Chapter 3: New Recruits (Part 2)

He is a ten-year-old child, and he is being cut open by machines.

Although he has fallen into a deep sleep, his body still twitches; his painful dreams and sleepless nerves are reacting to the rejection caused by the surgery.

It began with pain—a pouring, marrow-deep pain.

The pain was boundless, like a churning ocean surging toward the horizon, rolling back and forth, devouring time.

Seconds stretched and expanded into hours; hours shattered and compressed back into minutes. Past and future dissolved into the present, tearing and spreading.

Red clouds billowed and drifted through the gray matter of his brain. The pain turned into stinging sensations again and again; one second they vibrated like knife cuts, the next they transformed into flames enveloping him.

He could hear nothing at all. The pain severed all his other senses, leaving him with nothing but the wheels of torment, constantly rolling and crushing him at the edge of the infinite.

He should have been broken. They wanted him to submit, to surrender, to yield to the red ocean and its giant waves.

He couldn't even remember who they were, but that didn't matter.

The key to everything was that he could not give up; he could not yield. So the pain continued, and so he persisted.

Then, it all ended.

He roared at the sudden conclusion of the process. A cold sense of emptiness flooded into him, and then he soared into the haze, tumbling from one end to the other.

Perhaps this was death—no pain, the end of suffering, nothingness.

Then, from the nothingness came voices, hundreds and thousands of them, whispering as they accompanied him through the void, existing just beyond the reach of his hearing.

Then, colors replaced the pitch black. Images came one after another—every color he had ever seen in his life, sliced into fragments and pieces.

Sometimes he thought he could even see patterns and identify shapes, as if watching a picture through a sliding curtain of water, but then the patterns shattered, and he returned to the colorful vortex.

The only remaining consciousness of Soshiel told him that he was undergoing surgery without anesthesia, which would normally be enough to kill a grown man.

But he told himself: to survive, he must endure.

——————

He is a twelve-year-old child, and he is being reshaped.

Two strong hearts beat within his opened chest. The second, new organ is smaller than the new heart; it will alter the growth of his bones, stimulating his skeleton to absorb unnatural minerals throughout his life.

Many hands, some human, some mechanical, cut and stitched the boy’s body without a tremor, implanting new organs within.

The boy trembled again. His eyes opened for a moment, and something cold touched the skin beneath his eyes.

His vision began to clear, and he tried to blink again.

A god-like figure shook his head at the boy. Gray robes covered hard muscles, and a star-shaped tattoo covered his chest and neck. His eyes were gray and steady.

"Don't do that—"

A voice sounded beside him, soft but very firm.

"Your eyelids are fixed open. Trying to blink too hard will tear them off."

The boy tried to resist, but was soon enveloped by a thick drowsiness.

He felt, for just an instant, as if he were sinking into the deep, dark ocean of his home world.

He obeyed, because the chemicals in his blood forced him to obey.

——————

He is a fourteen-year-old child, destined to be born different.

A third organ was implanted in his chest, not far from the new heart. While the ossmodula altered his bones to rely on new minerals, the biscopea generated a massive amount of hormones to strengthen his muscles.

The Apothecary stitched up the boy’s surgical wounds, then casually moved a yellow wrench.

The restraints keeping the boy’s body upright were released, and he slumped forward onto the floor.

He lay there for a few seconds, breathing heavily, then braced himself to kneel.

"What..."

He began to ask, but the pain in his throat and lungs stopped him.

"What is your name?"

The Apothecary paused, looking down at him, the tattoo on the right side of his face twitching.

"My name is for myself alone, not for your use."

The boy wanted to retort, but his mouth was dry and empty.

"Most ask me why."

The Apothecary shook his head.

"I know why," the boy said stubbornly. The Apothecary raised an eyebrow.

"You think I am a failure."

The Apothecary shook his head again, hesitated, then pulled him up.

"No," he replied, leading the boy toward the rest of the hall.

Under the frost-covered ceiling, rows of metal racks stretched out. In the center of each rack stood a human figure, completely naked, bound by several loops of ceramite.

Numerous helmets covered their faces, the same style as the one the Apothecary had taken off the boy’s head.

As light flickered at the edge of their vision, their bodies twitched, and numerous tubes were connected to their arms and chests.

The boy could see veins bulging under the skin where needles were inserted. He rubbed his own arms, feeling the stinging of those wounds. Many of those figures leaned limply against their restraints, blood covering their bare skin.

Numerous Servitors in red robes and one-eyed masks moved through the rows of racks, pulling limp corpses from the restraints and discarding them onto carts.

The first stage was already a one-in-a-hundred survival rate.

This cold reality appeared in the boy’s mind. The Apothecary had told him, but he had once doubted it.

"That is what a failure looks like."

The Apothecary pointed to a figure that had fallen from a rack due to the release of its bindings. The youth was still alive, but only just.

Blood flowed from his mouth, his eyes rolled back, and his arms and legs flailed wildly as he tried to stand. Then he was attacked by the Servitors; the youth was as frantic as a wild beast.

Finally, one of them shoved a thick tube into the back of the youth’s head. A sound of a pneumatic punch and bone breaking followed, and the youth collapsed, blood leaking from a neat hole in his skull.

"We do not want you to fail. We want you to succeed."

"I will not fail!" the boy growled, the scene stinging him deeply.

The Apothecary looked down at the boy, and a trace of satisfaction flashed in his gray eyes.

"Good."

At this moment, this child was no longer human.

The night’s work was to achieve this goal. Time would tell how different that boy would become.

——————

He is a fifteen-year-old child, a new god waiting to rise.

When they cut him, he could feel it most of the time, but he was already numb. They were very rough, digging out large chunks of flesh and replacing them with fresh organs.

Before this, he had already learned why his surgery could not be injected with anesthesia.

Because he was special. His transformation surgery was different from everyone else’s. Usually, Astartes surgery had nineteen stages, but Soshiel’s surgery was actually twenty. There was a step called the [Ossmodula/Progenoid] process that had to be performed while he was fully conscious.

When they finished, the pain returned slowly, as if a ball of wire had been tied into his chest.

He didn't show a hint of that pain, because he already knew things beyond the reach of mortals, brought about by the newly implanted organs and hypnotic indoctrination.

"You have taken it well, child," the gray-eyed Apothecary said with a smile, while inspecting the series of surgical staples aligned along the center of the boy’s chest.

"Even having come this far, some still die from this."

"Most," the boy said, his voice hoarse. His vocal cords were being altered.

The Apothecary looked up at him, his gray eyes staring straight ahead, and the boy stared back without blinking.

"Most will die before all of this is over."

"Yes, they will die."

The structure of his thoughts had changed; he could feel it. Information and experience became clearer, the gap between thought and action narrowed, and some emotions withered and faded away.

His memories of the past drifted into the distance. He could still see them, but they felt like something that had never truly belonged to him.

At the same time, new memories filled his mind—some clear, some blurred and mixed. He knew more than the person he had been before, but he didn't understand how this could be.

The machine they clamped onto his head had done this; he knew it clearly, pouring changes into his mind like liquid metal poured into a mold.

The pain became worse, but his ability to endure it also grew. The pain from the surgery and the hypnotic indoctrination became islands in a vast, deep ocean.

Time lost its meaning; life became a series of different sufferings experienced.

Except for the Apothecary who occasionally flashed through the mist of pain, he had seen no other living person. The only words he heard came from the Servitors who moved his limbs according to the next stage of the schedule, repeating remote-controlled commands.

Everything seemed so lifeless.