Mutants

Now that Li Qinwu had a place, the next step was installing the brewing equipment.

Li Qinwu actually knew how to brew liquor. He had an older cousin in the countryside who did it for a living. It was really quite simple—any ordinary person could manage it.

For someone like Li Qinwu, who wanted large-scale production, he first needed a grinder to crush the grain for easier fermentation, then a large pot to cook the grain.

After that came the multi-stage fermentation vats, where the grain would ferment again and again. Finally, it would be heated and distilled into liquor.

First, they built a stove. They used Plasteel—someone had previously pointed out that Warhammer 40,000 used a lot of Plasteel in construction, so this had been changed—to build a deep circular pit and welded sheet metal inside it.

Little Knife hired several veteran craftsmen from the Fertilizer Gang. They brought their own welding equipment and charged fifty a day.

Then Little Knife led the rats around the Lower Hive, searching for highly oxidation-resistant steel—sheet metal that would not rust—and pried it off to bring back.

The welders fused those sheets into the Plasteel barrel and polished everything clean, creating a huge iron pot that could be heated and process several tons of grain and water at once.

As for how to heat it, naturally, they used electricity.

Li Qinwu had previously gotten a fully durable Posu Battery from the Hydrological Monitoring Station. Connected to something that looked like a portable immersion heater, it could be tossed into the barrel whenever heating was needed, releasing extremely intense heat.

The heater looked incredibly crude, like the rapid-heating rods boarding students in the 3K Era loved to use.

Forty-K technology was truly astonishing. Tossing that thing into a barrel holding several hundred liters of water heated it for real—less than ten minutes, and hundreds of liters of water became boiling hot. Its output was insane.

With the big pot for heating grain complete, they made a fully metal distiller by the same method. Then he had Little Knife and the others find some clean wooden boards and put together several fermentation pools. They scavenged a few ventilation fans from the garbage heaps, and Li Qinwu's Old Debiao-style distillery was complete.

Although the workshop did not exactly meet hygiene standards, people in 40K had 40K constitutions. It would not kill anyone~

"Little Knife, did you find the Little Train I asked you to look for?"

Seeing that everything was ready and his liquor business was about to set sail, with only the transportation link missing, Li Qinwu asked Little Knife beside him.

Little Knife nodded.

"Boss, I found the Little Train. The brothers pulled it out of a scrapyard. It has one powered locomotive and ten small cars.

"The cars are all intact, but the locomotive was badly damaged. I went and begged Boss Nipall to help fix it. He even gave us a crate of mineral oil."

Li Qinwu gave a grunt.

"I'll remember this favor from Nipall. Where's the train? Take me to see it."

Little Knife led Li Qinwu outside the iron doors of the distillery, where a Little Train was parked.

This kind of Little Train was somewhat like the vehicles used to haul ore from underground to the surface. It was small, the sort where only two people could stand inside a car.

It had one powered locomotive, also small—smaller even than the Diced Pepper Fish Head that had been popular during the 3K Era.

Li Qinwu circled the Little Train, clicking his tongue in amazement. "What does this thing burn? Electricity or fuel? How fast can it go?"

Little Knife explained, "Boss Nipall said its engine can burn anything we think can burn—vegetable oil, animal oil, mineral oil, alcohol. It can burn all of it, just with different efficiency.

"Boss Nipall said that no matter what we put into its engine, we have to filter it first and make sure there's no sediment, or the engine could be ruined.

"If all ten cargo cars are fully loaded, it should reach eighty kilometers per hour on mineral oil. On alcohol, it can still do at least forty kilometers per hour."

Li Qinwu was extremely satisfied. The straight-line distance from here to the surface definitely did not exceed forty kilometers. They could make a round trip in an hour, so the efficiency was quite impressive.

Li Qinwu returned to the Hideout and took out two Rebel Autoguns. He tossed one to Little Knife as a reward and slung the other over his own back.

Then he counted out a thick stack of cash and settled the wages for the workers Little Knife had brought. Amid everyone's delighted expressions, Li Qinwu said:

"Next, I'm taking this train ahead to scout the route. I need a few men who aren't afraid of dying to bring weapons and come with me. As long as you make it back, each of you gets one hundred Fertilizer Coupons. Who's coming?"

