Warhammer: Empire Reboot

The heavy element mining world on the edge of the Empire's dark side.

The planet's atmosphere is dark orange, and its surface is covered with large areas of crystalline mineral veins.

The vein contains high-purity promethium, one of the Empire's most important nuclear fuels.

But the cost of mining is equally staggering.

The surface radiation intensity of the Kravis-XII is four hundred times that of the Imperial safety standard.

The mine is located even deeper, and ordinary humans exposed to it without protection will develop acute radiation sickness within ten minutes and die within thirty minutes.

Wearing a standard radiation protection suit can provide protection for several hours, but the cumulative dose can reach lethal levels within a few weeks.

The Empire used two methods to mine on these types of planets in the past.

They sent convicted criminals, rebel prisoners, and indebted slave laborers into the mines to dig until they died.

Sending the dead to the next batch is low-cost but also inefficient, because people's physical strength declines very quickly in a high-radiation environment, and they soon become unable to dig anymore.

The second type is the machine servant, which transforms humans into semi-mechanical machine servants, implanting radiation shielding modules and mechanically enhanced skeletons, and sending them into mines.

While they are more durable than ordinary humans, the biological components of the servants are still human tissue, and they will still become unusable once radiation accumulates to a certain level.

The average service life of a standard servitor on the Clavius-XII is four months.

Both methods are wasteful.

Therefore, the cornerstone sequence has been exploring alternative methods.

Lawson stood on the observation platform at the entrance of the mine, looking down at the mine shaft opening.

A group of green-skinned men emerged from the mine.

Thirty orc boys emerged from the depths of the mine in a crooked column.

They are shorter than adult orcs, but their muscle density is already quite considerable.

Its green skin was covered with a thick layer of mineral dust, and its mouth was half-open, revealing large fangs.

The biggest difference between them and ordinary orc boys is their heads.

Each orc's skull had a metal plate embedded in it, covering the frontal lobe area. Behind the metal plate were several rough wires leading to a small control unit at the back of the neck.

The control unit is a simplified version of a neural inhibitor designed by the Cornerstone Sequence Engineers to suppress the orcs' fighting instincts.

Their limbs have also been modified.

The left arm has been replaced with a simple robotic arm, with a replaceable mining tool head at the end, such as a drill bit, bucket, or grappling hook.

The right arm retains the original orc muscle structure, used for carrying and heavy labor.

Each of the thirty orc servants carried a large piece of promethium ore and headed along a pre-set route toward the processing station on the outskirts of the mining area.

They didn't push, they didn't snatch, and they didn't bite each other's ears.

Each individual maintained a distance of approximately two meters and followed the route markings.

Lawson retrieved the project files recorded by the swarm intelligence mechanism.

Orc Servant Modification Project.

Startup time: one year ago.

The cause is very simple.

Lawson's greenskin breeding farms are scattered throughout the dark side of the Empire, with each breeding pool hatching a large number of orcs every cycle.

Squig was slaughtered for his flesh, providing a protein supply for the dark side of the Empire.

Orc Boy has never been used very often.

After killing the enemy and gaining life points, the corpse is usually broken up and thrown back into the incubation tank as organic substrate for the next round of hatching.

This process is efficient enough in terms of life point production, but it is wasteful in terms of actual resource utilization.

A year ago, a technology-based cornerstone sequence engineer on the main planet Agrippina came up with an idea while processing waste data from the Greenskin Farm: the physiological structure of orcs is naturally suited to working in high-risk environments, could they be transformed into machine servants?

This idea has a sound biological basis.

Orcs are fungal-based organisms.

Their cell repair speed far exceeds that of humans, their radiation tolerance is dozens of times that of humans, and they can maintain basic life activities in extreme temperature, low oxygen and highly toxic environments.

Orc boys often spontaneously engage in crude mechanical modifications, nailing iron plates into their skin, connecting muscles and engines with wires, and welding discarded parts onto their bones, indicating that their bodies have an extremely low rejection rate for mechanical implants.

From a physiological point of view, orcs are more suitable raw materials than humans for becoming machine servants.

The problem lies in the mind.

The first batch of experiments used fifty orc boys.

The cornerstone engineers operated according to the Imperial standard servant modification procedure: removing the frontal cortex, implanting neural inhibitors, installing mechanical limbs, and writing simple mission protocols.

