I jogged through the hundreds of parallel alleys made up of intricately carved bookcases. The smell of leather and ageing wood revalent throughout the whole library and I smiled as I ehe refreshing st. After all weeks of only smelling smog mould and rotting corpses, this was a more than wele ge. My gaze leapt from sign to sign, searg for the se where they kept the useful stuff. Once again I was astonished by the size of the se under which resided the variious texts. They had different parts for official Ecclesiarbsp; dots, religious tales and things like that. With a small shake of my head, I ighose and searched for history eography with a focus on anything that might tain stuff not avaible to the public. I thought there might be some of that in a library this far up in the pace but those might be kept in a private library or even locked up in a vault. I wouldn't put anything past one of the elite of the Imperium. I didn't quite know what I was searg for, maybe military history or some sort of astral map but I didn't know where that would be. I didn't hold out much hope for finding out about relevant threats this p faced in the near past. Likely those tter ones would be somewhere more secure which made me wonder why did I even boing through this library in the first pbsp;Yes, a map and history, that might be useful. Oh well. I was gonna read at least a few books here even if they are useless. It'd be a great ge of pabsp;With that idea in mind, I grabbed a few books as I passed them by even if they didn't hold much significe just because their title sounded iing. Soon enough I had both of my hands full with books and I plopped down into a fy armchair that was hidden away among the many alleys of bookcases. With a slight smile, I opehe book titled 'The Great Angel's Sacrifice' and breathed in deeply to savour that nostalgic st of ink on paper. I always liked the smell of books, I of course had an E-reader for most of the books I read but when I had the moo waste I liked to buy the real physical books instead. It was good to just hold a book in your hand and flip the pages and while these books didn't have that authentiew book smell thankfully her of them was mouldy. It would have been embarrassing for the person who owhis pce if his books were like that after all. I flipped the first page open, blinking my eyes in surprise as information bsted into my mind as soon as my eyes took in the page. I somehow maet that I upgraded my brain with the Lictors for a moment there. With that upgrade my itive speed was inhuman and my mind trahe letters my eyes saw into usable information in an instant. I could think faster and more now a's not even talk about my new rea speed in my upgraded human form. That was somewhat dragged down by my slow eyesight at first so I had to upgrade that too, as a human it would have been inprehensible how quickly a visual image turned into information in the mind of a lictor. Before a human would register that something was in front of it the lictor would have already reacted. To replicate this I had to scrap my whole neural work along with my eyes and recraft both with my new uanding of biology. I blinked again, reorienting myself. I flipped to the sed page, thehird, fourth, fifth, and then before I noticed the page to turn was the leathery backside of the book. Huh. This would make reading through these books quite a bit faster. I think that book which was more than a thousand pages only took twenty or so minutes and that was only because turning the pages any faster would have had me ripping them by act which I didn't want to do. Even if the book was filled with bullshit it didn't deserve ripping. I liked books, they were a great escape from my normal life bae. By the way, the book was as I'd assumed about the Primarch Sanguinius and his heroic sacrifice at the end of the Horus Heresy. I read through it as I was ied in how people remembered that time almost ten thousand years ter. It was impressive in a way how much they remembered. For text ba earth ten thousand years ago was 8000 Bd Mesopotamia was the most advanced unity of humans back then with their use of the wheel and pottery and agriculture. The wheel would only e in another 4 millennia. I gently put the book down onto my right into my soon-to-be 'read' pile and got back to reading. Some books I discarded once my bullshit-o-meter was close to blowing up and for others I read through every line, abs the information like a sponge. After a time I made a small game out to find where some catastrophe was glossed over or covered up by some sort of bullshit in the history books. It was funny how gaslighted the whole human species was in this gaxy. Soohan I wanted I got to the end of the final book and threw it onto the top of the t 'read' pile. By now night was setting on the p and the st lingering rays of the local star were lost behind the ever-present smog c the city. I couldn't help but wonder, would this pnt that looked utterly devoid of any flora or fauna recover now that humans seemingly got eradicated or was it beyond even that? I was doh this library, on my first round I saw a bunch of other books that might be iing to read but none of them were a must-read. I found a few books with more or less