Esdeath didn't reply much as we were walking through the Lower Hive and reaching the Underhive, which was far worse than the Lower Hive. Compared to the Underhive, the Lower Hive was like the most luxurious hotel for the Grand Nobles in the Holy Imperial Capital of Anor Long back home.
Even Esdeath stared at the streets of the Underhive and how they looked like hell on earth materialized... it was swarming with people like a ton of them, and all of them looked worse, like the scavengers and gangsters who attacked them when they were crossing the outskirts of the Hive City.
Even to me, the Underhive was something that was...
Beyond words.
I couldn't really understand how people could live in these conditions.
It was indeed true that within the Underhive, the living conditions were really bad. At the same time, I found it rather fascinating that humans could actually survive in a place like this, as it was almost shocking.
In the Underhive, things like food and water were far more precious than hold or anything else, and despite that, people were still prevailing and adapting to the enviroment in which they were living.
Navigating within the Underhive was...
I already stopped depending on the Architect's help, because a lot of information that my AI obtained from the systems of the Palatine Hive was either inaccurate or obsolete, because a lot of areas of the Underhive were either collapsed, repurposed, or something else done with them.
This was the place where the people of the Planetery Governor or the Planetary Defense Force wouldn't bother entering because it was not worth their time or effort. Most of the armed forces of the Governor's Mansion wouldn't bother themselves with the Underhive, and many considered this place really dangerous.
Even for the armed troops of the Planetary Defense Forces.
Which was already saying something about the current state of the things of the Underhive and how fucked up everything was in this place. I could understand that, judging on the number of corpses that were all on the corridors of the Underhive...
At least until the corpse collectors come and make corpse starch from them.
"They are eating them."
I answered Esdeath's question when she asked me what the weirdly dressed scavengers were doing with the remains of the corpses.
"Don't need to stare at them that intently... according to the information, it's the main source of the food in the Underhive and even Lower Hives... the Corpse-starch. A synthetic food source created from the recycled Human dead of the hive cities on many of the Hive Worlds of the Imperium of Man."
Necromunda was one of the Hive Worlds where this practice is most prevalent. On Necromunda, the Corpse Guild regulates the trade and production of corpse-starch, and it was the main source of food for the countless people.
Even Esdeath looked like she wanted to puke at the moment, because just the thought of it was disgusting.
What the Imperials were doing was no different from cannibalism, because well... it was cannibalism.
Recycling the corpses of the deceased into food and eating them.
"Without the orderly disposal of their corpses, plague and disease would run rampant across the Hive World. Without the food source that these corpses provide when rendered down in the great corpse grinder plants that dominate entire sectors in every hive city, the populace would starve. In a certain sense, it creates some twisted balance where everything functions as it should and maintains the balance between each other."
I said as we were descendign to even greater depths of the Underhive where the only thing that we could depend as form of navigation were my Psychic Abilities.
Divination Discipline.
Diviners seek to discern the hidden past of the galaxy and know the course of events yet to come. These abilities allow Diviners to look into the twisting strands of the Immaterium in search of the answers they seek, and sometimes even influence the outcome of Fate itself.
Simply said.
Yet, pretty useful because it was more than enough to lead us to the place where the Underhive was ending... technically speaking, near the base of the entire Hive City, where the foundations of the entire mega structure were located.
The deeper one went into the Underhive...
More twisted, dark, and disgusting it became.
Mutants, Chaos Spawns, and unspeakable horrors were on a daily basis.
Mutants killing humans, humans killing mutants, everyone slaughtering each other in exchange... we even saw how a bunch of cannibals were dismembering another person in plain sight in the middle of the street and started feasting on a child.
Children didn't survive long in the Underhive...
Safe zones within the Underhive were almost non-existent, and they were usually strongholds of the strongest gangs and cults that operated within the Underhive.
Yet the place where we were right now barely had any activity...
Only darkness and some remnants of technology from the Age of Federation that was still activated after many millenias.
"We are here..."
I said as we were standing in front of a half-destroyed alley that was actually an entrance to the underground research facility. The Underhive itself was located a few hundred meters under the planet's surface, because all Hive Cities were built from the underground and not at the planet's surface itself.
"There is nothing here."
Esdeath commented on the most obvious.
"Aside from the ruins and half-destroyed tunnel or what the thing is."
She continued as I nodded, but didn't really bother answering as I used my Holo-Brain on my hand that I constructed and used the console to access the control systems of the Research Facility.
"Accessing the Research Facility Araneus Prime. Name: Jeron Egan Butler. Accessing Direct Control."
Suddenly, the entire tunnel came to life, at least what could come to life was activated, because a lot of systems were already destroyed, decayed, or just fell apart due to the passage of time.
Saying his human name really felt weird.
He only used it twice since he was reborn more than thirteen thousand years ago.