I jogged slowly through the building, following my inhuman sense of smell to any room that might be interesting or one of the personal rooms of the governor.

Although I didn't hope for much I was still underwhelmed by the automatic defences put in place here. Yeah I know, abominable intelligence and all that but a simple if(sensor=1) trigger explosion; couldn't be that hard? Right? This was still a science fiction universe with humanity 38 thousand years later than my own.

I knew they regressed rather hard and had the dark age of technology with killer AIs running around but damnit. I kicked the latest object which caused my irritation to spike. This grotesque piece of crap dropped on my head when I opened a door.

I was initially ecstatic that they could make an automatic sensor but then realized after looking through it that it was this moron. I kicked the grotesque mix of machine and lobotomized human still trying to grab onto the lasgun next to it despite missing all of its limbs for good measure and to make myself clear.

"Please tell me they at least have a skitarii stuffed in here somewhere," I looked pleadingly at the foaming servitor but it just flailed around, "Yeah I thought so," I nodded and patted its ugly ass head.

"I'll put you out of your misery," tendrils extended from my arm and pierced through the ugly hideous thing, ravaging its body and then expanding to absorb it. The cybernetics left behind were mucky and far below the standard of what I would put into my body but they were at least clean of blood.

My soul vision which was superimposed above my normal one, saw a single slight light blink out of existence in the dark waters below me, my sight cleared right after the Lictor died by the way but I still wasn't willing to mess with this thing. As long as I didn't fuck with the disturbing ocean it shouldn't fuck with me.

I knew I was a rather high grade in the physical department, with my biomatter replication and biomanipulation which gave me absurd healing but I didn't know anything about how my soul would fare against the abominations hiding beneath the veil of reality.

There were a few options I thought of though, firstly I could be a Blank, a person with a negative soul which repelled the warp from itself but I didn't think that was likely. The others were the different grades on the psychic scale, it went from being a psychic amoeba, like those blue weirdoes with vaginas on their foreheads, to a psychic rat like average humans that were somewhat useful for being food (for demons) but they'd rather find something tastier and this was the same with low-grade psyker. They had shit powers, were hated and sometimes fed to the emperor but demons found them a bit more tasty than the average human.

Then came the ones that were like an open invitation for any and all demons to soul-rape you for a few millennia for fun before eating you like Alpha and Beta-level psykers, there was also a brief gap between the two where most of the most well-known psykers were at. Just below greater demons going out of their way to eat you while also having rather potent powers.

Most of the people in this category were still fed to the emperor or just killed as controlling psychic power while a horde of demons gnawing at your soul can be rather hard and most people fail at it.

I wasn't sure which one I'd be but I'm perfectly happy with the way I am, though I wouldn't say no to becoming a blank. If one of those uglies in the water could reach out and grab at me I was probably fucked no matter how powerful my material body is.

It was a constant worry in the back of my mind that I was failing to suppress and my thoughts went spiralling like they'd just done, not that I could do anything about it. I was scared okay? I've liked reading horror short stories and more than a few involve soul-vore, I was hoping by being a nice little soul just sitting outside of the water they'd opt for easier food.

I hoped, but the worry remained, fucking demons. This galaxy was so fucked up, no the whole universe was fucked up, the other galaxies are supposedly filled with flesh-eating bugs and loads of meathead orcs.

Well, I couldn't say that the appeal of it to me personally was lost on me, both were rather fond of direct melee fighting while not wearing too much armor so they might as well post a sticker saying 'free meal' on their foreheads.

Maybe I should just leave this galaxy the first time I get the opportunity to, fuck fighting Necrons, space elves, blue assholes, and whatever you could call the imperium.

No, I can't give up before even trying. At the very least I have to get a sample of each species, I was sure an Eldar would give me some idea about how to upgrade my human form further, I might as well give myself ears like theirs in this form, I think it'd look cool on me.

My daydreaming came to an end as I poked my head inside a room stinking of iron, mold, rust and oil, so much fucking oil.

Yep just as I thought, it was the room housing a bunch of machines. I wasn't a mechanic or an engineer but I knew I'd be crying if I was, these things were so horrendously ugly and impractical that it hurt to look at. The human obsession with circumventing using AI and their technological degradation left them with this mess.

If I remember right only tech priests could even interface with machines so I had no chance of getting information out of these, no monitor, no mouse and keyboard just a bunch of blocky machines covered in holy oil so their machine spirits won't throw a fit.

It worked somehow and shitty machines like this carried a galaxy-spanning human empire on their backs. If they were as shit as they looked humanity would have fallen long ago so they can't be that bad.

I narrowed my eyes at the thing, it had gears, why did a computer have gears? Anyway, I couldn't associate this with the tech needed to run this planet even but these people could make working spaceships. We couldn't make those back in my time, how could these weirdoes with a toaster fetish manage it?

