"It's… in the next room…"
The sorcerer forced the words through blood-flecked lips. His ruined hand lifted from the restraint frame by a few trembling centimeters, one broken finger pointing toward the iron-wrought door at the far end of the chamber. The door was heavy enough to stop a breaching team, its frame cut with old warding sigils that pulsed faintly beneath layers of soot, rust, and dried sacrificial residue.
"No," Qin Mo said. "It isn't."
He circled the bound heretic without haste, boots scraping over the chamber's stained floor. The sorcerer's eyes followed him with the frantic calculation of a trapped animal still looking for a gap in the cage. Qin Mo saw the fear. He saw the lie beneath it.
The chamber stank of burnt incense, blood, ozone, and the greasy chemical smoke of extinguished ritual candles. Black chains held the sorcerer upright against a frame of hooked metal. His chest rose and fell in shallow, uneven pulls, each breath wet with internal damage.
Qin Mo stopped in front of him.
Then he drove one gauntleted hand into the sorcerer's torso.
Flesh split. Bone cracked. The heretic's body jerked against the restraints, but Qin Mo's arm continued inward farther than any human anatomy should have allowed. His fingers closed around something cold and angular buried deep inside the man's chest cavity.
With a wet, tearing sound, Qin Mo pulled out a small black box.
Then another.
And another.
One by one, he extracted the objects from the sorcerer's body. Each was palm-sized, obsidian-dark, and carved with runes that crawled faintly beneath the surface like embers trapped under glass. They came free slick with blood, but the blood hissed and blackened where it touched the markings. Residual Warp-energy clung to them in thin, unpleasant strands, not strong enough to manifest, but strong enough to make the air taste foul.
Yoan watched from a short distance away, his expression rigid. Being near Warp-tainted objects made most men uneasy. Being near Yoan made the Warp itself recoil. The two pressures ground against each other in the chamber like opposing fields.
Now Qin Mo understood.
That was why he had failed to sense the summoning artifacts clearly.
They had not been hidden in the next room. They had not been shielded behind the door. They had been sewn, grafted, and folded into the sorcerer's own body, buried beneath meat, bone, pain, and fanatic will.
His hatred for the heretic had been too immediate, too focused. It had overwhelmed the subtler signs. Qin Mo had been staring at the filth and missed what the filth carried inside itself.
Now that the boxes were out, that hatred sharpened.
The sorcerer twisted in the restraints. His face contorted, but not from pain alone. Pain he understood. Pain was familiar. What broke through his expression was frustration. He had failed to deceive Qin Mo, and that failure wounded him more deeply than the hole in his chest.
Qin Mo lifted one of the boxes. "What's in them?"
The sorcerer gave a thin, bubbling laugh.
Qin Mo did not wait for an answer. He flicked the latch open with his thumb, then turned the box toward Yoan.
"Take a look."
Yoan approached cautiously. His instincts told him to keep distance from anything touched by the Warp. His nature told the Warp to keep distance from him. He leaned over the open container without quite touching it.
"Summoning artifacts usually take the form of relics, books, bones, sigils, or consecrated tools," Qin Mo said. His voice was controlled, but his eyes remained fixed on the box. "They serve as anchors. A daemon uses them to find purchase in realspace, or a sorcerer uses them to drag something through. The anchor must survive contact with both realms, at least long enough for the ritual to complete."
Inside the box lay only ash.
Fine gray dust. No bone. No metal. No relic. Nothing intact enough to identify.
"Of course," Qin Mo muttered. "This happens sometimes."
He sounded almost absent, as if one part of his mind had stepped away from the chamber and begun assembling a pattern from scattered facts.
"Could be the remains of the last daemonhost," Yoan said.
Qin Mo opened another box.
More dust.
Then another.
And another.
Every container held the same thing: dead residue, inert and useless. Whatever purpose the artifacts had once served had been burned out of them completely.
Except for the final box.
Inside lay a book.
At first glance, the binding resembled leather. Then the lumen light caught the surface, revealing uneven pores, faint veins, and the stretched impression of a face worked into the cover. The lips were slightly parted, not carved but preserved, as if the skin itself had once tried to whisper and been forced into silence.
Yoan's mouth tightened. "What kind of leather is that?"
