Fifty two thousand two hundred seventy-one.

After an incalculable period of time, this number began to decline again.

During this time, Coetzes, who had been boringly repeating the mechanical action of "board-suppress-reclaim" in reality, was touched by the change of numbers and cast a glimpse from above: some of his descendants had come out of it.

Before the feeling of surprise appeared, the answer was already presented to him. The few people who have been freed from the path of judgment have not been Astarte and joined the Chaos Wargang for a long time, at least subjectively. Although most of them had been the most vicious of their peers in the land they had been born in, the length of their lives did not allow them to accumulate too many sins, and therefore they had to experience less judgment here than others.

He looked down at the heirs who had recovered from the slowly ending pain, and for a moment he didn't know if he should be happy about it. Immediately afterward, he noticed that the few Midnight Lord recruits were struggling to wake up, and the first thing he did was to try to make a senseless show off to the veterans around him who were still barely receptive to outside information - which made Koz reconfirm that they were just another type of little bastard.

In the High Heavens, he used the link of blood to stop these things, and ordered them to work from their own ships—to unite all the ships in the fleet and to pay allegiance to him, the Midnight Lord Primordial, the genetic father of all the Children of the Night.

These people are not yet fully accustomed to the changes in themselves: the "red gloves" imposed on the perpetrators by the Primordial with subspace powers, causing them to feel the pain of moving their fingers or touching any other object like a knife. But they still happily began to carry out the first order they had received from the original body, as if this constant torture was nothing more than a trivial matter.

Originally, Koz would have taken this for granted, as the legionnaires were supposed to carry out every order of the primordial. But now, after experiencing everything in his second life, and realizing that the identity of the original body is not the final answer in the logic of all actions, he begins to wonder why they do such "illogical" things.

Until then, Coates had never met his children, and even if he had established a subspace connection with all of them through the base contract brought by the genetic seed, he had only transmitted power, violence, pain, and suffering to them through that connection.

There was no greeting, no approval, no positive connection between him and his son, but his son was still rejoicing at his presence, rejoicing in the pain he had given, and even obeying the commands of his abuser—not out of fear, but out of another emotion that he could not fully understand: love.

When Coetz noticed this problem and tried to understand it, he couldn't help but wonder if his genetic son, after 10,000 years of drifting in subspace, was mentally normal?

He looked down again at all his children, and at the same time realized that the sinful ones who had begun to suffer could not endure this torment and died in pieces.

Fifty one million four hundred fifty-two.

He had already said that his trial would have broken Astarte's mind and body in the face of unspeakable crimes. Coates laughed at these incompetent children inwardly, and his instinct grabbed their obsessive souls with the thin thread of the base contract, coldly annihilating their will in a constant wail of pain, and in an instant it was dismantled into pure energy and fused into its own essence.

If they consciously choose to die before that, then Coz will be generous enough to spare their souls. However, if the person on trial did not have the slightest idea of "stopping" at the time of his death, the trial would continue after his death. It's an instinct that doesn't depend on Coetze's will - just as a person can't control himself from absorbing the oxygen in it after breathing, Coz can't stop his essence from digesting the prey he has caught in his "judgment".

He also understood that doing so would cause him to inherit the karma and karma that these heirs had created, but what sin could be greater than being an accomplice in pushing the entire galaxy into the flames? So he doesn't care about these "little things".

- Look, he's also a "sin drinker". Coetzes thought to himself.

He continued to look down on the children who were still suffering, and realized that the number of those who had been consumed by their own sins, or tormented by his unrestrained "judgments" to the point of physical collapse, was still and would continue to increase.

This caused him to develop an emotion that was somewhere between annoyance and hatred, but he himself could not define it well, and he did not know where it began. Eventually, after a few microseconds of reflection, he continued his work of "destroying waste" in a frustrating and predictable future, "When this is over, the warden will definitely be going to give a long lecture again".

Some of them were not his intentions, fifty thousand six hundred and seventy-eight, and the number of heirs who had gone with him on the task of recovering the fleet had increased to sixty-seven, fifty thousand, and Fort Galatan had already shaken off the plague fleet, and in an hour and twenty minutes it would be their reserve—forty-nine thousand seven hundred and sixty-four.

He began to feel some unexplained agitation. In his trials, few passed, and so few consciously chose to die, and more than ninety percent of the declining numbers were instinctively devoured by him.

Coates had a vague feeling that his decision was very arbitrary, and the standard and intensity of the "trial" could not be said to be completely reasonable, but he thought that his son who was just a bunch of soft eggs should know when to retreat, instead of holding on to it and making things the way they are.

At first, he didn't expect that he would "eat" so many offspring.

Koz's essential judgment may have symbolized a certain degree of "justice" at the beginning, but Nostramo's poisonous environment has irreversibly distorted his mind in a bad direction, and his poisoned will has deviated from the emperor's original vision, and even with the help of various external forces in his second life, he still cannot perfectly control his essence.

He was in heaven, but the part of the judgment was almost entirely instinctive. Now, the so-called "trial" is nothing more than an indefinite punishment that he arbitrarily, overkillly, harshly, and never takes into account the human rights of the person being tried. He knew how quickly a man would succumb to such inhuman torture, even Astarte. He carefully concocted the most terrifying torture for his heirs, but he didn't expect that-

- Why do they just refuse to give up? Because of the so-called "love"?

Coetze has always been well aware that there is such a feeling in the world, but he has never succeeded in experiencing or analyzing what "love" is. He was able to comprehend these feelings in a superficial and mechanical way by means of basic inferences and fits, and then to make use of them—just as a farmer can predict whether it will rain the next day or not by the clouds of the evening, and then decide how much water to water his field—but the present situation is too far beyond his knowledge.

In his first life, he took his children's love for him for granted. But when he realized that it wasn't supposed to be, he realized how ridiculous what was happening, even ridiculous enough to frighten him.

"Love" should make people weak. That's how it should be.

"Why are you so insistent?" He asked his children, "Why do you not give up when you know that there is only endless pain and humiliating and humble death ahead?" ”

A broken whimper came from the connection of the base contract, and forty-six thousand three hundred and seventy-two answers converged in Koz's mind at the same moment:

Because you're there.

The singing of the aspirants sent chills down Koz's spine.

Miwoo (six o'clock).

(End of chapter)