"Remain humble at all times. Never allow power or knowledge to cloud your judgment."
Vanessa's voice cut through the mechanical hum of the research chamber just as Qin Mo turned back toward the cogitator array.
The words struck harder than they should have. His fingers, suspended above the interface keys, curled slowly into a fist. Around him, holo-slates shimmered with half-finished equations, resonance readings, and containment-field diagnostics. The chamber had been quiet a moment ago, filled only with the low drone of machinery and the faint clicking of servo-arms adjusting instruments. Now every sound seemed to narrow around her voice.
Qin Mo turned.
Vanessa watched him from where she stood under the cold lumen-glow, her restraint field flickering faintly around her wrists and throat. She looked composed in a way that was almost insulting. Her blue eyes carried that same unnatural depth, bright with psychic luminescence, as if something behind them was always looking at one more layer of the world than anyone else could see. Reflections of that light trembled across the steel walls and the polished surfaces of the machines surrounding them.
"What did you just say?"
"Remain humble at all times. Never allow power or knowledge to cloud your judgment," Vanessa repeated. Her tone held no mockery. That made it worse. "It is good advice."
Had Grey said those words, Qin Mo might have accepted them without hesitation. Had Klein offered them, Qin Mo might even have respected the warning. The advice itself was reasonable, the sort of maxim a commander carved into the foundations of an army before triumph became arrogance and arrogance became defeat.
But from a psyker?
From someone whose soul touched the Warp every time she drew upon her power?
That was much harder to swallow.
"Do you think I am in a good mood right now?" Qin Mo tapped two fingers sharply against his temple. The sound was small, but in the sealed chamber it carried like the click of a weapon's safety being released. "My mind is drowning in hatred and revulsion. The Warp's stink clings to this place. Every instinct I possess is telling me to remove you from my sight before your existence contaminates my work any further."
His words carried more than anger. A pressure moved beneath them, cold and hollow, something born not from the soul but from the star-forged thing inside him. Vanessa felt it push against her mind like glacial weight grinding across stone. It was not psychic force. It was worse in its own way: a rejection of the Immaterium so absolute that her senses recoiled from it.
Qin Mo knew his revulsion was not merely personal prejudice. It came from the C'tan influence bound into his nature. He had not chosen it, any more than he had chosen to be dragged from his old life and remade into something that stood between man and star-god.
Not every C'tan hated the Immaterium with the same intensity. Their differences were vast, greater than the differences between gods and mortals. Some viewed the Warp as an anomaly, a flaw in the structure of reality. Others despised it with a hatred so pure and cold that it resembled a principle rather than an emotion.
Qin Mo's instincts were drawn from those echoes. The disgust was not voluntary, but neither was hunger, pain, or fear. A lesser man might have surrendered to it. Qin Mo had learned to weaponize it.
He would never embrace the Warp.
But perhaps he could learn enough to silence it.
Vanessa tilted her head, studying him with the faint curiosity of a scholar examining a dangerous specimen through armored glass. Her composure did not crack, but a glimmer of interest sharpened in her eyes.
"You hate the Warp and psykers," she said. "Then study them."
Qin Mo's expression darkened.
Vanessa did not retreat. "Hatred alone is blind. It tells you what to strike, not where to strike. If you want to defeat something, you must understand how it works. And once you understand how it works…" She glanced around the chamber. "You can build weapons against it."
Her gaze moved over the instruments surrounding them: cogitator banks loaded with Qin Mo's own logic-engines, containment cylinders humming around unstable matter samples, resonance coils suspended inside gravitic clamps, and servo-arms precise enough to manipulate components smaller than a grain of dust. The room was not simply a laboratory. It was a battlefield waiting to become one, a place where Qin Mo turned observation into mechanisms and mechanisms into doctrine.
"These devices are incredible," Vanessa continued. "The material universe obeys you in ways that would make a magos weep oil. Metals change shape under your hands. Energy bends when you tell it to. You treat physics as something that can be negotiated with by force."
Her smile thinned.
