Chapter 42: Holy Number 13

District Nine, Residential Block Eighteen, Street Nine, the Blood of Baal Inn, Room Thirteen,

The streetlights dimmed, marking the arrival of night,

The broad avenue unfurled like satin between the hive city's high-rises, dotted with small stalls scattered like stars,

Many upper-hive residents had not gone home after nightfall, wandering the streets in loose clusters,

Some walking alone, some with a lover, some a husband and wife leading a child by the hand,

Stopping now and then at the roadside to buy food, small ornaments, or little handicrafts,

More of them headed into the chapel, devoutly praying to the Hua Hua Hua Di Huang, thanking Him for another day under His protection.

Zhou Yun stood at the window of Room Thirteen, watching a sight the lower hive could never see,

He had recently been a little tormented by numbers

When choosing a room, he had deliberately picked this one, Room Thirteen.

Thirteen — what a wonderful number,

The Hua Hua Hua Di Huang — oh no, the Great Horned Rat's holy number.

Damn the warp-cursed thing! Die die die!

Damn Tzeentch! We're finished!

Great Horned Rat! Yes! Yes!

Zhou Yun devoutly prayed to the Great Horned Rat,

The Great Horned Rat's power will punish Tzeentch! Rat-kin, yes! Yes!

"What kind of bizarre faith is this — wait, why is the Hua Hua Hua Di Huang the Great Horned Rat?"

While Zhou Yun was devoutly praying, the noisy sub-dimensional heretic creature in the white light was denying the truth of the Great Horned Rat and the Hua Hua Hua Di Huang being two in one.

"I can tell you for certain, there is no god in the galaxy called the Great Horned Rat," the winged figure in the white light quipped.

"Isn't he sitting on the Golden Throne?" Zhou Yun answered with a laugh.

Just then, through the window he spotted Xiang Leina,

Xiang Leina seemed to be holding something, panting heavily as she jogged into the inn.

Zhou Yun, a little curious, walked to the door and opened the room marked with the number thirteen,

Xiang Leina burst in from the corridor, flushed in the face, eyes sparkling with lively light, nearly crashing into Zhou Yun.

Zhou Yun stared at Xiang Leina, seeing delight, joy, and pleasure in her eyes.

"Guess what I found?" Xiang Leina exhaled a heavy breath, her voice turned lovely by joy.

Now Xiang Leina seemed, buoyed by that air of joy, to have diluted her usual airheaded air,

Honestly, she looked a little alluring right now.

Holy crap, this silly Xiang Leina girl couldn't have been corrupted, could she — that was the first thought that popped into Zhou Yun's head.

His fingers quietly rested on the pocket tornado,

"Go on, guess!" Xiang Leina said, eyes wide as she looked at Zhou Yun.

Zhou Yun could even smell the faint fragrance on her, see the strands of her hair damp with sweat.

It's Slaanesh! The Slaaneshi atmosphere wants to corrupt him, a wholesome, upstanding Imperial youth.

A flash of killing intent appeared in Zhou Yun's eyes.

"Wait wait wait!"

The killing intent in Zhou Yun's eyes startled Xiang Leina; she quickly stepped back a few paces and pulled something out from her clothes.

A model?

A starship model?

Zhou Yun stared at the roughly painted plastic starship model in Xiang Leina's hand, momentarily stunned.

"Fine, don't guess then, but why did you want to get rough?" Xiang Leina said, still shaken.

Zhou Yun carefully examined the plastic starship model, painted as crudely as a child's work,

It was a golden starship, slender and beautiful in form, with a huge blood-red eye-stone at the prow and golden wings adorning both ends.

"What is this?" Zhou Yun asked, dumbfounded.

"It's the Red Tears!" Xiang Leina said.

"It's the Red Tears!" the winged figure in the white light said.

Zhou Yun blinked in bewilderment.

"The flagship of the Great Angel, the glorious Gloriana-class battleship Red Tears!"

