---o---
Quintus Hive. The most opulent palace of the upper spire.
Nothing like the lower hive or the underhive, where toxic miasma hung perpetually in air so dark a hand raised before one's face simply ceased to exist, this place was filled with birdsong and the fragrance of flowers, with the murmur of running water between carved stone terraces. Everything that had graced Holy Terra in the years around the 30th Millennium could be found reproduced here, available to the most elevated among the elevated.
If you only ever looked at Space Marines, one might get the impression that everyone in the Imperium lived in austere discomfort. The truth was that Space Marines were, by inclination and by necessity, ascetic monks of war. They suppressed personal indulgence to its absolute minimum, waging the unending war for the Emperor and humanity among the stars. Maintaining purity of purpose was a requirement, not a preference. Those who faced the Warp directly needed clean minds or they risked falling.
These nobles were under no such obligation.
Before the Great Rift tore the galaxy in two, places outside the immediate vicinity of the Eye of Terror experienced Chaos influence that was, by the standards of what would come later, comparatively manageable. The primary hazards were xenos of various kinds. And though the Imperium prohibited cooperation with xenos on an official basis, quiet cooperation happened constantly. Zhou Ye himself had worked alongside the Aeldari against Chaos.
The people at the very top of these spires lived accordingly. They indulged. Of course, once the Great Rift opened, a place like this would be among the first to become a Daemon World. Zhou Ye was well aware of that. He could feel that the Great Rift's opening could happen at any moment, though his current distance from the Eye of Terror meant he could not reach that theater of war even if he wished to contribute something. And traveling through the Warp himself was absolutely not an option. He had just ruined Nurgle's plans on Tillius, and he was almost certainly already logged in a certain golden awareness.
---o---
The Altera Dynasty.
Controllers of several worlds within this sector. Originally a serious contender for the Lord Sector position itself, though higher political calculations had intervened to prevent it.
None of that mattered anymore.
The current head of the Altera family was a woman known throughout the sector as the Crimson Rose. Sola Altera. And Sola Altera, on some ordinary day that no one else remembered, had appeared to receive the favor of something divine. Her beauty became the kind that altered the perception of those who witnessed it. Any young man of talent and promise who found himself in the path of her bewitching gaze would find himself undone, tumbling from coherence into an obsessive madness from which there was no return, until the dream swallowed him entirely in an endless procession of indulgence, until the day his body was nothing but dry bone.
The soul would ascend then to the highest palace of perfect joy.
Sola Altera had climbed through the family hierarchy on the strength of exactly that capability, and climbed without encountering any meaningful resistance. Now she was the undisputed ruler of the Altera Dynasty, and she needed a suitable husband to help her seize the Lord Sector position.
"Inquisitor. Who will be attending my banquet this evening?"
"Every major figure in the Quintus Hive will be here tonight, my beautiful Lady."
The Inquisitor's eyes held a look of enthralled devotion as he responded from his position near the entrance to her chamber. A faint pink-violet luminescence clung to him. And if one looked carefully, the outline of a second shape moved behind his own, something distorted and unwilling to hold a clear form.
"This fruit has lost its taste. The supply from Governor Skant's planet has already spoiled. I need more. More fresh fruit."
She tossed aside a piece of fruit that would have covered the purchase price of a comfortable residential unit in this very district. The Inquisitor's expression shifted further into devotion as he bent down, retrieved it from the floor, and began eating it with visible enthusiasm.
If Zhou Ye had been in the room, he would have seen it immediately. Attached to the Inquisitor's frame was a daemon, a creature of ambiguous gender and considerable ugliness, one of the hermaphroditic Great Daemons, a Keeper of Secrets.
The Inquisitor had, at some point during his use of certain Chaos artefacts, failed to maintain the necessary precautions and been possessed. Inquisitors of this type tended to court exactly these risks on a routine basis, using Chaos material as tools while telling themselves they remained in control. Most did not survive to the point of possession, being killed by unrelated accidents first. Some did not survive that either.
Fresh fruit was intoxicating. The great Prince of Pleasure would surely desire it even more than mortal senses could appreciate. A pity that the mysterious young man who supplied it remained unlocated.
"My beautiful Lady. Our associate, the Oliveira Dynasty, has prepared thirteen bottles of fine wine for your wedding banquet this evening."
"Hmm?"
A trace of distaste crossed the woman's beautiful features.
