Warhammer: Rebuilding the Golden Age Starting with Farming

Chapter 115 The Commissar's Methods of Prosecuting

As the third month drew to a close, the weather in Horisonburg began to cool.

The cold air from the Arctic ice cap crossed the wilderness, but this did not lower the temperature in the underground core industrial area.

The place is still bustling with activity.

Since incorporating the more than 2,000 crew members of the "Scavenger", the population structure of the deep space industry has undergone a fundamental change.

What was originally a small industrial park with only a few hundred people has instantly expanded into a medium-sized industrial entity with thousands of industrial workers.

To accommodate this influx of new residents, Andy had to devote most of his energy to expanding the infrastructure.

Canteen, dormitory, water supply system, ventilation ducts.

While these things may not be as exciting as building guns and cannons, they are the cornerstone of maintaining the organization's stability.

In addition to their production duties, these newly joined workers displayed a kind of fanaticism that Andy found incomprehensible.

The source of this fervor is Gamma-9.

The first staff canteen is located on the second basement floor.

Lunchtime.

Hundreds of workers were sitting at long tables, spoons in hand, gulping down bowls of steaming broth and starch.

To Andy, this food was merely dry rations that could barely sustain his vital signs.

But in the eyes of these Zais natives, this was a delicacy that only the noble lords of Odin Fortress could enjoy.

There was no sand, no nauseating sour smell, only the pure aroma of carbohydrates and proteins.

Gamma-9 did not eat in its own private compartment.

He carried a stainless steel plate and squeezed his way into the middle of the workers.

He was still wearing his black political commissar's coat, which, combined with his single, red-glowing mechanical eye, made him look extremely intimidating.

But at this moment, he wore an unusually kind smile.

"How was it? Did you enjoy the soup today?"

As Gamma-9 passed by, it patted a young technician on the shoulder.

The technician was flattered and nearly dropped the bowl: "Excellent—excellent, Master!"

The technician answered haltingly.

"I've never eaten anything this good in my life—is this meat even real meat?"

"Of course it's true."

The Gamma-9 increased the volume so that people around could hear it.

"This is a gift from the Sage."

"In the Sage's hometown, in the dark age of technology filled with sacred radiance, this food was merely the most basic ration."

"But here, only the most devout and diligent believers are qualified to enjoy it."

The surrounding workers stopped cooking and looked at Gamma-9 with an almost worshipful gaze.

For these people struggling to survive in this desperate universe, technology and principles are meaningless.

A god is one who can feed them and give them a sense of security.

Gamma-9 is God's representative in this world.

Gamma-9 enjoys this gaze.

As a junior technical priest from the bottom nest, his technical skills were actually quite poor.

In a place like Zhongchao, where technical experts gather, people like him belong to the very bottom of the social hierarchy.

But here, in front of this group of wasteland technicians, he inexplicably found his confidence.

He doesn't need to demonstrate any advanced coding skills, nor does he need to fix those complex server arrays.

All you need to do is tell these people about Andy's extraordinary deeds.

Do you know about that molecular reconstruction instrument?

Gamma-9 pointed to the top of his head: "That is the artifact that the Sage summoned from the void."

"It can turn the dirtiest garbage into the purest metal."

What does this tell us?

Gamma-9 paused, then looked around.

"This shows that with sincere faith, even scrap iron can be transformed into steel!"

"As long as you follow the Sage diligently, one day you too will be able to shed these filthy skins and ascend to divine ascension!"

"Praise be to Ohm Messiah! Praise be to Sage Andy!"

The workers were so moved that tears welled up in their eyes, and they raised their spoons and shouted.

Driven by Gamma-9.

Horisonburg was no longer a refuge for them, but a gateway to paradise.

In another corner of the cafeteria.

Father Zor sat alone at a table.

In front of him was a plate of exquisite synthetic steak, a special treat Andy had given to his senior technicians.

But there was no one within five meters of him.

The workers avoided him, even taking a detour when passing by him, their eyes filled with awe and alienation.

As Zoll cut his steak, he coldly watched the Gamma-9 being surrounded by a crowd in the distance with his electronic eyes.

"Hmph, just trying to attract attention."

Zor muttered a complaint to himself, though no one could hear him.

As a true high sage of the Mechanicus, Zor possesses the most advanced industrial technology on this planet.

He can manually calibrate laser lens assemblies down to the micrometer level and can process more than thirty complex production instructions simultaneously in his brain.

Logically speaking, he should be the one these technicians admire.

But he was too arrogant.

When workers asked him questions, he would always throw out a string of complicated data models and binary code, then look at them with an expression as if they were mentally challenged, and add insult to injury by saying, "You can't even understand something this simple?"

He could not comprehend the dullness of mortals, nor could mortals comprehend his profound wisdom.

Over time.

