Warhammer: Empire Reboot

A densely packed data table floated on the holographic projection. Over the past 72 hours, the Swarm Intelligence had taken over the inventory systems of the three major guilds and completed the planetary food inventory.

Based on the current planet's population of 118 billion and a strict daily ration of 1200 calories, this is just enough to keep an adult from starving but to leave them permanently weak. All reserves will be depleted in 87 days.

Eighty-seven days later, this planet will not need chaos to destroy it. It will perish on its own.

Lawson gazed at the three planets on the holographic star map.

Obolus-II, that verdant agricultural world, the granary of the entire Triad system, is in the hands of the main planet's rebels. Food cannot be transported.

Looks like I'll have to steal it.

But seizing opportunities takes time; interstellar military operations spanning 1.8 million kilometers are not something that can be accomplished in a day or two.

From departure to landing, from landing to seizing grain-producing areas, and from seizing them to establishing transportation routes, it would conservatively take two to three months.

He needs a buffer solution.

A solution that can conjure food out of thin air in this barren world of nests.

Lawson closed the food data and pulled up another document, his analysis of the orc spores.

Orcs are a fungus-animal complex, the most insane bioengineering masterpiece in the entire galaxy.

Every orc, from the lowest of the lowly to the most ruthless warlord, originates from a single orc fungal spore. This spore is virtually ubiquitous; it is released when an orc breathes, splatters in their blood during battle, and its corpse becomes a spore bomb. When the spore falls into any environment rich in organic matter, it will differentiate into different orc ecological members based on conditions such as temperature, humidity, and organic matter concentration.

Lawson was focused on the lowest level of the chain, Squiger.

This thing is essentially a stomach with legs and teeth.

Without bones or a brain, its intelligence is roughly equivalent to that of a sponge. Its only survival instinct is to eat and grow. From a spore smaller than a pinhead to a mature, edible Squig, it only takes 12 to 16 days under favorable conditions. A mature Squig weighs an average of 120 to 180 kilograms, of which about 65% is pure protein and fat, a proportion far higher than any known edible animal in the Imperial livestock industry.

More importantly, Squier eats everything.

Organic waste, industrial sludge, heavy metal deposits, nuclear wastewater, rotting corpses, and even certain chemical toxins.

Their digestive tracts are symbiotic with an extreme thermophilic flora that can convert almost any substance into its own biomass.

And the Nest of the Dead, that dark heartland forgotten by the Empire for thousands of years, is the most ideal Squiger petri dish in the galaxy.

The total area of ​​the bottom nests of the three nest cities exceeds 12,000 square kilometers.

Over tens of thousands of years, industrial wastewater, nuclear waste, collapsed buildings, and the corpses of countless generations of bottom-nest inhabitants have accumulated in this area.

Every inch of this land is soaked in organic matter and toxins.

For humans, this is hell.

For Squiger's spores, this is a buffet.

However, the bottom nest was not completely cleaned up.

Over the past week, the suicide squads have advanced with astonishing efficiency, but even so, only about one-third of the 12,000 square kilometer underground labyrinth, filled with collapsed pipes, abandoned factory areas, and dark nests that have been run by Nurgle cultists for decades, has been cleared in a week.

The remaining two-thirds are still teeming with millions of remnants of the Nurgle. The deeper one goes, the more polluted and complex the terrain becomes, and the slower the progress.

One-third, or about four thousand square kilometers, of the cleared area.

This is the space available in Lawson at present.

Lawson spent three hours designing the system.

Project code name: Iron Bones.

Phase 1: In the area where the three nests have been cleared, 900 large-scale cultivation ponds will be constructed using existing industrial wastewater treatment ponds and abandoned cooling channels. Each pond will be 200 meters long, 100 meters wide, and 8 meters deep, as the bottom nests do not lack such large recessed structures.

The source of the initial culture medium is not a problem.

In the battle to eradicate the Nurgle cultists, tens of millions more corpses were added to the Deep Nest. The flesh and blood of the Nurgle cultists were infused with plague psionic energy, making them a deadly source of biochemical contamination for normal people. However, Lawson's experiments on the wrecked ship have proven that orc spores can not only devour this contaminant, but also that, under conditions where Nurgle carrion serves as a culture medium, Squig's growth rate is more than 20% faster than that of ordinary organic matter.

The corpses of Nurgle believers are not waste. They are excellent fertilizer.

As for the source of the spores, during the Greenskin siege, over 1.2 million Orcs perished outside the hive. Their corpses released astronomical clouds of spores. The swarm-thinking assassins have already collected enough dried spore powder outside the hive to simultaneously activate all 900 cultivation pools.

Controlling the cultivation conditions is not complicated. The bottom nest is kept at a temperature between 36 and 40 degrees Celsius year-round, completely dark, and with extremely high humidity, which is exactly the optimal range for Squier differentiation.

When the temperature is maintained between 38 and 42 degrees Celsius and the carbon-nitrogen ratio of the culture medium is higher than 25:1, the proportion of spores differentiating into Squiger is as high as 70% or more.

A cycle lasts 14 days.

From the moment the spores are released until the pool is filled with thousands of grayish-brown fleshy clumps, each weighing over 100 kilograms, with four short legs and a mouth big enough to swallow an entire iron plate, it only takes 14 days.

Then comes the slaughter.

This is the most crucial part of the entire plan, not only because it relates to food production, but also because of a secret known only to Lawson.

Each cultivation tank's outlet connects to a 50-meter-long harvesting channel. The channel is 3 meters wide, with assassins standing on both sides.

