0p0 Chapter 504 Black Cube
Chapter 504 Black Cube
After taking out the black cube, Hildra did not speak in a hurry. Instead, he opened his pocket watch to check the time and then glanced at Khan's status on the instrument.
There is still plenty of time.
So she simply leaned against Khan's legs, but her eyes never left the device in her hand.
"When did you discover you possessed power?" Hildra asked, but she didn't intend to listen to the Khan's answer. Instead, she continued:
"I was born with this power. My earliest memory is of being trapped in a small, hot and damp house. I wanted to get out but couldn't find the exit, so I broke through the wall. When I walked out of the house, I saw countless people kneeling before me. However, when I looked back, I didn't see any house, only the body of a woman."
"Before I even left that house, I could hear voices from the void. Some were muffled whispers, but others were distinct. I gained a lot of knowledge from them."
"Your situation is similar to my brother's," the Khan said. "But there are no free gifts in the void, only traps."
"But no one taught me this at the time. Neither the people who served me nor the voices from the void wanted me to listen and feel more deeply."
"The people of that planet therefore worship me as their Holy Son and High Priest. Every day they dig out a hundred human hearts and offer them to me, even though I never ask for any offerings. I have never performed any sacrifices, and I have made no contribution to them. It is only because I am more powerful than them that they fear and respect me."
"Then a group of interstellar pirates invaded that planet. I drove them away, then I hid on the pirates' spaceship and left with them. Later, I became their leader."
"I've been a pirate for about fifty or sixty years. I've led my fleet on plundering expeditions, but I've never encountered an opponent worth mentioning. In many battles, my subordinates handle them without me even having to fight. However, one time, when I was robbing a fleet of Black Bean Sprouts, I finally encountered a tough enemy. I put in some effort to clear the area. I originally thought their ship must have some incredible treasure, but in the end, all I found was this."
"According to my research, this seems to be a device belonging to the most disgusting of the Dark Eldar, the Haemonchi. Several souls are imprisoned within. I tried to listen to their screams, but I couldn't detect anything of value." Hildra tossed the restraining device in her hand like a ball. "Later, I roughly understood that this is a device that preserves secrets. There are secrets that the Dark Eldar cannot know, dare not know, but even more dare not forget. So, they imprisoned the souls of those who still know these secrets within. The endless torture has driven the souls within insane, and this is exactly what the Haemonchi wanted. The secrets have been disrupted, but they still exist."
"This piqued my interest, so I began to delve deeper. However, as I delved deeper, I heard the whispers in the void gradually turn into screams." At this point, Hildra sneered, "Those guys in the void are also afraid of what's in here."
"But having something screaming in my ears all the time wasn't a good thing, so I began looking for a way to quiet the noise. One year, my fleet passed by Tessaril, which was still a barren land at the time. I found that both the screams in the box and the screams in my ears had weakened, so I concluded that what I was looking for must be there, so I ordered my fleet to station there and build a port."
"I found a mechanical tomb on an insignificant satellite. The devices inside could suppress the screams from the void, so I began to study them. I continued to go deeper, passing through one door after another. Later, I discovered that this tomb was actually alive, and it hid the entrance to an alien kingdom. Deep inside the tomb, I met the owner of the tomb. When I walked out of the tomb again, the screams no longer bothered me, and I had a general idea of the direction."
Hildra casually skipped over her encounter with the alien dynasty and her eventual alliance with them. The real situation was obviously not that simple. The alien leader would never have had much affection for her as an intruder at the beginning. There must have been countless suspicions and conflicts in the middle, and perhaps many unspoken exchanges of interests, before they finally reached an agreement.
But the Khan didn't ask any further questions. Except for the initial one out of concern or warning, he remained silent even when Hildra was clearly hiding something. He was a very good listener, able to let the narrator fully describe what was on his mind.
Some listeners, however, will directly express their doubts and speculations about what the narrator is saying. This type of listener can easily interrupt the narrator's train of thought, but can also often help the narrator notice details that he or she has not noticed before. If the narrator is discussing a problem, this type of active listener is more helpful. If the narrator has no intention of discussing something, a silent listener like Khan is undoubtedly more popular.
"I wanted to leave immediately, but I was stunned when I emerged from the tomb. In the less than a hundred years since I entered the tomb, the group of space pirates I brought with me had all degenerated into technological barbarians due to internal strife. So I had to gather them together again and train and teach them. Originally, they were just a ragtag group. As pirates, they just had to obey orders, be loyal, and not capsize the ship. But if I want to carry out my plan, a ragtag group of people may not be enough."
"This process took me another three hundred years, mainly because it was very tedious to build a combat-capable fleet from mining with my shabby equipment. This was considered fast. Just as I was about to embark on the expedition, a birdman came to me from nowhere. He said he was my guide and had always protected me, and now he wanted me to return to him."
"Then I had a fight with that guy. I didn't have any prejudice against him, but I thought that since he said he was my guardian, he should be stronger than me. In the end, he couldn't resist fighting and was beaten away in a few moves. However, the fight with him damaged my fleet, and it took more than ten years to repair the warships. When I was preparing to set off for the second time, the void near Tessaril... The Warp blew up a storm of unprecedented scale. Later I learned that the range of the storm was not only the Tessaril sector, but the entire universe."
"Then the storm dissipated, and Tessarel received a visitor, your father."