The logic behind the modification of human bots is clear: the frontal lobe is removed to eliminate self-awareness and emotions, and neural inhibitors control the body to execute preset commands.

The modified human servant is a biological machine without thought.

But orcs are not human.

The orc boy was already close to lacking advanced thinking abilities.

Unlike humans, they do not rely on the frontal lobe for decision-making, planning, and self-control.

Orcs' behavior is driven by deeper instincts: the instinct to fight, the instinct to gather, and the resonance of the WAAAGH field.

Lobectomy has a far smaller impact on orcs than on humans.

The orc boys did become quieter and easier to control after the surgery, but their fighting instincts were not eliminated.

That instinct resides in every cell, every nerve, and every fungal spore of the orc.

The first batch of fifty orc servants were sent into the test mine.

He performs normally when working alone.

An orc servant can operate a drill, move ore, walk along a route, and avoid marked danger zones according to preset instructions.

The problem lies in the quantity.

When the number of orc minions in the mine exceeds a certain amount, the WAAAGH field begins to resonate.

When enough orcs gather together, their collective psionic energy spontaneously forms a field that makes all orcs more excited, more aggressive, and stronger.

This field is not controlled by individual consciousness, and is not even affected by lobotomy.

When the cornerstone supervisor led the team in, they found that fifty orc servants were already fighting each other.

Seventeen had their heads smashed by their companion's robotic arm, eight were biting each other's ears, and the rest were stabbing each other with mining drill bits.

The first batch of experiments ended in failure.

Over the next year, the Cornerstone Engineering team carried out more than thirty rounds of improvements.

The core issue remains the WAAAGH field resonance.

Individual orc servants are controllable.

However, once the number increases to a certain threshold, the WAAAGH fields between them will spontaneously form a feedback loop.

When one orc becomes excited, the orcs around him become excited as well. The level of excitement, in turn, strengthens the field strength, which in turn further stimulates the level of excitement.

Once positive feedback is initiated, it is irreversible; within minutes, the entire group of orcs will go from "working quietly" to "going berserk."

The engineers tried many methods.

Increasing the power of the neural inhibitor had no effect.

Injecting sedatives into orcs is effective in the short term, but ineffective in the long term.

The final solution was simple: control the quantity.

After repeated testing, the engineers determined a critical value of thirty.

With fewer than thirty orc boys, the resonance intensity of the WAAAGH field is insufficient to trigger positive feedback.

They will maintain basic obedience in servant mode and perform tasks according to instructions.

Once there are more than thirty, resonance begins.

Pushing and shoving begin at 35, fighting starts at 40, and a complete rampage occurs at 50.

Therefore, each work team is strictly limited to fewer than thirty people.

Maintain sufficient distance between different squads to ensure that the WAAAGH field does not resonate across squads.

Lawson watched for an hour on the observation platform.

Three orc servant squads are working simultaneously in three different mines.

Each team consists of 25 to 28 individuals, who are remotely observed by two cornerstone sequence supervisors through a monitoring system.

The radiation intensity deep inside the mine is twelve times that at the surface.

Human servants were rendered unusable after four months in this environment, while orc servants have been working continuously for seven months without showing any obvious radiation damage.

Their green skin was even thicker than when they first entered the mine; the orcs' fungal-based physiology had spontaneously strengthened their protective epidermal layer in the radiation environment.

Mining efficiency is not high.

It's far inferior to the Empire's standardized mining equipment.

The orc servants were clumsy and often broke the ore into irregular pieces, increasing the workload for subsequent processing.

They also do not actively avoid unstable rock formations, which can occasionally cause small landslides.

But at least they won't die from radiation.

In the environment of the Clavis-XII, being immortal is the greatest advantage.

Previously, human servants were replaced every four months, which consumed a large amount of human resources and modification costs every year.

The orc servants have been digging for seven months and the raw materials come from farming.

Lawson pulled up the benefit analysis of swarm intelligence.

The Dark Side of the Empire contains over two hundred high-risk mining planets.

These planets contain abundant rare minerals and nuclear fuel, but the mining conditions are extreme, including high radiation, high temperature, high pressure, highly corrosive atmosphere, and toxic environment.