Warhammer: Rebuilding the Golden Age Starting with Farming.

"But I have a question."

Andy raised his doubts.

"Helios makes high-end medicines, and their main customers are in Upper Nest, or even other planets."

"Why would they choose to build a factory in a garbage dump like the Dead Sea, which is full of radiation and pollution?"

"The environment here is not suitable for precision manufacturing, unless..."

Andy paused for a moment, then looked at Sisyphus with his blue electronic eyes.

"Unless they have their eye on something here."

"you're right."

Sisyphus walked to the window, looked at the murky green acid outside, and spoke with a sour tone.

"They are not interested in the land or the raw materials."

"What they value is the person."

"Or more accurately, cheap, hard-working labor that doesn't require pension or health insurance payments."

At this point, Sisyphus slammed his fist on the table and spat out a name through gritted teeth.

"Ascending Mining Alliance"

It's that name again.

When Gamma-9 mentioned these people before, his tone was full of admiration for hardworking people.

Now, when Sisyphus mentions them, his tone is full of resentment and bitterness, as if his business had been stolen.

"Those damn bald guys," Sisyphus cursed.

"You know those people, right? They're always talking about some four-armed god-emperor."

“In the past, they would just mine in deep pits and ask us for some stimulants or something.”

"But in recent years, they have set up a labor dispatch department and have begun to send workers to Helios's factories on a large scale."

Andy's heart skipped a beat.

Are gene stealers starting to feed people into the upper echelons of society?

This is a classic sign of an impending infiltration.

"Did Helios's executives slip away?" Andy asked tentatively. "They dared to use people from the bottom nest? Aren't they afraid of bringing in germs? Aren't they afraid of a worker riot?"

"Ha! A riot?"

Sisyphus seemed to have heard some enormous interstellar joke.

"Those bald guys are the most perfect workers in the world!"

"They don't smoke, drink, fight, or even need to sleep."

"They can work for twenty hours straight every day, and spend the remaining four hours in prayer."

"Most importantly, they are extremely resistant to radiation and corrosion."

"Some of Helios' production lines have excessive radiation levels. Ordinary workers would be ruined after a month of working in protective suits, but these bald guys go in shirtless and work for a year, and they come out still full of energy and able to have children."

"And they don't want wages!"

Sisyphus was so jealous his eyes turned red.

"They only want some industrial waste or the bare minimum of starch blocks."

"Therefore, Helios has now outsourced all the security and production of the newly built factories in the Bottom Nest to them."

"Even my businesses have been squeezed out because those bald guys never get sick and don't buy medicine!"

After hearing Sisyphus's accusations, Andy felt that this was too difficult to deal with.

Human greed is indeed the biggest loophole.

In the eyes of Sisyphus and Helios's executives, cunning was the perfect tool for reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

But in Andy's eyes, this was simply humanity digging its own grave.

Genestealers do not get sick. As the vanguard of the Tyranids, their genetic structure has evolved over millions of years and is extremely adaptable.

They don't really need much compensation, because their goal isn't money at all, but to occupy key positions, acquire resources, reproduce, and then send their hybrid offspring to the upper-level factories, to places that produce medicines, weapons, or even planetary defense systems.

Once that "great day of ascension" arrives.

These hardworking workers can instantly turn into bloodthirsty butchers.

They will cut off the power, shut down the anti-aircraft defenses, and guide the Zerg fleet to descend.

And now, for the sake of a little profit, the Helios Group is personally welcoming the seeds of destruction into its own home.

"So, Helios' new factory at the bottom of the nest is full of chickens... and bald guys are working there?"

Andy double-checked.

“All of them,” Sisyphus said irritably. “Not even a mouse can get in. It’s under closed management. They say they’re producing some kind of advanced composite life factor, but I think they’re just setting up some kind of biochemical breeding base.”

Andy nodded and didn't ask any more questions.

We already have enough information; asking any more questions might arouse Sisyphus's suspicion.

The situation was far more serious than he had imagined.

Andy originally thought that all he needed to do was farm well, fight in gangs, and upgrade his technology.

Now it seems that things are far more complicated than I thought, because the biggest enemy has already begun to act.

That new factory in Helios is definitely a huge hidden danger.

"Alright, the business is over."

Andy stood up and copied the data from the holographic map into his storage device.

"I'll send someone to explore that secret passage later."

"As for the cooperation, I will have someone send over the first batch of equipment drawings and models tomorrow."

Andy didn't give Sisyphus a chance to back out, and sent the preliminary agreement on antibiotic production directly to his terminal.

Sisyphus glanced at it, and although he was still heartbroken about the 70% profit share, he readily signed the document when he thought about getting rid of Helios's control.

