Deep Within the Fortress. Midnight.
Far beneath the surface of New Kato, below the reinforced habitation levels, below the ammunition vaults and fabrication chambers, below even the armored command galleries where officers still whispered over casualty projections, Qin Mo worked alone in the fortress's deepest sanctum.
The chamber had once been raw underhive substructure. Now it was a vaulted, steel-ribbed laboratory carved into the hive's bones, its walls reinforced with layered alloy and pressure-sealed against dust, heat, and intrusion. Cable bundles hung in disciplined rows from the ceiling. Cooling lines pulsed faintly beneath the floor. Half-assembled devices rested on workbenches, each surrounded by tools, sensor rigs, and components arranged with the ruthless order of a mind that hated wasting motion.
For days, Qin Mo had neither rested nor eaten properly.
Not because his body could not endure it. It could. That was becoming less comforting with each passing week. But the work demanded continuity, and his thoughts moved best when no one interrupted the chain between problem, theory, test, failure, correction, and result.
His chamber was lit only by the cold glow of cogitator screens and the intermittent flare of spatial distortion fields bending around his latest invention. At the center of the room stood the prototype: a dimensional transmission device, suspended inside a frame of gravitic stabilizers, focusing rings, and layered containment vanes. Every few seconds, the device emitted a low pulse that made nearby dust lift from the floor and hang motionless before settling again.
The prototype was assembled.
Now came refinement.
Qin Mo reached toward a tray of finely calibrated instruments, then stopped as a bell echoed through the chamber.
"Enter."
The heavy blast door hissed, unlocked, and rolled aside with the grinding weight of a sealed bunker opening under emergency conditions.
Grot stepped inside, one armored hand gripping the back of a man's coat as if he were carrying an unpleasant object rather than escorting a person. The man stumbled when shoved forward, caught himself, and immediately lowered his head.
"Lord, this is the one you asked to see."
At those words, Qin Mo halted his work completely.
His gaze fixed on the newcomer.
Yoan.
The name surfaced from recent reports, attached to a file so absurd that it had immediately become interesting. A PDF officer had accused a civilian of being a heretic infiltrator. Not because of symbols, weapons, suspicious contacts, or evidence of cult activity.
Because every man, woman, and child who laid eyes upon him recoiled with instinctive dread.
A primal revulsion. A divine warning, the officer had believed. An omen that the man was an enemy hidden among them.
Upon hearing that report, Qin Mo had ordered the man brought before him at once.
And now, here he stood.
"I remember you."
Qin Mo narrowed his eyes, fitting the gaunt, nervous face into an older memory: smoke, rubble, blood, and desperate men firing down the main boulevard during the Siege of Kato.
"During the Siege of Kato… you were among those who fought beside me on the main boulevard, weren't you?"
"Yes!"
Yoan's head snapped up. He trembled, not from fear alone now, but from something dangerously close to joy.
The Lord remembered him.
A simple underhive man. A nothing. A creature most people could barely stand to look at. Remembered by the being who had saved Kato, armed its defenders, and reshaped its future with steel and fire.
And, just like before, the Lord did not recoil.
No flinch. No disgust. No tightening around the eyes. Qin Mo looked at him as if he were simply another human problem to be understood.
Qin Mo pulled a chair from a nearby workstation. The seat was scorched along one edge from a recent containment failure, but it was stable enough. He set it in front of Yoan and gestured for him to sit. Then he waved Grot away.
"Leave us."
Grot's upper lip curled. His instincts clearly disliked being told to leave Qin Mo alone with someone every nerve in his body rejected.
"If he tries anything," Grot said, glaring at Yoan, "just say one word. I'll come in and rip him apart."
"Relax. He's perfectly safe," Qin Mo said calmly.
The certainty in his voice left no room for argument.
Grot snorted, gave Yoan one last look of open contempt, and withdrew. The blast door sealed behind him with a heavy metallic thud.
Only then did Qin Mo's expression sharpen.
"Tell me, Yoan. Does everyone despise you?"
"Yes." Yoan's voice wavered. His hands tightened together in his lap. "Everyone… except for you, my Lord."
Qin Mo stared at him for one silent second.
Then he laughed.
It was not cruel laughter. Not mockery. It was deep, sudden, and genuinely delighted, the sound of a man who had just found a tool he had not dared hope would exist in his current circumstances.
Yoan sat frozen, bewildered. He had spent his entire life watching people recoil from him. Hearing laughter without hatred attached to it was unfamiliar enough. Hearing it from Qin Mo was almost unbearable.
