This is the bonus chapter for reaching 1300 Powerstones.
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Paul floated hundreds of meters away watching the two talk, the five-pointed star deep within his dark gold pupils spinning rapidly.
The five traits were analyzing all the information he had just heard.
Sacken Alar... the sole survivor of House Alar...
Helovia Elnor... eleven years old... S-class psychic talent... mother is an ordinary worker, father is a mysterious man who vanished mysteriously before she was born...
Helovia's mother once said... that man had a reassuring aura about him...
Paul's pupils abruptly contracted.
The point representing Wisdom in the five-pointed star burst with brilliant golden light at this moment.
All the clues connected.
Sacken Alar, the final psyker of House Alar.
Helovia Elnor, born with S-class psychic talent.
Coupled with the obsession with Aurelian IV's ecology and the legacy of House Alar revealed in Sacken's words just now...
I see.
Helovia's father... is Sacken Alar.
Eighty years ago, all the psykers of House Alar were sent to the Black Ships. But Sacken was hidden away through some unknown method. He grew up slowly and began a life of deep cover.
He disguised himself as Garrison Conmo and infiltrated the Conmo Dynasty.
For some unknown reason, he met Helovia's mother... and they united.
But Sacken's revenge plan had already been set into motion. He couldn't risk exposing his identity, so he chose to vanish... leaving Helovia and her mother in the lower hive. Which ultimately led to them being tricked into going to the Aru Industrial Zone.
No wonder Helovia kept saying something was guiding her here. It was her biological father.
Paul looked up at the figure enveloped in blue-purple psychic energy in the sky.
Then he turned and looked at the Thunderhawk gunship hovering above the ruins behind him.
Almost simultaneously.
Inside the Thunderhawk cabin, Helovia suddenly stood up from her seat.
The little girl's face was as pale as paper, her hands gripping the handrails by the hatch with all her might.
Her eyes were fixed on the figure shrouded in blue-purple psychic energy in the distant sky.
Her lips trembled, opening and closing soundlessly.
"Al... Alar..."
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Sanguinius's Blade Encarmine clashed violently with the blue-purple psychic barrier surrounding Sacken.
The shrieking sound of energy annihilation tore through the air.
The energy fluctuation generated in that instant caused the Astartes clearing out Corrupted below to involuntarily look up.
"In the name of the Changer of Ways... [Stellar Labyrinth]!"
Sacken raised both hands high. Behind him, the five hundred-plus fallen psykers chanted in unison, their psychic energy pouring into his body like rivers flowing into the sea.
The sky above the upper hive ruins abruptly darkened.
A false, blue-purple firmament unfurled across a hundred-meter radius. Myriad stars rotated in ways that defied the laws of physics, each star a condensed mass of Warp energy emitting corrupting whispers.
Sanguinius's amber-gold slit pupils narrowed slightly.
The Primarch could clearly sense the authority of trickery contained within this false starry sky.
It was a cognitive corruption trap. Once dragged into it, one's senses would be warped, all sense of direction lost, and even the concept of self could be tampered with.
"Heh, a decent area of effect! But it is useless against me."
Sanguinius gently flapped the pristine white wings on his back.
Pale golden psychic energy expanded outward with him at the center. Wherever it passed, the blue-purple starry sky peeled away like a fading oil painting.
Before the will of the Great Angel, false constructs held no right to exist.
Sacken grunted in pain, the purple tentacles surging from his left cheek convulsing violently.
Among the five hundred-plus fallen psykers, seven spat blue blood simultaneously, suffering psychic backlash.
But Sacken didn't stop.
"Second layer, [Curse of Knowledge]!"
He formed seals with his hands, blue-purple psychic energy coalescing in his palms into a massive, ethereal tome. The pages flipped without wind, every page surfacing with twisted runes—runes that would cause a mortal's sanity to collapse and their brain to overload and fry just by looking at them.
The tome burst open, tens of thousands of runes swarming toward Sanguinius like a plague of locusts.
Each rune carried a fragment of knowledge. It could be the geographical coordinates of a certain planet, the principles of some technology, the historical records of a civilization...
But all of this knowledge was fragmented and contradictory. Accept it, and your mind would plunge into an infinite loop of logical paradoxes. Reject it, and your cognition would suffer unfillable voids.