Thirteen was genuinely an unpleasant number. Twelve would be acceptable if thirteen was unavoidable. Or better yet, sixty-six. That would be perfect.
"Have them bring it to sixty-six bottles. Bill accordingly."
"My beautiful Lady, that will be a very considerable expense."
"Pay it."
"Yes, my Lady."
The servant departed without further comment.
"Tonight will be a magnificent banquet." The woman's voice carried a note of bright anticipation. "Six crystal towers will be raised. All guests will witness the beautiful moment bestowed by the Lord of Pleasure, and I too will journey to the Palace of Joy."
She began to dance as she spoke, there in her chamber, her movements fluid and deeply expressive, her silhouette tracing lines that seemed to be reaching toward something above and beyond the ceiling. As she danced, everyone else in the room except the Inquisitor drifted into motion alongside her, their bodies finding the same rhythm without being directed to do so. They danced across the crystal floor, their joy absolute and consuming. Even when flesh wore against flesh and skin began to break, not one of them stopped. The sensation only intensified the movement. The boundaries between bodies blurred as the dance continued, as people pressed together and the distances between them ceased to mean anything.
Even the soul kept dancing, offering itself endlessly to the absolute Lord of Pleasure.
If anyone at that moment could have looked through the mirror on the chamber wall, they would have seen a different reflection, bloated and distorted, dancing with considerable enthusiasm in the glass.
---o---
In a hotel room nearby.
"That is an extremely concentrated Warp signature. That is Slaanesh's presence."
Zhou Ye had been on his balcony, looking out over the spectacular view of the hive city below and drinking a glass of wine, when he felt it. He lowered his gaze and then tilted his head upward, looking toward the deepest part of the upper spire.
Violet light pulsed in the distance. The unmistakable presence of Slaanesh.
And alongside that presence, he could feel the other three Chaos Gods reaching their awareness toward this sector as well, each of them making clear they had no intention of allowing this planet to fall under Slaanesh's control. None of them wanted it, but none of them would accept letting Slaanesh have it either.
Unfortunately for those intentions, Zhou Ye could feel that their influence in this location was genuinely weak. The current situation was barely serious enough to require the local PDF, let alone any significant Imperial response.
If you happened to be holding a Chaos artefact with a connection to Tzeentch and asked it about Slaanesh's operations here, you would receive at least half the truth in return. This was not Nurgle. The rules of inter-Chaos competition applied differently.
"You are all in a hurry. But there is no need to hurry. My plan is perfect. The Warp energy accumulation here is significant but nowhere near what we saw at Tillius. At most this produces a Slaaneshi Champion. Not even a Greater Daemon can get through yet because the final sacrifice has not begun. Ai-chan. Prepare ten Terminator squads. Another hive has become defiled."
He tipped the wine glass back and finished it in a single motion, then stood up.
He genuinely did not believe this one would go wrong.
Look at the situation honestly. The Nurgle campaign on Tillius had involved Nurgle descending personally, his divinely chosen Herald arriving with two corrupted Warlord Titans, and a Chaos artefact of considerable power prepared in advance. What did this situation have? A routine corruption operation with no visible command presence. Not even in the same category.
Zhou Ye also reflected on what he knew of Slaanesh in the setting more broadly. The honest answer was that there was surprisingly little to know. Whether this was the result of real-world pressures on the company or simply authorial priorities, Slaanesh received far less narrative presence than the other three Chaos Gods. What lore existed established that the Dark Prince's primary attention was directed toward the Aeldari rather than humanity. Tzeentch rewarded writers who could handle complexity without losing their readers. So the two gods who dominated the page were Khorne and Nurgle, straightforward enough to write compellingly without specialized expertise.
"That is the difference between you and Aha, and it is also what makes this universe genuinely frustrating sometimes."
He said it quietly, his eyes half-lidded, feeling the energy pulsing from the spire above.
He and Aha shared at least one common philosophical orientation: both found pleasure worth pursuing. But Slaanesh's pleasure had a threshold built into its structure. Once experienced, any given pleasure left an absence behind it, a hollow where satisfaction had been, demanding something more intense to fill it. The cycle inevitably pushed past the limits of the human body and mind, until something broke.
Aha had no such restriction. Large joys and small joys were all joys. And Aha shared something with Tzeentch too, finding pleasure in change and variation itself, rather than the escalating consumption of a single sensation. Aha and these Chaos entities were simply not the same kind of thing.