Qin Mo had just found something invaluable.
Yoan was a Pariah.
A soulless one.
A Blank. An Untouchable. A Null. One of those rare human anomalies whose presence made souls recoil and the Warp shudder. Reviled by instinct, feared by psykers, misunderstood by almost everyone unfortunate enough to stand near them.
The Imperium feared them.
The Warp loathed them.
Even the highest authorities of mankind had, in darker centuries, argued over whether such people should be weaponized, hidden, harvested, or purged from existence entirely.
And now one had walked straight into Qin Mo's hands.
"I didn't expect this," Qin Mo said, still smiling.
He paced once beside the workbench, fingers tapping lightly against cold metal as old lore, practical possibilities, and battlefield applications aligned in his mind.
"I assumed people shunned you because you had committed some terrible crime. That you bore some wretched sin that everyone else knew and I simply hadn't bothered to learn."
His smile widened.
"But no. You're an Untouchable. One of the rarest and most dangerous human anomalies in the galaxy."
Thinking back to the Siege of Kato, Qin Mo realized he had felt nothing unusual when standing near Yoan. No unease. No crawling revulsion. No instinctive desire to step away from the soulless absence that disturbed ordinary humans and tortured psykers.
Even now, he remained completely unaffected.
Interesting.
C'tan-born nature? Human mind shielded by something deeper? Or merely another sign that his relationship with souls, the Warp, and material law did not fit the categories the Imperium understood?
A question for later.
Yoan swallowed. His face had gone pale.
"God… what am I?"
"Your physiology is unique." Qin Mo paused. His brow furrowed. "Wait. What did you just call me?"
Yoan froze.
"A… god, my Lord."
Qin Mo's expression changed. The delight vanished, replaced by the flat stillness of a man who had just heard a warning alarm from a machine that should not have been powered.
"Explain."
So Yoan explained.
The Devotees. Their gatherings. Their doctrine. Their worship of the so-called servitors. Their belief that emotion was weakness and that salvation lay in imitating the cold, tireless obedience of Qin Mo's machines. Their discipline of suppression. Their reverence for him.
For the first time in a long while, Qin Mo found himself genuinely speechless.
He had anticipated this possibility in the abstract. The Imperium trained humanity to worship power, suffering, sacrifice, and symbols. He had saved cities, built impossible weapons, and created machines that moved like obedient angels of logistics and death. At some point, someone deifying him had been inevitable.
But actually hearing it from a trembling man in his laboratory was different.
It was no longer a theoretical problem. It had a name, a location, followers, and doctrine.
"Your faith is meaningless," Qin Mo said. His tone was not loud, but it struck like a sealed order. "I do not require worship. I do not need believers. Abandon this delusion immediately."
Yoan flinched as if physically struck. Qin Mo ignored the hurt. Hurt could be survived. A growing cult could not be ignored.
He reached for a nearby vox-caster and activated a direct command channel.
"Grey. Take a squad to the South District tavern. Monitor every single person inside. Do not provoke them unless they become dangerous."
A brief pause answered through the vox, followed by Grey's voice.
"Understood."
The channel clicked off.
"Why?" Yoan asked, confused and suddenly afraid.
Qin Mo considered explaining. Then decided against it.
Not because the Devotees were disloyal. That was not the immediate issue. The problem was worse. Their loyalty had begun to deform their minds.
They modeled themselves after servitors, striving to become cold, emotionless machines. They treated numbness as holiness and obedience as transcendence. They were not becoming pure. They were becoming hollow in a way that had nothing to do with Yoan's natural condition and everything to do with fanatic imitation.
How many of them truly suppressed their emotions?
How many merely convinced themselves they had?
In this universe, sincere belief was not harmless. Faith shaped the Warp. Conviction mattered more than truth. Madness, repeated with enough certainty by enough souls, could become a signal. A wound. A beacon.
Even false gods could rise from sincere belief.
A religion of emptiness, mimicking purity through mechanical imitation, was not harmless eccentricity. It was a contagion with hymns.
If they insisted on faith, they should worship the Emperor. At least then their souls would be aimed toward humanity's existing spiritual bulwark, however brutal and compromised it might be.
Qin Mo could offer no afterlife. No throne of light. No divine redemption.
Only direction.
"Tell me about yourself," he said.
If Yoan was to be useful, Qin Mo needed to understand the man before he shaped the weapon.
Yoan obeyed immediately. His words came haltingly at first, then faster once he realized Qin Mo was listening without disgust.
He had only one family member.
His wife.