This time, Sanguinius finally got serious.
For the first time, the Great Angel initiated a forward charge, the Blade Encarmine trailing a pale golden afterimage through the air.
He didn't attempt to decipher the runes, nor did he use psychic defenses. The Primarch chose the simplest and most direct method.
Cleave.
Wherever the blade carrying pale golden psychic energy passed, the runes popped like bubbles, thoroughly erased.
The Warp energy carrying the contradictory knowledge vanished as if it had never existed the instant it touched the pale golden psychic energy flowing on the Blade Encarmine.
"How is this possible..." Sacken's pupils contracted.
That was a level of power far beyond his comprehension. It wasn't a disparity in psychic strength, but a difference in fundamental essence. Like a two-dimensional creature unable to comprehend a three-dimensional existence.
As an Alpha-class psyker forcibly elevated by the grace of the Changer of Ways, he simply couldn't comprehend how powerful the source of a Primarch's strength truly was—a transcendent creation meticulously crafted by an entity like the Emperor, a psyker rivaling the Chaos Gods, who had drawn essence directly from the Warp.
"Third layer, [Narrative of Mist]!"
Sacken gritted his teeth, pushing his psychic energy to the absolute limit. The five hundred-plus fallen behind him simultaneously let out roars of agony.
Thick, blue-purple mist surged through the ruins.
Countless illusions surfaced within the mist.
The Iron Hands Legion orbitally bombarding the Seventh Administrative Zone, the screams of millions plummeting into the abyss.
The chaos and humiliation faced by billions of people on this planet.
The Four Great Factions carving up the legacy atop the ruins, driving civilians into the deepest reaches of the mining pits.
Mechanicus laboratories filled with the corpses of psykers whose frontal lobes had been excised.
Every single scene was a historical fragment that had truly occurred.
But twisted by the authority of Tzeentch, they were imbued with intense emotional corruption: hatred, despair, betrayal, madness.
These emotions permeated like a toxin, attempting to erode Sanguinius's will.
"Do you see it?! Sanguinius!" Sacken roared from within the mist, his voice echoing from all directions. "This is the truth of Aurelian IV! This is the legacy left behind by your Great Crusade! Now tell me, do you still believe your False Emperor is just?!"
Sanguinius stopped in the center of the mist.
The Great Angel quietly watched the tragic illusions cycling around him, his pristine white wings untainted by a single speck of filth.
After a long time, he spoke softly, his voice terrifyingly calm.
"I have seen the suffering. I have seen the injustice. I have seen... humanity's struggle in the darkness."
Sacken froze.
"However, Sacken Alar." Sanguinius looked up, his amber-gold slit pupils piercing through the mist and locking precisely onto Sacken's true body. "You have made a fatal mistake."
The Blade Encarmine was slowly raised.
"Do you think that displaying suffering proves you were right to throw yourself to Warp? Do you think exposing darkness absolves you of the crime of sacrificing billions of lives?"
Pale golden psychic energy began to rise, carrying the will of judgment.
"Suffering is not an excuse to fall. Darkness is not a justification for betrayal. True strength lies in seeing all of this and still choosing to raise your sword and fight for the light, rather than kneeling down and begging for power from the very entities who create suffering."
Sanguinius's voice resonated through the ruins like a great bell.
"Every tragedy you have displayed proves one thing. Humanity needs the path of salvation guided by the Emperor, not the false hope promised by you."
The instant his words fell, the pale golden light erupted like a sun.
The blue-purple mist melted like snow, the illusions shattering inch by inch.
The five hundred-plus fallen psykers spat blood in unison; their souls had long been deeply bound to the authority of the Changer of Ways.
Sacken let out a cry of agony, the psychic wings on his back snapping as he plummeted from the sky. He smashed heavily onto the ruins, the purple tentacles on his left cheek mostly withered, his entire body going limp like a rag doll.
Sanguinius slowly descended, the Blade Encarmine pointing directly at him.
"I have heard your statement. The evidence of your crimes is conclusive."
The Great Angel's voice carried not a single trace of emotion.
"Now, in the name of the Emperor and the Imperium of Man—I sentence you to death."
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