"But the Warp? You cannot even sense it. You are blind. And I…" She touched two fingers lightly to her temple. "I am not."
Qin Mo's eyes narrowed. He did not answer immediately.
His hatred urged him to end the conversation. His reason ordered him to listen. The two impulses ground against each other in silence while the chamber machinery hummed around them.
Finally, Qin Mo forced the disgust down. Not away. Never away. Only down, into the part of himself where useful things were stored until needed.
"Tell me what you know."
Vanessa's smile sharpened.
"Gladly."
....
She did not describe the Warp as an Imperial preacher would, with warnings, incense, and convenient ignorance. Nor did she describe it like a cultist, with reverence and hunger. Vanessa explained it like a scholar peeling back diseased skin to show the infection beneath.
She began with the basic distinction. The material universe possessed laws. Gravity pulled. Energy changed form. Matter decayed, collided, bonded, and broke. Time moved in one direction unless extraordinary force was applied to it. Those rules could be manipulated, but they were rules all the same.
The Warp was different.
It was an ocean without water, a storm without air, a wound beneath reality filled with emotion, memory, belief, hunger, pain, and desire. In realspace, mass bent space. In the Warp, thought had weight. In realspace, engines required fuel. In the Warp, obsession could become momentum. Time there was not a road but a knot, looping through itself, devouring sequence, spitting out prophecy, memory, and nightmare without caring which had come first.
Qin Mo listened without interrupting.
Some of it he already knew from lore, from memory, from old knowledge that had become dangerously real. But Vanessa's explanations carried texture that books and games never could. She spoke from the perspective of someone who had touched that sea and survived its tides.
Psykers, she explained, were not masters of the Warp. Not truly. They were conduits. Fragile ones. Their minds acted as strained filters through which a fraction of the Immaterium could be drawn into reality. Willpower shaped the flow. Training gave it direction. Discipline kept the flood from tearing the conduit apart.
Without discipline, a psyker did not become powerful. They became an opening.
Madness was only one possible outcome. Possession was another. Death was often the merciful one. Every psychic flame, every bolt of force, every vision, every whispered warning from impossible futures was an extraction from the infinite storm beyond the veil.
Vanessa did not spare him the uglier truths.
She spoke of predators in the Immaterium without naming them directly. The Ruinous Powers. Their hungers. Their domains. The way mortal emotion fed vast intelligences that were not gods in any comforting sense, yet were close enough that the distinction did not matter to the dead. She avoided their names, but not their nature, tracing the shape of them with enough precision that the chamber seemed colder by the time she finished.
Qin Mo stood still through it all. His face remained unreadable, but his mind worked with mechanical intensity. He discarded what was mystical, retained what was functional, and filed every useful detail into place.
To another man, the lesson might have been corrupting. To Qin Mo, it was a system. Horrific, unstable, and hostile, but still a system.
And systems could be disrupted.
The lesson lasted a full Terran day. Vanessa's voice grew rough. Her posture lost some of its effortless elegance. The restraint field around her wrists flickered as its emitters cycled through another power draw. Qin Mo did not tire. He absorbed everything.
At last, Vanessa leaned back against the edge of an inactive workbench, fatigue weighing her shoulders even as her eyes remained bright.
"A psyker's power does not come from within," she said. "That is the first lie fools tell themselves before they die. It is always drawn from the Warp. Stolen, siphoned, channeled, extracted. If you reduced the process to a single word, it would be extraction."
She lifted her chin, amusement returning like a blade sliding back from its sheath.
"So? Any insights?"
Qin Mo closed his eyes.
The word settled inside his thoughts. Extraction.
Pipelines. Circuits. Valves. Conduits. Filters. Networks. Flow. Interference. Shutoff.
The Warp was not merely mysticism. It was infrastructure built from impossible substance. If power moved from one state to another, then there was a connection. If there was a connection, it could be measured by its effects. If it could be measured, it could be interrupted.
"Psykers exist in the material universe," Qin Mo murmured. "Their bodies are here. Their brains are here. Their connection to the Warp must express itself through something that touches realspace."
