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 back in the countryside who did it for a living. This stuff was pretty simple—any ordinary person could manage it.

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

After that came multistage fermentation vats, where the grain would ferment again and again, and finally heating and distillation to produce the liquor.

First, they built a stove. They used Plasteel to construct a round, deep pit, then welded iron sheets 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—iron sheets that would not rust—and pried them loose to bring back.

The welders welded those sheets into the Plasteel barrel and polished them clean, creating a massive 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 acquired a fully charged Posu Battery from the Hydrological Monitoring Station. He connected it to something that looked like an immersion heater, and whenever heating was needed, they could toss it into the barrel to release intense heat.

The heater looked extremely crude, like those cheap immersion heaters boarding students loved to use back in the 3k era.

Warhammer 40,000 technology was truly shocking. Toss that thing into a barrel holding several hundred liters of water, and it heated up incredibly fast. In less than ten minutes, hundreds of liters of water would be boiling. Its output was insanely powerful.

With the grain-cooking pot complete, they built a pure-metal still by the same principle. Then he had Little Knife and the others find some clean wooden boards and make several fermentation vats. They also scavenged several ventilation fans from the trash heaps, and Li Qinwu's Odebar-style brewing workshop was complete.

Though the workshop's hygiene standards looked somewhat questionable, people in 40k had 40k constitutions. Nobody was going to die from drinking it~

"Little Knife, did you find the little freight train I asked you to look for?"

Seeing that everything was ready and his brewing enterprise was about to take off, with only transportation remaining, Li Qinwu asked Little Knife beside him.

Little Knife nodded.

"Boss, I found the little train already. The brothers dug it out of a junkyard. It has one powered engine and ten small freight cars.

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

Li Qinwu grunted.

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

Little Knife led Li Qinwu outside the iron gates of the brewing workshop. A small train was parked there.

It resembled the kind of vehicle used to haul ore from underground to the surface. It was not large; each car could only fit two standing people.

It had a powered engine as well, and it was small too—smaller than the fish-head cars popular in the 3k era.

Li Qinwu circled the little train, looking it over from every angle in amazement. He asked, "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 consider flammable—vegetable oil, animal fat, mineral oil, alcohol. It can burn all of it, though the efficiency differs.

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

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

Li Qinwu was very satisfied. The straight-line distance from here to the surface definitely did not exceed forty kilometers. They could make a round trip within an hour, which was quite efficient.

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 across his own back.

Then he counted out a thick stack of money and paid the wages of the workers Little Knife had brought. Amid their delighted expressions, Li Qinwu said:

"Next, I'm taking this train ahead to scout the route. I need a few people who aren't afraid to die to bring weapons and come with me. Anyone who makes it back gets one hundred Fertilizer Coupons. Who's coming?"

He needed to map out the route from the brewing workshop to the surface ventilation shaft. It was at least forty kilometers, and moving 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, heretics, Genestealers, or daemons suddenly jumped out, Li Qinwu would not find it strange at all.

The more than thirty worker lackeys exchanged looks, then grabbed the tools lying on the ground as weapons and jumped into the cars.

Li Qinwu chuckled and boarded the engine with Little Knife.

After Little Knife worked the controls for a moment, the train slowly began to move.

It first passed through Li Qinwu's brewing workshop. All the workshop equipment had been built along the sides, deliberately leaving the tracks clear through the middle, so the small train could pass through easily.

Once all the cars had left the brewing workshop, Li Qinwu locked the gate. Then, with a wave of his hand, the train proceeded at a slow ten kilometers per hour.

They were moving so slowly because nobody knew whether the tracks ahead were intact. If they spotted trash stuck in the rails or damage ahead, they would have to get down and clear or repair it.

A large headlamp shone from the front of the train, illuminating the passage brightly.

Li Qinwu stared intently at the tracks below, occasionally calling for a stop and sending people down to clear debris from the rails—mainly old chunks of Plasteel that had fallen from the walls after years of neglect and become lodged in the tracks.

The little train traveled for over an hour, occasionally encountering slopes that rose at a forty-five-degree angle.

Every time they came across one of those upward slopes, Li Qinwu knew they were on the right path. They were getting closer to the surface.

What made Li Qinwu feel fortunate was that they encountered almost no living creatures or people along the way.

That was normal. They were already very close to the outer edge of the Lower Hive. Humans simply could not survive in a steel-and-concrete jungle like this without supplies to sustain them.

To survive, one had to stay near the Great Elevator. Only there could one find water, food production, and human activity.