Xiang Leina held the starship model high and said excitedly:

"I made this with my mom when I was little!"

"I buried it under a steel plate in District Nine — I didn't expect it to still be there!"

Oh, so it was a model of Saint Guilliman's Gloriana-class battleship Red Tears from back in the day.

Seeing that not-very-bright air return to Xiang Leina, Zhou Yun quietly let out a breath of relief.

Looks like this dummy hadn't been corrupted.

"Did you find anything today, following Nama. Karl?"

"Mrs. Nama. Karl was the same as yesterday, everything normal."

Xiang Leina shook her head and said:

"Oh, but I did pin down her movements."

"Tomorrow the factory where she works is pulling overtime to ship out a batch of weapons, and she's in charge of the accounting — tomorrow night her house will be empty."

"You're planning to move tomorrow?"

Zhou Yun frowned and handed over the file he'd obtained from Augustus Flax:

"Take a look at this."

Xiang Xiang Leina blinked and took the file folder from Zhou Yun's hand.

She opened it and couldn't help being startled:

"Lady Nama's file, this detailed? Where did you get it?"

"I have my own channels. Take a careful look," Zhou Yun said to Xiang Xiang Leina,

then he turned his head to look at the wall,

where a calendar hung,

marked not only with the local Ashford calendar but also with the Terra calendar.

This was because some of the Empire's holidays were set according to the Terra calendar,

for example, Saint Guilliman's Day was a holiday in the twelfth month of the Terra calendar.

This Terra calendar was very familiar to Zhou Yun — it was the solar calendar from ages long past.

According to the Terra calendar, tomorrow was October 9th.

Carrying a nine, but not such an extreme date as September 9th,

if it really were September 9th, Zhou Yun would probably recite a verse of "Remembering Battle-Brothers on September 9th," and then absolutely not take action tomorrow.

But October 9th — it seemed more like Zhou Yun's nerves were a bit on edge,

for ease of calculation, below it was also marked, according to the Terra calendar, which day of the year tomorrow was.

"October 9th, the 282nd day of the year."

"Seems like there's nothing strange about it."

Zhou Yun rubbed his chin,

among these numbers there was only one nine, and 282 wasn't a multiple of nine either.

387, 420, 489, six thousand five hundred and sixty-one blood-coin, four years one hundred and fifty-three prayers, October 9th, two hundred and eighty-two days.

These strings of numbers interweaved, echoing ceaselessly in Zhou Yun's mind,

but no matter how he tried, Zhou Yun could not find the pattern within them,

some of these numbers were multiples of nine, some contained a nine, some simply had nothing to do with nine at all.

Nine was Tzeentch's sacred number,

if He really was using mathematics to transmit corruption, then nine should have been used,

after all, other numbers might well point toward other Chaos gods and instead cause interference.

Zhou Yun was even considering whether to write sevens all over his body — sevens representing Nurgle — to counter-charge against Tzeentch.

"Mm, feels like there's nothing wrong with this file," Xiang Xiang Leina said, pointing at the file in her hand.

"In this file I see a woman devout enough to give up most of her savings, a wife whose husband died for the Empire, a kind-hearted lady."

"She does have a unique interest in mathematics, but surely not enough to make one suspect she's been corrupted?"

Zhou Yun listened to Xiang Xiang Leina's words and was silent for a long moment,

Xiang the Big Dummy could not possibly be corrupted by Tzeentch — after all, her IQ wasn't up to it; what she said was probably the truth.

Could it really be that Zhou Yun was just being too sensitive?

Zhou Yun glanced sideways at the winged figure in the Bai Guang: "What do you think?"

"No signs of corruption have been found — at least not yet."

The winged figure in the Bai Guang said in a low voice:

"But corruption is always subtle and hidden, working imperceptibly."

"Until the Horus Heresy began, who could have imagined that so many Primarchs and Astartes had been corrupted?"

Join the group, join the group — at 8:30 we'll raffle off a Spirit-Eater

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(End of this chapter)