This is the bonus chapter for reaching 400 Powerstones.
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Holy Terra.
The transport ship's hatch slowly groaned open with a deafening hydraulic screech.
Vance trailed behind Darius. But as he took his first step onto the boarding ramp, his foot froze in midair.
The sight laid out before him completely shattered the absolute limits of his meager imagination.
The Lion's Gate.
The beating heart of the Imperium of Man. The premier spaceport of Holy Terra. A megastructure where over a hundred thousand voidships launched and docked every single day.
But standing inside it now, Vance finally understood. All those dry statistics and text descriptions he'd read couldn't convey even a fraction of a percent of this true scale.
The very first thing that seized his attention was a towering beam of golden light piercing straight from the planet's surface into the heavens. It was the eternal glow of the Astronomican, refracting through the atmosphere.
Beneath a vaulted ceiling three hundred meters high, Berth D-7 of the Lion's Gate Spaceport was a hive of chaotic activity. Dozens of transport ships were simultaneously loading and unloading cargo. Massive mechanical arms danced and crisscrossed through the air, feeding colossal shipping containers and supplies into the port's automated transit system.
Vance followed Darius down the ramp. The moment his boots hit the metallic deck, he rooted to the spot as if struck by lightning.
His field of vision was completely swamped by figures in white armor. Swarms of White Scars Astartes.
They were clad in standard Mark IV power armor, their pauldrons branded with the jagged lightning bolt totem of the White Scars Legion. Some were marching in strict formation, their synchronized footsteps sending faint tremors through the deck plates. Others leaned against the bulkheads, conversing in low tones with the stoic, grim expressions unique to Space Marines. Still, others were manually hauling supplies, tossing massive cargo crates around as if they were children's toys.
Further off in the military berths, strike cruisers bearing the White Scars insignia were undergoing maintenance. Gigantic drydocks suspended the warships in midair while dozens of Mechanicus tech-adepts crawled like ants over the hulls, using plasma torches to patch up battle-scarred armor plating.
Vance swallowed hard.
"Mind-blowing, isn't it?" Darius's voice floated back, carrying a hint of a smile. The gray-haired old man stood with his hands on his hips in the middle of the corridor ten meters ahead, looking back at him. "Don't just stand there gawking, Stellan. This is just the appetizer. You're in the absolute center of the Imperium of Man now. If a little scene like this is enough to spook you, you're going to embarrass me as your teacher."
Vance took a deep breath and hurried to catch up.
He forcibly suppressed the shock rolling through his chest, though his eyes couldn't resist darting around at the white-clad giants.
These White Scars warriors operated on a completely different wavelength from the Emperor's Children.
The Emperor's Children obsessed over perfection. Their power armor was eternally polished to a mirror shine, and every tiny scratch was meticulously repaired the moment it happened.
But the White Scars? They were a different breed. Their armor was absolutely peppered with battle damage—caved-in bullet craters, scorched burn marks, deep gouges cleaved by enemy blades. Some had even lost half of their lightning bolt totems to glancing blows, yet they still strutted through the spaceport wearing the battered ceramite like a badge of honor.
Vance suddenly recalled a quote he had seen online back in his past life: The warriors of the White Scars dance with death while they still draw breath.
In this very moment, he truly felt the crushing weight of those words.
The two of them navigated through the concourse of Berth D-7, eventually arriving beneath a colossal transparent dome.
This was the dedicated orbital elevator platform connecting the Lion's Gate to the Eternity Wall.
The platform formed a massive semicircle, where dozens of tracks converged from all directions. Gigantic elevator carriages waited at the edge of the boarding zone. Each carriage was three stories tall, easily spacious enough to hold hundreds of passengers at once.
Darius led Vance into the nearest carriage.
The interior was surprisingly sparse, featuring only a few rows of minimalist metal benches. The roof was transparent, offering a crystal-clear view of the outside world.
With a low, resonant hum, the carriage shuddered slightly before accelerating smoothly along the track.
Vance took a window seat, his gaze locked on the world beyond the glass.
The track ascended along a fixed, sweeping arc, rapidly leaving the Lion's Gate Spaceport below. The sprawling port shrank in his field of view, transforming from a gargantuan megastructure into a tiny dot, before disappearing altogether.
Taking its place was an endless, sprawling cityscape stretching to the horizon.
Holy Terra. The cradle of the Imperium of Man was slowly unfolding beneath their feet.
As far as the eye could see, it was an ocean of hive cities.
These hive spires pierced the clouds, packed so densely they looked like countless metallic needles stabbing at the sky. Every single needle was an entire metropolis. Every metropolis housed millions upon millions of human souls.
Between the hives lay a labyrinthine transit network. Elevated rails, subterranean tunnels, aerial flight lanes... Countless transport vehicles wove through them, pumping through the arteries of the planet like blood.
The peaks of the spires glinted with a harsh metallic sheen under the sunlight, forming an infinite forest of steel.
Further out, at the very edge of that steel forest, an incomprehensible megastructure was slowly coming into view.
