Warhammer: Empire Reboot

They took over the crippled orbital defense array, the destroyed communications relay stations, and the seaweed processing plants piled high with corpses.

Lawson stood in front of the star map projection.

His gaze swept over the seventeen planets below.

They are gradually transforming from blood red, representing the erosion of chaos, into a deep blue, symbolizing absolute control.

Before his departure, Dante, the Dark Regent, allowed Lawson to appoint governors of the planets and even the galaxies he had reclaimed from Chaos.

With this regent's decree, the seventeen agricultural planets of the Klein system were effectively under imperial rule and absolute physical occupation.

Naturally, this is the territory of Lawson.

He was no longer merely a warlord of the Oberlus Triad.

His territory has officially expanded to a complete, vast galaxy that once supported the logistics of the entire Agrippina Sector.

However, the current state of this enormous asset is extremely dire.

According to the swarm intelligence's deep scan, the surface ecosystems of these seventeen agricultural planets have been completely destroyed by the plague legion.

The invasion of Nurgle is not only a military occupation, but also a biological assimilation.

The once fertile soil has turned into an acidic swamp emitting poisonous fumes, the rivers flow with yellowish-green pus, and the farmland is overgrown with decaying plants with eyeballs and tentacles.

Billions of civilians died in despair, their corpses piling up and becoming a breeding ground for a new wave of plague.

Under such extremely harsh conditions, it is completely impossible to replant genetically modified crops that meet imperial standards.

The moment a seed comes into contact with the soil, it is corroded and mutated by chaotic pathogens.

Before resorting to conventional ecological restoration, Lawson offered a most pragmatic solution.

The most suitable place to build on these ruins is a green-skinned breeding base.

Seventeen agricultural planets, each planned to have three hundred large green cultivation pools.

A total of 5,100 green-skinned aquaculture factories were put into construction.

This is a massive bioengineering project. But for the elite army with the ability to micromanage bee colonies, the speed of infrastructure construction is beyond imagination.

These agricultural worlds have just experienced a full-scale invasion by the Plague Legion and have also endured the indiscriminate heavy firepower of the Death Squad.

Other resources may be scarce, but organic matter is so abundant that it's practically overflowing.

The plague zombies shattered by bombs, the rotting bodies of Chaos Space Marines, the charred remains of Nurgle demons burned by plasma, and the mutated plants covering the mountains and plains.

According to the doctrines of the Imperial State Religion, these are absolute heretics who must be completely burned to ashes with a promethium flamethrower.

But in Lawson's economics of war, these are all the richest nutrients for cultivating green-skinned creatures.

The biological nature of the green-skinned fungus is that of a highly invasive fungal complex.

Their underlying spore genes possess the most ruthless assimilation and engulfment capabilities in the entire Milky Way.

When orc spores were sown on these chaotic corpses, a brutal war broke out on a microscopic scale.

The putrefactive pathogens of the filthy attempt to infect the spores, but the "Waaagh" ferocity in the green skin genes causes an extremely savage backlash at the cellular level.

The lowest form of green-skinned creature, Squig, has stomach acid that can even dissolve metal.

As they devour these chaotic corpses, their powerful digestive systems forcefully break down the filthy toxins, transforming them into proteins for their own growth.

When these 5,100 green-skinned aquaculture factories begin operating at full capacity, the resulting benefits are terrifying.

It can bring Lawson tens of millions of life points and mountains of "Spark-3" Squig pure meat rations every fourteen-day harvest cycle.

More importantly, Squig's frenzied eating was essentially a biological process of planetary purification.

They devoured the poisonous carrion, and the assassins then severed their heads. The system, upon acquiring the life points, also erased the remaining chaotic aura.

This not only solved the potential for a secondary epidemic caused by corpses scattered everywhere, but also completed the transformation from waste to strategic resources.

Get more in one fell swoop.

-

The 5,100 farms, like giant pumps, greedily drained the remnants of the war.

But during his strategic planning at the Governor's Palace, Lawson was very clear about the limits of this system.

No matter how much organic matter there is, it will eventually be depleted. Corpses do not grow out of thin air.

According to the swarm intelligence calculations, within two and a half years at most, the chaotic remnants on the surface of these seventeen planets will be completely devoured by Squig.

This is, after all, an agricultural planet.

Their true strategic value lies in utilizing the vast land and starlight to cultivate "Imperial Standard Type-VII seaweed" or other high-yield crops, thereby achieving a truly sustainable carbohydrate and oxygen cycle.

Restoring the ecosystem and initiating agricultural cycles as soon as possible are the most important foundations for supporting hundreds of billions of ordinary people.

However, in the process of ecological restoration, Lawson encountered the biggest problem left behind by the invasion of the Plague Legion.

