Warhammer: Rebuilding the Golden Age Starting with Farming.

The intelligence was quickly gathered.

This is Furnace-7, located on the edge of the Hazy Starfield.

This place is terrible, terrible in a perfectly good way.

The Empire's main fleet was busy fighting at the Eye of Terror and had no time to spare for this godforsaken industrial world.

The planetary governor here is a good-for-nothing who only hides in the upper hive and throws smut parties. The administrative system below has long since collapsed, and the lower hive is completely dominated by gangs and mutants.

As long as Andy doesn't cause a planet-destroying event, no one will bother with him.

This is the perfect start for an Ironman who needs to develop.

The first essential element of the great cause of farming is environmental safety.

In Holy Terra or Macurag, Andy would be annihilated by the Imperial Guard or Ultramarines if he dared to show his face. But in this lawless frontier world, as long as you have enough power and can feed people, you are the local tyrant.

Andy began to renovate the shelter.

First and foremost, it's about people.

Three hundred and forty-two refugees—that's all Andy currently owns.

These people were a burden before, but now they are a source of labor.

Andy abolished all rituals involving prayer, sacrifice, and anointing. He established a new rule: no work, no food.

This rule is simple and straightforward, and it works better than any religious dogma.

Andy divided the people into three groups.

The first group was a scavenging team, consisting of strong men whose task was to scavenge metal, plastic, and electronic components from the ruins outside.

The second group is the purification team, consisting of the elderly, women, and children, whose task is to clean up the shelters.

This group of people was responsible for cleaning up all the feces, garbage, and human bones that had accumulated over hundreds of years. After all, the sanitary environment was directly related to the health of the workers. In this place where medical care and medicine were scarce, a single bout of dysentery could reduce Andy's workforce by half.

The third group was the engineering team, consisting of Gamma-9 and a few apprentices who knew a little about the technology.

The engineering team had the heaviest workload.

Andy wants to expand production capacity; for example, the iron bucket used to cook starch balls is too small and simply not enough to meet demand.

Andy had the construction team bring in three abandoned oil storage tanks.

These containers are everywhere in the bottom nest; once the residue inside is cleaned out, they become ready-made reaction vessels.

Andy used the STC database to provide the simplest modification solution.

No precision machining is required; all you need are a few heating rods, a few stirring motors, a simple self-sustaining environment, and the control of that black box.

Three days later, three enormous, standard-issue bioreactors stood in the center of the hall.

The production of starch balls also skyrocketed to two tons per day.

Although this stuff doesn't taste like much and has a texture similar to chewing some kind of gelatin, it provides a high amount of calories.

For the bottom-nest people who grew up eating corpses, this was already a delicacy.

Many people misunderstand STC, thinking that STC only builds high-tech weapons that can destroy the world.

In fact, the greatest strength of STC lies in its backward compatibility.

It can provide an optimal low-end industrial solution based on the waste materials you have on hand, and build an automated production line from scrap iron and rubber pipes. This is the true value of the technology of the Golden Age.

Once production capacity increased, Andy began upgrading his tools.

The refugees were still carrying scrap metal by hand and breaking steel bars with stones.

The inefficiency is outrageous.

Andy pulled up tool blueprints from the 20th century.

Handcart, crowbar, entrenching tool.

In Andy's previous life, even elementary school students knew the principles behind these things.

But this knowledge isn't even widely available here.

When Andy used a freshly polished crowbar to easily pry up a slab of stone weighing several tons using the principle of leverage, the people around him looked at him as if he were a magician.

When the first handcart equipped with bearings and rubber wheels was built, and a thin boy pushed two hundred kilograms of ore with great speed, the entire shelter was in an uproar.

In just one week, the shelter has changed.

The once dark, filthy, and despair-filled refugee camp is gone.

Instead, a production base that is already taking shape has been established.

Everyone had a handy tool in their hand. Although their bodies were still unclean and their faces were still greasy, at least they had some spirit.

But the problem also followed.

Andy stood in front of the control panel, looking at the energy monitoring screen in front of him.

The red warning lines are almost fully drawn.

[Warning: Power grid load is 92%.]

[Warning: Unstable voltage. It is recommended to disconnect some devices.]

That old geothermal generator has reached its limit.

It couldn't power three high-powered reactors, let alone the automatic sentry turret that Andy wanted to build.

To develop, we need electricity.

Andy pulled up STC's planetary scan map.

Fifty kilometers underground in this shelter lies a massive high-energy reaction point.

[Marked as: Planetary-level geothermal hub (backup node)]

That point of light was ten thousand times brighter than this broken generator.

If they could take that place, Andy would gain access to almost limitless energy and could even restart those ancient production lines deeper within the bottom nest.

But next to that spot of light, STC marked a bright red skull.

[Extremely Dangerous: High-energy biological activity detected. Heavy weapons recommended.]