He opened his eyes.
"If I can sever, distort, or overload that connection before they draw upon it, I can render them helpless."
Vanessa's smile became genuine for the first time. "There it is."
Qin Mo was already moving. Holo-slates flared to life around him. Equations spilled across them in clean lines. Servo-arms shifted, awaiting commands. He sketched field geometries, resonance ranges, containment lattices, and suppression patterns that had nothing to do with hexagrammic wards or priest-blessed chains.
He was not designing charms.
He was designing a jammer for the soul's radio.
A device that would not pray against the Warp, but choke the signal before the Warp could answer.
Vanessa watched him work with interest that was too sharp to be harmless.
"By the way," she said lightly, as if discussing the weather above a world where weather still mattered, "does this mean you are trapped in the Talon Sector forever?"
Qin Mo paused without looking away from the slate. "What do you mean?"
"Imperial warships use Warp drives." Vanessa's voice turned almost playful. "To cross the stars, they plunge into the Immaterium. Navigators guide them through that storm. Gellar fields keep the things outside from coming in. All very heroic. All very suicidal."
She leaned closer.
"If merely standing near a psyker makes you want to tear the walls apart, what happens when you place yourself inside the Warp?"
"Who says I need Warp drives?" Qin Mo replied.
"Oh?" Vanessa's smile widened. "Then perhaps you will stroll through the labyrinthine passages of the Webway like the Eldar. Or resurrect some inertialess drive from the ashes of ancient heresies. Or simply glare at the stars until they move closer out of fear."
Qin Mo finally looked at her.
Vanessa shrugged. "You are still flesh, Qin Mo. Whatever else you are, your body must travel somehow."
She spoke of secrets that would have seen most Imperial scholars executed, dissected, or quietly disappeared. Qin Mo heard the bait in every word. She wanted to see what he knew. She wanted to learn the borders of his ignorance.
He gave her nothing.
If the Warp was a prison, he would build a door that did not open into it. If every road between the stars passed through hell, he would make a new road. That was not arrogance in his mind. It was design criteria.
"I have a better idea," Qin Mo said. "I need time to research it, test it, and build the necessary infrastructure. But I will find a faster and more direct method of interstellar travel."
Vanessa's eyes narrowed with renewed curiosity. "Can you give me a hint? Considering I just spent a day teaching you about the Warp and the Neverborn?"
"No."
"Ha." Her laugh was sharp and amused. "So you haven't solved it yet. You are stalling."
Qin Mo returned to his notes.
"Yes."
Vanessa blinked. "What?"
"You are correct. I have not solved it yet." His stylus moved across the slate. "That is why I said I need time."
For several seconds, Vanessa simply stared at him. Then she clicked her tongue and looked away, robbed of the satisfaction of provoking him.
"You are very annoying when honesty serves you better than pride."
"Useful habit."
"Dangerous habit," Vanessa said. Her tone shifted, losing its playfulness. "Which brings me to another matter."
Qin Mo did not look up. "Speak."
"You were fortunate."
His stylus stopped.
Vanessa continued. "The heretics' last stand helped you filter candidates for your personal guard. Battle reveals men more honestly than interviews, sermons, or loyalty oaths. Most of your Thunderborn are suitable. Nearly all."
Qin Mo turned his head toward her. "Nearly?"
"One is a problem."
"Name."
"Grot."
Qin Mo's eyes sharpened. "Reason."
Vanessa's expression lost its amusement completely. For the first time since the conversation began, she looked less like a prisoner playing games and more like a woman issuing a warning she expected to be ignored.
"He enjoys it too much."
Qin Mo said nothing.
"Not battle," Vanessa clarified. "Not victory. Not even the relief of surviving. Slaughter. The moment of impact. The crush. The sound. The body becoming meat under his hammer. He is not merely brave, and he is not merely violent. He revels in it."
Her voice lowered.
"That is not discipline. That is appetite."
The chamber hummed around them. A coolant line hissed softly somewhere behind Qin Mo.