I pulled my head back and headed for another room, this one was giving me a headache, good to know I could still get those.

I disregarded dozens of rooms only giving a few minutes to one or two which had some books in them but I only found a recipe book and other similar things. I only glimpsed at a few of the recipes and even my alien stomach was recoiling.

These people were crazy, just putting all the spices you could buy on your food that didn't make it good or luxurious and that was disregarding the fact that they ate parts of animals that were better left unnamed. So all in all it was a weird mix of Indian and Scottish cuisine.

"Okay, let's head up a floor, I learned more than I wanted on this one," I murmured to myself, I wasn't sure if it was my narcissism enjoying the sound of my newer voice or if I was just going crazy from being alone for so long.

I expected many things to be used as a defense in a building as important as this, automatically locking doors being among my guesses. What I didn't think was that they would use two-meter-thick reinforced ferrocrete doors that were more like walls that dropped down from the ceiling.

I wasn't bothering to hide by now, fully relying on my Lictor form to take the beating should I step into a trap but this was just plain annoying. I had to spend the next hour digging through the walls as there was one every fifty or so meters, sealing off my way forwards.

I wasn't even to blame for these being here as they were already down by the time I got to the floor. Not that I think they did much based on the molten one leading to the next floor.

It was grating and monotonous and it didn't help that it was fruitless in the end as the whole floor was just luxurious bedrooms, swimming pools, massage rooms, saunas and everything you could imagine.

I made sure to test the strength of my Lictor Form on all of the shitty marble statues that depicted the same man, the governor, based on the obnoxious title written on the base of each and every one of them. I felt a bit better about my own budding narcissism, compared to this dude I was the epitome of humility.

I made my way up, through the molten drop--door and headed up to the next floor. If I remember right this was the second to last one, with the governor's personal living space being either here or on the top floor.

If I was a betting girl I'd bet on his office being right on the top of the spire, allowing him to be on the top of the world both in power, prestige and physically.

Once I got to exploring the floor I realized I wouldn't be finding much of use here, this was evidently the place where the people guarding the governor made their heroic last stand and the scene I saw the moment I entered was quite evident of that fact.

Bodies were strewn around, ripped, clawed, and chewed apart with those being just a few of the many grotesque ends the unfortunate humans here had to endure. The furniture was gone, the walls were demolished and I'd have questioned how the floor still had the structural integrity to hold up the rest of the building were it not for six huge pillars still standing strong.

Blood, vomit and entrails covered the brutalized interior of the floor and I had a difficult time trying to figure out what kind of floor this could have been.

I was a bit confused about why the bodies were left unmolested after their deaths unlike all of the other bodies I found so far. I thought they would have collected them all for those rituals.

While it was surely interesting this was also a fine meal that has been left behind just for me so I wasn't going to let it go bad despite it being a bit rotten. Unlike with the bodies down a few floors, I had a hard time empathizing with patches of blood and scattered entrails, the remains didn't even resemble humans in any way so I was only sure they were humans once I absorbed them.

My whole body recoiled in disgust as everything was absorbed into me, what was this? I felt like someone just shoved the most disgusting piece of dung straight into my nose while shoving a sock down my throat that hasn't been washed in years.

The worst part was that I wasn't feeling it through my nose or my mouth or even my body, the disgust resounded throughout my whole being and I felt sick for the first time I'd arrived here.

It was my soul, along with the biomass I had absorbed a small part of the dark sea also floated up towards my soul. It was darker than the water and it carried a feeling of uncontrollable chaos with a tint of blood and death.

It wasn't a soul and neither was it a demon, I knew how those looked, I'd spent that much time staring into the Abyss but it was unmistakably corrupted by demons of the blood god if my feelings weren't tricking me.

The murky water that I knew to be warp energy spread over the skin of my soul form, I was still unable to do much else than flail in panic but unlike how I expected it to seep into me and corrupt my soul, slowly driving me insane or worse it was the opposite.

It slowly lost its disgusting tint and along with it I regained control of myself, I realized barely a few seconds had passed but it felt like minutes to me and yet when I refocused on my soul self the small patch of energy was coating it like a second skin but it didn't have any of the feelings I'd associated with the warp.

It was clear and pure, an energy of the soul and nothing else, left unmolested by the infinite monsters of the immaterial. I marveled at it a bit but I was snapped back into my material body by my instincts telling me I had absorbed something new, it had traces of humanity in it but it was both more and less.

It had faint signs of the greatness that once was but it was buried under many millennia of degradation.

It wasn't much and it was far from a full sample, with this small one being once a few liters of blood mixed in with all the gore.

"Now let's see what the hell I'd just eaten," I growled out, I delved into the information collected from it and felt my frown dissolve into a grin.

"Thanks for your donation," I giggled a bit.