Chapter 316: Three Relics
With several thousand items in the reliquary, not every one of them could be a fake. Kian found two that passed.
The first was called Flesh Given for the People — a small knife, crudely made, the kind of thing you'd barely look twice at under normal circumstances.
Its history was this: in the early years of the agri-world's development, before the infrastructure had fully taken hold, a famine struck. People died in enormous numbers.
The Planetary Bishop at the time appealed to the noble houses to open their granaries and share their stores with the starving population.
The noble houses did what noble houses do in famines — they hoarded.
The Bishop spent himself making personal appeals, visiting estates, arguing, pleading. Nothing worked.
The famine deepened. Deaths climbed into the millions. Finally, out of options, the Bishop took matters to their logical extreme.
He built a fire beneath the Emperor's statue in the cathedral square, set up a cooking pot, and began cutting his own flesh off with the little knife — dropping the pieces into the pot, and feeding what came out to the people gathered there.
He knew his body couldn't feed a population numbering in the hundreds of millions. That wasn't the point. The point was to make the nobles look at themselves.
The Planetary Bishop — the spiritual face of the entire world — was carving himself apart to feed the poor. Could they really go on doing nothing?
Apparently, yes. The noble houses decided he was performing — a political stunt designed to generate pressure. Not only did they refuse to open their stores, they sent servants to mock him publicly.
So he kept cutting.
First his hands. Then his legs. Then his chest.
Even at that stage, survival was still medically possible — Imperial medicine, applied aggressively, could bring a person back from almost anything as long as they were still technically alive. A man reduced to a skeleton could theoretically be reconstructed.
The nobles watched the whole thing and still concluded it was theatre.
The Bishop bled to death.
Whether he'd started it as a gesture or as a genuine act of self-sacrifice, he'd finished it fully. He'd achieved the thing his name now stood for: Flesh Given for the People.
What his death failed to accomplish was making the nobles relent. What it did accomplish was something rather more significant — the starving population finally understood, with absolute clarity, that mercy wasn't coming from above. They rose up.
The famine-year Governor was eventually pulled apart, which is a different story.
The knife the Bishop had used, saturated with the collective resistance and grief of hundreds of millions of hungry people, had become something genuine. The system's assessment when Kian held it: Priceless.
The second item was called The Primarch's Warrant — a piece of sheepskin parchment barely the size of a palm, ragged and burned at the edges.
The story held that some Primarch had issued it to the planet's founding Governor as formal authorisation to settle and develop the world.
The planet had seen many uprisings over its history. Rulers had come and gone. The document had passed through fire and war enough times to reduce it to this fragment.
But whatever remained of it was the seed-text of a world with a population in the tens of billions. The accumulated faith that had passed through it over centuries was remarkable — concentrated enough to register in the system as: Priceless.
Two items with checkmarks. That was the whole collection.
He needed a third. Confessor Pious came to mind immediately as his next stop. He said goodbye to the Bishop with a meaningful look.
"These are irreplaceable treasures, and you're simply giving them to me?"
The Bishop smiled and nodded.
"You made a blade burn with the Emperor's own psychic fire. You are His instrument. This reliquary isn't mine — it belongs to the Emperor. If you are His instrument, you have every right to draw from it as needed."
Kian considered this for a moment, then made a promise.
"I won't forget this. If there's ever anything I can do for you — come find me."
Then he got in the car and drove down to the Mid-Hive cathedral.
He found Confessor Pious in the nave and explained what he was looking for, without explaining why.
"Warrior of the Emperor — may I ask what you need a relic for?"
The request had caught Pious slightly off-guard. Kian standing on his doorstep asking for sacred objects wasn't a situation the Confessor had anticipated.
Kian hesitated. Pious was, by any honest assessment, a good man — genuinely so, from any angle you looked at him. Kian didn't want to lie to him. But the Sanctum's upgrade mechanics weren't something he wanted to explain to anyone, and he could feel the complications multiplying before he'd even opened his mouth.
He stood there, not quite answering.
Pious watched him think it over. Then, without a word, the old man rose from his chair, took his staff down from the wall — the same one he'd once used to beat a Chaos sorcerer to death — and walked it over to Kian.
He held it out.
"This staff, so the record says, once served as a reliquary for a holy text on a devout Ecclesiarchy world. For hundreds of years, priests carried it during their ministry — using it to hold the scripture aloft while they read the Emperor's truth to the people.
If you're asking about relics, this is the only one I have."
Kian took it and opened the system. Priceless. The checkmark was already there.
He looked at Pious, slightly embarrassed.
"You're really just giving this to me? Something this valuable?"
Pious smiled, warm and without reservation.
"Warrior of the Emperor, I can see your soul. It shines with gold. You're standing in front of me like a smaller edition of the Emperor Himself.
I don't know what you need it for. But I know it matters to you, and I know you'll use it rightly."
The trust in it was so unguarded that Kian nearly said it all — nearly just told the old man everything, the Sanctum, the system, all of it.
Pious seemed to read exactly what was about to happen. He blinked, very gently, and shook his head.
"A soul that carries too many secrets grows heavy. I'm old, son. I don't want any more weight.
You're young. Carrying weight will make you stronger. But don't burden an old man who's already halfway into the ground."
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