detailed astral maps and made sure to memorize them down to the smallest drop of ink. The history books were utterly disappointing. There wasn't a sitle or war recorded in them where the Imperium lost. When I realized that after the fifth I was someset and as the target of my annoyahe book had most of its pages turned intami to help me calm down, it was at least o look at it like that. I left the library behind myself with a disappointed shake of my head, after hours of reading the only useful stuff I had was the map I'd memorized. The rest were givihe text of the gaxy at best and useless at worst. I stuck close to the side of the tower as I took my time asding the floors this time instead of rushing through it like before. The walls on the side of the spire had many panoramidows ohrough which I looked down on the hive city below. It was somewhat addig and when I imagihe billions of small, insequential humans scurrying along down there I thought how the nobles would have dohe same from up there. Feeling so superior and self-important. I smirked as I thought how they probably ended up just like the rest in those piles of corpses, used up as sacrifices. The Imperium of Man was a fuing to read about but an utter shithole to live in. Living in a hive world like this was hell, you had no worth, no dignity and nhts. You only lived as long as you served your role as a tiny little cog in this malfuning mae. I felt thankful that I wasn't dropped down here as a normal human, even with the way I was right now I had doubts about my ces of surviving this hellish gaxy. Annoyingly I couldn't even look at the stars from here due to the shitty smog. I was curious how different it would look with my upgraded vision, I khey used telescopes with ultraviolet or infrared or ht filters ba Earth to observe the gaxy more accurately and with the help of that generous Lictor I could do that too but without the telescopes. Soon enough I could barely make out the skyline of the city far below me as I he top of the spire. The lights were still up and running here which made me realize that they weren't before this floor. It was obvious, looking ba it but with my night vision, the dark night didn't look any different than a rather cloudy day ba Earth. Even with it though the smog made it hard to see the city from up here with the sparse light. The lights meant security might be up too. I didn't slow my steps but my attention was now bay surroundings instead of drifting through memories. I was trying to make sure I didn't fet the stuff I remembered from Earth while climbing the stairs. Thankfully this building was designed by a single archited its stairs were right atop of each other, making it easy if a miask to make my wards. I strode through the obsely luxurious hallways, I kept myself alert even though I haven't seen nor sensed anything that might have been a security system or something like that. I khe Imperium was backward ad had a hard-on for archaic teology while ahat wao i uff soon found themselves at the wrong end of a bolter. Still, the ck of automatic stuff was staggering to my 21st-tury self. I khey had sensors, radars and tech like that but in the books as far as I knew all of those needed a human to directly trol and interpret them. By the way, the spire was suspiciously , unlike any of the previous buildings I've been in this one had not a single drop of blood. I could still smell the blood in the air along with the stench of rotting human remains so there were a few unfortunate victims here but it was far from how many I'd have assumed. I raised my alerthat bled out of me a bit on the way once I reached the third floor down from the top. The st few floors had huge halls capable of hosting thousands of guests and many smaller guest residences along with very pact servant quarters. I found most of the poor servants in a bloody pile. They barely showed any signs of resistand many of them had small burn wounds on their backs or even on the back of their heads. I ed them all the same but couldn't help but feel a bit of pity for them. It didn't help that most of them were beautiful young girls, the oldest barely twenty. The wounds were distinctly different from the ones I found on the many other corpses before. These spoke of effid pragmatism that I wouldn't associate with people that ripped people to shreds and tore them in half. Laser ohe most on ones in the imperium if I remember correctly. A s-gun or rifle could blow a limb off with a single shot while a s-on could obliterate a human. The smallest ser on was the s-pistol, a small sidearm. These wounds would match those made by a s-pistol I think. Even though this left a sour taste in my mouth I already tried to untahis mystery in my mind. Hmmm, maybe there would be something even more iihan military history. I felt an expet smile form on my face as I left the room behind me. P3t1

  New cover ( still don't own it)The previous one was a random one I found on my drive in a hurry so at least I give credit to the creator for this one. BTW Question: Should I use any important WH lore characters or stay with inal characters? (text: If I use some I might fuck up as I'm unwilling to read through fifty book to uand their characters enough to do them justice)