They had both been orphans, abandoned in the Underhive before memory could give either of them a proper beginning. They had survived by scavenging, hiding, working, and trusting no one who did not first prove they could endure their presence. They had no clan, no patron, no inherited shelter, no family shrine, no bloodline worth naming.
Only each other.
And most importantly… she was an Untouchable too.
Qin Mo's smile returned.
"Do you know of any others like you?"
"None."
Qin Mo nodded slowly.
"You two are exceedingly rare. In this entire hive, you may be the only ones."
Yoan hesitated. The question that followed sounded older than him.
"Why does everyone find us repulsive?"
Qin Mo leaned back against the workbench and crossed his arms.
"That's a long story. I could explain it scientifically, starting from the birth of the cosmos, the emergence of psychic resonance fields, the Immaterium's relationship with sentient minds, and the significance of your absence within that structure."
Yoan stared at him blankly.
Qin Mo waved the explanation away.
"But ultimately, none of that matters right now."
His gaze settled on Yoan with uncomfortable precision, as if he were looking not into a soul, but at the place where a soul should have been.
"All you need to know is this: you are special. And to me, you are important."
The words struck Yoan harder than any insult ever had.
Important.
Not tolerated. Not useful by accident. Not paid to stand nearby while others tried not to gag. Important.
Something shifted in him. A lifetime of being treated like a stain did not vanish, but for the first time, it had been contradicted by someone whose judgment could reshape cities.
Yoan felt, with absolute certainty, that his life had just changed forever.
"Go home for now," Qin Mo ordered, standing.
The decision had already been made.
"Tomorrow morning, I will send for you and your wife. You will both be brought to the fortress."
He stepped toward the chamber doors, then turned back.
"You have been chosen."
Yoan trembled. His joy was so intense that it bordered on fear.
"Can I… can I become your Emissary?"
Qin Mo smiled faintly.
"More than just my Emissary. Your role will far exceed anything you can imagine."
Because Qin Mo already knew one thing clearly.
Yoan would never be a leader in the conventional sense. No good army would willingly follow a man whose mere presence made them feel contaminated. Rank could force obedience, but it could not erase instinct. Soldiers would hesitate near him. Officers would distrust him. Civilians would whisper.
But a living nightmare on the battlefield?
That, he could be.
A warrior clad in the finest armor Qin Mo could build. A void given shape and discipline. A man whose existence unraveled witchcraft, whose approach made daemons recoil, whose weapons would be made not merely to kill flesh, but to exploit the terror his presence already created in the Warp-touched.
A soldier who could stride into the places psykers feared.
A hunter who could bring ruin to witches, cults, sorcerers, daemonic servants, and anything else arrogant enough to rely on the Sea of Souls.
And never fear corruption.
For he was soulless.
Even if he screamed the names of the Ruinous Powers, they would not hear him. They could not claim what was not there. His presence would not invite them. It would deny them.
He was not a shield.
He was a void.
Qin Mo's Culexian Assassin.
Yoan's eyes widened with joy and devotion so raw that Qin Mo nearly frowned again. That would need correction later. Fanaticism was useful only until it became stupidity.
"I… I don't know if this is a dream or reality," Yoan whispered. "But I swear upon my life, I will give you everything. If you ask for my heart, I will carve it from my chest!"
Qin Mo chuckled and placed one hand on Yoan's shoulder.
"No need for that."
Yoan went completely still beneath the touch. For most men, touching him required effort. Qin Mo did it casually. That almost broke him.
The blast door opened. Grot stood outside, arms folded, clearly having waited close enough to hear trouble if trouble began.
Qin Mo turned to him.
"Put him on a transport. Take him home. In the morning, bring him and his wife here."
Grot grimaced. The order plainly offended his instincts, but not his discipline.
"By your will."
He grabbed Yoan less roughly this time, though his expression made it clear the restraint cost him effort. Yoan barely noticed. He kept looking back at Qin Mo until the door began to close.
Qin Mo watched him go, then turned back toward the dimensional transmission prototype.
The device still pulsed softly in its containment frame, patient and unfinished.
For days, Qin Mo had been working on a way to cross distance.
Now another kind of distance had appeared before him: the gap between humanity's fear and humanity's survival.
Yoan and his wife would not be easy to protect. They would not be easy to train. They would not be easy to place among soldiers who could barely stand near them.
But rare tools were rarely convenient.
Qin Mo returned to his workbench, picked up the calibrated instrument he had reached for before the interruption, and resumed testing.
Outside the chamber, deep within the fortress, orders began moving through the night.