The world was furious.
Perhaps this blatant violation of the timeline's causality triggered the repulsion of the entire dimension. The world was trying to completely erase the rift caused by the Reaper's Scythe. The surrounding space became incredibly viscous, delivering a suffocating, crushing pressure.
Zeke let out a muffled groan and looked at the Reaper's Scythe.
There, a soul was quietly sleeping, safely protected. It was a success; he could retreat now.
However, Zeke was still reluctant to give up and didn't leave by riding the repulsive force. He swept his gaze over Dorn and Vulkan, who were frozen in time, trying to fish out one more person.
He reached out toward Vulkan, who was a step closer to him, wanting to grab him.
But when his fingertips touched Vulkan's body, it was like grasping at a phantom, sending out ripples.
"Am I missing some kind of medium? Like Malcador's ashes," Zeke deduced.
The temporal turbulence finally lost its patience. Zeke was spat out of the rift, his body smashing through several marble pillars before sliding to a halt on the debris-littered floor.
The rift gradually closed. Through the shrinking gap, the Emperor, sitting on the throne with a face full of grief, seemed to sense something.
He raised His head and, across a rift in time, cast a gaze into the future.
Snap. Reality became whole again, and the rift vanished without a trace.
"Zeke, are you alright?"
Guilliman pushed aside the marble that had fallen on Zeke, extended a hand, and pulled him up.
"I'm fine, minor issue. Just shattered a Totem of Undying." Zeke shook off the crushed stones on his clothes.
His gaze turned to the Reaper's Scythe. After forcibly extracting Malcador's soul, the weapon had fallen into a kind of starvation, its originally flowing ghostly light having grown dim.
Looking closely, Zeke saw that above the Reaper's Scythe's durability bar, there was an energy bar. Capturing Malcador's soul just now had consumed more than half of its energy.
Zeke took out a few Villager Spawn Eggs and offered them as sacrifices to the Reaper's Scythe. The energy rose slightly.
It seemed the method to replenish energy was simple: capture other souls. This wouldn't be difficult for Zeke; he just needed to build a few mob farms later.
"How is it? Is Malcador..." Guilliman asked, restless and uneasy.
"You could say it's a success."
The scythe's blade gently swept over the pile of ashes, and a burst of pitch-black, pure resurrecting power erupted.
"Come back, Malcador."
Malcador's ashes began to proliferate. Under the scythe's guidance, the gray dust began to multiply exponentially, completely defying the law of conservation of mass.
They swirled madly in mid-air, constructing a skeletal framework and filling it with muscle fibers.
The Scythe's energy bar continued to drop.
Even though Guilliman had witnessed Zeke's miracles one after another, his heart was still gripped with tension.
In the center of that cloud of ash, a familiar, thin, and stooped body was emerging from nothingness, inch by inch.
When the final layer of wrinkled skin covered the exposed tissue, that iconic robe was also accurately reconstructed.
Watching this figure gradually come to life before his eyes, Guilliman choked up. The ecstasy of this reunion made his mind lose its usual rigor, and he accidentally spoke his true thoughts.
"I finally don't have to face mountains of Imperial administrative affairs alone at that damn desk anymore," Guilliman sighed, his voice filled with a sense of immense relief.
"Guilliman… I thought you'd say something a bit more grand."
Malcador's body finished recovering and dropped from the air with a thud.
Guilliman quickly caught him, holding Malcador in his hands.
Next came the soul. Zeke could feel that the soul residing within the Reaper's Scythe strongly desired to return to its own body.
Zeke slowly brought the tip of the blade close to Malcador's head and tapped it gently.
When the soul beam from the Reaper's Scythe plummeted into the reconstructed body, a crackling sound like burning dry wood erupted in the air.
Malcador's aged body twitched, emitting terrifying psychic fluctuations.
The Hero who had vanished for ten thousand years opened his eyes.
"What happened? Where is this? Didn't I already... die?"
Malcador's memory was still stuck on his final moments sitting on the Golden Throne.
The shattered universe had gripped him tightly, and razor-sharp reality had torn him apart at the subatomic level.
The Throne was a screaming ghoul that refused to die, devouring everyone who sat upon it.
The soul would be eternally imprisoned in a cycle of torment, experiencing agony again and again, witnessing death over and over.
After enduring countless torments, you would find yourself still sitting on the Golden Throne, only to move on to the next round of torture, without end.
It was an instrument of torture that would make even Haemonculi—the Dark Eldar who had maxed out their torture skill trees—marvel.
Malcador did his best to drive this lingering shadow from his mind and noticed the mortal before him, Zeke.
Then, his gaze locked onto the giant blue figure beside him.
"Guilliman... is that you?" Malcador's taut nerves relaxed slightly, but what followed was an even deeper suspicion.
"Sigillite, this is Macragge. It is this person named Zeke who resurrected you."
Resurrected. Even with all his vast experience, Malcador was stunned by this word.
He was a Perpetual and had faced death and resurrection many times before. But the moment he vanished on the Golden Throne, he had clearly felt that he was utterly and completely dead.
He didn't speak further; instead, he silently extended his psychic tendrils outward.
Outside, a light rain was falling, and the streetscape of Macragge entered his perception.
He didn't see the war-torn Imperium of his memories.
Instead, he felt prosperity—a sense of order that even surpassed Terra during the Great Crusade. The streets were clean and tidy, and the faces of the citizens lacked the numbness born of despair.
At first, Malcador didn't even recognize Macragge; it had changed too much under Zeke's intervention.
"It is so good to see you return, Lord Regent," Guilliman sighed sincerely, a trace of pride on his face. "The Imperium is once again marching toward glory. Sanguinius and the Lion would be gratified by this as well."
"Indeed, the relationship between you three from Imperium Secundus and Malcador was quite good," Zeke added from the side. "You all should have a reunion."
"Imperium Secundus?!" Malcador felt as if he'd been struck by lightning. His elderly heart couldn't take the shock and nearly stopped.
In that instant, he pieced all the clues together into a terrifying, heart-shattering truth:
No wonder Guilliman's reinforcements arrived so late during the most brutal moments of the Siege of Terra.
No wonder Macragge was built to be so prosperous, even surpassing the Imperial Palace on Terra.
No wonder he hadn't been resurrected on Holy Terra, but in this sector far from the Throne.
The joy of Malcador's recent resurrection was completely washed away.
Guilliman had betrayed the Imperium, struck out on his own, and founded a Second Empire!
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