Starting from the Planetary Governor - Chapter 971

Chapter 962, The Destruction of the Eldar

Gu Hang’s words silenced the being who was conversing with him through the old woman’s body for a long moment.

But he didn’t believe he was wrong.

Based on what the ‘Thousand-Faced God’ had said, as well as Gu Hang’s previous experience with devouring Komo’s remaining soul, Gu Hang was essentially certain that this ‘Thousand-Faced God’ was the god of the Eldar.

The Eldar, once the dominant race of the universe, naturally had their own racial deity during their heyday. Human historical research, revelations from Eldar ‘allies,’ and the interrogation of Dark Eldar captives on the battlefields of Komoro have yielded some clues.

‘Ten Thousand Gods’ may be a fictitious number, but the deities they worship are indeed numerous, touching upon nearly every aspect of Eldar religious life.

But in reality, there is only one God. Those aspects are, in reality, just one of the ‘Thousand Faces’ of a single deity.

The Thousand-Faced God, with countless faces, forms countless forms. There’s a withered face wielding a crescent scythe to harvest souls, a magnificent crown woven with a star map from countless threads, and a chaotic silhouette shrieking and twisting amidst a sea of blood and joy… He employs these various guises to address the varying directions of the Eldar’s faith.

Even the modern Eldar may not be aware of this.

However, the Thousand-Faced God’s situation is clearly not good.

As Gu Hang said, they, or rather, He, are unmitigated failures.

He is a racial god, but the race He protects is on the verge of extinction.

This isn’t referring to the human attack on Commorragh.

Even without that, the Eldar’s status in this universe is nothing more than a lingering struggle. Their entire focus is on survival, with no future or development to speak of.

They may still possess powerful, ancient technologies. Perhaps their individual strength remains considerable, maintaining a highly developed civilization.

But they have lost all hope.

With the entire race already at this point, what good is the Thousand-Faced God as a “racial god”?

Slaanesh, born from the corpse of the Eldar Empire, has long since destroyed him, leaving nothing behind.

Now, of the so-called Thousand Faces, only two remain.

Windsor, the face of the Ark Eldar, is the so-called “God of Hope.”

Mensha, the face of the Dark Eldar, is the so-called “God of Tyranny.”

As for Como? That was once a face of his, the so-called “God of Despair,” but it has long been incomplete, with only a remnant of his soul remaining, forged into the sword Como.

Of course, strictly speaking, the Thousand-Faced God isn’t doomed. In fact, he’s grown stronger—if one were to consider Slaanesh to be the former God of Pleasure, a face of the Thousand-Faced God.

By devouring the vast majority of Eldar souls and the godhead of the Thousand-Faced God, he became the “youngest of the Four Gods.” In a sense, he truly represents the Thousand-Faced God better than the one with only two faces left.

How ironic.

In this sense, calling him a loser was already considered polite.

In response to Gu Hang’s sarcasm, the spirit in the old woman’s body remained silent for a long time, without replying.

Until Gu Hang grew impatient,

he checked his watch and said, “Even silence counts. I still have a lot to do. If you don’t want to say anything, please leave.”

The ‘Thousand-Faced God’, in the old woman’s body, let out a wry laugh.

“You’re truly merciless.”

“Then, please allow me to show you something.”

The old woman raised her hand slightly, and a beam of light enveloped Gu Hang.

An endless torrent of illusions poured into Gu Hang.

With his abilities, Gu Hang could easily reject them.

However, after a moment’s hesitation, he decided—since he was already here, he might as well take a look.

He saw battlefields from eons past. Magnificent Eldar warships, fleeing, were swallowed by the purplish-red maelstrom. Highly developed Eldar cities were instantly dragged into the storms of the Warp, forming the foundational building blocks of a new god’s kingdom.

In the kingdom of the Thousand-Faced God, the heavens were torn apart, and from the Pantheon emerged one after another of Slaanesh’s Great Daemons. They came from the past, the future, and, more importantly, they were present in the present.

Driven from the temple, the Thousand-Faced God’s body had long since been fragmented.

Lacking the greatest part—the part that belonged to Slaanesh—they could never unite again, powerless to resist, and could only flee separately.

The claws of the Slaanesh Great Daemons shattered the arrogant Eldar gods one by one.

The devastated gods screamed as they plummeted into the eternal abyss.

He saw how the surviving fragments of divinity drifted hopelessly in the eternal storms of the Warp, colliding and gnawing at each other like cosmic dust, fighting for the remnants of faith and conceptual power.

Finally, on the brink of utter dissolution, a shared, reality-bending fear of death, emanating from the depths of all the Eldar’s souls, served as the final bond, forcibly gluing the largest fragments together.

This was not rebirth, but a more desperate death imprisonment—a horrific agglomeration of thousands of unidentifiable, humble consciousnesses, thus taking shape.

This was Windsor and Mensha, now.

They bore the names of “God of Hope” and “God of Tyranny,” but in reality, they were nothing more than a disgusting patchwork.

They clung on, escaping the pursuit of their formidable enemy, while simultaneously guiding two sections of the Eldar to survive, each in its own distinct way.

“We are not complete spirits… nor are we of free will… Every fall of my people… Every tremor of the Soul Stone entering the net… tears at our pseudo-shells…”

Countless fine, shimmering “threads” emerged in Gu Hang’s expanding mental vision, extending from the shattered core of the Thousand-Faced God, weeping with divine pus and blood.

Each strand was as thin as a spider’s silk, so fragile that it seemed as if it could be blown apart with a single breath, yet they pierced the veil of space, casting a faint, desperate shadow upon the physical universe.