He needed to map out the route from the distillery to the surface ventilation shaft. It was at least forty kilometers, and traveling forty kilometers through unknown areas of the Lower Hive was still dangerous. Who knew what they might encounter along the way?

If a few Mutants, Xenos, cultists, Genestealers, Daemons, or something else suddenly popped out, Li Qinwu would not find it strange in the slightest.

The thirty-odd laborers exchanged looks, then immediately grabbed the tools lying on the ground as weapons and jumped into the cars.

Li Qinwu chuckled and jumped into the locomotive with Little Knife.

After some operations from Little Knife, the train slowly began moving forward.

It first passed through Li Qinwu's distillery. The facilities inside had all been built along both sides, deliberately leaving the tracks down the middle clear, allowing the Little Train to pass through with ease.

After all the cars had left the distillery, Li Qinwu locked the main doors. Then, with a wave of his hand, the train advanced at the slow speed of ten kilometers per hour.

They were moving so slowly because nobody knew whether the tracks ahead were intact. If they found garbage jammed in the rails or any damage, they would have to get down and clean or repair them.

A large headlamp shone from the front of the Little Train, illuminating the passage brilliantly.

Li Qinwu stared fixedly at the rails beneath them, occasionally calling for a stop and sending people down to clear rubbish from the tracks. Most of it was chunks of Plasteel that had fallen from the walls after years of neglect and gotten wedged in the rails.

The Little Train traveled for over an hour, occasionally encountering slopes that angled upward at forty-five degrees.

Whenever they came upon an upward slope, Li Qinwu knew they were headed the right way. They were getting closer to the surface.

What made Li Qinwu feel lucky was that they had encountered practically no living creatures or people along the way.

That was normal. They were already very close to the outskirts of the Lower Hive. If they were ordinary people, they simply could not survive in this jungle of steel and concrete. There were no supplies to keep them alive.

To survive, one had to stay near the Great Elevator. Only there was water and food production, only there were people active.

Unless someone was not normal, why would they come to such a "desert" region?

As it turned out, Li Qinwu's little expedition convoy really did encounter people who were not normal.

"Stop!"

Li Qinwu shouted, and Little Knife immediately hit the brakes, bringing the Little Train to a halt.

Li Qinwu pointed at the damaged track over ten meters ahead.

"That section of track is broken. Go repair it."

The underlings in the cars took their tools forward to make repairs. Fixing this was simple: use Plasteel powder to restore the ground, then straighten the rails.

If the rails were severely damaged, they had also brought plenty of spare rails dismantled from other places, which could be installed.

The underlings began mixing mortar and working. Li Qinwu sat in the locomotive and lit a cigarette. The instant he pulled out his lighter, his twenty points of stamina alerted him that something was wrong. Something was coming down the passage ahead!

With a click, he pulled back the bolt on the gun behind him, chambered a round, raised it in his hands, and shouted at the underlings working ahead, "Come back! Something's coming!"

The few underlings froze, then hurriedly ran back toward the Little Train.

Hearing Li Qinwu's warning, everyone else on the train picked up their weapons and jumped down, ready to fight. Little Knife also raised his Autogun, aiming into the darkness ahead alongside Li Qinwu.

Everyone was extremely tense. They could see nothing and hear nothing, and had no idea why Boss Li had issued a warning.

But seeing how serious Boss Li looked, they suppressed their questions and stared fixedly at the tracks ahead.

The Little Train's headlamp could not fully illuminate the way ahead. It provided visibility for roughly three hundred meters; beyond that, everything was pitch-black.

Everyone stared hard at the area three hundred meters ahead, but the darkness prevented them from seeing anything. It was simply too far away.

Li Qinwu, however, could make out a little. With twenty points of stamina, his senses, eyesight, and hearing were all stronger than everyone else's.

He could see over a hundred human-like things swaying toward them from the distance, in places the light could not reach.

From afar, these things looked humanoid, but Li Qinwu could see several protruding pixels on their bodies. Those pixels were things that should not have grown on a human body, yet they had grown from this group of unknown people.

As time passed, the group ahead came closer and closer. This time, even Little Knife and his underlings could see the figures ahead, and the hands gripping their weapons began to grow hot.

