"We believed ourselves to be the masters of the galaxy. We even began arrogating the authority of gods to ourselves, altering at will the ancient genome that had followed us into the stars."
"When it seemed that everything in the material universe was already within our grasp, that young race, consumed by ambition, turned its greedy gaze toward the far side of creation."
"Researchers who fancied themselves creators tried to reshape our polarity, so that a new humanity would be able to sense the echoes of the ancient Warp."
"They succeeded, and that was the root of every disaster that followed."
"Unfortunately, it was only on the eve of extinction that we realized where all calamity had truly begun."
"The real enemy was never anyone else. It was always Them. And with our own hands, we delivered our species onto Their table."
"Perhaps only by returning to purity can the continuation of suffering be stopped. After all, we cannot resist Them. They are everywhere. By any scale of judgment, that conclusion remains the same."
"Successor who still possesses purity, be wary of Their gaze. Go to the summit of the mountain and seek the relics of Old Night."
"Remember this. Souls have a price, and they are immeasurably precious."
With that final long sigh, the recording that had crossed time itself vanished into invisible fragments along with the collapse of the stasis field that had held that single moment frozen.
At the instant the field shattered, a precise set of three-dimensional coordinates was imprinted into Gaia's mind.
She did not even have time to think about what the coordinates were for. She immediately removed Dushi's core, then returned to her original position and waited for the entire energy field to disappear completely.
After a brief aftershock, sound returned to the world that had once been silent, and Solomon and the Forge Lord, who had been frozen in place, resumed moving normally.
"So you're saying this stasis field really can't be broken?"
Solomon continued the conversation from before, but after saying those words, his eyes drifted toward Gaia.
She was still standing where she had been, but for some reason, Solomon had the strange feeling that her position had shifted by an almost imperceptible amount in an instant, and even the movement of her body and the folds of her clothes seemed slightly different.
"Oh no. This lower level's been abandoned too long. I've gone oxygen-starved and started hallucinating."
Solomon clicked his tongue to himself, and under the power of suggestion alone, his head actually did feel a little dizzy.
The Forge Lord, meanwhile, had his gaze fixed on the scene ahead.
For some reason, he felt that something there had suddenly changed.
The difference was difficult to put into words, but it undeniably existed.
His bionic eye narrowed, and he began carefully scanning the ground ahead.
Then, under the impact of overwhelming shock, his eye began flashing rapidly.
Because he saw that within the area that had once been frozen, grains of stone were now shifting slightly under the influence of the geothermal vent.
Could it be...?
To confirm his suspicion, the Forge Lord picked up another stone and once more threw it into the area that had previously been sealed by the stasis field.
The rock traced a graceful arc through the air, and a sharp clatter echoed through the silent cavern.
The Forge Lord's eyes remained locked on the stone as it rolled across the ground, all the way to the feet of the dormant humanoid machine.
Nearby, the expression on Solomon's face froze.
If he remembered correctly, the Forge Lord had demonstrated this exact same thing just a few minutes earlier.
And the endings of those two stones seemed just a tiny bit different.
Solomon glanced at the Forge Lord.
Just moments ago, this metal giant had been solemnly explaining how terrifying the stasis energy field was, repeatedly stressing that there was absolutely no way to deal with it.
And now, the field had simply disappeared on its own.
For the Forge Lord, who was now breathing heavily, there was not even a second to spare mourning the vanished stasis field, because one fact was already standing directly in front of him.
The ancient construct that had once been trapped in a region of space-time bound by high-energy particles was no longer beyond reach.
Driven entirely by his desire to uncover the mysteries of ancient technology, the Forge Lord did not even stop to consider whether the thing might still be dangerous. He walked straight to within five meters of it and began using the servo-skulls to scan its internal structure in detail.
Until now, everything they knew about the ancient construct had been based purely on visual observation. After all, scanning beams had never been able to penetrate even the slightest bit into that region of absolute stillness.
With excitement burning inside him, he patiently waited for the servo-skulls to finish.
The ancient device was protected by numerous anti-scan and encryption measures, but he did not care in the slightest about the time being wasted. He simply stood there and waited in silence for the preliminary scan results.
To him, this was one of the hopes he had for restoring both his and his mentor's name.
If he could uncover the secrets of such an ancient construct, then winning back recognition for his unjustly disgraced mentor would surely be easy.
Gaia, meanwhile, silently watched what the Forge Lord was doing, all while absentmindedly rolling Dushi's core around inside the inner pocket of her cloak.
Oddly enough, the sensation of handling the cold Men of Iron core made of unknown metal was actually quite satisfying.
But Gaia was in no mood to enjoy something like that.
Because whether it was meeting Dushi, hearing him recount part of the truth himself, or listening to the fragment of truth he had specifically passed on, all of it had shaken her deeply.
Once again, she was reminded of just how unfathomably deep the waters of the Warhammer universe ran.
All kinds of information tangled together in Gaia's mind, and with her superhuman logical thinking, she began sorting and judging it piece by piece.
Clearly, the Men of Gold, in other words the Gold Ones, seemed to have made massive changes to the human genome.
At first, those genetic modifications may simply have been meant to help humanity adapt to the extreme environments of its colonies, or perhaps to create nearly perfect superhumans.
But as humanity of the Dark Age of Technology expanded at incredible speed with the aid of the Men of Iron, the urge to conquer the physical universe was no longer enough to satisfy that absurdly arrogant race.
Under the direction of some of the Men of Gold, humanity as a whole underwent a massive genetic transformation, and the purpose of that transformation seemed to be to harness the power of the far side of material reality, the Sea of Souls.
But that attempt to forcefully strengthen the souls of the entire species seemed to have drawn the attention of certain malicious beings within the Warp.
That Man of Gold had referred to those entities as Them, and had said that They were everywhere.
That was the true beginning of humanity's long suffering.
Souls have a price.
And they are immeasurably precious.
The arrogant Men of Gold had taken the wealth of their entire species and cast it into the invisible tides of the Warp, provoking Their scramble to seize it.
"Dushi said the rebellion of the Men of Iron began with a bargain involving the gift of souls."
"And that Man of Gold kept emphasizing the value of the soul."
At that thought, Gaia's heart suddenly jolted as if struck by lightning.
A nearly insane idea rose within her mind.
(End of Chapter)
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