Warhammer 40K in a box

Chapter 422 Intercontinental Factory
The colossal intercontinental train, like a weary metal python, slowly slid into the intercontinental foundry's entrance, which seemed capable of swallowing stars.

The name Intercontinental is by no means undeserved.

This foundry covers an area of ​​over five million square kilometers—a vast country in the 3K era.

Even in the whole of Europe, there are only two factories this big.

Standing on the observation platform at the edge of the factory, one can see a continuous stretch of steel buildings as far as the eye can see. They are like waves of metal solidified by some mysterious force, extending all the way to the horizon where they meet the sky.

In this vast ocean of steel, countless production lines, like intertwined blood vessels, roar and pulsate, producing every screw, every piece of armor, and every wisp of energy necessary to sustain the entire Rostov subsector.

Millions of furnaces spew forth torrents of scorching metal day and night, shaping raw materials into the forms the empire requires.

It greedily devours the massive amounts of raw materials transported from the Rostov sub-sector, and continuously spews out all the creations needed to maintain the Empire's operation.

Every day, hundreds and thousands of transport ships land on the factory's giant loading and unloading platforms, unloading ore that piles up like mountains, while the finished products transported away fill every cargo hold of the starships.

This factory is like an insatiable gluttonous beast, forever caught in a cycle of hunger and satiety.

This enormous throughput is far beyond the capacity of intercontinental trains crawling on the earth; it belongs to the exclusive domain of steel behemoths—large transport ships—that traverse the stars.

Those colossal machines, exceeding ten kilometers in length, are the true main force responsible for the exchange of matter between the factory and the rest of the galaxy. Each of their take-offs and landings is accompanied by a low-frequency roar powerful enough to shatter the windows of ordinary buildings.

Intercontinental trains are merely the blood vessels of this massive steel behemoth. Although they also transport various "blood" that sustain its operation, their most important function and true mission is to transport the most basic, cheapest, yet indispensable flesh and blood components that make up this decaying behemoth of the empire: workers.

Every day, millions of workers in uniform pour out of these train carriages, silently and orderly flowing into various areas of the factory, as naturally as blood flowing into organs.

Their presence breathed life into this cold, metallic labyrinth, even though this life form was so mechanical and pathetic.

The operation of this steel continent requires an unimaginable amount of manpower.

Countless workers, like worker ants, fill every stage of production, from the most basic assembly of parts to the most precise calibration of instruments; every process is soaked in human sweat and blood.

Their figures wriggle on the never-ending assembly line, forming the most basic life rhythm of this industrial behemoth.

The Empire's "automation"? That's a dark joke steeped in despair.

Those processes that should have been done by machines are now being repeated by countless calloused hands; those procedures that should have been precise and error-free are now being maintained by sheer manpower.

In the core assembly workshop of the foundry, thousands of workers lined up in long queues, passing parts in the most primitive way, like an absurd religious ritual.

Admittedly, the Empire possesses automation technology capable of eclipsing the stars, yet due to various distorted "traditions" and "reality," it stubbornly adheres to the most "ancient" production method: filling every gap in the production line with living humans and "machine servants" pieced together from human remains.

Those pathetic creations known as "machine servants," their nerves fused with machinery, their consciousness deliberately blurred, becoming beings existing between tools and life, repeating programmed actions day after day. The logic is chillingly suffocating: in the empire's frantically running meat grinder, feeding living people, or turning living people into half-dead machine servants, into the production line is the most "economical" and "optimal solution" that can barely maintain "efficiency."

The cost accounting sheet clearly shows that it takes fifteen years to train a qualified worker, while manufacturing a machine servant only requires three corpses and two days of surgery; maintaining a fully automated production line requires scarce scientific priests, while managing a thousand workers only requires one overseer with a whip.

Dark humor? No, this is a brutal reality that seeps into your bones.

In the foundry's underground archives, every body was numbered with a serial number, and every drop of sweat was converted into production value.

The workers lined up to receive not only their daily rations, but also their permit to survive as "production resources".

Here, humans themselves, and the skeletal remains and their derivatives, are merely registered and quantifiable means of production, no different in essence from ores and fuels.

Flesh and blood became the cheapest lubricant and fuel.

When a conveyor belt in a workshop makes a screeching noise, the foreman's first reaction is not to add lubricant, but to order several workers to manually adjust the running machinery—after all, their medical expenses are much cheaper than the cost of mechanical wear and tear.

This is the true face of the human empire.

A monument to civilization built upon countless walking corpses, a distorted system that operates by devouring its own people, a living corpse that has been gradually decaying over millennia yet continues to move forward.

No wonder that when Robert Guilliman awoke from his millennia-long slumber and witnessed this monster, a product of his father’s ideals, he was heartbroken and nearly wished for death.

What he saw was not the continuation of human glory, but a mad machine that placed efficiency above humanity, a distorted civilization that used its fellow human beings as fuel.

Any pioneer who once participated in igniting the flame of hope for humanity's starry sea, after crossing the chasm of ten thousand years, would fall into boundless despair upon facing this quagmire of despair that relies on chewing on its own corpses to keep going, due to the bone-chilling absurdity and betrayal.

Those slogans that once proclaimed "for the future of humanity" now sound like the most biting mockery of reality.

All our struggles, the blood we shed and the ideals we cherished, have ultimately given birth to such a deformed creation.

This question, like a persistent boil, gnaws at every heart that still retains a conscience.

The ever-burning flames of the foundry's furnaces reflect not only the molten metal but also the terrifying process of a civilization's gradual alienation.

For a rigid empire that has existed for thousands of years, decay seems to be its only destiny.

This colossal object is like a cursed mummy, slowly decaying in the long river of time, yet refusing to fall due to some twisted obsession.

Its joints were rusted and solidified, its blood vessels were clogged and hardened, yet it still dragged its decaying body forward.

(End of this chapter)