Chapter 635: This is Mortarion, He Often Poops

A blue-and-white rounded hand extended from the pink-tinged wooden door, clutching a wooden stick tied with a white cloth strip, which struck squarely atop the Silent King’s head, half-caked in rust-brown iron oxide.

The Silent King heard only a single boom inside his skull—like a bell, like a lute, like wind, like thunder, like a great bronze bell, like a sparrow’s chirp, like the sudden chime of a pipe organ in a midnight-calm church, like the distant plaintive warble of a harmonica beneath rubble, like a musician’s soaring song falling from a clear sky.

A sudden breeze stirred in the dry valley, rolling in distant clouds and rain, bringing a warmth unseen for millennia, melting the eternal snows, and causing something—anything—to sprout in the once-empty hollow.

An indescribable sense of fullness erupted within the Silent King, slowly dispelling the cold that had clung to his metallic frame for eons, warming his body, then scorching it.

A burning fire—hot, blazing, bright, clear—was placed inside the hollow box.

He realized in horror that the hard ice wall between himself and the world was melting.

Previously, though his advanced perception—meticulously engineered—surpassed nearly all fleshly bodies in precision, he had always felt separated from the world by a thick ice wall: he could perceive all beyond it, yet when he reached out, his touch met only cold.

Now, he was truly and utterly connected to this world.

He felt the pain of his body slowly rusting, smelled the stench of rolling toxic gases, sensed the sharpness of the rock beneath his face, and became aware of his emotions surging uncontrollably.

Pain—clear, real, searing—ripped through his will.

Sixty million years had passed, yet the images of his race’s extinction, long lingering in his memory modules, now sharpened into vivid clarity.

What had once been mere memories now felt like lived experience, turning into countless sharp blades piercing into parts of him that had never existed before, stirring within him an urge to weep.

But his body—the eternal Necron body—was never designed for this function.

Soul.

The Silent King finally remembered what he now possessed within.

It was a soul.

A hot, newborn soul.

The Silent King hated the soul.

It was his soul—but not the soul of the Necrontyr.

Yet the fullness the soul brought him was undeniable; it caused him unbearable pain—a fracture between his will, his obsession, and his soul.

“Silent King, do you repent?” came a voice from behind the pink-tinged wooden door.

First a round, bloated belly emerged from the door, then a round, bloated head, then a pair of round hands.

The blue lynx-cat crawled out and stood before the Silent King.

Zhou Yun had just risen from a bathtub filled with Ziggfried bath solution, and before standing, had molded his body-clay into the form of Doraemon.

It wasn’t that he disliked wearing clothes or appearing as himself—it was that certain eyes kept watching him, making his skin crawl.

In the Warp, the gods and countless secondary gazes still watched here; most of these gazes Zhou Yun barely cared about—they merely observed him, with no deeper intent.

But Slaanesh—no matter how many times Zhou Yun had endured it in dreams—he could never grow accustomed to Slaanesh’s gaze.

“I need no soul from you. For sixty million years, I have never ceased repenting.”

“I repent—but I will not submit to you. I must atone for my sins, and save my race.”

“I am giving you the chance to save the Necrons—your true race,” Zhou Yun said, looking down at the Silent King and shaking his head gently.

“I am Szarak, the last Silent King of the Necrontyr. My race is forever the Necrontyr and their legacy.”

“The Necrons who abandoned their race’s past are not my race.”

Pain flickered across the Silent King’s face, yet his will remained firm—he rejected Zhou Yun’s proposal without hesitation.

On Zhou Yun’s face, molded from body-clay into a lynx-cat’s visage, a faint aura of death appeared.

Silent King.

In over twenty thousand dreams, Zhou Yun had subdued him only a handful of times—this was among the most successful.

Yet even those few times had contributed at least one-tenth of Zhou Yun’s accumulated frustration.

He had never, not once, succeeded in persuading the Silent King to accept any path beyond biological transformation.

Even now, having forcibly granted him a soul, it made no difference.

Zhou Yun’s power over the Art of Malice allowed him to perceive—

the Silent King’s will was violently hammering at his newborn soul.

This act finally triggered, after eons of frustration, an indescribable surge of rage in Zhou Yun.