Qin Mo gave him a humorless glance. "Take a guess."
Yoan did not.
Qin Mo opened the tome.
The pages shifted beneath his fingers with a slow, unpleasant flex. The script was old, written in a ritual dialect that had no business surviving into the present age. Some characters resembled pre-Imperial sigils. Others were older still, warped by generations of cult practice until every line seemed designed less to convey meaning than to wound the mind reading it.
It was a ritual guide.
Not a prayer book. Not a simple grimoire. A manual. Practical, structured, and deliberate. Diagrams showed circles of containment, sacrificial alignments, names broken into phonetic fragments, and sequences for anchoring a Warp entity inside flesh. It had been written by someone who understood procedure. That made it worse. Madness was dangerous. Competent madness was a weapon.
But something was missing.
Entire passages had been erased. Not scratched out. Not burned. Erased. The parchment remained, but the meaning had been stripped away so thoroughly that the surrounding script bent around the gaps as if trying not to remember what had once been there.
Qin Mo turned to the final page.
The diagram showed the completion of a summoning. Circles. Offerings. Binding sigils. Lines of force joining anchor, host, and entity. Yet the daemon's image was gone. Not faded. Gone. The space where its form should have appeared was blank, and the surrounding sigils floated without purpose, divorced from the thing they had been created to bind.
Qin Mo's brow furrowed.
"That's… strange."
"Impossible!"
The sorcerer spoke before Qin Mo could question him. His voice cracked between fury and disbelief. His gaze was no longer on Qin Mo. It was fixed on Yoan.
"Did you land the final blow on the daemon?"
He thrashed in his chains, the restraint frame shrieking under the sudden strain. His eyes burned with terrified accusation.
He had felt Yoan's absence in the Sea of Souls. A cold void. A pressure that was not power but negation. A place where the Warp found no purchase.
A Blank.
An Untouchable.
Yoan shook his head. "No."
"It was me," Qin Mo said.
The sorcerer stopped moving.
For the first time, true horror entered his face. Not fear of pain. Not fear of death. Something deeper and more instinctive.
Qin Mo looked down at the ash-filled boxes again, then at the damaged book. The conclusion settled into place with brutal simplicity.
The moment the daemon died, the summoning artifacts had collapsed into dust. Their connection to the entity had not been severed by banishment. It had been destroyed because the thing they were tied to no longer existed.
The daemon had not merely been cast back into the Immaterium.
It had suffered true death.
No return to the Sea of Souls. No reformation in the tides of the Warp. No slow gathering of scattered essence until hatred, worship, or ritual gave it shape again.
It was destroyed. Annihilated.
Qin Mo had known, in theory, that certain forces that could harm the soul itself could do such a thing, one of the few true mysteries in the universe. Like the Emperor's power. Certain relics. Certain rare phenomena. The absolute null-presence of beings like Yoan but more powerful could wound Warp entities in ways ordinary weapons could not. But this had not been Yoan's doing.
And there were few forces in the galaxy capable of such a thing.
To destroy a daemon's soul was an act so rare, so terrible, that even the Ruinous Powers themselves recoiled from it.
For the denizens of the warp, existence was pain, madness, and power in equal measure. But it was still existence. Even the most wretched daemon could cling to the raw matter of the Immaterium, awaiting the moment it could be reborn.
But this daemon? It would never return.
Qin Mo's thoughts flashed back to an ancient war, a war that had shaped the very fabric of the galaxy itself:
The War in Heaven.
Before mankind rose on Terra, before the Imperium, before the Long Night, before even the Eldar became the architects of their own damnation, the Old Ones had shaped the young galaxy.
A race of hyper-advanced psykers, masters of psychic engineering, creators of species, builders of the Webway, and manipulators of the Immaterium on a scale no human institution could now equal or even fully understand.
They made weapons out of life.
The Eldar. The Krork. Other engineered races whose names survived only as fragments or not at all.
Against them came the Necrontyr, a people born beneath a cruel star, trapped in failing bodies, short lives, and bitterness that hardened into a civilization's central law.
They gazed upon the Old Ones, their lifespans stretching across eternity, and they seethed with envy and hatred. They sought the secrets of immortality, but the Old Ones, for all their wisdom, refused them.
