Seraphs of the Emperor’s Judgment

Chapter 196: Old Family Matters

The serfs worked swiftly.

With the help of many hands and specialized tools, Soshyan's armor was quickly dismantled—if he were alone, he could never have completed this task so fast.

Once the power cables and chest plate were removed, he was essentially free.

The Chapter's senior serfs began removing the armor from his legs, whispering praises to the armor's Machine Spirit as they worked.

As soon as his leg armor was removed, he stepped out on his own, not waiting for his greaves to be taken off as well.

The dismantled armor lay on a nearby table.

If necessary, a Space Marine was capable of removing his own armor, but for these sacred pieces of wargear, a comprehensive dismantling was the only appropriate treatment.

If they were not subjected to regular cleaning, testing, and maintenance, their Machine Spirits would gradually lose their vitality.

At this moment, two serfs stepped forward and began unfastening the respirator collar from his neck—it was stuck to his body by a layer of sweat.

Afterward, Soshyan took a few more steps forward, completely free from the armor's constraints, exposing his skin to the cool air inside the ship.At this point, he turned around.

That suit of Artificer armor had been completely dismantled. The backpack's power cables hung down from the securing racks. The serfs wrapped the other components in red cloth, bowed deeply, and then retreated.

Once they left this room, the serfs would take his wargear to the adjacent workshop.

There, they would meticulously clean these sacred weapons and armor sets, perform any necessary repairs, reapply sacred oils, and place them back on the racks.

By the time Soshyan returned, his weapons would be gleaming once more, and his armor would be fully assembled on the arming rig.

Pair after pair of diligent hands would wash away the marks left on the armor by a full day's activities.

Then, completely naked, he walked through the armory. The servitor guards on either side of the doors opened the way leading to the baths.

Soshyan walked into a room decorated from top to bottom with white mosaics.

He stood in the center of the room, allowing the serfs to use warm cloths to wipe away the sweat generated from his training, and then walked into the sauna room.

For the next half hour, he sat in heat sufficient to cook an unaugmented mortal alive, letting the perfumed steam soothe his muscles.

As the Grey Marrow content within his body grew higher and higher, he increasingly grew to enjoy this high-heat environment, even when he remained in a normal state.

Afterwards, he walked into the shower room, where hundreds of liters of water poured over his head and drained away down the grates.

Feeling the tingling sensation across his skin, he walked into the main bath surrounded by colonnades.

This bath was large enough to swim in. The water in the pool appeared a deep azure due to various minerals, and various murals decorated the walls and ceiling.

He walked down the steps into the pool one by one, letting the warm water embrace him until it submerged his neck.

Taking a deep breath, Soshyan closed his eyes.

The vibrations generated by the nearby pipes transporting hot water synchronized with his heartbeat, and Soshyan thus entered a state of meditation.

It wasn't until two hours later that he awoke from it. Using his powerful arms, he hoisted himself out of the pool water, dried his body using the drying equipment to strip the moisture from his skin, and finally draped a silver-grey robe over himself.

Afterward, Soshyan left the baths and walked into his private chambers.

Food had already been prepared for him—cooked personally for him by Rozim, the Master of the Chapter's Refectory. Beside it sat a golden flagon filled with fine wine and a goblet.

As Soshyan walked past the dining table, he casually picked up a dessert resembling cheese from it, dotted with many dried fruits he didn't recognize.

He sat down at his desk, slowly chewing his food and taking large gulps of wine to accompany his meal.

Stacked reports and documents lay on the desk. The vast majority of them concerned the progress of the warship's repairs and various intelligence reports from neighboring systems, with the occasional "story" from distant wars.

While reading through these reports, he steadily demolished the food on his plate.

Ten minutes later, by the time he finished reading these documents, his plate was exactly empty.

Soshyan stood up and fed some of the temporary documents into the shredder nearby.

