He was a ten-year-old Boy, being cut open by machines.
Despite being in a deep slumber, his body still twitched, and his painful dreams and unyielding nerves reacted to the rejection caused by the surgery.
They began with pain—pain that poured in, pain that pierced to the bone.
The pain was boundless, like a churning ocean surging towards the sky, ebbing and flowing, devouring time.
Seconds stretched into hours, hours fractured and compressed back into minutes, past and future dissolved into the present, tearing and spreading.
Red clouds billowed and rose in the grey marrow of his brain, and the pain repeatedly turned into a stinging sensation; one moment they vibrated like knife cuts, the next they transformed into flames engulfing him.
He could hear nothing; the pain severed all his other senses, leaving him with nothing but a wheel of torment endlessly rolling and grinding on an infinite expanse.
He should have been broken; they wanted him to submit, to surrender, to yield to the red ocean and its towering waves.
He couldn't even remember who they were, but it didn't matter.
The key to everything was that he could not give up, he could not yield, so the pain continued, so he persevered.
Then it all ended.
He cried out at the abrupt end of the process, a cold emptiness surged into him, and then he ascended into a haze, tumbling from one end to the other.
Perhaps this was death, without any pain, the end of suffering, nothingness.
And then from the void came sounds, hundreds of thousands of voices, whispering with him as he drifted through the void, just beyond the reach of hearing.
Then colors replaced the darkness, and images flooded in, all the colors he had ever seen in his life, cut into strips and fragments.
Sometimes he thought he could even make out patterns and identify shapes, as if looking at a painting through a shimmering curtain of water, but then the pattern shattered, and he was back in a colorful vortex.
The only remaining consciousness Soshiyan had told him that he was undergoing surgery without anesthetic injections, which would normally be enough to kill an adult.
But he told himself that to survive, he had to endure.
— — — — — —
He was a twelve-year-old Boy, being reshaped.
Two strong hearts beat in his opened chest; the second new organ, smaller than the new heart, would 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.
The Boy trembled again, his eyes opening for a moment, something cold touching the skin beneath his eyes.
His vision began to clear, and he tried to blink again.
A deity shook his head at the Boy, a grey cowl covering hard muscles, a starburst-shaped tattoo covering his chest and neck, his eyes were grey and serene.
"Never do that—"
A voice sounded nearby, soft but firm.
"Your eyelids are held open; trying to blink too hard will tear them."
The Boy tried to resist, but was soon enveloped by a deep drowsiness.
He felt, for just a moment, as if he was sinking into the deep ocean of his home world.
He obeyed, because the chemicals in his blood compelled him to obey.
— — — — — —
He was a fourteen-year-old Boy, destined to be different.
A third organ was implanted in his chest not far from the new heart; while the osteo-enhancer altered his bones to grow with new minerals, the musculature-enhancer would generate large amounts of hormones to strengthen his muscles.
The Apothecary stitched the Boy's medical wounds, then casually moved a yellow lever.
The restraints holding the Boy upright released, and he tumbled forward to the ground.
He lay there for a few seconds, breathing heavily, then propped himself up onto his knees.
"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 half of his face twitching.
"My name is for myself alone, not for your use."
The Boy wanted to retort, but his mouth was dry.
"Most would ask me why."
The Apothecary shook his head.
"I know why."
The Boy said stubbornly, and the Apothecary raised an eyebrow.
"You think I'm a failure."
The Apothecary shook his head again, hesitated, then pulled him up.
"No."
He replied, leading the Boy towards the rest of the hall.
Beneath the frosted ceiling, rows of metal racks stretched out, each with a humanoid figure standing in the middle, naked, bound by several coils of ceramite.
Numerous helmets covered their faces, the same style as the one the Apothecary had removed from the Boy's head.
Their bodies twitched when light flickered at the edge of their vision, and numerous tubes connected to their arms and chests.
The Boy could see veins bulging beneath the skin where the needles were inserted; he rubbed his arms, feeling the sting of those wounds, and many of the figures leaned loosely against the restraints, blood covering their bare skin.
Numerous Servitors in red cowls and cyclopean masks moved among the rows of racks, pulling loose corpses from the restraints and discarding them onto numerous transport carts.
The first stage alone was a one-in-a-hundred survival rate.
This cold reality surfaced in the Boy's mind; the Apothecary had told him, but he had been skeptical.
"That's what a failure looks like."
The Apothecary pointed to a figure that had fallen from a rack as its bindings were released; the youth was still alive, but barely.
Blood flowed from his mouth, his eyes rolled back, his arms and legs flailed wildly trying to stand, then he was attacked by the thralls, the youth frenzied like a beast.
Eventually, one of them inserted a thick tube into the back of the youth's head, followed by a crushing bang and the sound of bone breaking, and then the youth fell, blood leaking from a neat hole in his skull.
"We don't want you to fail; we want you to succeed."
"I will not fail!"
The Boy roared, deeply stung by the sight.
The Apothecary looked down at the Boy, and a hint of satisfaction flashed in his grey eyes.
"Good."
By now, this Boy was no longer human.
This night's work was for this goal; time would tell how different that Boy would become.
— — — — — —
He was a fifteen-year-old Boy, a New God waiting to rise.
Most of the time he could feel them cutting him, but he was numb; they brutally dug out large chunks of flesh and then replaced them with fresh organs.
Before this, he had already understood why his surgery could not use anesthetic.
Because he was special, his transformation surgery was different from others; typically a Space Marine's surgery involved nineteen stages, but Soshiyan's surgery actually had twenty stages, with a step called grey marrow that had to be performed while he was fully conscious.
When they finished, the pain slowly returned, like a bundle of wire coiling into his chest.
He showed no trace of that pain, for he had already learned something beyond the reach of mortals, something brought by the implanted new organs and hypno-indoctrination.
"You are taking it very well, Boy."
The grey-eyed Apothecary said with a smile, as he examined a series of fixed sutures aligned along the center of the Boy's chest.
"Even having come this far, some still die from this."
"Most."
The Boy's voice was hoarse, his vocal cords were being altered.
The Apothecary looked up at him, his grey eyes staring directly, and the Boy stared back unblinking.
"Most will die before all this ends."
"Yes, they will die."
The structure of his thoughts changed, he could feel it; messages and experiences became clearer, the gap between thought and action narrowed, and some emotions withered and faded.
Memories of what had happened in the past drifted into the distance; he could still see them, but they felt like something that never truly belonged to him.
At the same time, new memories filled his mind, some clear, some blurry and mixed; he knew more than he ever had before, but he didn't understand how.
The machine they clamped onto his head did this, he knew clearly, pouring changes into his mind like liquid metal into a mold.
The pain got worse, but his ability to endure them also grew; the pain from the surgery and hypno-indoctrination became many islands in a vast, deep ocean.
Time lost its meaning, life became an experience of many different torments.
Aside from 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's adjustment schedule, repeating remote commands.
Everything seemed so lifeless.