Chapter Seventy-One: The Loyal Lord of Midnight

Xu Feng and the other transmigrators had searched for four hours straight. They combed through the entire sector, even sweeping through several neighboring areas as well, but still failed to locate the Midnight Lord they sought.

“Where could he have gone?” Xu Feng muttered to himself as he dragged along a recently subdued cultist, staring up at the underhive’s ceiling with its tangled web of metal pipes.

The cultist in his grasp was still alive and struggling desperately.

Just as they were about to give up hope, a figure emerged from the darkness.

The moment Xu Feng saw the silhouette, he instantly hurled the writhing cultist aside. The unfortunate man crashed into the wall of a nearby building and died on impact.

The figure was none other than the Midnight Lord they had been searching for, encased in Terminator armor. Xu Feng and the other transmigrators instinctively raised their bolt guns the instant they saw him.

Yet they did not open fire, for the Midnight Lord raised his hands in a gesture of peace, signaling that he did not wish to fight. He had watched from the shadows for some time, only stepping out once he was certain these Space Marines were loyal to the Imperium.

“Loyal brothers, which legion are you from?” the Midnight Lord inquired, fixing his gaze on Xu Feng, who was clearly the leader. His voice carried the weight of centuries.

He had been lost in the warp for so long that he did not recognize the paint or patterns of their power armor.

Xu Feng hesitated, noting the ancient lightning emblem on the Midnight Lord’s chest, and the nature of his question. It gave Xu Feng the impression that this Midnight Lord was a veteran from the days of the Great Crusade, hailing from Terra itself.

“The Twenty-First Legion, the ‘Stellar Crossers’,” Xu Feng replied. He made up the name on the spot.

“The Twenty-First Legion?” The Midnight Lord was bewildered by Xu Feng’s answer. He had no memory of a twenty-first legion in the Imperium, and the style of these Astartes’ armor was entirely unfamiliar to him.

“Are you a Terran-born veteran?” This time, it was Xu Feng’s turn to question. He suspected the Midnight Lord was not a Chaos Space Marine, for his Terminator armor bore no taint or iconography of Chaos.

“Yes, I am a Terran-born Midnight Lord,” the stranger nodded in response. He understood why Xu Feng had guessed his origin; the thunderhawk on his chest was unmistakable.

“What is the state of the Imperium now? Has the Great Heresy been suppressed?” the Midnight Lord suddenly asked with urgency.

“What? Which era are you from? The Heresy ended ten thousand years ago!” Xu Feng exclaimed, growing more convinced of his earlier suspicion.

This Midnight Lord was indeed a relic from the time of the Great Crusade, a Terran-born veteran. Judging by his words and his actions against the Chaos cultists, he seemed to be a loyalist—a Midnight Lord who had never turned traitor.

“It’s been ten thousand years? I’ve been trapped in the warp for ten millennia?” The Midnight Lord was visibly shaken by what Xu Feng told him, stunned by the vast gulf of time that had passed in the material universe while he was adrift in the warp.

Through further conversation, Xu Feng gradually learned the Midnight Lord’s story.

His name was Rozesbynes, a loyalist among the Midnight Lords, once a member of Konrad Curze’s elite Black Guard. As for how he had come to the present day from the warp, that was another story.

When the Heresy broke out, Rozesbynes, a psyker, had foreseen the coming catastrophe through a prophecy. As a Terran-born veteran, he went to aid other loyalist legions as soon as the Heresy began.

Later, when Konrad Curze was assassinated, Rozesbynes, as one of his gene-sons, was overwhelmed by the death of his primarch. The emotional turmoil caused his psychic powers to spiral out of control, and he was cast into the warp.

He wandered there for ages, only returning to realspace a few days ago. After emerging, he discovered his psychic abilities had grown even stronger.

He happened to reappear in the lower hive of West Syphos Hive City, where he encountered Chaos-worshiping cultists and set about purging them in his own way.

Xu Feng led Rozesbynes out of the underhive and had him brought before Wang Ming, who was locked in a fierce battle with the Necrons.

At the Imperial encampment on the stony wasteland, Rozesbynes was presented to a gene-sire he had never seen before.

Following a sustained campaign of persuasion by Wang Ming, Rozesbynes was finally convinced to join the “Stellar Crossers” Legion as a loyal Midnight Lord.

In truth, Rozesbynes had nowhere else to go. No one would accept an Astartes from a traitor legion. If the Inquisition discovered him, he would be hunted relentlessly as a heretic, unless he managed to hide with the Deathwatch for a few decades.

Wang Ming, for his part, valued Rozesbynes for his psychic prowess. None of the transmigrators in the “Stellar Crossers” Legion possessed psychic abilities, so Wang Ming was not about to let such a rare talent slip through his fingers.

After inducting Rozesbynes, Wang Ming provided him with a suit of power armor matching that of the other transmigrators—for wearing Midnight Lord colors in the Imperium in this era was tantamount to suicide.

He also granted Rozesbynes the title of Chief Librarian, as he was the only psyker in the entire legion.

Thus did Rozesbynes join the unyielding battle against the Necrons.