Warhammer 40K in a box

Chapter 283 Treat People Like Humans

With the full-scale rollout of several large-scale infrastructure projects initiated by Chen Xi, the Rostov II has now become a bustling, giant construction site.

Towering cranes stand like a steel forest on the horizon, anti-gravity transport boats trace busy routes in the low sky, and tens of thousands of construction machines play an industrial symphony at the prefabrication assembly site.

In this bustling construction scene, workers wearing safety gear can be seen everywhere driving engineering vehicles to various construction sites.

In stark contrast to the rest of the Empire, these workers possessed a rare vitality in their eyes—standard ration bags hung from their waists, gleaming wrenches peeked out of their work pockets, and they occasionally chatted and joked with each other.

This vibrant scene was an anomaly across the territories of human empires.

In most worlds ruled by the Terran Council, all you see are people like zombies: their sunken eye sockets are filled with death, and their hunched backs weigh down the entire decaying empire.

These worlds are like giant corpses slowly decaying; though they haven't completely stopped twitching, every festering wound is oozing foul-smelling pus and blood.

Imagine people being forced to breathe air contaminated with industrial toxins, drink water polluted by radioactive isotopes, and struggle to survive amidst mutated pathogens...

Day after day, they swallowed "nutrient blocks" made from swill, rodent matter, and starch from carcasses...

When 20 standard hours of forced labor every day completely drains the last bit of vitality from one's life...

Can such an existence still be called "life"?

If someone could remain radiant and hopeful in such a hellish environment, Chen Xi would absolutely call the Inquisition without hesitation and unleash an extermination order on this planet.

This can only be irrefutable evidence of the gene-stealing cult's full-scale infiltration.

As the old proverb goes: when you find one cockroach in the kitchen, there's already a whole swarm lurking in the cracks in the wall.

In this dark and desperate forty-first millennium, perhaps only those Genestealer followers blinded by psionic illusions can maintain a chilling optimism and fanaticism within the rusty meat grinder that is the Empire.

However, the situation was not so bad in Rostov.

Firstly, the living environment here is relatively good, with a low level of pollution. Moreover, because this planet produces the precious Holy Blessing Wine, both the State Religion and the Inquisition strictly limit industrial and urban pollution on this planet in order to ensure its production.

Not only did they devote great effort to addressing urban pollution, but they also demanded that the Mechanicus cult modify the entire planet's environment in order to expand the cultivation area of ​​the Holy Blessed Grapes as much as possible.

Although the fundamental purpose of these measures was to ensure the supply of the sacred consecration wine rather than to improve the lives of ordinary people, they did objectively spare the residents of Rostov from the hellish living conditions of the rest of the empire.

Compared to those hive cities where even breathing can burn your lungs and the air is filled with industrial waste and radioactive dust, the air in Rostov is at least tolerable—if you go out without a respirator, you'll at most get a mouthful of sand and dust, but you won't get lung rot or radiation ulcers within a few hours.

Here, at least people can see some natural colors, instead of an eternally gray sky and acid-rain-corroded metal ruins, or even never seeing the sky in their entire lives. In terms of drinking water supply, Rostov-II is also far superior to most of the Empire's worlds. While it cannot guarantee that every resident has access to a sufficient supply of clean water, at least the tragic situation of the lower classes being forced to drink radioactive wastewater, as seen in other Empire worlds, is avoided.

Thanks to the efforts of the State Church to ensure the growth of the Holy Blessed Grapes, the pure water from the icy asteroid, after being processed by the melting station, will be given priority to the irrigation system of the Holy Blessed Grapes, as well as to higher-level institutions such as the Planetary Governor's Office and the State Church Temple.

However, in order to avoid industrial wastewater pollution of precious grape-growing areas, the Ministry of Machinery has established a comprehensive wastewater treatment system in various locations.

While this purified water cannot compare to the natural clean water directly from ice meteorites, its purity far exceeds the drinking water standards available to the average resident of Chaohu City.

Such water quality standards would probably only be available to residents of Zhongchao in other industrialized worlds.

However, on Rostov II, most residents, unless they lived in the most remote slums or dilapidated low-rise communities, had access to drinking water that had undergone basic purification.

Although it may occasionally have a slight metallic smell, it is at least not like some Nest City worlds that are made from recycled industrial wastewater.

Regarding food supplies, even if Chen Xi wanted to provide everyone with normal food, the Rostov II was still unable to completely break free from the constraints of the Imperial standard rationing system.

Limited by the planet's agricultural production capacity and the empire's resource allocation system, most civilians' daily diet still mainly consists of industrially synthesized energy bars and nutritious porridge.

Fortunately, Rostov's food processing industry was fundamentally different from that of other imperial worlds.

At least on the Rostov II, the people of the empire did not need to rely on corpse starch to fill their stomachs, nor did they need to recycle corpses and process them into new food.

Although 'corpse starch' is not actually made from corpses, and is called that simply because it tastes terrible, it doesn't mean that corpses aren't added during its production.

In fact, many hives have organizations called Corpse Guilds. Their job is to collect the huge number of corpses in the hives, then recycle and process them with promethium extract into corpse starch, which is then made into energy bars to feed the huge population of the hives.

In Rostov, the orbital hydroponic farm can produce a variety of natural foods, including fresh vegetables, fruits, grains, and even seafood and meat!

Although the quantity was insufficient to feed everyone, these natural agricultural products, after being processed in food processing plants into energy bars and nutritious porridge, were still able to keep most of the people on Rostov from going hungry.

In fact, at least 60% of the ingredients in the energy bars and nutritious porridge they eat are natural foods!

For those accustomed to the Empire's dark food industry, such a standard of food is nothing short of a luxury—after all, in most hive worlds, commoners may never taste a single bite of natural food that is not chemically synthesized in their entire lives, or rather, it is extremely rare for them to eat anything other than corpse starch sticks.

It can be said that Rostov is completely different from most imperial worlds!
The fundamental reason for this huge difference is actually quite simple: Chen Xi treats people as human beings, rather than as unmodified living machine servants.

(End of this chapter)