Gu Hang followed one of these “threads” and was immediately drawn into a distant, flame-enshrouded starry battlefield. A vast ark world, its lines elegant as a work of art, yet riddled with wounds and scars, was being frantically besieged by bloated, filthy, and pus-oozing green warships.

Nurgle’s plague missiles slammed into the ark’s pale light shield, exploding clouds of rotting psychic energy. Near a crumbling spire of bones at the edge of the deck, a howling banshee charged, her battle cry piercing the void as she pointed her shuriken at plague warriors many times her size.

But Gu Hang saw something deeper.

At the moment her will to charge reached its peak, a pure, resolute psychic glow emanated from the depths of her chest. This wasn’t just the energy needed to power the Shuriken. A thin, blood-thin stream of light was being invisibly drawn away, rapidly flowing back along the thread connecting Gu Hang to the Thousand-Faced God in his vision!

That tiny stream of light was injected into the Thousand-Faced God’s core, and the area of light there would flicker briefly before being swallowed by the deeper darkness, like a starving dying being trying in vain to absorb a drop of rainwater.

Simultaneously, thousands of similar threads rose from every corner of the battlefield, from souls untouched by the war deep within the Craftworlds, and even from the undiscovered fragments of Eldar colonies at the edge of the galaxy. Billions of tiny streams converged on the crumbling divine core.

Gu Hang frowned amidst the myriad illusions. The rapid influx of information was becoming a bit overwhelming for him.

Yet, he finally grasped the true meaning of all this: every transcendent Eldar individual, each time they unleashed their potential, instinctively used the purest flash of their soul to briefly “ignite” the dying embers of divinity, earning the “divine grace” of increased power. Yet, they also unconsciously tore themselves apart, becoming the fuel that sustained their “god-bodies.”

It seemed like a perfect cycle.

The Many-Faced God provided the Eldar with strength and protection, preventing their departed souls from sinking into the Warp and being captured by Slaanesh, instead returning them to the sanctuary provided by the Many-Faced God.

For the Ark Eldar, this was the “Soul Stone,” nestled within the spiritual realm of the Craftworld; for the Dark Eldar, it was the Soul Repository, the chance to be reborn in a new body forged by the Haemonchi.

Meanwhile, with each of their intense outbursts, even their ultimate death, they fed their experiences and soul power back to the Many-Faced God, enabling it to continue.

If this entire mechanism were truly perfect, they wouldn’t have suffered from a daily decline over hundreds of thousands of years.

The biggest problem with this mechanism lies with Slaanesh.

This external enemy, the true terror that towers over the entire race, renders the entire cycle unsustainable.

“A deeper corruption… is flowing back through this vein…” Gu Hang heard a low, raspy voice, like a thousand voices superimposed on one another.

He saw that the withdrawn stream of light was mingled with a more insidious, more viscous filth.

On the battlefield, the Howling Banshee’s psychic attacks seemed indeed more powerful, but the unnatural blush on her face, and her mouth, where a scream should have been, now laced with a strange, inappropriately sweet whisper, blended into her war cry…

When the Eldar unleash their immense power, no matter how many protective measures they take, they inevitably connect with the Warp. There, the source of all supernatural power, no matter what race.

But the Eldar are unique in that every connection they make with the Warp always attracts the attention of Slaanesh.

Even a tiny bit of infection might have little impact on their entire lives.

But when they die and return, the Soul Stones and Soul Receptacles receive the purest souls. Where does the extra contamination go?

“The Dark Prince… Slaanesh’s gaze… like a cancer… is corroding every spiritual channel connecting my Eldar to me…”

“Every painful struggle and wailing at the soul level accelerates his pervasive penetration… The interior of our ‘divine core’… is already filled with his ‘pleasure’… Every painful twitch pleases him, every burst of power nourishes his infiltrating tentacles… If not severed… if not eradicated… the fate is already determined… This divine zombie of ours will become a giant abscess projected by him into the real universe! And all Eldar souls connected here will…”

“Sever… this self-destructive cycle…” A relatively clear voice, with a knife-like resoluteness, briefly drowned out the countless wails of the Thousand-Faced God.

Gu Hang’s gaze was intensely drawn to the source of the voice—a massive fragment nestled deep within the divine core. It was a sharp, deathly pale, like the purest essence of tyranny, emanating a chilling refusal of all.

That was Mensha’s part. It was he who sustained the Thousand-Faced God, preventing him from completely dissolving and rotting under Slaanesh’s plague of pleasure. It was he who guided the Dark Eldar to survive within Commorragh, teaching them to resist Slaanesh’s soul-draining power through pain.

Yet, at that moment, Gu Hang keenly observed a sickening, malevolent iridescence creeping around the edges of the Mensha fragment—Slaanesh’s poison greedily licking at this last bastion.

Simultaneously, Gu Hang’s mental vision also witnessed something of what the Thousand-Faced God had seen: the golden web of will representing the Imperium of Mankind, a vast web spanning the galaxy, its countless nodes dimming and flickering under the erosion of Chaos. Above this golden web, a blue web grew, entangling a third of the human world.

That golden light must represent the Emperor of Mankind. In other words, it’s the shared faith of countless trillions of humans, the dominant race in the real universe.

And the blue network must be Gu Hang, or rather, his alliance. That spiritual resonance, built on the foundation of the human empire and symbolizing a higher degree of shared ideals, order, and sacrifice, is a behemoth spanning the galaxy, built on an indestructible system and shared imagination.

(End of this chapter)