It was a wall. A monolithic barrier towering thousands of meters high, stretching endlessly into the distance.
Its surface was densely carved with countless inscriptions. Every groove represented a brutal campaign. Every name etched into the stone meant the final resting place of a fallen martyr.
The Eternity Wall.
Vance stared at the titanic structure, completely speechless.
He knew the lore of the Eternity Wall. In the setting, this wall was the absolute last line of defense during the Siege of Terra. It was the impenetrable bastion that nine traitor legions—the Sons of Horus, Emperor's Children, Iron Warriors, Death Guard, World Eaters, and the rest—had thrown absolutely everything at, yet still failed to breach.
But now that the wall was actually right in front of his face, he realized just how tragically inadequate those lore blurbs were.
This wasn't a wall in any conventional sense. It was a mountain range. A continuous, endless mountain chain forged entirely from steel and rockcrete.
"Breathtaking, isn't it?" Darius stepped up beside him, his gaze also fixed on the colossal barrier. "The first time I laid eyes on it, I was just like you.."
Vance paused for a moment before offering a faint smile. "Yeah. It's the center of the Imperium. It really is awe-inspiring."
Darius nodded, falling silent. He simply turned back around, gazing through the transparent dome at the scenery blurring past them.
The orbital elevator was moving at breakneck speed, ferrying them toward the largest, most prosperous sector on all of Terra... the Eternity City.
The architecture below grew denser and taller by the second. These were no longer ordinary buildings; they were colossal structures casually scraping hundreds, even thousands of meters into the sky.
They were crammed so tightly together they looked like jagged spikes thrusting upward. The streets threading between the buildings were incredibly narrow, appearing as nothing more than hair-thin cracks from this altitude.
Within those cracks, countless tiny figures swarmed like ants. They were people. The citizens of Terra.
Darius suddenly raised a hand, pointing out the window. "Stellan, do you have any idea how many people live on Holy Terra?"
Vance's heart rate picked up slightly. He had checked the lore back in the real world. According to canon, the population of Holy Terra was... in the trillions.
But he merely shook his head, feigning a perfectly measured look of ignorance. "I don't know, Teacher."
Darius turned to look at him, his eyes deeply shadowed. "Trillions."
A brief silence fell over the carriage.
Darius's voice echoed again, heavy as lead. "Do you grasp the sheer scale of trillions? If everyone plucked a single hair from their head and dropped it on you, you'd be crushed to death."
Vance stayed silent.
Of course he knew what a trillion meant. Earth back in his time had eight billion people. Terra's population was one hundred and twenty-five times that of Earth.
One hundred and twenty-five Earths crammed onto a single planet. And where did all those people live? Right down there, at the absolute bottom of those sprawling structures. In the pitch-black underhives that would never see a single ray of sunlight.
Darius kept his hand pointed at the window, but his voice shifted, turning low and raspy. "Countless ordinary people exist solely in the rotting underbelly of this mega-hive world. They are completely numb to a life of utter despair, day after relentless day, year after year. Their life expectancy barely pushes past forty. The infant mortality rate exceeds thirty percent. They have never seen the sun. They have never breathed air that wasn't artificially filtered. They have never tasted a single bite of truly fresh food. Their entire existence, from the moment they are born to the moment they die, is just silently rotting away in the pitch-black dark of the underhive."
Vance swallowed hard, but said nothing.
Darius's voice continued, almost as if he were talking to himself. "But care to guess what the very first thing they do when they wake up every day is?"
Vance shook his head.
"They thank the Emperor." Darius smiled, a cold, bitter edge pulling at the corners of his mouth. "They thank the Emperor for letting them live another day. They thank the Emperor for giving them the opportunity to work. They thank the Emperor for letting them continue rotting in the dark."
His voice rapidly dropped in temperature, turning bone-chillingly cold. "And yet, it is these exact same people who built the greatness of Terra. They forged the Golden Throne with their own flesh and blood. They paved the path of the Imperial Crusade with their bones. They fed the Great Crusade—the very crusade that brings hope to countless trillions—using nothing but their own despair and numbness."
Darius slowly lowered his hand. His gaze remained fixed on the boundless city sprawling outside the window.
"But the dry bones of countless ordinary people are buried so deep underground that no one can hear them scream. People will only sing praises of the Emperor's greatness and the victories of the Great Crusade. Those ordinary people in the underhives treat the victories brought by the Crusade as their faith, and they look to the sacred light of the Emperor as their salvation.
"But their lives..." Darius's voice dropped to a near whisper. "...have never changed in the slightest.
"I once asked many of the elders in my family, as well as the noble friends around me. I pointed at the lavish, half-eaten delicacies left behind in extravagant dining halls and asked them: Why are we allowed to waste these resources so recklessly? Why not send them down to the lowest Imperial citizens of Terra?
"The answer I got was always the exact same. They are unworthy. They are merely the consumables of the Imperium; they are unworthy of enjoying such delicacies."
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