Vanessa held his gaze. "Dismiss my words as manipulation if you wish. It would be an easy conclusion. I am a psyker. I am dangerous. I have every reason to influence you. But I am telling you the truth. If you leave that hunger unchecked, it will cost you later."
Qin Mo remained silent for a long moment.
Then he nodded once. Slow. Certain.
"You are correct."
....
He turned back to his research, but his thoughts no longer stayed on the equations.
They drifted to Grot.
Qin Mo had noticed the pattern before. Grot possessed weapons capable of erasing enemies at range. Multi-lasers. Shoulder cannons. Scatter-beam systems. Tools designed to end threats efficiently and keep the wearer alive. Yet whenever the battlefield allowed it, Grot reached for the graviton hammer.
The hammer had been designed as a close-quarters solution, a brutal answer for enemies that closed inside optimal firing range. It was meant for emergency impact, for corridor breaches, for mutants and armored targets that survived long enough to become immediate problems.
Grot used it as a preference.
He enjoyed wading into the enemy. He enjoyed the shockwave of impact, the way armor folded, the way heretics vanished under the hammer's field in bursts of meat and broken bone. His laughter over the vox during close combat was not relief. It was delight.
He killed with joy.
And in the galaxy Qin Mo now inhabited, joy in slaughter was not a private vice. It was a scent.
The Ruinous Powers could smell such things across distances that made astronomy irrelevant. Bloodlust did not need ritual circles or daemonic names to become dangerous. It only needed repetition, indulgence, and a man who began to believe violence was where he was most alive.
If left unchecked, Grot would draw attention.
Perhaps not today. Perhaps not tomorrow.
But eventually, Khorne would notice.
Qin Mo's jaw tightened.
He set the slate down.
"Guards. Summon Grot."
Silence answered him.
Qin Mo looked toward the door. The sentries outside should have responded immediately. They had been chosen because they were alert, disciplined, and frightened enough of their assignment not to become careless.
Nothing.
A thin unease moved through him. Not fear. Calculation sharpening around an unexpected absence.
He strode to the chamber door. The security lock recognized him and withdrew with a heavy click. Qin Mo stepped into the corridor.
His guards lay sprawled across the floor.
They were alive. Their armor remained intact. Their weapons had not been fired. One man lay with his cheek pressed against the deck plating, snoring with the peaceful stupidity of someone drugged into dreamless sleep. Another had slumped against the wall, still clutching his lasgun, his head tilted at an angle that would have been alarming if his breathing had not been so deep and steady.
Qin Mo's eyes widened.
He moved at once.
The corridor lights flickered overhead as he passed. Security seals opened before him one after another. He reached Vanessa's holding cell and forced the outer door aside before the mechanism had fully disengaged.
Someone was still imprisoned inside.
But it was not Vanessa.
The heretic Magus lay within the restraint field, suspended in the place Vanessa had occupied. Her body was swollen and distorted, flesh bloated beneath the remains of her robes, but the chamber's medicae monitors showed stable vital signs. The restraints held her in place. Her eyes twitched toward Qin Mo as he entered, unfocused and dazed.
There was no recognition in them.
Only confusion.
The Magus had no idea how she had gotten there.
Qin Mo's fists clenched. Metal creaked under his gauntleted fingers.
"Vanessa."
The name came out cold.
In less than ten minutes, she had escaped the underground research chamber, incapacitated every guard without raising an alarm, abducted the fleeing heretic Magus, transported her into the cell, and swapped places with her under Qin Mo's own security systems.
No broken locks. No triggered wards. No visible damage.
Just a clean exchange, performed under the nose of a man who had built fortresses from rubble and weapons from scraps of war.
Her psionic power was immense. At minimum, she was an Alpha-level psyker. Perhaps worse, if her talents leaned toward subtlety rather than raw destruction.
Qin Mo stood in the doorway, staring at the imprisoned Magus as the realization settled into place.
But he was not truly worried.
Because despite everything Vanessa had done, she had not fled.
At least… not yet.