When Tech-Priest Anthony uttered the word "Brainleaf," everyone present, except Magos Lauster, thought of the same thing: Lauster, that old scoundrel, had set them up!
Brainleaf: This is a carnivorous plant, shaped like a small tree, native to the dense jungles of the Death World Catachan.
The leaves of the Brainleaf tree can float in the air, propelled similarly to birds. Upon landing on a living organism, these seemingly harmless leaves attach themselves to the prey's flesh with thorny tendrils. Removing these leaves is almost impossible, as once in place, their tendrils penetrate deep into the body, engaging with the victim's nervous system. From then on, the victim becomes the Brainleaf's brainless prisoner, capable of only the most basic motor functions.
"Catachan?"
Tech-Priest Anthony explained with considerable pride, "Yes, Magos, but this salad isn't just Brainleaf. I also added the secretions and powder of Spinegrass for seasoning to give it a richer flavor."
"Hiss! Lauster, you…"
Spinegrass: Also a giant spherical plant from Catachan, covered in sharp spines.
The vibrations caused by passersby are enough to trigger this plant's attack mechanism. Spinegrass shoots thorns in all directions, and even if only one pierces the skin, the creature will meet its end. Mutagenic toxins flood the victim's bloodstream, beginning to alter their tissue structure.
If the victim happens to be human, he might stumble around for an hour or two, while thorns grow from his flesh. However, the toxin acts so quickly that he is unable to call for help or even understand what is happening to him. By the next day, he will be completely transformed, becoming indistinguishable from the plant that poisoned him.
Magos Lauster calmly watched the Sages who had already raised their weapons. He picked up a fork, put a piece of "Brainleaf salad" into his mouth, chewed slowly, and then said:
"You'll slowly get used to it in the future. Once you're used to it, you'll find they actually taste quite good."
"We don't want to get used to it! Tell us, whose side have you joined? What benefits did they give you to make you treat us like this?"
"No one. This is just our food from now on. I ate a roasted Blightvine yesterday; it tasted good, a bit like snake meat."
"Roasted Blightvine!?"
Blightvine: Another plant from Catachan. It is well known that on the Death World and Jungle World Catachan, the instincts and predatory nature of flora and fauna are magnified to an astonishing degree.
The Blightvine, a giant carnivorous plant that actively hunts, is a prime example.
This plant is not content with merely "waiting for prey to come to it"—its tendrils and leaves will lunge at prey meters away from the main stem, coiling around them with the strength of a large snake to strangle them to death.
The Sages' steps were a bit unsteady, a bit dazed, as they left.
Magos Gamma and Magos Lauster were unconcerned. The Sages would get used to it in the future; everyone went through it, didn't they? They were used to it. Which Priest of the Temple hadn't eaten "fresh Brainleaf" harvested while wearing a three-layer protective suit? This was "high-grade ingredient" that ordinary workers couldn't even enjoy!
The desired information had been obtained, and the situation outside was indeed beginning to slide as Magos Gamma had predicted.
Archmagos Will had now begun to promise food to the hungry workers and demand weapons from factories like Magos Gamma's that produced conventional weapons.
The Temple faction had begun to assault the spaceport, having discerned the Archmagos's intention to seize the spaceport before the workers could be armed and trained.
Both sides understood what the other wanted to do. They began a fierce offensive and defensive battle around the space elevator connecting to the spaceport. Currently, the Temple faction was not at a disadvantage on the battlefield, but as their effective forces were consumed, the Archmagos, with his reserve forces, would inevitably gain the upper hand and even achieve outright victory in the future.
At the same time, many other areas experienced riots due to food shortages. Workers used factory materials to blast open warehouses, and used the weapons inside to beat the usually high and mighty Priests into mangled fragments, burning and destroying the temples of the Omnissiah they usually revered, prayed to, and praised.
Even if the Priests possessed many powerful and excellent weapons, in the face of such absolute numbers, in the face of this despair of impending starvation, even the most powerful, wise, and knowledgeable Priest would be crushed to dust.
But food still could not appear out of thin air. Hunger would not dissipate with the death of the Priests. The armed workers began to attack the relatively stable areas, and the workers there also had no choice but to take up arms and resist.
There was no room for surrender, no room for compromise, no room for joining, because people! Could also be food! They were both hunters and prey!
"Magos Gamma, you have saved all of us. We should all thank you!"
These were Magos Lauster's words to Magos Gamma after the Sages left, spoken with such sincerity that Magos Gamma's face flushed with embarrassment. He fidgeted and said:
"Magos, can I make a request?"
"castellan robots are out of the question!"
Magos Gamma turned and walked away: Hmph, not a shred of sincerity.