Desperate for power, the Necrontyr turned to beings even older than the Old Ones.
The C'tan, the Star Gods.
Star Gods. Predators of the material universe, entities of pure energy, the C'tan hungered for more than flesh.
They desired worship, adoration, and above all, sustenance.
And so Mephet'ran, the Deceiver, whispered promises of vengeance and eternity to the Necrontyr.
A pact was forged in arrogance and desperation.
The Necrontyr, blind to the cost, forged necrodermis vessels to grant these cosmic entities physical form.
And in return, biotransference followed.
The Necrontyr gained immortality and lost the part of themselves that made immortality worth having. Their souls were consumed by the C'tan. Their bodies became metal. The once-proud species, the Necrontyr were no more. In their place rose the Necrons, deathless and empty.
And with their newfound power, they waged war.
The War in Heaven was not merely a war of flesh and steel, it was a war that shattered the very fabric of the universe.
The Necrons, guided by their C'tan masters, unleashed annihilation upon the Old Ones and their children. Star systems were extinguished, whole races wiped from existence. The fabric of the galaxy trembled as the slaughter escalated beyond what was ever seen. Material gods fought warp-born masters of life, and the galaxy paid for every victory in suffering.
And in the end, the Necrons won.
The Old Ones fell, their empires shattered, their creations scattered to the winds. But victory was hollow, for the Necrons had no souls. They did not dream, they did not feel, they did not weep or hate or love.
And so the Immaterium, already unstable, latched onto the suffering of those who did.
Even as the Immaterium churned in agony, the daemons did not yet roam freely. Chaos was still a whisper, not yet the endless tide of madness it would become.
But when the Necrons, turned against their own gods, the balance shifted. The C'tan were shattered, their unfathomable essences broken into shards, and yet, even in their destruction, their influence remained. The raw, unchecked suffering of the galaxy swelled into the Immaterium like a rising storm.
The Old Ones had been more than just rulers, they had been the shepherds of the Immaterium itself. Their mastery of the Warp kept the raw, roiling energies of Chaos in check.
With their fall, the Immaterium began to shift, no longer shaped by "benevolent" hands, but left to the primal emotions of a galaxy in turmoil.
The psychic races engineered by the Old Ones, meant to be their ultimate weapons, became vulnerable.
The Eldar, the Krork, the Rashan, all their powers fed the Warp in ways even their creators had not foreseen.
And as the galaxy drowned in one more war, agony, and slaughter, the Immaterium fed upon it all. Emotions burned like fires in the Sea of Souls, and from the depths of that madness, the first true daemons were born.
The Immaterium, once a tool of creation, became a crucible of madness. The War in Heaven was not just a physical conflict; it was a war of existence itself.
The Age of the Old Ones ended, and the Age of Chaos began.
Qin Mo had never known how the C'tan truly affected the daemons.
But now, he did.
The power of the C'tan was not Warp-born. It did not bargain with the Sea of Souls, did not drink from it, did not echo through it. It belonged to the material universe at its most absolute: starfire, gravity, radiation, matter, energy, the cold laws beneath flesh and faith.
It was anathema to daemons.
Not holy. Not blessed. Not psychic.
Worse.
Something that denied the premise of their existence.
Qin Mo looked down at his gauntleted hand. Lightning crawled between his fingers in thin white strands. Beneath that light, for one brief instant, he felt the shape of the question he had been avoiding since the first time his power answered him.
What had he become?
The sorcerer stared at him, shaking now despite the chains.
Qin Mo closed the book.
"You've given me quite a discovery."
His lips curved into a smile without warmth. The air around his hand brightened, not with Warp-light, but with hard, clean energy that made the ritual candles gutter and die.
"As a reward," Qin Mo said, "I'll grant you a merciful death."
The sorcerer's breath hitched.
"Your soul will be erased."
"No…"
The word barely left the heretic's mouth before Qin Mo touched two fingers to his forehead.
There was no explosion. No dramatic flare. No scream from the walls or the air.
The sorcerer simply came apart.
His flesh blackened and peeled away in an instant. Bone flashed white, then vanished into vapor. Blood became steam before it could fall. The chains snapped shut around empty space as the body they held ceased to exist.
