Warhammer: Empire Reboot

Just as the festive atmosphere reached its peak, Lawson, surrounded by his guards including Er Gou, entered the main hall on the top floor of the fortress.

Old Karl Wald, his face flushed, greeted him with a hearty laugh:

"Your Excellency, the Master of the Seal! By the grace of the Ancestral Spirits, the artisans under your command are nothing short of miracles! Come, taste our Black Rock Spirit, aged for four thousand years. This is what a true man should drink!"

Lawson raised his hand to block the barrel of wine that was being offered to him, and smiled meaningfully:

"No need for wine."

"The cleansing of the ancestral spirit core was very successful, but there is one thing that clan leaders should listen to carefully while they are happy."

"Your ancestral spirit core has been operating under extreme conditions for tens of thousands of years. The aging of the quantum lattice and the nanoscale decay of the underlying hardware cannot be completely erased by simple code cleaning."

UR-025 then retrieved a crystal scan image filled with microscopic cracks:

"After the core resumes full-power operation, the rate of loss of internal quantum entanglement will accelerate. Every three standard Terra years, a deep-level maintenance and data demagnetization must be carried out by the T-series engineering team directly under the Sealholder's Office."

"If maintenance is not carried out by the end of the three-year period, the internal logic redundancy will collapse like an avalanche within 72 hours, degenerating back to the previous state of logical chaos, or even being completely brain dead at any time."

The noise in the hall subsided at a visible speed.

Olsen's lips twitched.

Maintenance only once every three years?

Can it only be operated by the Empire's T-series team?

Will it completely crash if it's not maintained?

The dozen or so old dwarfs looked at each other in bewilderment.

This is clearly putting the core lifeline of their entire race in a tight noose that tightens every three years, right in front of the control panel of the Imperial Seal Holder's Palace!

If Wotan dares to harbor even the slightest disloyalty, if he pays less than a single gram of refined gold in his tithe, or if he is even slightly negligent when the Empire summons him...

They don't even need to send their star-destroying battleships to fight. They just need to delay the engineering team's business trip approval in Terra for a few months, and those dozen or so old ancestral machines in the Galactic Core will all crash and die.

The dwarves' stubborn and obstinate nature churned wildly in their chests, but looking at the ruler of the empire before them, all their protests and curses had to be swallowed back down.

Wald swallowed hard, and the old Karl slammed the barrel of wine he was holding heavily on the table:

"Oh dear! Look at you, Master of the Seal!"

"Now that our Wotan Alliance has officially signed and pledged its allegiance to the Empire, we are now one big family! Regular maintenance by our own top-notch technical team is an imperial benefit! Our Great Turian Alliance's loyalty to the Sealholder's Office is purer than adamantite, so we have absolutely no worries about that!"

"Yes, yes, yes! Waldekar is absolutely right!"

Olsen, wiping away sweat frantically, tried to smooth things over by taking the opportunity to smooth things over:

"A three-year overhaul is good. Regular maintenance will help our ancestors live longer! We will completely obey the Empire's arrangements!"

Lawson's lips curled up slightly.

"Better so."

In the void, the massive imperial expeditionary force began to slowly change course.

The remaining Leviathan fleet at the galactic core has had its backbone completely broken.

The remaining swarms scattered and fled among the galaxies, plunging headlong into the perilous deep-space gravitational black holes and radiation nebulae.

Lawson had no interest in wasting time chasing after the routed troops.

The strategic goals of the core of the galaxy have been exceeded.

The seventeen Wotan Alliances were brought under their control, and the four completely destroyed Alliance Ancestral Spirit Cores were packaged and transported back to the Dark Side of the Empire. The massive heavy industrial capacity and deep space mineral veins were officially incorporated into the logistics network of the Sealholder's Palace.

The vast torrent of imperial ships tore open the curtain, officially setting sail back to Holy Terra.

……

The massive tail flames of the Tianzhu ship completely dissipated at the edge of the starry sea.

The smiles on the old dwarfs' faces vanished completely.

"Oh shit……"

Olsen slammed his fist on the table:

"So you've just been fitted with a bit like that?"

"Three hundred million tons of refined gold ore, ten percent of the annual industrial tax, and we also have to spare thirty million elite Hess Guards to form some kind of Wotan Auxiliary Legion to fill gaps on the front lines..."

A young clan representative gritted his teeth:

"The most critical thing is that they have the lifeblood of our ancestors in their hands! We have been roaming this Gravitational Sea for tens of thousands of years. Are we really going to be long-term laborers for those long-legged toilet seat guys on Terra from now on?"