Over the next period, Priests began to bring workers to Magos Gamma's location in a continuous stream. The reason for this gradual arrival was that their existing resources could not immediately satisfy everyone in the areas managed by the other Sages; abandoning those workers now would be no different from releasing starving beasts from a cage.
The good news was that Magos Gamma now needed more manpower. The cave passage leading to the underground space had been opened under his "firepower." Along the way, all flora and fauna deemed "ingredients" were preserved, while everything else was destroyed.
"Plant ingredients" were enclosed in metal grids, supervised and harvested by trained professionals.
"Animal ingredients" had their prefrontal lobes surgically removed by Louis before being sent to "farms" to live a happy animal life of eating and sleeping, sleeping and eating.
Many people were injured and died here, but more people survived because of this place. The smiles on people's faces were actually more numerous than before, or to be precise, the smiles of adults were more numerous, while the smiles of children had decreased, because they now had to go to school every day.
That's right, Magos Gamma established the first school in the history of Thedan Forge World, with apprentices serving as teachers and warehouses as classrooms. All children under 14 were mandated by Magos Gamma to attend, and apprentices were given the right to physically punish students and call parents to "beat" them.
Regarding this school, the workers believed Magos Gamma was kind-hearted, while the Priests believed Magos Gamma established it to manage unsupervised children.
Only Magos Gamma knew his thoughts when he walked down the road, deep in troubled thought, and a "big kid" two heads taller than him pushed a toy car made of scrap metal past him in a flash: Let the world feel pain!
The opening of the cave passage further expanded the "hunting ground." Now, the limitation on the quantity of "ingredients" they could obtain was the number of people and weapons, but with the addition of other districts, these were no longer issues.
Magos Lauster finally moved from his "old lair"—the Mechanical Temple. He and the other Sages had now gone underground to "seek dragons and divide gold," and shamelessly ignored Magos Gamma's previous contributions, stripping him of his "Legion Warmaster" position and taking it for himself, dispatching Magos Gamma to manage logistics and liaison with other districts.
Now, the Mechanical Temple's auditorium was Magos Gamma's office, and his desk was beneath the Omnissiah's cog-skull.
"Jacob, have all the enemy's weapons been brought back?" Magos Gamma asked the metal-headed Jacob who had entered.
Jacob found a chair and sat down, replying, "Just one more trip. After this batch is stored, I'll make another run and try to finish today."
"You've worked hard. We've already received two notices today telling us to hand over weapons. Since there's no material supply, we can't produce anything, so we should stockpile as much as we can now."
Jacob immediately said with a face full of anger upon hearing Magos Gamma's words, "They don't care if we live or die, and they still want us to send them weapons. Why don't they just perish together, and let Archmagos and Temple Sage duel? Whoever wins becomes the Fabricator-General!"
Looking at Jacob, who usually seemed like a good-natured person, with some surprise, Magos Gamma asked with concern, "Jacob, did something happen on the way?"
"Magos Gamma…" Jacob hesitated to speak but still didn't say it.
"Go on, it will make you feel better to say it, just like Louis said: This is everyone's responsibility."
Jacob looked at the "little Priest" in front of him, enveloped in official documents, and then thought of the "miracles" he had created along the way. He knew Magos Gamma was no ordinary person, destined to achieve great things, but to tell the young Magos Gamma what he had seen on the road, he truly didn't know how to say it.
Seeing Jacob remain silent, Magos Gamma guessed that something extremely cruel must have happened on the way to turn this kind and rational Priest into his current state, so he spoke:
"Has cannibalism already begun?"
"You knew!"
"I guessed it. I guessed it when I decided to let most of the workers die, so you don't have to worry about me," Magos Gamma said calmly.
"…"
"Alright, tell me what happened on the way?"
Seeing that Magos Gamma was already mentally prepared, Jacob no longer hesitated. He said, "I saw some Priests and Adeptus Ministorum escorting the old, weak, women, and children on the road, but I don't know where they were going."
Magos Gamma keenly caught the key point in Jacob's words: "Only the old, weak, women, and children? No young, strong men?"
"No!"
Upon receiving Jacob's confirmation, Magos Gamma's face also darkened. He gritted his teeth and said, "I thought they would recycle the corpses on the battlefield; I thought they would use the servitors in the factories, but I…"
If there was one food among the diverse array in the warhammer universe that best reflected the cultural essence of that cesspit, it would undoubtedly be "Corpse Starch."
"Corpse Starch," as the name suggests, is starch produced from corpses as raw material. Of course, it doesn't necessarily have to be made from corpses, but it can be. However, the vast majority of it is a byproduct of refining "Promethium," the backbone of the Imperial industry.
