Solomon followed behind Gaia, walking through the outer district streets that had become strangely quiet.
The dim night hung over the city like a black curtain drawn across the sky, smothering the place beneath a suffocating weight of despair.
Far away, the lights of the inner city still flickered, but looking at that bright, distant glow through layer after layer of ruined buildings gave him a deep sense of helplessness, as though it could never truly be reached.
It felt as though there was more than a physical barrier between the inner city and the outer city. There was something invisible there too, something harder to name.
His eyes swept over the grime on the ground, while the faint smell of rot drifted into his nose.
It was too similar.
The ruin.
The pressure.
The despair.
The suffocating heaviness.
All of it was exactly like the lower decks.
What a strange phenomenon.
The upper decks of a voidship, the spires of a hive city, the eternal forges of a forge world. Prosperity in different places could take on all kinds of luxurious forms depending on local conditions and culture.
And yet the lower decks, the underhives, the outskirts of those same worlds all seemed to share the exact same gloom.
The people who lived in such places also seemed cut from the same mold. Like the environments around them, they became embodiments of the lowest and most degraded things in human life.
That resemblance felt like a curse, latched onto the vast machine of the Imperium and eating away at every bolt that held it together.
Under such a curse, people's morals rotted, and the light of humanity was buried.
The people who lived in places like this ceased to be treated as human at all.
They were reduced to something lesser.
Trash.
At that thought, Solomon narrowed his eyes.
Yes. Trash.
Those who fed well always placed merciless burdens on the people trapped in hell, squeezing them dry through cold taxation until the last scraps of their humanity, sweat, and blood were wrung out of them.
And then those same self-proclaimed noble rulers stood atop towers built from countless corpses, looked down at those broken souls, and gave them the most contemptuous title imaginable:
trash.
Thinking that, Solomon let out a bitter laugh.
Just as certain old images began flashing through his mind again, Gaia, walking ahead of him, suddenly stopped.
Solomon's thoughts were cut short by the abrupt change. He lifted his head, looked at the tall, toned figure carrying the heavy crate, and asked in confusion,
"Is something wrong?"
Gaia did not answer him. Instead, she turned toward an alley to their left, one drowned in heavy darkness, and said coldly,
"You'd better come out on your own before I do something about it."
Solomon turned toward the place she was staring at, but at first saw nothing unusual.
Then, just as he was about to speak again, a faint rustle of cloth came from that direction.
As the sound gradually grew clearer, a faint smell of blood also began to drift into his nose.
Then, beneath the weak leftover light, a hunched middle-aged man emerged from the alley.
His clothes were torn to shreds, and his bony body was covered in ugly wounds.
Some of them were still leaking dark blood. Others were already giving off a foul, sour smell, with sickening pus oozing from them.
That was not surprising. Wounds this numerous were already enough to be fatal in a place with sanitation this poor, and malnutrition only made healing even harder.
His eyes were dull and lifeless, like rough stones, and they rested on Gaia and Solomon without any real focus.
Clearly, the infection in those wounds had already driven him into delirium.
Gaia looked at the man, whose body was slowly rotting from his injuries, and a trace of pity appeared in her eyes.
She turned to Solomon and said quietly,
"I remember you brought a medkit."
Understanding what she meant, Solomon dug a small military medkit out from the pack hanging behind his coat while muttering with obvious pain,
"This stuff costs a fortune..."
Gaia took out a reusable antibiotic injector and slowly approached the man, intending at least to ease some of his suffering.
But when she drew near and raised the injector, the man, who had until now barely been capable of reacting to anything around him, suddenly became violently agitated.
"No, don't help me!"
Seeing the delirious man fall into panic, Gaia stopped and lowered her hands, speaking calmly.
"Don't be afraid. I just want to treat your wounds."
But hearing that only made him more frenzied.
His feet kicked wildly. His head shook without rhythm. His whole body slipped into a kind of twisted, compulsive dance.
Then, in a slurred voice that made it obvious his mind was barely intact, he began murmuring,
"Wounds are a blessing... whipping the imperfect self... the ticket to the lost paradise... beyond the six circles behind the Golden Throne..."
Gaia's eyes shifted.
It was obvious now that he was connected to that cult parading itself under the name of the Ecclesiarchy, and that he had been deeply poisoned by it.
She did not force the injection on him. If he had already accepted this pain and torment as something right and holy, then even if she prolonged his life for a little while, all she would really be doing was slowing down his self-destruction.
"If what you call a ticket to paradise is suffering and wounds, then I think it sounds a lot more like hell."
"Face your faith clearly, my friend. The God-Emperor loves humanity and judges all equally. If it were truly Him, He would never demand human suffering as the price of blessing."
Gaia crouched down and spoke with firm gravity.
Her words struck like rolling thunder, landing in the man's ears and bringing a flicker of clarity into his eyes.
He stopped his maddened dance, but the numbness in his gaze did not go away.
Looking at the tall figure crouched before him, he asked in a voice barely above a whisper,
"If the God-Emperor truly loves mankind, then why do we live in suffering? If all people are equal, then why do the inner city and outer city exist at all?"
"All I want is something beautiful... and the only price I still have left to pay is this body."
"You say what I seek is hell. But to me, the place I'm standing in right now is hell."
Gaia looked at the man in silence as he slowly began dancing again.
For a long time, she said nothing.
In her vision, the purple radiance spread outward from that open square, slowly enveloping Hecius beneath the stars.
And beneath that violet glow, the man before her moved like a broken puppet, dancing away what remained of his life.
For a moment, Gaia thought she could see invisible strings extending from his joints.
But when she followed those strings upward, all she found was empty nothingness.
(End of Chapter)
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