The sky is deeply polluted by filth.

Lawson pulled up images from the Klein-IV high-altitude probe.

The image shows no blue sky, no white clouds, and not even the light of stars can penetrate it.

The entire planet's atmosphere was shrouded in a mustard-yellow poisonous cloud thousands of meters thick.

This is not ordinary industrial smog.

This is a subspace weather weapon known as "Breath of the Father".

This thick cloud of pollution is composed of high concentrations of sulfur dioxide, putrefactive aerosols, deadly pathogens, and materialized subspace psionic energy.

It blocks more than 85 percent of the starlight.

This alone is enough to spell the death penalty for any photosynthetic plant.

It is still raining extremely acidic black rain.

This black rain, falling on the remaining adamantite structures, could corrode them into countless pits. If it fell on the skin of an ordinary person, it would dissolve them into a puddle of pus within seconds.

If no human intervention is taken, and the planet's atmosphere simply allows it to dissipate slowly through natural circulation—

According to the physics modeling of swarm intelligence, it would take at least a thousand years for the toxic cloud on this planet to dilute to a level that humans could barely breathe.

Lawson doesn't have that much time.

Back when he was on the Oberlus Triad, facing years of nuclear radiation pollution and industrial exhaust fumes over the Nest City, he was already thinking about purifying the atmosphere.

However, solving the problem of stellar-level pollution is by no means an easy task.

If we rely on the Empire's existing technology to solve this problem, there are only two options.

The first option is to issue an extinction order directly, using cyclone torpedoes to burn up the entire planet's atmosphere, and then spend thousands of years cooling it down and replanting trees.

The second option is to ask the great sages of the Mechanic Church on Mars to build hundreds of thousands of atmospheric purification towers on the planet's surface, using extremely expensive chemical neutralizers to filter the air for centuries.

Both of these options are too expensive in terms of both time and resources.

The current Lawson simply cannot afford it.

As for the Tau Empire, which possesses advanced environmental modification technology, it lies on the other side of the galaxy. Lawson currently has no way to contact them.

He has no choice but to rely on himself to solve this terrible subspace climate pollution problem.

-

Lawson completely immersed his consciousness into the deep sea of ​​computational power of swarm thinking.

They began conducting frantic weather intervention simulations.

Launching a neutralizing missile carrying a massive amount of perchlorate into the clouds? Failed. Physical and chemical reactions cannot eradicate the subspace psionic energy contained within the clouds; the toxic cloud will recombine in a few days.

Using a fleet to launch a plasma salvo from near-Earth orbit to forcibly heat the atmosphere and create thermal convection to disperse the toxic cloud? Failed. The localized high temperatures would only trigger global super-acid rain storms, accelerating surface corrosion.

Hundreds of deductions based on conventional physics and chemistry were tried, but the results were all very poor.

The pollution from Nargob violates the law of conservation of mass. It uses the malice of subspace to continuously generate poisonous gas out of thin air.

Finally, when the deduction reached a dead end, and Lawson was almost about to give up on this macro-environmental transformation and prepare to order all civilians to move into underground caves—

A sudden flash of inspiration struck him.

If physical methods are ineffective, what about subspace methods?

He thought of his subspace projection, which was detached from the physical universe.

Lawson's projection is a black hole!

What is the physical nature of black holes?

It is an extreme gravitational collapse, an absolute gravitational field from which even light cannot escape, and the ultimate celestial body that devours all matter and energy.

In previous battles, Lawson had never considered it as a mere cleaning tool.

Since completing his fifth physical leap, the tiny black hole projected into subspace has undergone significant growth.

Originally, the black hole was only about the size of an adult's fist.

Now, it has grown to the size of a volleyball.

Although on a macro scale, the volume change from a fist to a volleyball may not seem significant.

However, the mass and gravity of a black hole increase exponentially.

Lawson could clearly feel that the suction force of this volleyball-sized black hole had indeed increased significantly.

Inside the event horizon of the black hole, a wisp of golden flame floats.

This wisp of golden fire was originally just a faint trace.

Now, it slowly rotates at the center of the black hole, and its size has increased, vaguely showing the beginnings of a miniature star.

The golden energy fragments from the ownerless, cold sun that the Emperor scattered throughout the subspace were being continuously captured and absorbed by this growing black hole, nourishing the ball of golden fire.

Lawson seemed to be deep in thought.

Since black holes can devour heavy weapons in the physical universe, they can also absorb the spillover energy from subspace.

Therefore, it can naturally also absorb the Nurgle cloud, which is a mixture of physical toxic gases and warp energy.

This is logically sound.

Practice is the sole criterion for testing truth.