Thanks to the Adeptus Mechanicus's miraculous carbon chain restructuring technology and other incomprehensible cracking and polymerization reaction technologies, the process of purifying "Promethium" can produce a variety of products including medicine, plastics, fuel, adhesives, synthetic rubber, and food—Corpse Starch.
The fact that it includes the word "Corpse" indicates that a considerable number of Imperial worlds do use corpses as material, and these worlds include Forge Worlds.
Discarded biological components, obsolete servitors, failed wetware modifications, and the remains of deceased slave laborers on their planets are crushed and fed into a "Bio-Protein Reactor," where they undergo a series of complex reactions—high temperature, acidolysis, hydrolysis, and so on—before finally being extruded to form Corpse Starch.
Gamma had eaten this stuff, for a whole month. To overcome the psychological barrier and avoid starving to death, he constantly told himself that the stick he was eating must have come from a "Promethium" factory. At the same time, he changed the name "Starch Block" to "Starch Bar" to formally differentiate what he was eating from the ordinary—essentially, deceiving himself.
So, when a Forge World experiences a famine, what is the optimal solution from a purely rational and calculated perspective—to relieve some slave laborers from hunger and, incidentally, feed the rest!
Unfortunately, the Adeptus Mechanicus has never lacked "rational people."
Gamma rubbed his face to calm himself down, then said, "The Archmagos's side wouldn't resort to feeding live people to his subordinates. He can get supplies from outside the world. That only leaves the Temple's side."
"Hmm."
"But with so many years of preparation, shouldn't the Temple have a food shortage? Why is that?"
Jacob watched Gamma pacing in circles, deep in thought, and suddenly felt how truly absurd reality was. The Sages, with more knowledge and experience, were busy searching for possible ruins, while a child of only a few years old was busy contemplating the future of tens of thousands of people. No, it shouldn't be "contemplating"; after the war began, they were indeed living, fortunately living, and successfully living under the "leadership" of this "child."
"I understand!" Gamma clapped his hands and exclaimed.
Jacob was pulled back to reality from his thoughts by Gamma's voice. He asked, "What did you think of?"
"The Temple is competing with the Archmagos for military recruits! They're getting restless seeing the Archmagos arming workers."
"So there are no young and strong people among those being escorted," Jacob said.
"Exactly, but they don't have a continuous supply of food like the Archmagos, so while they're competing for recruits with the Archmagos, they're also accumulating strength."
Jacob somewhat understood Gamma's meaning. He said, "You mean when the Temple can no longer feed so many people, that's when the Temple will launch its full-scale assault."
"That will be when they are at their strongest," Gamma nodded and said.
Jacob then asked, "Will they succeed?"
Gamma shook his head and said, "I don't know. I can see it, and the Archmagos and his people can see it too. Both sides are now playing with open cards, relying on sheer strength."
"If they fail, will they blow up the spaceport as you thought before?"
"Perhaps, perhaps not, or perhaps the Archmagos has already taken precautions."
Jacob rubbed his metallic forehead in distress and said, "Yes, what can we do, knowing or not knowing?"
Gamma saw that Jacob was distressed due to his kindness, and he comforted him, "The misfortune of those people is not caused by us, and the good fortune of the people here is the reward of our efforts. So, Jacob, you can pity them, but don't keep the suffering to yourself."
Jacob pondered Gamma's words. After a moment of thought, as if he had come to a realization, he smiled and said, "Thank you, Gamma, I understand."
"It's good that you've understood. I need to go find the Sages now. They need to put in some effort. Why do low-ranking Tech-Priests like us have to worry about everything?" Gamma grumbled, patting a pile of documents on the table.
"Hahaha, I feel the same way."
"Right?"
Driving the Gamma at full speed, with a smooth road surface, Gamma didn't take long to reach the first outpost in the underground space, arriving before Magos Lauster, who was "usurping power."
"Magos, can we get some intelligence from the Temple's side now?"
"Has something happened?" Magos Lauster asked.
"Yes, we've discovered some things."
Gamma told Magos Lauster about the Temple's use of live people to make Corpse Starch and his conjectures behind the matter.
He didn't avoid the "Legionaries" surrounding them when he spoke. While these soldiers were greatly frightened by the Corpse Starch, they held even greater respect for Gamma, who had led them to a way out.
Gamma: That's right, I did it on purpose. I want to tell everyone who the true "Warmaster of the Legion" is.
Magos Lauster, unaware of Gamma's rich inner monologue, began to contact the Sages who were "locating treasure" in the distance via remote communication, to see what connections everyone had within the Temple. If they could get data on the Temple's food supplies, they could estimate the approximate time of their general offensive, which was much better than being completely in the dark.
