Chapter 679: I Ultimately Cannot Stand Beside the Emperor

The wisdom emanating from the Source Blood Stacks filled Fabius Bael with dread.

His fingers trembled slightly as he stared in disbelief at the power seeping through those sacred gene sequences.

At this moment, Fabius Bael finally unraveled the mystery in his heart.

Why his cloned Primarchs, identical in both genes and memory to the true Primarchs, could never match them.

The flesh was not all a Primarch was. Fabius gazed at the power seeping from the Source Blood Stacks.

The Source Blood Stacks did not merely store the gene sequences of the twenty-one Primarchs—they also held samples of twenty forces drawn from the Warp.

Fabius extracted a single thread of one.

Like fire, like ice, like howling wolf packs, like northern blizzards, like the Kraken of the deep sea, like the molten titans buried in the earth’s core, like the King of the Dead leading the Wild Hunt in late autumn.

It was a primal, wild current of thought, a microcosm of ice, fire, and the world of great beasts, a mesmerizing experiment of the Golden Age to reconstruct ancient myths.

Fabius faintly glimpsed ancient memories: Golden Age psykers and researchers standing on a barren, ice-covered planet.

There, they reconstructed ancient myths, awakening the primal worship of the masses toward natural phenomena—ice and fire, storms and mountains, beasts and thunder—and drew forth that power from the Warp.

Then

Fabius watched humans let out savage screams, their bodies sprouting manes, limbs growing claws, transforming into wolves upon the snow.

He saw gods born in the heavens, raising cups and laughing with wild joy; he saw great beasts born from the sea, phantoms stirring from the earth, freezing winds locking the World Sea and surging toward the Sea of Stars and the Sea of Souls.

But a traveler clad in gray-brown robes suddenly appeared upon the snowfield, standing in the cold, his immense psychic power radiating outward, sealing the entire planet, trapping the freezing winds within as a prison.

“This place is the Wolf’s Cage,” the traveler declared, then vanished into the wind.

No human witnessed this, but the wind did not forget, the mountains did not forget, the wolf packs did not forget—the planet itself became legend, and legend recorded all. The traveler found his place in myth, and in the blizzards, his name was often heard: “The All-Father.”

Fabius felt his nerves go numb, his head swell—he instantly understood what he had just seen.

A runaway experiment of the Golden Age, a force drawn down from the Warp, bound by the Traveler—the All-Father, or the Emperor—to the land of Fenris.

Fabius stared at the twenty Warp entities embedded within the Primarchs’ gene sequences.

The flesh was merely a vessel; what truly mattered was the Warp. Long before the Primarchs were born into the material universe, they already existed within the Warp.

They were chaotic storms, primal urges and hungers, never tamed, never truly born—but the Emperor bound them, sealed them within fleshly shells, draped them in the mask of humanity, and granted them intellect.

Superstitious mortals called the Primarchs demigods; Fabius had often mocked them. But now, it seemed superstition carried a grain of truth.

And in some sense—though Fabius refused to admit it—the Primarchs were gods.

The more Fabius studied the Source Blood Stacks, the more astonished he became by the Emperor’s audacity, madness, wisdom, and extraordinary creativity; and in his study, he faintly perceived something he had never seen before.

He saw threads, like spiderwebs, converging from every corner of the ship and the stars, swirling around him.

Each thread connected to a new human Fabius had created— their thoughts, emotions, and beliefs all flowed into Fabius himself.

Fabius turned his head slightly, gazing behind him, toward his projection in the Highest Heaven.

He saw the great cocoon, formed from the withering plague spread by the Selene Cult on the Moon, grown through the faith of his new humans and his creations toward him.

The Jifu , his creations called it, believing this to be Fabius’s true essence.

Fabius suddenly understood—he was slowly growing into a form resembling the Primarchs before their birth, though far weaker.

Yet he could still use the technology of the Source Blood Stacks to reshape himself, to be reborn in a form nearly identical to a Primarch—he could become a new Primarch.

A faint tremor passed through him; a sensation of falling and weightlessness enveloped Fabius Bael, and the cocoon hovering above his body drew instantly closer.

Fabius knew that just then, his ship had pierced the veil between the material universe and the Warp, entering the Warp.

This was routine—over millennia, Fabius Bael had long grown accustomed to Warp travel.

But now, Fabius gently set down his experimental tools.

He sensed something was wrong.

Silence. Too much silence. How could the Warp be this quiet?

It felt less as if he had entered the turbulent Warp, and more as if he had been submerged in a black shadow.

Bael’s expression grew grave. He left his laboratory and stepped into the ship’s corridor.

The ship’s eerie silence was absolute—no sound of machinery, no footsteps of Fabius’s creations, all vanished without a trace.

Fabius approached the ship’s observation window with caution.

Outside, the Geller Field bubbles flickered and writhed wildly, as if desperately resisting something beyond.

Yet beyond the Geller Field, there was nothing.

No surging waves of the Highest Heaven, no strange lights, no twisted wills—only darkness, profound darkness, utter shadow.

Fabius stared into that shadow—and he heard it.

It was not silence; all sound had been drowned by the shadow’s roar.

A hungry, greedy, mad, twisted roar—it craved to devour everything in existence.

It roared, it shrieked, it clawed relentlessly at the Geller Engine, trying to swallow the blood within the Source Blood Stacks, to seize the gene sequences.

It was the Warp Shadow, the Hive Mind.

Fabius’s breath nearly stopped—his ship had sailed directly into the Warp Shadow, colliding head-on with the Hive Mind.

How could this be? Fabius’s will faltered.

His mind flickered, linking to his ship—just as he expected—the Warp engine had gone out of control.