God-given things have a price.

Being a child of God is not a blessing, but a curse.

Bear the curse and watch fate, which shows a cursed desperate future.

A prophet never dies well.

— but he will not give in until death really comes.

——————

The son of the demigod gasped in pain.

But he couldn't, couldn't, and didn't need to run away.

Here, in this dark, lightless sealed room, he could indeed feel a secret reassurance before falling into a sea of unconsciousness madness.

The metal chamber was just another of his cages, and his power armor defended against external attacks almost as many times as it did against internal shocks.

This God-given thing made him valued by many people, and it also made him abandoned by many people.

It killed his beloved Father of Genes, and even the Lord of the Night was not spared from his poisonous pestering of prophecy.

Astarte's strong, artificially coded muscles spasm and lose control like fragile mortals, those with organic lesions of the brain, their muscles contracting unnaturally, tugging at his strong, thick, stone-hard bones, sometimes tensing his body into a straightened string that almost breaks like a stiff corpse, sometimes forcing genetically modified demigods to curl up like newborn babies.

And he was completely unable to control what was happening at this moment, but if it was just physical pain, he even thought it was bearable, but when the pain calmed down a little, the real suffering and the pain of slicing the soul apart had just arrived.

The sight in his eyes, which he considered a godsend, was always so hopeless and empty—that there was still nothing but sacrifice, fighting, constant loss and endless war in the far and dark endless future.

There is no light.

There is no hope.

He screamed, roared, roared from his skeletal helmet, inscribed with Nostramo runes, and spat out from his mouth a steady stream of idiotic whispers of saliva flying from the canine's teeth in the midst of painful inhuman torment, which passed through the metal grille of his helmet into buzzing fuzzy resonances and indistinct beastly roars, echoing through the wreckage of the metal chamber where his head had smashed in pain.

It is clear to anyone who is well versed in the psionic arts of prophecy and divination that the usual prophecies are always vague, obscure, a glimmer of possibility about the future hidden under a thousand superficial symbols that may be the same and need to be quoted and extended.

The omen of fate is as fragile and fragile as the dew on a spider's silk before the sun rises in the morning, and if you don't pay attention to it, you will fall into the mouths of the long-awaited lifeline manipulators beneath it as you try to decipher it.

But not here.

Conrad Kozna's cursed bloodline bequest was named a godsend because of the terrifying and precise details it poured into the eyes and minds of every heir who could inherit the godsend, even down to what color of armor they would wear next time they would attack them, or where they would go next, what planets they would see, what ships they would attack, and what kind of captives they would receive.

He tossed and turned in pain, slamming his head into the metal bulkhead again and again in between screaming and pausing.

His ancient helmet faithfully guarded the integrity of his head, and as always protected his skull—for them, in hellish space was nothing more than decades of fighting and expeditions to escape and evade pursuit, or to plunder as needed.

Time enslaved by the supernatural laws of aether slipped away at an irrational pace, and every time they cruised through reality, every time they saw something of the old that was now unrecognizable, it aggravated the hidden pain in the hearts of everyone who realized it.

So most of the people here have learned not to think carefully about how much time has passed—but the Prophet reluctantly realizes that 10,000 years, a full 10,000 years, have been stolen from them, and that they are the ghosts of the old legions, still living in the shadows of the past.

The ancient apothecary began to pant as the burning pain of mental hallucinations subsided like a tidal wave, and then he knelt there wearily, and began to regain his grasp of his muscles and bones, and his second heart was the first to regain a more steady beat, slowly pumping the blood back into his pale first heart, which had lost blood from the sight of those too shocking sights, and the feeling of dizziness gradually disappeared.

The scroll bar warning of hypoxic suffocation gradually departed from the edge of his helmet eyepiece, he had lost his breathing function for a long time due to the omens he had witnessed, and even the genetically modified extraordinary physiology was beginning to be overwhelmed, but as long as he could recover, he would always get better...... Yes.

The terrible apothecary member of First Blazing Claw grunted and staggered straight up in the dark room without any light, his head still hurting, so painful that it made him temporarily blind, but it wasn't a big problem.

There was no lighting on the ship in the first place, the transcendents didn't need it, their natural and acquired enhancements allowed them to see freely in the dark, and the mortal crew was only allowed to use the faint light when they moved furthest, and the vast majority of people had become accustomed to using things other than their eyes to live and operate everything on this ship - it took an average of sixty-six days to form a habit, and several generations of mortal turnover were long enough for a helpless approach to become natural.

Although the prophecy seizure came very quickly, it should be over by now, and although he was still in pain, he was more concerned about when his weakness would leave.

He knew he had a fan among his brothers, but what left him and his reputation was more of a backstab and a bomb fired from behind that didn't pull the trigger.

Suddenly.

Without warning, an incomparably dazzling black lightning bolt enveloped the gold and silver, piercing through the fog of time and space, descending here, piercing through his mind and violently splitting his eyes.

The Nightlord's pure black eyes, accustomed to the absence of light, were completely shattered by this astonishing light.

Talos Wolfran let out a howl in his room that had never been heard before a Midnight Lord would have uttered.

And every Midnight Lord on the Blood Covenant who had not yet taken off their power armor had their eardrums pierced through the communication channel by the terrible wails of the First Blazing Claw Prophet.

Footsteps hurried towards the chamber in the darkness, carrying the rusty and fishy smell of blood and metal.

(End of chapter)