Imperial Tithe

What was a planetary Governor's most important duty?

Whenever anyone asked that question, every planetary Governor had one and only one standard answer.

That was to pay taxes to the Imperium!

The Imperium of Man, spanning the Galaxy, was surrounded by countless enemies.

Fighting on multiple fronts created immense wartime pressure, which in turn gave rise to an exceptionally harsh taxation system.

This taxation system was called the Imperial Tithe, also known as the Great Tithe.

It referred to the various resources that every world within Imperial territory was required to provide.

Among them, there were two most important types of tithe:

The Military Tithe, which meant surrendering an appropriate portion of a planet's population as Imperial logistics laborers or new recruits.

The Exact Tithe, which meant precisely handing over the planet's specialty resources and wealth.

The payment of tithes depended on the type of world to which they applied and could take the form of any resource: food, weapons, minerals, population, and so on.

Although the Imperial center on Holy Terra had established the vast Administratum to oversee tithe collection.

The immense territory and instability of Warp travel often made the process of paying tithes chaotic and inefficient.

As a planetary Governor, Ron's most important duty was to ensure that the tithe from his world was delivered.

Once he paid the required amount, he could rule this planet however he wished and do whatever he pleased.

Even if he turned all the people into slaves and exploited them in the most extreme fashion, piling corpses into mountains, the Imperium would not interfere.

Paying taxes on time was the greatest Loyalty to the God-Emperor!

Conversely, any world that dared refuse to pay its tithe would suffer the Imperium's most brutal reprisals. If its resistance escalated, it would very likely earn itself an Exterminatus.

If violations or omissions occurred during the payment process, Imperial officials would often order the local Adeptus Arbites enforcers to immediately execute the planetary Governor!

Imperial rule was just that extremely dictatorial and cold-blooded.

This meant that no matter how well Ron governed the planet, if there was a problem with its tithe, his head could roll!

Hiss—Ron felt a chill around his neck. This was way too terrifying.

Linda noticed something was off with Ron and came over to ask gently, "Are you feeling unwell?"

"I'm fine. I suddenly felt a little cold, um—"

Before Ron could react, he had fallen into Linda's embrace. It was so warm and soft.

"Feeling better?" Linda asked softly.

Better, sure, just a little suffocating...

I can't stay here any longer!

Ron got up and headed outside. He planned to check whether there had been any problems with the tithe over the past few quarters. If there were, he had to deal with them as soon as possible.

If he waited until the enforcers came knocking, with a Bolter pressed to his head, it would be too late.

This concerned his life. He couldn't joke around about it.

"Tell Chief Bayev to meet me at the Departmento Administratum!"

Ron tossed out those words and walked out of the dining hall. But after only a few steps, he turned back to Linda. "Where was the Departmento Administratum again?"

Damn this memory fog. He had even forgotten the way!

After figuring out the direction, Ron headed straight for the Departmento Administratum.

Along the way, administrative staff greeted him from time to time, though their gazes held a trace of surprise.

For some reason, Ron felt that the Administratum looked somewhat different from what he remembered.

Many departments were gone, and the place had become much quieter.

Something must have happened in the meantime...

Ron wanted to find someone to ask, but after thinking it over, he decided against it.

He would slowly learn about it when he had the chance later.

His most urgent task now was to figure out the tithe situation.

The Departmento Administratum archive.

The entire archive stood nearly six meters tall and covered an area as large as a dozen football fields. Thousands of enormous bookshelves were crammed with densely packed paper documents.

Ron sat at a wooden desk, lifelessly flipping through a thick dossier.

Beside him stood mountains of paper documents, enough to bury someone if they collapsed.

He was numb. This was only the tax information for the current quarter; he would not finish reading it all in a year!

"What era is this? At least get a computer!"

Ron could not help complaining. After searching for ages, he had confirmed that this damned place did not have a single networked device.

That was right. In an age advanced enough for interstellar travel, the Imperium prohibited the use of intelligent devices, while artificial intelligence was absolutely forbidden!