Unless someone was not normal, who would come to such a "desert"?

And as luck would have it, Li Qinwu's little expedition convoy really did encounter people who were not normal.

"Stop!"

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

Li Qinwu pointed at the damaged tracks a dozen meters ahead.

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

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

If the rails were severely damaged, they had also brought plenty of spare rails dismantled from elsewhere in the cars and could install them.

The lackeys began mixing and laying the material. Li Qinwu sat on the engine, lighting a cigarette. The moment he pulled out his lighter, his twenty points of energy alerted him that something was wrong—something was coming through the passage ahead!

With a click, he racked the gun on his back, chambered a round, and raised it. Then he shouted at the lackeys working ahead, "Get back! Something's coming!"

The few lackeys froze, then hurriedly ran back toward the train.

Hearing Li Qinwu's warning, everyone else on the train grabbed their weapons and jumped down, adopting fighting stances. 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 they had no idea why Boss Li had issued a warning.

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

The train's headlamp could not completely illuminate the way forward. It provided visibility for roughly three hundred meters; beyond that was pitch-black darkness.

Everyone stared fixedly at the area three hundred meters ahead, but the darkness prevented them from seeing anything. The distance was simply too great.

Li Qinwu, however, could make out something. With twenty points of energy, his perception, vision, and hearing were all stronger than the others'.

He could see more than a hundred human-like things swaying toward them from the distance, beyond where the light could reach.

From afar, they looked humanoid, but Li Qinwu could see several protruding shapes on their bodies. Those shapes were not things that should have grown on humans, yet they had grown on that group of unknown people.

As time passed, the group ahead drew closer and closer. This time, even Little Knife and his lackeys could see the figures ahead, and the hands gripping their weapons began to sweat.

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

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

The Imperium roughly divided humanity into four categories:

Pure Humans, meaning ordinary humans.

Augmented Humans, such as Astartes Space Marines, as well as people like Tech-Priests who had replaced their original flesh with machinery.

Abhumans, a type of benign mutant. They generally lived for thousands of generations on planets with certain special environments, and their bodies evolved in some way to adapt to those planets.

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

Or consider a planet with extremely high gravity and a particularly harsh environment. Human intelligence would offer no advantage there; physical strength would matter more for survival.

After several thousand generations, the humans of that world would see their intelligence degenerate, and everyone would become ape-men two and a half meters tall, with incredibly dense muscles and powerful bones. Those were Ogryns.

Abhuman races had several traits. Though their bodies had undergone certain mutations, those mutations were benign and highly stable.

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

But the last category of humans was met with violent extermination by the Imperium: Mutants.

Mutants were not a human race that had naturally evolved over thousands of years under particular circumstances. They were created in a short time by genetic mutation, chemical pollution, radiation pollution, Warp corruption, daemonic modification, alien modification, and other factors, and they could not pass their physical traits to the next generation through reproduction.

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

If the mutations were merely caused by chemical or radiation pollution, that was manageable. But if Xenos or daemons had modified them, then Xenos and daemons had already infiltrated this world. Prepare for a glorious planetary war!

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

They approached Li Qinwu's group step by step, making the lackeys breathe much harder. Those twisted things across from them were so fucking ugly that a single glance made their eyeballs feel scraped raw against a wall.

Still, none of the lackeys retreated or fled. Li Qinwu paid far too well, and with life in the Lower Hive already being such dogshit, encountering Mutants that made people lose sanity just by looking at them was practically a little variety in their lives.

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

The train's headlamp was too bright for them to open their eyes. Those who had long adapted to darkness were extremely uncomfortable in sudden bright light.

One severely deformed Mutant with two faces roared, "Damn you flesh cattle! 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 uttered the threat, while the little mouth on the side of his face let out a strange laugh. It was as though two consciousnesses controlled the two mouths separately, making him exceptionally eerie and terrifying.

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

"Did you motherfuckers look in a mirror before leaving home? Just standing there is an infringement on my human rights! When your moms gave birth to you, were they smoking weed while riding a roller coaster, shaking you around in the placenta so hard you couldn't grow straight? Did your mother's birth canal clamp down on you too, turning you into this ugly shit? Instead of hiding in the deepest, darkest corner you can find, you fucking dare stand in the middle of the road and block it? Are you trying to tell the world that its bottom line can be lowered even further? Can you fucking stay out of sight for love and peace, for morality and law, for the mental health of teenagers? Fuck your mother!"