Chapter 101 Soul

The interior of the Startide Nexus didn’t look vastly different from the rest of the Empyrean.

The only major difference was that it was completely devoid of demons. It seemed as though they had all been forcibly repelled by some unseen power.

“So, where exactly are we supposed to find this Goddess T’au’va?” Vane asked, looking around the swirling cosmic void.

“Go grab a few demons and toss them into the Nexus,” the Emperor suggested. “She’ll definitely show up to deal with them.”

“Alright, hold on. I’ll go grab some bait.”

Capturing Warp demons alive would be an absolute nightmare for a regular person, but for Vane, it was as easy as picking up a rock.

Only a few moments later, Vane returned, dragging a handful of captured demons behind him. The hellspawn were shivering uncontrollably in sheer terror, absolutely petrified that Vane would decide to casually swing his sword and erase them from existence completely.

Exactly as the Emperor predicted, not long after the demons were introduced into the Startide Nexus, the Goddess T’au’va materialized.

She was a colossal, physical entity. Her overall form vaguely resembled a hybrid of T’au and human features, but she possessed a completely absurd number of arms. Some of her hands had five fingers like a human, others only had four like a T’au, and some ended in sharp, bird-like talons similar to the Kroot auxiliaries. A few of her limbs even ended in bear-like claws or writhing tentacles.

Where her face should have been, there was absolutely nothing—just a blank, pale, featureless expanse of flesh resembling a sheer cliff face.

“Why have you allowed these abominations to enter this sanctuary?”

Goddess T’au’va stared down at Vane and the Emperor with her faceless visage, her voice echoing with divine authority.

Deep within the Warp, the four Chaos Gods silently gave this young, naive deity a collective thumbs-up. Seeing the terrifying Evil Outer God and the Anathema refusing to flee, and actually having the sheer audacity to interrogate them?

This chick’s got some massive balls!

“Goddess T’au’va, you are unbelievably ugly,” Vane remarked, his face twisting in genuine disgust.

Goddess T’au’va froze for a second. Even without any facial features to emote with, it was blatantly obvious she was absolutely furious.

She violently thrust out one of her massive arms—a limb easily larger than an Imperial cruiser—intending to instantly crush Vane into dust.

Vane didn’t even blink. He casually drew his blade and cleanly severed T’au’va’s arm with a single swing.

The severed limb spontaneously combusted in mid-air, rapidly burning into a cloud of drifting ash.

Staring at the charred, blackened stump where her arm used to be, T’au’va let out an agonizing, echoing wail.

Immediately recovering, she launched a second assault. Multiple colossal arms surged forward simultaneously, intent on violently ripping Vane and the Emperor to shreds.

The result of the clash was completely predictable. During the Great Crusade, it had taken the combined, unified might of all four Chaos Gods just to barely suppress the Emperor.

T’au’va, on the other hand, was nothing more than a newly birthed deity spawned from a single species’ faith. If she had run into an exiled Greater Daemon like Skarbrand, she likely wouldn’t have even survived a single axe swing.

Against Vane and the Emperor? She didn’t stand a sliver of a chance. In mere seconds, seven or eight of her massive arms were effortlessly hacked off.

At this point, Goddess T’au’va finally realized that these two human males were completely out of her league.

She hastily turned around, intending to retreat and formulate a new plan to deal with the intruders.

“You really think you can just run away after picking a fight with us?” Vane scoffed.

“Immobilize her and stuff her in here!” Vane shouted to The Emperor, simultaneously pulling out his Magical Suitcase and popping it open.

The Emperor nodded. He immediately unleashed massive psychic tentacles, violently snaring Goddess T’au’va and dragging her backward.

T’au’va thrashed wildly, desperately trying to break free, but it was completely useless. The Emperor’s psychic constructs relentlessly dragged her struggling form and violently shoved her straight into Vane’s open suitcase.

The interior of the Magical Suitcase housed an entirely isolated pocket dimension. Vane had specifically constructed a maximum-security Bedrock prison inside, completely insulating it from the Warp.

The moment Goddess T’au’va was dragged inside, she was unceremoniously locked right inside the Bedrock cell.

She desperately swung her remaining massive arms, frantically trying to shatter the Bedrock walls.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

T’au’va violently hammered and slammed against the cell, but her efforts were completely futile. The Bedrock didn’t even suffer a scratch.

“Alright, what’s the next step?” The Emperor turned and asked.

“The T’au’s soul reflections are far too weak. We need to artificially boost them.” Vane opened a massive crafting menu, browsing through the options while simultaneously discussing the plan with The Emperor.

“As the literal manifestation of the Greater Good, Goddess T’au’va can be used as a direct conduit to influence every single living being that subscribes to that faith.”

Vane quickly located exactly what he was looking for: a colossal, ultra-high-output Psychic Amplifier.

This terrifying device would relentlessly siphon raw energy directly from the Warp, violently forcing it into Goddess T’au’va. Then, using her as a cosmic anchor, the device would aggressively pump that raw psychic power directly into every single living soul within the T’au Empire. It would forcibly and continuously mutate them, artificially granting them vastly stronger soul reflections and highly potent psychic abilities.

—

While Vane was busy finalizing the psychic mutation array, Shadowsun was already running into massive, catastrophic problems on the front lines.