Just as he was preparing to return to his bed to get some proper rest, he suddenly noticed a small lockbox beneath his bed—in truth, he noticed it every day, but he ignored it every time.

This was something left behind by his biological father, said to contain his notes regarding the research into their ancient family.

Soshyan had no particular interest in his family. The responsibility of continuing the family line naturally fell to his cousin. But from the moment he became an Astartes, their relationship was reduced to only the thinnest sliver of sentiment—from a bloodline perspective, they couldn't even be considered the same species anymore.

But for some reason, Soshyan noticed it today and did not choose to ignore it.

He bent down, pulled this wooden box out from under the bed, brushed off the dust atop it, and opened it.

Inside the box lay four notebooks bound in brown leather, stacked atop one another. They bore no signatures, nor any markings whatsoever.

Soshyan took out the topmost one and opened the first page.

"My child, when you read this line of text, do not be too surprised."

Although this was exactly what was written, Soshyan was still stunned for a moment.

Then, he hurriedly continued reading downwards.

"I have always had a very strong premonition that one day, these research notes of mine will find their way into your hands. This is no prophecy, nor any sorcery; this is merely the intuition of myself, a father."

As Soshyan read, he slowly sat back down in his chair, casually placing the box on the desk.

"It might also be a stranger or another family member reading this. I hope you can preserve them well. As long as they remain, then my child, Soshyan Alexei, a great Adeptus Astartes, will have the chance to read them. This is a father's most earnest request."

This was all the content written on the first page.

Soshyan's heart was filled with immensely complex emotions. Unsure of what to say, he merely pinched the corner of the page lightly and turned it over.

"Since I could remember, I have always been told that we are an ancient family bearing a special glory, with a history tracing all the way back to the era when the Emperor still walked among mortals..."

The notes his father left behind were all exceedingly thick and heavy. It took Soshyan three hours to read through the entire contents of the first one without missing a single word.

When he closed the notebook, he appeared heavily weighed down by his thoughts.

According to the published literary records in circulation, the glorious Unification Wars brought an end to the Age of Strife on Terra.

From that point forward, Terra welcomed over a hundred and fifty years of peace, stability, and recuperation. The Emperor then led his Great Crusade, leaving his home to bravely and fearlessly reincorporate the scattered human worlds across the sea of stars back into the Imperium's territory.

This was what the historical texts said, but reality was far from being so clean and tidy.

History only recorded the macroscopic trends and overall phases, forcefully imposing much arbitrary, vague content onto it using the subtle phrasing of 'many grains of sand building a tower'.

In reality, the Age of Strife had a profoundly deep impact on humanity. Even at the tail end of the Great Crusade, its aftershocks continued to reverberate endlessly throughout the galaxy.

Even though the Emperor declared on Terra that the Imperium of Man was the orthodox continuation of past human civilization, it could not stop all manner of Feudal Worlds, religious organizations, remote kingdoms, and autocratic monarchs from stubbornly refusing cooperation, attempting to firmly uphold their insignificant state of independence behind towering walls.

Many of these, even under the storm of the Great Crusade, managed to string out their lingering last gasps for decades. Leveraging the Imperium's peaceful negotiations and appeasement, they resisted or evaded all treaties, reconciliations, and numerous other diplomatic maneuvers intended to annex and digest them.

The majority of stories indicated that the Emperor, or his highly regarded ministers and prime officials, possessed extraordinary patience.

Even at the absolute zenith of the Great Crusade, the Imperium's higher-ups still spared no effort in attempting to use non-violent means to resolve conflicts. The Emperor even permitted a portion of factions to maintain a semi-independent state, waiting for them to accept reality.

But another portion of stories—ones not frequently recorded—also indicated that the Emperor's patience was limited, and when his patience ran out, his mercy and forbearance would vanish entirely without a trace.

And according to the research of Soshyan's father, the history of their family was probably far more than what the rumors said—they might even be the descendants of a certain faction that was once hostile toward the Imperium.