After Celestia defected to Dawn Star Planet, an uprising immediately broke out on Forge World Kastel, the Merchant Guilds' most important industrial world.
Kastel was rich in resources. After setting their sights on it, the Merchant Guilds used every trick in the book to acquire it outright at a low price.
Then, the Merchant Guilds turned the entire planet's population into slaves, guaranteeing only their most basic living conditions while exploiting them mercilessly. They opened vast numbers of mines and factories across the planet, forcing everyone to work day and night for them.
At the cost of utterly destroying the planet's environment and people's livelihoods, they drove its industrial output soaring, making Kastel responsible for a huge portion of the Merchant Guilds' wartime production capacity.
The people of Kastel had long hated the Merchant Guilds to the bone. Now, with Tang Xiao deliberately fanning the flames, massive uprisings and strikes erupted almost at once.
Arms dealer Yuri Orlov had also been operating in secret, supplying Kastel's industrialists with large quantities of weapons and enabling them to contend with the Merchant Guilds' robot garrisons.
The situation on the planet began spiraling out of control. In several industrial cities, enraged workers armed themselves and charged forward without fear of casualties, breaking through the robots' defenses and storming city halls. They dragged out every bloated Merchant Guilds official and strung them up from the streetlights.
Problems erupting in two major industrial worlds in succession left Shu Mai utterly flustered. She went to Count Dooku again, expressing her willingness to support the Confederacy of Independent Systems' military reforms, but asking him to preserve a portion of the Merchant Guilds' profits and hoping to reclaim the two industrial worlds of Celestia and Kastel.
Count Dooku coldly dismissed her, citing the people of those two planets'