Andy, carrying the lead box containing the original bacteria and his heavy logging gun, crawled back into the dilapidated submarine.

As the submarine surfaced, the oppressive green color of the acidic liquid gradually faded.

Andy sat in the cramped cabin and began planning the next production schedule.

His previous plan was to slowly improve people's livelihoods and solve the problems of food and clothing.

But now, facing the behemoths Helios Corporation and the Genestealers, it's no longer possible to proceed slowly.

We must develop military technology, and we must first have heavy firepower.

Nitric acid, sulfuric acid, saltpeter, and starch—these raw materials are already available.

In Andy's STC database, that row of gray icons is shining brightly.

High Explosive Fragmentation Grenade (Mark-V)

XPG-200 Individual Rocket Launcher (Improved Version)

[Dual-base propellant]

Standard bolt-action round

……

These things could not be manufactured due to the lack of chemical raw materials.

But now, everything is connected, without missing a single one.

Chapter 25 Production Upgrade

After returning from Dr. Birdbeak's acid swamp, Andy locked himself in the core workshop deep inside the vault.

For three days, except for changing the coolant every eight hours, he hardly moved from his spot.

Over the past three days, the entire shelter's production pace has been rapidly accelerated by Andy's series of commands issued from the data terminal.

The first step is the processing of raw materials.

Not a single drop of the dozen or so barrels of sulfuric acid and saltpeter that Gamma-9 brought back from the Skinners' lair was wasted.

Andy designed a simple yet efficient chemical purification device using STC.

Essentially, it involves using sulfuric acid and saltpeter to react to produce nitric acid, and then using a mixture of nitric acid and sulfuric acid to nitrate starch.

The process is not complicated; the difficulty lies in temperature control and stirring speed.

Once the temperature exceeds the critical value, the entire can will turn into a powerful bomb, sending half of the shelter to the sky.

Unfortunately, under Andy's direct computing power monitoring, the probability of such a thing happening is zero.

Soon, the first batch of pale yellow nitrated starch powder was produced.

This is not an ordinary explosive, but a fairly stable double-base propellant precursor.

When Bauer received the batch of samples, his hands were shaking.

As a tech fanatic, he knew all too well what this thing meant.

Previously, the most commonly used material in the bottom nest was black powder, which burned slowly, left a lot of residue, and lacked kinetic energy. The bullets fired would drift away after flying only two hundred meters.

The energy density of double-base propellant is three times that of black powder.

When loaded into those batch of stamped automatic gun bullets, the muzzle velocity increased directly from 300 meters per second to 700 meters per second.

Double the penetration power and double the range.

Those ramjet guns, which were originally only used to shoot ordinary people, now have the ability to penetrate mutants and light armor.

……

Then, Andy opened the lead box containing "Penicillin variant P-772".

This fungal strain, which has been lingering in the bottom nest for who knows how many years, has an incredibly strong vitality.

Andy did not follow the primitive "organ culture method" used by Dr. Birdbeak.

That method was not only inefficient, but the resulting liquid was full of corpse poison. Drinking it might save your life, but Andy found it really disgusting.

Therefore, Andy chose the path of independent research and development.

The raw materials are readily available, such as high-yield starch balls produced by hydroponic farms, which become the perfect carbon source after hydrolysis.

Add ammonia, a byproduct of the saltpeter refining process, as a nitrogen source. Pour these ingredients into the fermentation tank in a golden ratio, keep the temperature constant, and aerate and stir.

Under this process, the bacteria are like mice that have fallen into a honey pot, and they begin to multiply wildly.

In just forty-eight hours.

The liquid in the fermenter becomes cloudy and viscous, which is the result of a high concentration of mycelium.

The next steps are filtration, extraction, and crystallization.

The sophisticated centrifuges and chromatography columns haven't come off the production line yet, but fortunately, Andy has homemade alternatives.

By taking advantage of the differences in solubility of different solvents, the pH value is adjusted using acids and bases, and finally, activated carbon is used for decolorization.

Although its purity does not reach the 98% pharmaceutical grade standard, it is definitely several orders of magnitude higher than Sisyphean green soup.

Soon, the first bottle of pale yellow crystalline powder was sealed in a glass bottle.

Andy gave it a very simple name: "Andy Biochemical One".

If you take this stuff and sell it on the black market, one bottle can be exchanged for a brand new explosive gun, or for ten adult strong laborers.

But Andy doesn't intend to sell, at least not now.

After all, mass production is not possible for the time being. Putting aside everything else, there is a lot of room for optimization in the production line itself.

……

……