For a fraction of a second, something more than flesh tried to recoil. A stained, flickering remnant clawed for the Warp, desperate to flee into the Sea of Souls before judgment could reach it.
Qin Mo's power reached it first.
The remnant burned without flame. It thinned, tore, and disappeared. No echo remained. No shadow. No taste of departure into the Immaterium.
A true death.
Yoan stared at the empty restraint frame. His jaw tightened. Then he spat onto the floor where the sorcerer had been.
"That's what you deserve, filth."
His voice carried no triumph. Only certainty.
There was no corpse left to burn. No ashes to scatter. Only absence, and the lingering stink of the chamber's old rituals being consumed by cleaner fire.
Qin Mo turned away. "It's done. Let's go."
Yoan followed without argument.
As they moved through the halls, Qin Mo raised one hand. Fire bloomed behind them. It ran along walls, across ritual markings, beneath doors, and through hidden chambers. It did not spread like ordinary flame. It searched. It found blood-stained altars, prayer strips written in heretical script, cages, bones, talismans, concealed relics, and every surface that had been used to invite daemons into realspace.
Room by room, corridor by corridor, the fortress began to burn.
The flames did not rage wildly. They worked.
By the time Qin Mo and Yoan reached the outer passage, the structure behind them had become a furnace for everything that deserved no salvage.
Then Qin Mo stopped.
"Yoan."
Yoan halted at once. "Yes?"
Qin Mo did not look back toward the burning halls. His attention remained on the path ahead, but his voice had gone colder.
"Never speak of daemons. To anyone."
Yoan nodded immediately. "I understand. Because most people can be corrupted, right?"
"No."
That made Yoan pause.
Qin Mo turned his head and looked at him directly.
"If someone falls to corruption, we can still kill them. That is dangerous, but simple. The real danger is the Inquisition."
Yoan's expression changed. He understood the word. Every Imperial citizen did. Few understood what it meant until it was too late.
Qin Mo continued. "If they discover you know about daemons, they will not ask whether you learned it while saving lives. They will not care that you are a Blank. They will not care that you fought the thing. They will kill you. They will kill your wife. They will kill your daughter. Then they will erase the records and call it necessity."
Yoan's stomach tightened.
He had lived long enough under Imperial law to know Qin Mo was not exaggerating. The Imperium did not need malice to destroy a family. Procedure was enough.
"I won't tell a soul," Yoan said.
This time, the words were not obedience. They were a vow.
Qin Mo studied him for a moment, then nodded. The two continued walking. Behind them, the fire deepened, and another set of hidden chambers collapsed with a distant metallic groan.
After several steps, Qin Mo spoke again. His tone had changed. It was not soft, exactly, but it no longer carried the edge of immediate threat.
"You've had a rough life."
Yoan said nothing.
Qin Mo did not need the answer. He could see enough. The way Yoan kept his distance from others by habit. The way he expected disgust before respect. The way he accepted useful cruelty more easily than kindness because cruelty, at least, made sense.
"Shunned as a Blank," Qin Mo said. "Used by bounty hunters. Cast aside by people who feared what they could not name."
Yoan's face remained still, but his fingers curled slightly.
"At least you had her."
That struck deeper.
His wife. The woman who had not recoiled from the cold emptiness around his soul. The one who had stayed when everyone else found reasons to leave. And their daughter, impossible and precious in equal measure.
A Blank born from a Blank.
Yoan looked away first. Not out of shame, but because some things were too important to let another man see clearly.
Qin Mo let the silence stand.
Then he said, "You are uniquely suited to this work."
Yoan glanced back at him.
"Daemon hunting," Qin Mo said. "Not as a priest. Not as an inquisitorial pet. Not as a disposable tool held on a leash by people who would kill you the moment you became inconvenient."
His expression hardened.
"As yourself."
A long silence stretched between them. The burning fortress roared behind them, and the passage ahead opened into colder air.
Yoan finally asked, "And what would that make me?"
Qin Mo's mouth twitched.
"Someday, I might give you a title."
Yoan frowned. "A title?"
Qin Mo stepped forward into the smoke-thin light beyond the fortress gate.
"Slayer of Kairos."
Yoan stared at him.
"Who's Kairos?"
Qin Mo laughed, low and brief, as if the question amused him more than it should have.
"You'll find out."