Warhammer: Empire Reboot

The production quantities of these two models have each exceeded 10 billion.

After the Tau were formally incorporated into the Empire system, Vision once led a group of high-ranking Tau officers to visit a newly built Imperial armory reserve world.

After the orbital transport ship passed through the clouds, the people on the bridge who were chatting earlier fell silent.

On the ground, row after row, and then another row.

Wolverine and Sabretooth stretched all the way to the horizon, while transport platforms in the sky continued to drop new mechs down.

The entire empire is undergoing the same changes.

Technologies that were previously only accessible to great sages of mechanical engineering are now beginning to enter grassroots factories.

Equipment performance that was previously only available to the Imperial Guard, Astartes, or top-tier warbands is now being distributed to hundreds of billions of ordinary combat nodes.

What used to require hundreds of years of accumulation to build an industrial system can now be directly replicated in a new world using planetary industrial templates.

Over the course of a decade, the traditional imperial fleet underwent a large-scale modernization, and the average global production capacity of major castings increased several times over.

But the most terrifying thing about all this is not the numbers.

The factories behind these machines are still operating.

New mines are still being opened, and new industrial sites are still being established.

New standard production lines are being generated daily from the Ancestral Core; the Empire has not emptied its coffers to complete this round of military expansion.

Quite the opposite.

Its production capacity is still increasing.

The true technological revival of the human empire has only just begun at this moment.

The changes over the past decade have certainly not been limited to shipyards, the foundry world, and the military.

Those warships numbering in the millions, mechs worth tens of billions, and ever-increasing industrial capacity are actually far removed from the lives of someone living at the bottom of an ordinary city.

For them, whether a single-star super battleship can blast through several Zerglings with a single shot will not directly change tomorrow's fate.

What truly made them realize that the empire was different from the past were some other, more insignificant things.

All the lost worlds on the dark side of the Empire had already been largely recovered more than a decade ago.

With the extinguishing of the Star Torch and the full rollout of the Cornerstone Navigation System, the original dark side and holy side of the Empire gradually lost their practical administrative value.

The Milky Way Rift is still there, of course.

Subspace storms will not suddenly disappear because of human administrative reforms.

However, for the imperial central government, the million worlds have already reverted to the same management system.

The administrative distance between an agricultural world located in the shadows of a former empire and an industrial star in the solar system might even be shorter than that between two adjacent star sectors from the old era.

The fleet can still sail without the starlight.

Even without a traditional Star Language Court, orders can still be delivered to the farthest front lines.

The administrative nodes of the five major star regions are kept running in real time through the swarm. If a world experiences a food shortage and the local reserves are insufficient, the system will check the star system. If the star system is insufficient, the system will transfer resources from other star regions.

As long as there is still food in the empire's warehouses, no one should starve to death due to transportation and scheduling errors.

This principle sounds as simple as a truism, yet it took the human empire ten thousand years to finally achieve it again.

The same applies to the post-war world.

After twenty years of iteration, the Wotan Heavy Industry system and the Titanium Group construction drones are no longer simply a combination of two different systems.

The new Imperial construction drones show little trace of the Tau race in appearance, with a thicker structure and a more complex environment to adapt to.

Atmospheric treatment, cleaning up radiation deposits, and repairing damaged water circulation networks.

The toxic wastewater that had accumulated underground for hundreds or even thousands of years was extracted and treated separately.

First, let people breathe, then let them drink water.

This kind of thing happens constantly in millions of worlds.

The empire did not become paradise, nor could it transform every world into an Eden within twenty years.

The mining world still requires intensive labor, the frontiers remain dangerous, wars have never truly ceased, and people in many places do not have a plentiful diet every day.

But at least we can eat our fill.

This has also changed the lives of countless people.

After the large-scale production of artificial proteins, fungal foods, high-yield grains, and closed agricultural factories improved by Wotan and Titan technologies were rolled out, corpse starch was not abolished by a grand decree.

It simply disappeared from the ration list slowly.

Finally, even many of the most remote border garrisons have not received that grayish-white, strangely oily compressed food for many years.

People in the old days couldn't even believe it at first.

But a year passed, then two years, and the granary remained full.

One day, in a world that had survived three great famines, a newly rebuilt local school was distributing lunch.

A group of children around ten years old lined up, each holding a uniform stainless steel plate.

Today's main dish is cereal biscuits, along with a serving of artificial meat, a small bowl of thick soup, and half a genetically modified sweet fruit.

It wasn't exactly lavish.

At least to the people in the wealthier parts of Terra, it even seemed somewhat shabby.

But the children clearly didn't think so.

Some people complained that the artificial meat was too tough, some secretly swapped sweet fruit with their classmates for thick soup, and two little boys had been arguing for ages about whose cereal biscuit was bigger.

The old lady in charge of the cafeteria stood behind the window, constantly cursing.

"They all weigh the same! With the Emperor above, are you all so arrogant that your eyes are on the scale?"

"Hey you in the back, don't pour the soup for others. You left half a bowl yesterday!"

The children laughed and joked; no one was afraid of her at all.

After the old lady finished scolding, she would still secretly scoop an extra spoonful of meat for the thinnest child.

Just then, a little girl with short braids noticed an old metal plaque hanging on the wall of the cafeteria.

It was cleared out of the underground warehouse when the school was rebuilt; it was so rusted that only a few characters were still legible.

[Third Nest Area Corpse Starch Distribution Point]

The girl munched on a sweet fruit and tilted her head to look at it for a while.

"grandmother."

"What?"

What is "corpse starch"?

The old woman behind the window suddenly stopped moving.

Several middle-aged people who were moving food boxes nearby also slowly raised their heads.

The girl glanced at the sign again and asked curiously, "Is it also a kind of food?"

"Is it similar to our current artificial meat?"

An elderly man's spoon fell into a soup bowl with a "clatter".

He worked in the food processing area at the very bottom of this city when he was young, and later broke a leg.

The girl recognized him; everyone at school called him Old Mick.

"Grandpa Mick? Have you ever eaten this?"

The girl still had a little juice on the corner of her mouth, her face was clean, and although her school uniform was just the most ordinary uniform style, it had no patches and no burn marks left by acid rain.

Several children behind her also gathered around.

"Is it tasty?"

"Is this the old military rations?"

"The teacher said that many things used to taste terrible."

"My dad said that the nutritional paste used to be like wall plaster."

The children chattered amongst themselves.

The old man suddenly remembered something from more than ten years ago.

Back then, this area wasn't called a school.

This is the seventeenth body disposal plant in the third nest area.

Same location, same wall, only without sunlight.

His daily job is to stand next to a conveyor belt and watch the black bags being sent in from the other end.

Sometimes the bag contains the complete item, and sometimes it doesn't.

The foreman next to them would hit the machines with a stick to urge them to hurry up, because the supply station above had been without food for three days.

One time, the conveyor belt suddenly jammed.

Old Mick went over to check and found a black bag torn open, from which fell a very small hand with a blue identification band for hospital patients still attached to its wrist.

That night, he didn't eat his ration, but later, when he was so hungry he couldn't stand it anymore, he ate it the next day.

After that, he stopped looking at those bags and didn't dare to ask any questions.

When the old man came to his senses, he realized that the children were still waiting for his answer.

The girl handed him the sweet fruit in her hand.

"Grandpa Mick, why are you crying?"

The old man then realized that his face was wet.

He quickly wiped it with the back of his rough hand.

"Don't ask anymore. Corpse starch is no good. You'd better never know."

The children didn't understand.