Warhammer: Empire Reboot

While some positions are still nominally appointed by the Empire, the actual candidates always come from a fixed few families.

The father died, and the son went in.

The son died, and the nephew went in.

Generation after generation of people have access to the same batch of files, the same approval chain, and the same set of subordinate relationships.

They may not be high lords, and few people even know their names.

But a transfer order has to go through them.

A budget has to go through them.

These people are the most numerous cogs in the ancient machine of the empire.

Lawson was not a butcher, and he did not treat them all the same just because they were all nobles.

He divided all nobles into three categories.

Loyal minister.

mediocrity.

Woodworms.

The criteria for judgment are so simple that many people find them difficult to adapt to.

Like the merchants investigated earlier, there were both good and bad members of the nobility.

There is a military and political family with a history of over three thousand years, which controls several military supply nodes in the Solar Star Region.

When the bee colony audited the accounts, they were initially listed as key targets.

The reason is straightforward.

These people's war spending is frighteningly high.

The mortality rate among family members was also unusually high.

Further investigation revealed a completely different result.

Over the past 1,200 years, this family has had a total of 47 direct heirs.

Thirty-nine of them served in the military, and twenty-one died on the front lines.

One of the family heads even handed over the entire family's private fleet to the Imperial Navy after the outbreak of the Terran War, and took his two sons on a transport ship to the most dangerous war zone.

Less than 30% of the fleet has returned, and neither of the two sons have come back.

There are also problems with the family's accounts.

The administrative hierarchy responsible for the investigation continued to verify the findings at the next level.

The money was eventually used to purchase a batch of urgently needed air defense weapons.

If the procedures had been completed back then, at least tens of millions more people would have died in that world.

After reviewing the document, Lawson gave his instructions: "Keep the family position and make up the money owed to them."

There are many similar families.

Family members enjoy privileges, but also bear responsibilities.

This family, Lawson remains unmoved.

The swarm even began to recalculate the military spending, land, and compensation that had been owed to them for a long time.

This brought tears to the eyes of the family patriarch, who had been struggling to survive in Terra despite being ostracized. He wept uncontrollably.

The Emperor has finally opened his eyes!

People with truly clean accounts begin to feel at ease and even voluntarily open up their family archives.

Mediocre officials are the most numerous.

They did not engage in large-scale corruption, nor did they have millions of lives on their hands.

But they just occupy the positions without doing anything.

An administrative family has controlled a certain approval authority for nine hundred years.

Efficiency is decreasing while the number of personnel is increasing.

What could have been done by 300 people ended up requiring more than 40,000 people to support.

They made something that could have been done in three days take three years.

In the past, it was difficult to define the crime in this kind of case, and Lawson was not prepared to charge them with the death penalty.

Cut them off immediately!!!

A group of nobles who had lived for hundreds of years suddenly found that they had lost their jobs, along with all their benefits and status.

For the last type of termite, Lawson left no room for maneuver.

Some families have controlled the pilgrimage slots, accommodation, medical care, and disposal of remains in Terra for generations.

A family that controls a pilgrimage zone has been uncovered by a swarm of over four thousand secret accounts.

They crammed hundreds of people into the free dormitories, withheld medical supplies and resold them at high prices, and even charged an extra purification fee for corpses.

Some children starved to death on the street less than a few hundred meters from the food warehouse, while the grain in the warehouse rotted into mud because of waiting for prices to rise.

Those who hold the right to reside in public areas have turned them into private property, leaving billions of people crammed into sewage and toxic fumes, while they themselves keep large tracts of vacant upper-level housing and raise prices.

Some people are withholding pensions for disabled veterans.

Some people even re-registered the deceased's identity to continue fraudulently claiming rations.

If we find out who these people are, we'll kill them.

In the second week, more than forty public execution sites in Terra were put into use simultaneously.

After the charges were read out, the noose was put on.

As soon as the pedal was activated, rows of nobles were suspended in the square.

Three weeks later, the number of nobles, high-ranking officials, and merchants executed had exceeded one million.

The numbers continued to rise after that.

Accomplices of minor offenses were stripped of their property and status, while all the young and strong were incorporated into the disciplinary corps, armed, and sent to the front lines.

The man who used to sit in a greenhouse and sign a piece of paper that could send billions of people to their deaths is now finally standing in the trench himself.

The two people who received the most attention during the entire purge remained in the Seal Holder's Office's direct detention area.

Two High Lords, Leopold Frank and Kania Danda.

The investigation revealed a more serious situation than initially anticipated.

Danda's problems go far beyond a few merchant ship kickbacks.

Over the past few centuries, she has redistributed a vast number of shipping licenses, concessions, and highly profitable trades through her affiliated merchant shipping groups.

In the most serious incident, an evacuation fleet carrying 200 million refugees was stranded in port for 19 days because it refused to accept a temporary increase of seven times in transportation fees.

After the Tyranid swarm arrived, fewer than 40 million people ultimately escaped.

The records that the swarm could trace show that abnormal transportation incidents directly related to Danda's orders and his direct interest groups resulted in the deaths of over 30 billion imperial citizens.

Frank's problems are equally alarming.

As the master of the Star Torch, he had long known that the Star Torch was in continuous decline.

However, in order to preserve the Star Torch Court, the Star Language System, and his own high-ranking position, he suppressed the reports of malfunctions for a long time, changed the severe decline into a normal fluctuation, and forcibly maintained the surface stability by using the lives of more psionicists.

More than a hundred years ago, the starlight signals in a certain star field were already clearly abnormal.

Frank received a warning three months in advance but refused to issue the highest level of navigation ban.

Over the next eleven days, more than 40,000 Imperial ships entered the warp along their original routes, of which tens of thousands never returned.

On another occasion when the Star Language relay zone was on the verge of collapse, he rejected twelve applications for shutdown.

The relay station eventually suffered a psionic catastrophe, and more than thirty worlds lost communication, eight of which had already fallen before reinforcements received the distress signal.

The number of deaths that a bee colony could eventually establish a complete causal chain of over 40 billion would exceed 40 billion.

The two of them together directly or indirectly caused the deaths of more than 70 billion citizens of the empire.

This doesn't even include the 19 billion from Kirill IX, which they personally handed over to the trading table.

On the day the verdict was announced, almost all public channels in Terra broadcast it.

When Danda and Frank were led to the execution ground, they were still wearing the formal attire that the High Lord had allowed them to retain.

Beside the execution ground, Judge Jia 44 personally supervised the proceedings.

The pedal is released.

Two figures fell at the same time.

Countless civilians on Terra roared in fury, "They died too easily!!!"

Lawson's reorganization of Terra is not yet over.

Chapter 294 Reform of the State Religion, Conferring Titles on the Living Saint

The public execution of two Imperial Highlords sent a far greater shockwave through Terra than any galactic rebellion.

That was a public trial watched by hundreds of billions of people across Terra.

The noose was placed around their necks, the pedals were lowered, and the two figures that once represented the highest secular power of the empire swayed gently in the air above the square.

If nothing unexpected happens, they will remain here for a long time to come.

The Twelve High Lords are figures who stand at the very top of the power pyramid of the human empire.

Over the past ten thousand years, they may have been replaced by old age, disease, or political struggles, but no one has ever dared to hang them in front of everyone in such a brutal way.

Lawson took down two as soon as he arrived in Terra.

In addition, ships shuttle back and forth in Terra's spaceports, and hundreds of millions of criminals are transported there.

They would go to the battlefield, to the mines, and to new colonies to reclaim wasteland.