Quadrillions lived under His regime.

Trillions prayed to His name.

Billions armed under His armies.

Millions die each day in His glory.

Hundred thousands of wars fought for His Ideals.

Ten thousand golden demigods protect His palace.

Thousands of psykers sacrificed to his corpse daily.

Hundreds of planets sacrificed regularly in preservation for His empire.

Nine loyal sons, now only two, in service to the One.

The Emperor sat immobile on His Golden Throne. The God-Emperor, The Corpse-Emperor. The Carrion Lord and Anathema. The Master of Mankind or The Omnissiah.

Thousands more titles are engraved in forever stones to preserve his so-called greatness.

Yet all of these titles meant nothing to the face of truth. For He even realized, and understood his limits. Despite everything he had done, everything he was capable of, one truth remained.

He was at heart, a human. An imperfection in more ways than one.

He failed his Imperium, He failed His sons, and he failed himself.

His dream was shattered, His promise unfulfilled.

Even the immense power of The Imperium now was just a shadow of the actual strength it once had, forgotten in their darkest history.

It was now a rotting carcass of an empire, doomed by its own culture and the very values that structured it. Now He realized that no matter how beautiful your palace is, if the foundation is made on rotten wood, it would always be doomed to fail. Promises of a better future cannot be built on the things it wishes to remove.

Things had to change. Even if it will take millenia.

His soul was shattered. An uncountable amount of shards of hyper intelligence, conscience and powered soul scattered throughout the warp, finding a way to finally end all that has happened and is happening.

The Emperor was not a God. Or so He convinced himself. But times have changed. More than ever, The Imperium needs not just Him, but an actual God. His people had suffered enough, what was He if He couldn't even fulfill His people's prayers? Their wishes?

The imperial cult, the religion and belief he hated was formed only because of His faults after all.

In the Heresy, when hope was unseen, His people still refused to give up. They looked to Him, the Emperor as their savior, and they prayed to Him. And who could blame them? They were humans after all, stuck in the most brutal, catastrophic war in their entire existence. The Imperium was not only built on rotten foundations, it was also compounded in endless trauma throughout countless generations. Their desperation led to prayer, and their prayer sprung faith. If they wanted a god, then He would give them one. That's the least He could do.

Ascension by the powers of the warp was immediately out of question. There was no need for a 5th Chaos God, especially after Slaneesh. The C'tan were too unstable, too inhuman and too prideful to properly imitate, or even try to research. The Gods of the material realm were not to be trifled with, and with the actions of the Necrons, He could guess that their very being only craves vengeance that not even the survivors of the dropsite massacre could imagine.

The answer lies elsewhere. A hidden wormhole in the webway, undiscovered by anyone except one small shard of His wandering soul. A new dimension, a new reality and a new universe. His mind focused, and yet not even an intelligence of His caliber couldn't fully comprehend what was inside. It was massive, it was all encompassing, He hasn't seen something like this before. A giant tree, of all infinite colors and at the same time black and white, contained everything within imagination greeted His conscience. Power surpassing the combined strength of the Four Chaos Gods and more tried to push Him, force him back to where He came from, but more and more of His shattered soul connected and combined with the one, strengthening His resistance until He forced his way into the foreign universe, breaking an unseen barrier native to the tree.

The tree of imagination looked more inconceivable now, forcing the utter limits of all His brain, soul and being to comprehend. He felt it. This was it. The answer He was looking for. He did not know if the tree was alive or not, malevolent or otherwise, but He felt something other than endless war could be achieved in it.

He recognizes a type of force, similar to Him staying at His side, and eventually spreading out to each of the infinite leaves of the imaginary tree. He could not understand how they even existed, but this tree seemed to strengthen the trinity even more, shackling the once fictional Deus into reality with a part of His soul shaking intensely. He would pay them no mind, they meant no harm to humanity, only to help it.

For the first time in countless millennia, The Emperor had finally found the smallest yet most hopeful strand of saving grace He could gift to His Imperium. He formulated one final plan. He was a human, and the best of humans, must right their wrongs. His people deserved something, their faith, even if misguided, needed to be rewarded.

The Emperor gathered all that He could of His shattered souls, concentrating warp energy and the power of faith and worship in one final gamble.

But humans were imperfect, and would always be imperfect.

Errors were made, and other things interloped.

A/N

(Warhammer 40k x Honkai: Star Rail crossover)

I have written this in my dreams.

Featuring my homebrew space marines chapter and original 40k Characters

This fic is not meant to be 100% lore accurate to both of the franchises

The idea of this fic is to put a disgusting, broken empire born in a grimdark universe to a more, hopeful one

Takes place after the Borisin arc in HSR

Might update if I want to