None of which mattered at this precise moment. What mattered was that his blade was impatient.
Kill. That was the entire plan. Reduce whatever Slaaneshi presence had assembled here to ash before it became something larger. This was a banquet, which meant tonight the Slaaneshi elements would all be in one place. Clean them out in a single sweep, fast enough that the hive barely noticed.
He did not need to attend the banquet under cover. He did not need to maintain any pretense of being an ordinary merchant. He just needed to be fast enough and thorough enough to close everything down before it spread.
The hive would be briefly chaotic afterward. Not a Grand Free-for-All. Nothing near it. The Oliveira Dynasty fish had already been hooked. Once that family assembled their fleet to come rob him, he would simply take the fleet and the Warrant along with the rest. His plan was without flaw.
He had also prepared numerous contingencies. He felt confident in a way he had not felt since the early stages of Tillius.
And the Chaos Gods genuinely could not see him directly. Their prophetic sight operated by drawing on the Warp's disordered time-flow to observe past and future from the present. Whether those observations were inevitable events or events that only occurred because they were observed was philosophically unresolved. But you could not observe something that cast no reflection in the Immaterium at all.
This was precisely why he had been so careful about avoiding any contact with faith-based Imperial structures. Even a small connection could pull him into range of something's awareness. His own Honkai-based power left no Warp shadow.
Once his Star Rails were complete, he would have a tool capable of restricting the Warp's garbage from reaching the worlds along his network. Advantage to him. Develop quietly for centuries. Build the network until it connected thousands of worlds.
By that point he would have resources capable of standing against the Imperium itself in open confrontation, if it came to that. In some ways he and the Emperor operated from similar principles. Both could theoretically produce vast armies from scratch. His choice to work through Astartes rather than larger conventional forces was partly resource efficiency and partly the necessity of discretion.
"Ashira."
Zhou Ye looked back at the Special Grade Chef he had brought along on this excursion. The cooking was one reason. The other was an experiment.
"Yes, my Lord."
"I have written a portion of my genetic information into your body. A standard Astartes undergoes nineteen surgical procedures. A Primaris Astartes undergoes twenty-two. Your count is twenty-three. You carry one thing more than they do. I do not know how stable it is. I do not know what ceiling it has. The final gift I have given you: never activate it. If you do, you will likely cross beyond what humans are."
He looked at the Emperor's Children champion for a moment, then continued in a level tone.
Bringing him along was not purely for culinary purposes. As the strongest individual among this locally-raised cohort of Astartes, he had sufficient biological capacity for Zhou Ye to push the experiment further. That experiment was writing a fragment of Honkai Beast genetic material into his body alongside everything else.
Zhou Ye had taken precautions. Activation would not be simple or accidental. But when activated, the result would be a substantial increase in combat capability, likely pushing him toward the lower range of what a member of the Adeptus Custodes could achieve. What the full transformation would look like, Zhou Ye genuinely could not predict.
He had infected people before, but only with minute quantities of Honkai energy. Larger doses tended to produce either ash or, in the rarest cases, Honkai Zombies. Soldiers who could handle higher concentrations were extremely uncommon.
"Yes, my Lord."
"Go back to the Hyperion now. Armor up when you get there. Young Phoenix. You are all about to look upon the shadow of your greatest enemy."
He snapped his fingers and opened a transit portal, gesturing Ashira through it.
If they were going to kill Slaaneshi forces tonight, there was no reason not to bring the Emperor's Children along. Rylanor's instruction had already brought their hatred of Slaanesh to a pitch that could not meaningfully increase.
And forget the original Gene-father's side. The loyal faction of the Emperor's Children was itself a significant proportion of the entire Legion's numbers. These men were the continuation of that loyalty.
Zhou Ye also had, he would admit privately, a certain amount of wanting to see Fulgrim's eventual reaction to these warriors. Because when he had been sorting through the soul-imprints of the Gene-seeds during fabrication, his mind had drifted at one point to the Emperor's Children's strongest warrior of a particular type, the legendary dual-blade champion.
His tendency to think casually about things and have those thoughts manifest unexpectedly in his output was well-established by now. Rylanor had already started to suspect that perhaps Zhou Ye had somehow gotten his hands on Akurduana's Gene-seed specifically.