It was a dry, humorless sound driven entirely by sheer exasperation.
"Son of a bitch, you golden bastard, you played !"
Indeed, he now understood everything.
Successfully escaping the cesspit that was the Foundation universe was certainly a beautiful thing, but why in the warp was his luck so abysmal that he had simply jumped from one cesspit directly into another?
Warhamr 40,000 was a renowned space opera from his past life, birthed by a British corporation known as Gas Workshop.
It was a setting defined by gothic darkness and eternal war, where a myriad of distinct races and factions butchered each other across the galactic stage, each possessing their own unique strengths, esoteric arts, and secret weapons guaranteed to deliver horrific surprises.
According to their pact, the faction Rowan was tasked with leading to revival was the Imperium of Man, a regi so tyrannical that it had successfully amalgamated the absolute worst dregs of every political system in human history.
It possessed the buck-passing cowardice of democracy, the iron-fisted oppression of totalitarianism, the ignorant fanaticism of theocracy, the rigid stagnation of feudalism, the at-grinder attrition of militarism, the cruel exploitation of slavery, the agonizing inefficiency of bureaucracy, and the ideological chains of autocracy, all blending into a stench that reached the end of the galaxy.
Ever since a minor little accident occurred during the Great Crusade ten thousand years ago, resulting in the Emperor being confined to the Golden Throne, the entire Imperium had been in a steep, terminal nosedive.
Despite the valiant efforts of nurous heroes attempting to salvage the dying empire, their collective sacrifices had ultimately proven futile in the grand sche of things.
"Whatever, there is no need to be so pessimistic."
Rowan rapidly forced himself to calm down.
Right now, his primary objective was to ascertain his exact location within the galaxy and determine the current year of the forty-first millennium.
He walked toward the exit of the room, intending to open the door and step outside.
Pushing against it, the thick alloy blast door remained completely motionless, locked firmly in place.
"...Tch."
Rowan furrowed his brow, and with a re thought, the impenetrable tal door was instantaneously transmuted into a cascade of loose sand that rustled uselessly to the deck.
Cold, harsh light spilled in from the outside as he stepped forward, his field of vision suddenly opening up to a massive expanse.
It appeared to be a vast cargo hold originally designed for the storage and transportation of bulk goods.
At this very mont, however, the cavernous space was echoing with the deafening roar of detonations and the relentless chatter of gunfire as a brutal massacre unfolded.
The butcher orchestrating this slaughter was a Chaos Space Marine clad in pink and purple power armor, the ceramite desecrated with warping sigils that exuded a cloyingly sweet, sickeningly unnatural perfu.
Wielding a revving chainsword in one hand and a bolter in the other, the traitor Astartes danced through the throng of defenders with a grotesque elegance, leaving a trail of spattered gore and dismbered corpses in his wake.
"For the Four-Ard Emperor!"
An Astra Militarum guardsman had just hoisted a heavy lta bomb when his head was cleanly severed from his shoulders by a sweeping blade.
His helt tumbled away in mid-air, revealing a hideous, mutated visage and a bald skull plated with thick, chitinous carapace.
The prid explosive was deftly flicked aside by the Chaos Space Marine's blade, detonating in a blinding flash that instantly incinerated several nearby combatants as the slaughter continued unabated.
"Well I'll be damned, Genestealers holding the line for the Imperium, huh."
Witnessing a scene so Warhamr, Rowan could not help but mock the absurdity of it all within his own mind.
The two factions currently engaged in the bloody exchange finally noticed the lone human who had wandered onto their battlefield, and their reactions were starkly different.
The Genestealer Cultists continued to pour relentless las-fire into the Chaos Space Marine, while the traitor Astartes imdiately wheeled around, abandoning his prey to charge directly toward Rowan.
"Praise the Prince of Pleasure!"
For a Chaos Space Marine sworn to Slaanesh, the pursuit of victory was absolutely never the ultimate goal; true purpose lay only in the ecstatic thrills and sensory stimulation derived from the act of combat itself.
He had already grown utterly bored of butchering these xenos hybrids, creatures bound by genetics and psychic control who failed to exude the deliciously fragrant scent of genuine terror.
Discovering an ordinary, uncorrupted mortal suddenly appearing on the battlefield was an unexpected delight.
How should he best play with this pathetic little human?
An idea struck him: he would keep the mortal alive, carefully flay the skin from his body in one pristine piece, and then ticulously carve the entire Lectitio Divinitatus into his exposed tendons; the re thought of such exquisite agony was intoxicating!
