A soul-tearing, rending pain surged through him.
It wasn't neurological pain, but something deeper, more fundamental—as if the very fibers of his soul were being torn apart and then sloppily stitched back together.
It felt like someone had yanked his soul from his body, thrown it into a warp storm to be stirred around hundreds of times, then brutally stuffed it back in. The sensation was profoundly nauseating.
If he hadn't already converted his stomach into an energy reactor, he probably would have vomited by now.
Cairo's consciousness struggled to surface from chaos, each thought bringing fresh waves of dizziness and nausea.
He suddenly activated his optical sensors. The blinding sunlight made him instinctively lower their sensitivity.
Before him stretched an endless golden sea of sand.
"Emperor above... where in the warp am I now?" he muttered. His voice, filtered through his face mask, carried a metallic rasp.
The aftereffects of transmigration left him irritable. This time felt even worse than when he'd had the misfortune of transmigrating into the Warhammer universe.
He tried to sit up. Servo-arms and mechanical appendages extended from beneath his dark red robes, steadily supporting his body as sand cascaded from the joint gaps.
"Priority action: Status self-check." He habitually initiated the procedure, trying to use familiar routines to dispel the chaos in his mind.
"Frame structural integrity: 93.7%. Power core output: reduced to 41%. Energy level: low. Warning: Non-essential systems have automatically entered low-power mode."
The energy warning made his heart tighten—this meant most of his combat capabilities were temporarily sealed.
His hand inadvertently touched something cold at his waist—a dark gold dodecahedron ancient artifact. Its surface was covered in incomprehensible patterns that seemed to flow like living things and made one dizzy just looking at them. It was faintly emitting energy fluctuations.
"Was this your doing?" he muttered to himself, both helpless and amused.
This thing had suddenly activated a teleportation in some ruins and dumped him in this godforsaken place.
He looked around, trying to find any landmarks.
Sand dunes stretched endlessly to the horizon.
He activated his multi-spectral scanner. His vision was immediately overlaid with data streams.
"Environmental parameter scan: Gravity... approximately 0.998 standard G. Atmospheric composition: nitrogen 78%, oxygen 21%, argon 1%..." He recited the data, but his voice suddenly cut off.
This ratio... it was too familiar! So familiar it nearly made his heart stop—if he still had his original heart.
Impossible! How could this be?!
He took a sharp breath. Though the air was filtered, he could almost "smell" that scent from memory—so similar to the blue planet he'd dreamed of! The gravity was nearly identical too!
An absurd, insane thought leapt into his mind, making every component in his body tremble.
"Could it be... I've returned? Back to Earth?!" Excitement added a hint of electrical static to his voice.
Wild joy surged through all his circuits like an electric current.
Home! Cola! The internet! No Chaos whispers! No Ork Waaagh!
No Mechanicus brothers constantly wanting to disassemble and study you, or declaring you a heretic for using one extra kilowatt-hour of electricity!
He almost wanted to dance and shout at the sky.
After spending such enormous effort to barely adapt to that hellhole of Warhammer, had he really been blessed in disguise and returned home?
But the caution and suspicion he'd cultivated over the years quickly suppressed his impulse.
"Calm down, Cairo, calm down! The data might just be coincidence... I need more evidence." He told himself, though his tone still carried an irrepressible tremor.
His gaze locked onto several clusters of thorny, drought-resistant plants growing close to the sand. The scan quickly deployed.
"Plant sample analysis: Gene sequence contains extensive non-natural splicing and mutations, carrying weak beta and gamma radiation... characteristics consistent with forced mutation caused by radioactive contamination. Ecological assessment: abnormal, confirmed as radioactive mutation product."
Radioactive mutation? His heart sank slightly.
Had his homeland's environment deteriorated to this extent? Or... was this not the time period from his memories?
"Attempt to connect to local data network! Quickly!" He nearly roared in impatience, his excitement almost overflowing.
He raised his hand. From beneath his robe sleeve flew a pale metal construct the size of a human skull—decorated with eagle emblems and data ports, its jaw constantly opening and closing—a servo-skull that hovered buzzing beside him.
"Scan all available frequencies, search for data signals, attempt to access local network nodes, priority: identify network protocols and state of civilization!" He issued a series of binary commands.
The servo-skull's eye sockets flashed with faint light, its jaw movements accelerated, emitting fragmented clicking sounds to acknowledge the order.
It quickly ascended, beginning a spiral reconnaissance with Cairo at the center, its built-in sensors and communication arrays fully activated, greedily capturing any trace of data flow in the air.
Cairo nervously watched the real-time data the servo-skull transmitted to his vision.
At first, there was only blank noise, making his heart tighten.
But soon, the skull caught something.
However—
What fed back to his neural system wasn't the orderly data packets and abundant signals that the noisy, vibrant digital world of his homeland should have.
Only amplified, even more piercing noise.
Sharp, chaotic, full of meaningless static roar. The servo-skull barely forwarded some extremely weak, fragmented data packet remnants, but they were like wreckage after an explosion—no valid protocol headers or information payload, only unreadable garbled data and a destructive interference background noise.
The servo-skull transmitted a calm analysis: «Warning: Large-scale signal annihilation traces detected. No valid network beacons found. Data fragments cannot be reconstructed. Hypothesis: Global data network severely damaged or in extreme disordered state. Access attempt failed.»
Hope deflated rapidly like a balloon pierced by a needle.
The massive disparity left him suffocating. The stronger his earlier wild joy, the deeper his current disappointment.
He could even sense a trace of logic-based "confusion" from the servo-skull—it too couldn't comprehend this complete network silence.
"Return. Maintain alert mode." He ordered somewhat dejectedly, his voice lowering.
The servo-skull quietly flew back to his shoulder, its jaw gently opening and closing, silently accompanying its master.
This wasn't the home he'd yearned for day and night. At least, not entirely.
The gravity was right, the atmosphere was right, but the plants had mutated and the network had collapsed.
What had happened to this world? Had he actually returned or not?
A sense of isolation filled every one of his sensors like cold grains of sand.
He stood at the center of the boundless sand sea, under an unfamiliar scorching sun, atop radioactive sand, holding mysteries from ancient times in his hand, with a severed path home behind him.
Even the technological creations he trusted most couldn't provide the answers he craved.
His core protocols automatically updated, but this time with more personal, urgently answer-seeking drivers.
He chose a direction and began walking.
Precise mechanical feet left deep impressions in the sand, but they were quickly erased by the never-ceasing wind and sand.
His dark red robe snapped loudly in the hot wind. A heart that had risen with hope but grown heavy with doubt beat silently within his mechanical chest cavity.