Anyone who dared break the taboo and use artificial intelligence would most likely be judged as a heretic and purged!

Some might ask: wasn't the Imperium being incredibly backward and stupid?

Young. Still far too young.

It could be said that behind every bizarre workplace rule, there was often a lesson written in blood and tears.

The Imperium did not use Internet-connected intelligent devices because electronic Daemons from the Warp could attack them and tamper with their data.

During wartime, such erroneous data had caused severe accidents and inflicted devastating losses upon the Imperium.

Only the Tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus could use electronic devices on a limited scale. They could use rune-code to resist the electronic Daemons.

Artificial intelligence was forbidden because humanity had endured a catastrophe known as the "Cybernetic Revolt."

The rebellion of intelligent machines had nearly driven humanity to extinction.

Humanity had ultimately won the war and preserved its species, but from then on, it called artificial intelligence Abominable Intelligence and banned it completely.

Of course, humanity did have substitutes.

Ron glanced at the "human" standing motionlessly in the corner, its body covered in cables and fitted with all kinds of auxiliary mechanical arms and tracks.

That was a Servitor, an inferior substitute for artificial intelligence.

They were generally made from criminals or bodies cultivated in flesh vats.

After simple surgical modifications and brain programming, they became mindless "robots" capable of performing simple, intensive, repetitive work.

For example, the document-moving work in this archive was performed by Servitors, though intellectual work still required humans.

The Imperium's complex administrative affairs were almost entirely handled by human minds, and paper documents were still used.

One had to remember that the Imperium spanned the Galaxy and ruled millions of planets!

This also resulted in the Imperium having a massive administrative system and personnel force.

Holy Terra, the Imperial center, had hundreds of billions of inhabitants, with administrative personnel making up a considerable portion of them and managing the affairs of the Imperium's millions of planets.

Their management was so chaotic and inefficient that it made one's scalp crawl.

A certain administrative order might take decades to make its way through procedures before reaching a specific planet.

Yet that planet might have been invaded by Chaos Daemons over a century ago, with all its inhabitants long dead.

Even more absurdly, some unknown departments still existed within the Imperium, calculating the supplies needed for a certain battle.

But that war had ended more than a century ago. Who knew whether they were doing it deliberately or simply by accident?

So the fact that this broken Imperial cart had not fallen apart by now was truly impressive.

Jokes aside, surviving within such an administrative system was difficult.

Those muddleheaded Imperial officials occasionally made mistakes, such as overestimating a planet's capacity or incorrectly calculating its tithe data.

The consequences of these mistakes were usually borne by the planetary Governor and the world under his rule.

Every miscalculation almost inevitably resulted in tragedy.

Tithes far beyond a planet's capacity often plunged tens or even hundreds of billions of people into extreme misery.

Even if the responsible officials were held accountable afterward and turned into Servitors to atone eternally to the God-Emperor and the Imperium, it was already useless.

By then, countless people had already died in agony, and even entire planets had withered into lifeless wastelands!

Reality was simply that cruel.

Ron had to first strip the planet of its resources and population for delivery to the Imperium before he could consider how to develop the planet, improve the people's lives, and absorb the Power of Hope.

But if all the resources and population were handed over, how was he supposed to develop anything?

And he could not just walk away, or the Administratum would send enforcers to send him to meet the God-Emperor, then replace him with another planetary Governor to keep collecting taxes.

Because the tithe had to be collected. If the Imperium could not collect taxes, it would fall apart, and humanity across the Galaxy would face an even crueler fate.

This was a bugged situation!

"Being a planetary Governor isn't easy either..." Ron could not help sighing.

It seemed that in the brutal world of Warhammer 40K, the Power of Hope was not easy to obtain. He would be lucky just to keep his life.

After flipping through documents for ages, Ron finally found the latest assessment report on Earth Planet's Imperial Tithe.

The instant he saw the report, his heart went cold.

"According to the assessment by the Administratum of Holy Terra, Earth Planet's tithe grade has been raised from second-class special to first-class superior?!"