While the Sages communicated in clear code that Gamma could hear, they also communicated in a binary cipher that only they could hear.
"He's really not that old man Will's son?" one Magos asked.
Magos Lauster: "How many more times will you ask me the same question! No!"
Another Magos said, "He doesn't seem like someone who came out of a cultivation pod."
"A normal person couldn't even give birth to him!"
"That's true, but I'm starting to understand why Lauster you are willing to pay such a great price to have us protect him with you."
"This kid has unlimited potential in the future."
"Envious, too late. Haven't you seen Lauster almost give him his treasure trove? I look at this set of equipment, and I'm starting to doubt if Leia is his biological daughter."
Lauster: Did I say I didn't give you guys a letter?
However, Magos Lauster certainly wouldn't tell them what he was thinking. He had to stop them for Gamma. He was also curious about where Gamma had acquired his knowledge, and he had investigated it. Yes, he hadn't misread; he had often spied on and eavesdropped on Gamma.
After all, who wouldn't be curious or worried if a prodigy like Gamma, who was "self-taught," suddenly appeared beside them? The only reasonable explanation he derived from his long period of "observation" and "experimentation" was that Gamma was a "prodigy."
He believed the results of his investigation, but that didn't mean others would believe his explanation after learning about Gamma's situation. To reduce unnecessary trouble and protect Gamma, Leia and the other five people who knew about Gamma's situation had all been warned by Lauster about the dangers of leaking these secrets of Gamma.
Magos Lauster said in the cipher, "Genius is always favored, isn't it?"
"If I had a disciple like that, I'd probably do the same thing as Lauster."
"True, it's just that this kid Gamma is unlucky enough to be used as a pawn by the Temple."
"Heh heh, I'm not surprised by anything those fanatics in the Temple do."
"It's truly ironic. They pride themselves as the most devout believers, yet they've abandoned the Omnissiah's most important directive: the pursuit of all knowledge. How ironic!"
"Have they done too few absurd things? How many people truly became heretics only after they were branded as such?"
"And those guys from the Lightning Monk Brotherhood, do they even deserve to be called Priests? The first condition for selecting people is their body's conductivity, by the Omnissiah!"
"The second condition is whether their body is strong enough. If they're not strong enough, they might not survive the modifications. One would think they're selecting Space Marine, not Priests."
"This is what the Adeptus Mechanicus looks like after dominating for over ten thousand years. I can't even imagine how crazy they must have been ten thousand years ago!"
"Alright, let's stop here. Any more and it starts to get a bit blasphemous."
"Alright."
The Adeptus Mechanicus is a highly diverse religious sect.
The Adeptus Mechanicus is a loose, vast bureaucratic organization.
All Tech-Priests are subordinate to the Adeptus Mechanicus.
All Tech-Priests believe in the Adeptus Mechanicus: Source Power, the omnissiah, the omnissiah.
The Adeptus Mechanicus is the organization, and the Adeptus Mechanicus is the faith within the organization.
Over ten thousand years ago, there was no organization called the Adeptus Mechanicus; their earliest name was simply: the Adeptus Mechanicus.
When the Unification Wars on Terra ended, Mars had developed a culture vastly different from Earth's, and the Adeptus Mechanicus ruled this planet.
The Emperor unified Earth and signed an alliance with Mars, bringing the red planet back into the embrace of humanity. During the Great Crusade, the Titan Legions and newly created Space Marine Legions from Mars fought alongside each other to expand the Imperium's territory.
However, during the Horus Heresy, Mars became a crucial battlefield, and a great war broke out between the loyalist Mechanicus factions and the Dark Mechanicum, who had sided with Horus.
In the Martian civil war, the Dark Mechanicum ultimately triumphed, while the loyalists retreated to Terra, and the Traitors occupied Mars.
The leader of the loyalists, Zagreus Kane, the Deputy Fabricator-General of Mars, declared himself the new Fabricator-General of Mars on Terra and later proposed the establishment of a new order in the Terran Council—the Adeptus Mechanicus.
Since then, "Adeptus Mechanicus" became the official designation for the Adeptus Mechanicus within the Imperium, and the Adeptus Mechanicus became the Adeptus Mechanicus's sole official faith.
This roughly equates to transforming from a "theocratic sect" into a "separated organization of church and state" with a single faith.
Among the Tech-Priests within the Adeptus Mechanicus organization, there are those with faith factions and those without, or those with conflicting doctrines. These unaligned Priests are quite displeased with the fanatical behavior of the factional Priests, believing they waste a significant amount of time and resources on meaningless endeavors.