Just as the Chaos Space Marine was reveling in the brilliant cruelty of his sudden inspiration, his massive armored fra violently seized up, freezing completely in place just re feet away from the mortal he had deed so hopelessly fragile.
What in the warp was happening?
"Scared for a second, good thing I am vastly superior!"
Rowan, having telekinetically locked the traitor's Mark VII power armor down to its individual servos with a single thought, grumbled internally.
In his previous life within the Foundation universe, virtually every anomalous organization possessed extensive, agonizing experience in anti-reality bending tactics.
In Rowan's mory, every single strike team deployed to capture or kill him had co equipped with standard-issue Scranton Reality Anchors to suppress his powers.
A situation like this, where an enemy was completely defenseless against localized reality distortion, was an incredibly rare luxury.
Rowan reached out his hand and gently clenched his fingers into a fist.
"Bang!"
A muffled detonation echoed out.
The Chaos Space Marine instantly staggered, pitching forward to collapse heavily onto the tal deck as his power armor violently ruptured, torrents of dark, transhuman blood geysering wildly from the breached ceramite joints.
Rowan had not actually done anything overly complex; he had simply transmuted a localized portion of the Astartes' bloodstream directly into pure nitroglycerin.
This primitive explosive, used by humanity for mining back in the second millennium, remained devastatingly reliable in the forty-first millennium, instantly blowing the traitor's two hearts and three lungs to absolute bloody ruin and granting him imdiate, violent death.
Rowan exhaled a soft breath as he felt a surge of energy flood his entire being the mont the Chaos Space Marine died, subtly elevating so fundantal aspect of his power to a slightly higher tier.
"The soul quality of this Chaos Space Marine is quite exceptional, a single one is easily worth the souls of several hundred ordinary humans."
He marveled internally at the sudden influx of power.
anwhile, deep within the Immaterium, in the Sixth Circle of Slaanesh.
A palace of impossible perfection, beyond the wildest linguistic comprehension of any mortal mind, stood silently amidst the churning tides of the Empyrean.
Between its soaring architectural columns rested countless sculptures, paintings, and esoteric artworks rarely seen in the materium, each one possessing a maddening beauty capable of dragging a soul into eternal, obsessive ruin.
Yet the most captivating feature of this palace was not the art, but rather the sheer, overwhelming multitude of seemingly ordinary mirrors that covered the interior walls.
They were arranged like stars orbiting the moon, completely surrounding a magnificently opulent bed positioned at the absolute center of the space.
Upon this grand bed, scenes of absolute blasphemy and debauchery were unfolding, sights so twisted that a re glimpse would instantly regress a mortal man into a mindless Chaos Spawn.
Every single mirror perfectly reflected the profane acts occurring upon the bed, with each reflective surface representing a different realm of possibility.
The figures trapped within the mirrors experienced the sensations simultaneously, feeding the stimulus back to the origin.
This psychic feedback loop magnified the sensation thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of tis over, generating enough ecstatic pleasure to satisfy a daemon of Slaanesh whose sensory thresholds had already been elevated to incomprehensible extres.
An unknown asure of ti passed before a towering Keeper of Secrets lay limply across the silken sheets, clearly exhausted and entirely incapable of movent.
anwhile, the other person slowly rose to her feet.
She wore the vestnts of an Imperial Sister of Battle, garnts entirely incongruous with the profane surroundings, yet every single purity seal and holy icon upon her armor had been ticulously replaced with the blasphemous runes of Slaanesh.
Her physical form was grotesquely mutated, standing over four ters tall with elongated, slender limbs that evoked the disturbing imagery of a predatory reptile, her face a mask of terrifying allure.
Miriael Sabathiel.
She was the eternal sha of the Order of Our Martyred Lady, a Fallen Sister who had abandoned her faith to bend the knee to the Dark Prince, ascending as a deeply favored Champion of Chaos.
She extended a spiked tongue easily a ter in length, languidly licking her own face.
The barbs tore deep, bloody gashes across her pale flesh, wounds that almost instantly sealed and vanished without a trace.
The sudden flash of pain finally served to clear the drug-like haze clouding Miriael's mind.
"What is the matter, my dearest Miriael?" the exhausted Keeper of Secrets purred in a sickeningly sweet, cloying voice from the bed.
"...It is truly nothing of grand importance," Miriael replied, her expression heavy with languid indifference, "rely that the soul of a little fish I had previously laid claim to seems to have sohow slipped entirely from my grasp."
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