Chapter 10 The Four-Armed God Emperor

Andy projected the map in holographic mode, and the energy reading of the red dot was incredibly tempting.

It is a backup geothermal hub for Furnace-7, originally intended as a core node to provide industrial steam and electricity to the entire bottom nest.

Once they take control of the area, they'll have more than enough energy, let alone a few bioreactors. They could even build a fully automated Titan production line in the Bottom Nest if Andy wanted to.

But the "extremely dangerous" red skull marker given by STC calmed Andy down.

Gamma-9.

Andy pointed to the red dot, and a red laser beam pierced through the semi-transparent map projection, illuminating Gamma-9's face, which was filled with piety.

"Whose territory is this down there?"

Gamma-9 looked in the direction Andy was pointing, and the aperture in its single eye suddenly contracted.

He seemed to have a kind of inexplicable awe towards that place.

“My sage, that’s a ‘deep pit’.”

Gamma-9 lowered its voice, as if afraid of disturbing something underground.

“That is the sacred ground of the Ascension Mining Alliance.”

“The Ascendant Mining Alliance?” Andy repeated the name; it sounded like a legitimate union organization.

"Yes, they are a group of...very hardworking miners."

Gamma-9's tone carried a hint of envy; as a priest of the Mechanic Church, he greatly admired this tireless labor force.

"They worship a deity known as the 'Four-Armed Emperor'."

"It is said that the god-emperor had four strong arms, symbolizing the ultimate efficiency in labor."

“Those miners were all bald, with healthy purplish-red skin. They never rested, never complained, and some of the foremen who were favored by the gods even grew a third or even a fourth hand in order to better serve the God-King.”

"Their digging efficiency is ten times that of ours. The Governor's Office once wanted to send tax collectors to collect taxes, but those tax collectors were moved after they went in and never came out again."

As Andy listened, he began to sense that something was amiss.

and many more.

Bald, purplish-red skin, four hands, a perfect laborer who never complains...

In addition, there's that name, "Four-Armed God Emperor".

Andy suddenly looked up and stared intently at the red dot on the map.

Good heavens, what a sly fox!

And the hardworking miners' union?

This is a cult of gene-stealers that's as pure as can be!

Why are there so many familiar faces everywhere?!

In this malevolent universe, if you find that your neighbors suddenly become unusually united, exceptionally hardworking, and love having children, and that the children they have are somewhat strange-looking, then you'd better move out immediately, or choose to call in orbital bombardment.

Genestealers are the vanguard infiltration units of the Terran Zerg.

They infiltrate human society and infect humans through a process known as "gene kiss," implanting alien genes into the victims' bodies.

The victims would give birth to mixed-race offspring, who would become more and more human-like with each generation, until they infiltrated the upper echelons of society.

These guys will establish a huge underground cult, frantically mining and hoarding resources while secretly sabotaging the planet's defense systems.

When the time is right, they will send psionic signals into the depths of the universe.

What will arrive then will not be some four-armed god-emperor.

Instead, it was a massive, overwhelming Tyranid hive fleet.

They will devour every single gram of organic matter on this planet, including the devout believers.

Andy felt a chill run down his spine. What kind of auspicious place was this Forge-7 that he was in?

On the surface, there's a useless governor who only knows how to throw lavish parties; in the middle layer, there's a gang of lunatics whose minds are filled with nothing but killing and skinning; and then there are the Chaos Believers hiding somewhere.

Now look what's happened; there's a whole bunch of traitors hiding underground, ready to pack up the planet and hand it over to the Zerg swarm.

The only reason this place has survived until now without exploding is because these idiots haven't communicated with each other.

Andy immediately marked the option of "storming the geothermal hub" with a big red cross in his mind.

Are you kidding me?

Now he's a somewhat fierce engineering marvel, armed with only a few dozen broken guns and a few hundred malnourished refugees.

If you really went deep underground and faced thousands of gene stealers with sharp claws, agile movements, and possibly even psionic lightning, wouldn't that be like delivering takeout to them?

With its cunning claws, it can slice through Terminator power armor like butter, and cutting through Andy's engineering armor is child's play.

A complete overhaul is necessary.

Let's forget about that backup geothermal hub for now; we can deal with it when we have tanks and heavy artillery.

The most urgent task now is to address the power grid in the shelter, which could collapse at any moment.

"Except for this bunch of four-armed freaks."

Andy zoomed out on the map and pointed to the area surrounding the shelter.

"Who else in this area has electricity?"

Gamma-9 thought for a moment, then the robotic arm pointed in another direction on the map.

“Let me think… Look here, the abandoned industrial zone number 42 next door.”

“That’s the territory of the Rust Brotherhood.”

"They were a group of vagrants who had been driven out of various gangs, and a traitorous tech priest who had been expelled from the Cult of Mechanics for various reasons."

"They occupied an old-fashioned fission power station."