Li Qinwu narrowed his eyes. He saw them clearly now. The group approaching from afar were Mutants, and grotesquely mutated ones at that!

Among the strange people blocking the way, some had horns on their heads, some had extra arms, and others had tentacle-like growths resembling fleshy tumors sprouting from their necks. They looked utterly sanity-draining, fucking disgusting—like humans twisted and corrupted by Cthulhu. These were the so-called Mutants.

The Imperium's classification of humanity roughly had four categories:

Pure Humans, meaning ordinary humans.

Augmented Humans, such as Astartes Space Marines, or humans like Tech-Priests who used machinery to replace their original flesh.

Abhumans, a kind of beneficial Mutant. They generally came from planets where their people had lived for thousands of generations in certain special environments, and the human body had evolved in some way to adapt to that planet's conditions.

For example, if a planet had no light, after thousands of generations, its people might naturally evolve night vision.

Or on a planet with extremely high gravity, where the living environment was exceptionally harsh, human intelligence offered no advantage and physical strength mattered more for survival.

Then after thousands of generations, humanity on that world would undergo intellectual degeneration. Everyone would become ape-men standing 2.5 meters tall, with extraordinarily dense muscles and powerful bones. Those were Ogryns.

Abhuman races had several characteristics. Although their bodies had undergone certain mutations, those mutations were beneficial and highly stable.

These Abhumans could pass their stable mutations to their descendants through natural reproduction. They were controllable, and the Imperium accepted quite a few legal Abhuman races.

But the last type of human was subject to violent extermination by the Imperium of Man: Mutants.

Mutants were not a race that humanity had naturally evolved into over thousands of years under certain conditions. Instead, they were caused in a short time by genetic mutation, chemical contamination, radiation contamination, Warp corruption, Daemonic modification, alien modification, and other factors. They also could not pass their bodily traits to the next generation through reproduction.

These Mutants were extremely dangerous and mentally unstable. Their emergence was usually accompanied by all kinds of secondary contamination.

If the mutation was merely caused by chemical or radiation contamination, that was manageable. But if Xenos and Daemons had modified them, then Xenos and Daemons had already infiltrated this world. Time to prepare for a truly exhilarating planetary war!

At that moment, nearly a hundred bizarre-looking Mutants were approaching Li Qinwu from ahead. They wore armor made from scrap iron and held weapons fashioned from all kinds of garbage. They did not look friendly.

They approached Li Qinwu's group step by step, making the underlings in the convoy breathe much harder. That twisted bunch across from them was fucking ugly. One glance felt like having their eyeballs scraped against a wall.

But none of the underlings retreated or ran. Li Qinwu paid far too well, and besides, with life in the Lower Hive being such a damned mess, encountering Mutants that made people lose sanity just by looking at them at least added some variety to life.

The Mutants stopped fifty meters in front of Li Qinwu's group, covering their eyes.

The Little Train's headlamp made it impossible for them to keep their eyes open. Having adapted to darkness for so long, they felt extremely uncomfortable when suddenly exposed to such intense light.

One severely deformed Mutant with two faces roared, "Damn you meat livestock! Turn off that annoying light right now, or I'll chop off your heads and shove them up your assholes!!"

"Hehehe! Chop off... heads... hehehe... shove them up their assholes... hard..."

The mouth on his front-facing face was making threats, while the little mouth on his side face let out strange laughter. It was as though two consciousnesses controlled the two mouths separately, making him exceptionally eerie and terrifying.

Li Qinwu raised his gun and cursed at the Mutants ahead:

"Did you motherfuckers look in a mirror before coming out? Just standing there is an infringement on my human rights! Did your mothers smoke weed while riding a super roller coaster when they were pregnant with you, shaking you around in the placenta until you grew all wrong? Did your mom's birth canal clamp down on you when she gave birth, turning you into this shit? Instead of hiding in the deepest, darkest corner you can find, you fucking dare come out onto the main road and block it? Are you trying to tell the whole world that the bottom line can be lowered even further? Can't you motherfuckers, for love and peace, for morality and the rule of law, for the mental health of teenagers, stop showing your fucking faces outside? Fuck your mother!"