Once the gate at the entrance to the passage opens, the Squigs in the pool will be attracted by the scent of the protein lure released at the other end, instinctively rushing towards the exit. Their intelligence is insufficient to comprehend the concept of a trap; for them, the entire philosophy of life is simply to move forward where there is food.

They surged into the passage.

Then the assassins made their move.

Single-molecule blades, chainsaws, industrial cutting knives—each assassin slashed at Squiger with precise movements. Blade fell, head severed. One per second. An assembly-line slaughter.

When a suicide assassin kills an orc creature, the system will automatically extract two things from the prey: an active factor and WAAAGH energy.

One Squig: 1 health point.

One fart spirit: 1 point.

An orc boy: 7 o'clock.

After extraction, all biological activity within the prey, including every spore that may have been scattered, will be completely drained by the system.

All that was left was a clean skeleton.

There are no active spores.

This is crucial.

Under normal circumstances, any attempt to process orc meat would be a disaster, as the active spores remaining in the orc corpses would spread during processing, contaminating equipment, infecting personnel, and even causing new green skins to grow in food factories.

This is why the Empire never used orc flesh as a food source on a large scale, not because orc flesh was inedible, but because the processing was too dangerous.

But the system solved the problem.

The moment the assassin killed the orc, the system extracted life force and WAAAGH energy, simultaneously reducing all biological activity in the corpse to zero. There were no active spores, no risk of fungal infection, and no danger of spread. The remaining meat could directly enter the Corpse Guild's processing line, where heavy-duty centrifuges separated blood and tissue fluid, protein extractors extracted edible protein, nutrient compressors pressed the extracts into standard ration blocks, and finally, it was sterilized in a radiation sterilization chamber.

Moreover, through comparative analysis of nutritional components using swarm intelligence, the food blocks processed from Squiger meat completely surpass traditional carcass starch in terms of protein density, amino acid integrity, and calorie efficiency.

One piece of Squiger rations is equivalent in nutritional value to about three to four standard carcass starch blocks.

In other words, the same weight of food can feed three to four times the population.

This was enough for Lawson to make the decision to build the culture pool.

一座培养池，一个14天的生长周期。产出大约3000只成熟史奎格、5000到8000只屁精、300到600只地精、以及50到120个兽人小子胚芽。

The assassins slaughtered all creatures that emerged from the pool in the passage, and the system automatically reclaimed their life points.

One pool, one cycle: approximately 3000 Squigs + 6000 Farflies + 400 Goblins + 80 Orc Boy Spawns = close to 10000 health points.

900 pools, one cycle: approximately 900 million life points.

What does 900 million life points mean?

This means that his combat-type suicide squad can fill the roster.

This means he can create a large number of non-combatant assassins.

Instead of combat suicides, they are precisely the labor force needed to operate the incubation pool.

Compared to the grain harvest from raising green-skinned animals, the life points gained are ten times more valuable.

He saw the true nature of this system.

Kill orcs → gain life points → create more assassins → build more breeding pools → raise more orcs → kill more orcs → gain more life points.

A positive feedback loop leads to exponential growth.

First cycle: 900 pools, 18000 suicide soldiers in operation. Produces 900 million life points.

Second cycle: Utilize the life points from the first cycle to create new non-combat undead, while the bottom-clearing forces continue to advance deeper, opening up new cleared areas. Add hundreds, even thousands, of new breeding pools.

The third cycle: more pools, more suicide squads, more output, snowballing.

One month later? Three thousand ponds. Two months later? Perhaps tens of thousands.

Three months later, if the bottom nests are completely cleared, the 12,000 square kilometers of space will be enough to accommodate tens of thousands of culture ponds.

The only bottleneck limiting the start-up speed of this perpetual motion machine is the progress of cleaning the bottom nest.

You can't build a breeding pool in an uncleaned area where millions of Negro remnants still lurk.

Currently, there is only 4,000 square kilometers of clean land, and 900 houses is already the maximum density that this area can accommodate.

In theory, once the cleanup is complete, more culture ponds can be built continuously.

But things rarely go so smoothly.

Swarm intelligence completed the full-cycle simulation in 1.2 seconds and then presented the results to Lawson.

The data is divided into two parts.

The first part is good news.

30天后：培养池总数预计突破3000座。日产口粮可覆盖星球总需求的5%至8%。底巢已清理面积预计达到60%。

60天后：培养池总数预计突破12000座。日产口粮可覆盖星球总需求的20%至30%。底巢基本清理完毕。累计回收的生命点总量将达到一个天文数字，洛森的死士军团规模将从现在的11万膨胀到一个他自己都需要花几秒钟来消化的数字。

Ninety days later, on the day when the original food reserves are exhausted, the Ironbone Project's production capacity will reach its peak.

If all the base nest spaces of the three hive cities were fully utilized, the theoretical upper limit could cover about 35% to 40% of the planet's total needs.

With a strict rationing system, it was enough to keep 118 billion people from starving to death.

This is good news.

Lawson had a backup plan, a lifeline that would allow the planet to barely keep running even in the worst-case scenario.

Then came the bad news.

The organic matter in the bottom nest is limited.

The bottom nest, covering an area of ​​12,000 square kilometers, is filled with industrial waste, organic sludge, and the remains of countless generations of bottom nest inhabitants accumulated over tens of thousands of years.

It sounds like an astronomical amount of organic reserves. But Squig's stomach isn't an ordinary digestive system; it's a biomass incinerator.