The Startide Nexus was essentially a massive tunnel punched directly through the Warp. Fundamentally, it was just two interconnected spatial rifts.

In the past, Goddess T’au’va had vigilantly guarded this tunnel, preventing any demons from invading, which was the only reason the T’au Empire had been able to safely transit through it.

But now? Goddess T’au’va had been kidnapped by Vane and the Emperor.

With her divine protection completely gone, the Warp demons immediately began exploiting the rifts, violently pouring into realspace.

The first sign of the impending apocalypse was the massive Warp storms that had previously been suppressed. They violently erupted, violently tearing into the T’au military bases and orbital stations constructed near the Startide Nexus.

Seeing the catastrophic Warp storms brewing, the incredibly experienced Imperial armada instantly disengaged from the firefight, rapidly pulling back to avoid getting sucked into the demonic maelstrom.

“The humans have been repelled!”

Shadowsun, however, was completely oblivious to the horrific reality of the situation.

Despite conquering countless worlds across the galaxy, she had never actually experienced a genuine, full-scale demonic Warp invasion.

And very soon, she was going to pay a brutally heavy price for her arrogance and ignorance.

As the Warp storms violently swept through the system, the first casualties were the highly advanced electronics. The delicate systems suffered massive interference and completely failed to operate. Countless critical devices and instruments were paralyzed, power grids catastrophically failed, and entire planetary settlements were plunged into total darkness.

Next came the nightmares. Initially, only the auxiliary races—humans, Gue’vesa, Kroot, and others—fell victim to the horrific visions.

In their dreams, they were tormented by terrifying, twisted abominations, forced to watch their fallen comrades and dead loved ones suffer in endless agony.

But it didn’t stop there. The nightmare plague rapidly spread, aggressively infecting the T’au themselves, targeting the Fire, Earth, Water, and Air castes indiscriminately.

Within a mere few days, the relentless nightmares had physically and mentally broken the populace. Everyone was completely exhausted, incredibly irritable, and practically on the verge of violent, psychotic breakdowns.

Unable to endure the relentless psychological torture, several Fire Caste warriors completely snapped. They went violently insane, opening fire on their own allies and causing massive casualties across the fleet.

“What in the Greater Good is happening?!”

Auxiliaries going violently insane, Fire Caste warriors gunning down their own comrades, and an empire-wide epidemic of horrific nightmares… Reading through the endless stream of catastrophic casualty reports, Shadowsun’s sharp tactical mind immediately realized these events were deeply connected.

Desperate for answers, she summoned a handful of human psykers who had defected to the T’au Empire.

“It is the Empyrean, Commander,” an elderly human psyker explained grimly. “The Startide Nexus is a massive Warp rift. Previously, your forces were protected by an unknown, powerful entity. But now… that power has completely vanished.”

His words immediately made Shadowsun think of ‘T’au’va’—the mysterious entity that had saved her life on multiple occasions.

Has T’au’va been silently protecting the entire Empire all this time?

Was that the only reason the T’au were able to safely use the Startide Nexus without being violently slaughtered by these malicious, incomprehensible horrors?

“What must we do?” Shadowsun asked, desperately hoping the human psykers had a solution.

“You must immediately suppress them,” the old psyker stated bluntly. “An unprotected, fractured mind is nothing more than an open gateway for demonic possession.”

“The Imperium of Man typically executes them on the spot to prevent the demons from using them as vessels.”

Hearing that, Shadowsun immediately rejected the idea. “Such barbaric actions violently violate the core tenets of the Greater Good.”

“Perhaps we could attempt to prevent the populace from dreaming entirely?” an Earth Caste scientist interjected, offering an alternative solution.

“Prevent them from dreaming?” Shadowsun turned to look at the scientist.

“Indeed. Dreams are simply neurological impulses released by the brain as it processes information and consolidates long-term memories. They are merely a biological integration of past experiences and internal imagery,” the Earth Caste scientist explained confidently.

He projected a detailed holographic model of a T’au brain.

“If we broadcast a highly specific, localized electromagnetic frequency, we can actively block the brain from automatically releasing these neuro-impulses, thereby completely preventing the onset of dreams.”

“How quickly can this countermeasure be deployed?” Shadowsun demanded.

“Our orbital stations are already equipped with similar communication arrays. We merely need to recalibrate their output frequencies.”

“If that is the case, execute the plan immediately,” Shadowsun ordered.

Backed by Shadowsun’s absolute authority, the Earth Caste scientists rapidly retrofitted the orbital stations into massive transmitters. They began broadcasting the specialized electromagnetic frequencies across the entire planet, attempting to chemically force the T’au populace to stop dreaming.

However, the brilliant, hyper-logical plan catastrophically failed almost immediately.

“This defies all known science! Their brainwave activity is completely suppressed! Why are they still dreaming?! How is this possible?!”

Staring at the completely flatlined monitoring graphs on his console, the Earth Caste scientist who proposed the plan sounded absolutely desperate.

“What do you mean?” Shadowsun demanded, glaring at the scientist.

“The source of these nightmares… it is not originating from their physical brains. It is something else entirely,” an assistant standing nearby explained, his voice trembling with sheer terror.

“It might be what the humans refer to as a ‘soul.’ Their souls are the ones dreaming. Our technology is completely and utterly useless against it.”

—

OR