The technical genius Zol was deserted, while the half-baked charlatan Gamma-9 was the center of attention.

The new workers preferred listening to Gamma-9's stories about how Andy the Sage punched a Titan and how he crafted the Glory Queen-class battleship with his bare hands, rather than listening to Zor talk about mathematical models they couldn't understand.

Zor sighed and stuffed the last piece of steak into his mouth.

"A bunch of hopeless rotten wood."

He decided to go back to the laboratory on the fourth floor after finishing his meal.

Even just staring blankly at a cold machine tool is better than watching these idiots engage in a personality cult.

On the third floor of the research tower, Andy's private studio.

Andy watched everything that happened in the cafeteria through the surveillance cameras.

He did not stop Gamma-9's missionary activities, and is currently forced to acquiesce to this trend.

In this hopeless universe, giving people some faith, even blind faith, is an effective way to maintain organizational cohesion.

As long as they are willing to work and obey, it doesn't matter whether they believe in the Omnipotent God or the Andy God.

But Andy himself felt extremely uncomfortable.

Putting aside the fact that he himself actually scoffs at things like hope and faith.

Andy always believed that only extreme efficiency could create the future.

But these are secondary.

Mainly————

When he heard Gamma-9 boasting below that he "radiated golden light" and that "his eyes could calm subspace."

awkward!

That was incredibly embarrassing!

"That old lad, he's wasted his talent not being a pyramid scheme leader!"

Andy angrily turned off the surveillance camera and turned his attention to a report on the worktable.

This is a detailed list of resources to be recycled in Area A.

Area A is the location of the wreckage of the land-based warship known as "Fuck Your Grandma".

After continuous cutting and dismantling by the engineering department and hundreds of drones, this steel behemoth weighing tens of thousands of tons has been broken down into piles of sorted parts.

"Gold recovery rate —"

Andy's finger traced a line and stopped at a number.

[Refined gold (including impurities): 32.5 tons.]

[Estimated output after purification: 15.8 tons.]

"Only fifteen tons?"

Andy frowned, clearly dissatisfied with the number.

The "Fuck Your Grandma" is, after all, a land-based ship with a displacement of tens of thousands of tons, and it was converted from the wreckage of an old frigate.

Logically speaking, a ship of this caliber should have a keel containing a large amount of refined gold.

But reality is harsh.

Over the long years, this ship has long been dismantled and broken into pieces.

Those truly valuable adamantium keels were probably dismantled by some powerful warlord hundreds of years ago to build other ships.

What the bald guy got was just an empty shell whose core value had been emptied out.

Most of the refined gold recovered this time was extracted from the barrels of those scrapped cannons and the thick main drive shaft.

"Fifteen tons —"

Andy was calculating quickly in his mind.

His newly designed subspace engine, the inner wall of the core reactor, would require at least ten tons of high-purity refined gold to forge a pressure hull in order to withstand the scouring of subspace energy.

It's just barely enough.

And we have to use it sparingly, without wasting a single bit!

"What about the hull?"

Andy pulled up the keel blueprints for the starship.

If you want to build a battlecruiser that can freely navigate through the turbulence of subspace.

The ship's main keel must be made of a special alloy with a gold content of over 70%.

According to Andy's plan, the starship would be about six kilometers long, so the keel alone would require at least two thousand tons of adamantite.

Two thousand tons, my goodness!

Looking at the pitiful fifteen tons in his hand, Andy felt the enormous gap between the rich and the poor.

"That's a huge difference."

Andy threw the report on the table.

The remaining two mining sites, Area B and Area C ("Jingchu No. 1" and "Daoping Machine No. 1"), are estimated to be in similar, or even worse, conditions.

If these three ships together could yield fifty tons of refined gold, we'd be lucky to get them.

This amount is enough to build an engine, and barely enough to make a base for a Geller force field generator.

But you want to build a ship?

What kind of interstellar joke is this!

Without enough refined gold, he cannot build a proper ship hull.

Without building the hull, the envisioned battlecruiser will forever remain only on paper.

On this wasteland planet that has been overexploited for thousands of years, trying to find two thousand tons of refined gold through archaeology is like finding a needle in a haystack.

The only way is to rob it.

Andy turned his gaze southward.

This is based on the information gathered from the scavengers over the past few days.

Andy now knows that the south leads to the Sea of No Light, the location of Zais's most powerful warlord, "Odin Fortress".

"Odin Fortress" is a super landship that is twelve kilometers long and was converted from the wreckage of a battlecruiser.

If it's a ship of that class—

The amount of refined gold stored inside is absolutely astronomical.

"It seems we still have to confront Odin."

Andy muttered to himself.

But not now.

Deep Space Industries' current capabilities are insufficient to challenge such a behemoth.

The task now is to make good use of the small amount of refined gold we have.