It was weird, though, that they didn't have an Inquisition that went from home to home searching for heresy. The Adeptus Arbites, which were supposed to be some form of FBI, went around wantonly killing to enforce the Imperial Creed.
The fact that he had learned about all this in just a week said a lot about how bad things actually were. Though he considered all these a problem, there was no problem bigger than the faith known as the Ecclesiarchy and the fact that these people considered human life essentially worthless.
As soon as he arrived in his room, Bastion simply sat down on a couch and pulled out three large tablet-sized devices. These were data slates, essentially this world's version of a flash drive.
They were used to store information, which he needed at the moment. He had no idea what this world's history was or how to go about ruling it, and even worse, he couldn't rely on his memories since they were fading quickly.
He could barely remember the non-personal things in his life. He knew he was once a firefighter, but how do you fight fire? He had no idea. In essence, he needed knowledge fast; if not, he would be ousted very quickly.
After all, in this world, there existed people called Psykers. They were somehow able to project their thoughts onto reality. How it worked, Bastion had no idea, but he would like to find out one day.
Bastion sat and scrolled through the data slate. This was supposed to hold the detailed history of this planet, but the more he read, the more he discovered holes in it. He didn't care to question it.
"History is truly written by the victors," Bastion claimed as he dropped the book to the side and picked up another.
"My lord, here are the rest of the books," the attendant said as she handed them over.
"Thank you, you may leave," Bastion commanded as the lady dropped them and left.
Immediately after the door closed, he reached for a book that was sitting on the table before him.
The book was already halfway filled. This was mostly because he wasn't just changing physically—there were also some mental changes as well.
First, he could read an entire book just by flipping through it and yet remember every single sentence or word within it. This wasn't just excellent remembrance—he could somehow thoroughly process the information in the time it took him to drop the book and pick another.
However, that wasn't his main concern for now. It was the fact that he was losing his memories. He had yet to receive any memories from this body, so he had no idea how this body interacted with people.
However, his own memories were now slowly fading away despite his amazing memory.
He didn't need some fancy magician to tell him—he could guess that this was a side effect of his reincarnation.
He was no longer his old self, and he wasn't Luthor Kael Bastion either. He was an entirely new person altogether—both people and not at the same time.
It was a weird concept to accept, but it was one he had come to terms with. It would be stupid of him to expect to remain the same person after such a miraculous event like being reincarnated after death.
"Come to think of it, doesn't this body have any family members?" Bastion thought as he looked up from the book he was holding.
So far, apart from Elara and the various nobles who came each day to try and gain an audience with him, he had not interacted with, met, or even heard about any family members.
"At least there is no family drama to weave through," Bastion thought as he turned back to his studies.
Bastion wasn't reading through all these just because he wanted to. Many of them contained nothing but lies and propaganda for the Imperium.
However, he was gathering a few facts from all this. First, Mordaxis was integrated into the Imperium of Man over 700 years ago.
Due to its size, it is a major recruitment center for the Astra Militarum, which took about four million civilians each year to be trained to join the Imperial Guardsman regime and more.
The Mechanicus didn't play as major a role as he had thought, considering the level of disregard that the Magos had shown by kicking down his door.
However, they seemed to be an Imperium-backed agency and were still one that you shouldn't mess with.
The Ecclesiarchy was invincible in all ways that you could think about. They had political power through the Inquisition—turns out they did have one.
They also had military power, and above all, they were not only backed by the Imperium but also by the people, who had subconsciously begun to fall for their false faith.
Well, that was unless the Emperor truly was a god, which remains to be seen.
As for the noble families, that was an even more complicated matter that surrounded his Luthor family.
When the Imperium took the planet, it had been done internally. The Luthor family, which was then just a family of farmers, had somehow gained the support of the Imperium.