Several hot-tempered commanders were also panting heavily.

Wald, seated at the head of the table, silently lit a thick cigar, the bluish smoke rising slowly in the dim light.

"Have you all shouted enough?"

"What does the letterhead on the allegiance book we signed say?"

“We are loyal to the Imperial Seal Holder’s Office, and to Lawson himself.”

"As long as that Lord of the Seals remains seated before the highest throne of Terra, the alliance of the Wotans' pact with the Empire is stronger than any mineral deposit."

"We pay our taxes honestly and send troops diligently. Even if we have to go to Terra to ask for a firmware update once every three years, it's still a worthwhile deal."

Young Karl paused for a moment, then couldn't help but frown:

"What if Lawson dies someday?"

Several old Karls simultaneously sneered.

If that day ever comes when that terrifying behemoth that looms over the entire galaxy is truly gone...

What is an empire without Lawson?

At that time, who will be the farmhand, who will be the master, and who will break the contract...?

Does it even need to be said?

The old Karls silently raised their glasses and drank them down in one gulp.

…………

After the four Ancestral Spirit Cores were transported back to the Empire, Lawson never intended to use them for administrative reporting.

There was no intention to have this super quantum computer, which has survived from the Golden Age to the present day and contains a complete system of civilization engineering, calculate food shortages for which star sector or arrange routes for which fleet every day.

The bee colony can do these things on its own, and it does them very well.

With its administrative scheduling across millions of worlds, task allocation across trillions of cornerstone sequences, cross-stellar logistics, battlefield fire control, and fleet coordination, the swarm has long since developed a system so mature it's almost abnormal.

What Lawson really valued was something else entirely.

Terra, the highest technological hub beneath the Sealholder's Palace.

The four enormous ancestral spirit cores were placed in four separate, enclosed halls.

Each hall is as large as a small city.

Countless modified quantum lattices, heat dissipation arrays, data pillars, and T-sequence maintenance platforms extend along the dome and the ground to the horizon.

In the center, a giant, golden tree-like projection is suspended, constantly growing.

Lawson stood under the tree.

General Raskian of the Mechanicus Casting Cult, UR-025, hundreds of top sages, the chief engineering node of the T sequence, and the heads of Agrippina, the Tau, the Genetic Engineering Center, and the Blackstone Institute were all present.

The tree's root system extends to the most basic human processes: material processing, alloy smelting, energy conversion, and mechanical structures.

Further up, there are bomb guns, laser guns, plasma, power armor, Lemanrus, knight armor, Titans, cruisers, battleships, Blackstone technology, Titan ion technology, and Wotan gravity technology.

The Eldar have opened up some knowledge of spirit bones, antigravity and space materials, Bayer's 10,000-year genetic engineering, the UR-025 Golden Age database, compressed stars, and the T-series' own mechanical intelligence engineering.

There is even data on the divinity of life provided by Isa.

Everything was connected by glowing lines.

Previously, these technologies were almost entirely unrelated to each other.

Lawson looked up at the ever-growing technology tree.

What is this thing called?

UR-025 stood to the side.

"According to the engineering definition, it should be called a cross-civilization technology system compatibility and standardization compilation framework."

Lawson glanced at it.

"It's too long, so let's just call it the Imperial STC Compiler."

From this day forward.

The core of the Four Ancestral Spirits has truly begun to function.

All the technologies that humanity has rediscovered over the past ten thousand years will be reorganized into a complete technology tree that truly belongs to the new era empire.

The first one, Emberg's ancestral core.

The official designation given to the new imperial technology system is:

Imperial Forge

It is responsible for the most inconspicuous yet most important things.

Materials, metallurgy, standard parts, heat exchangers, reactor valves, cables, bearings, bolts, armor interfaces, ship pipelines, hydraulic structures, and seals.

Almost all of the empire's high-ranking officials thought at a glance that there was nothing worth studying about this.

As a result, the entire Mechanical Engineering Department was in an uproar in the first month.

A high-ranking sage from Mars stood before the conference table, holding two bolts in his mechanical tentacles: "These are M36 standard heavy ship reactor fixing bolts produced on Mars."

He then held up another one: "This is the same model produced by Agrippina, but the size difference is 0.7 millimeters, the thread pitch is different, and the interface standard is also different."

A wise man named Riza scoffed, "You Martians changed your standards three times yourself, and you still have the nerve to criticize us?"

Another great sage immediately retorted: "That's because the M38 underwent a material replacement!"

Why replace the threads along with the material?

"Sacred creation process..."