Situval arrived on the planet where recruits were selected. This was not Scaria. There were no wealthy hive cities, advanced transport systems, or magnificent orbital ring stations.
None of the Three Hundred Worlds were "wealthy" by the Imperium's standards.
If Scaria and Atris combined could match a single world among the Five Hundred Worlds of the Ultima Segmentum,
then the combined production of the Three Hundred Worlds might only equal that of ten wealthy worlds.
Impoverished planets were the norm.
For some unknown reason, the colonists who first arrived here had not begun building hive cities. Instead, they had followed older traditions and built vast complexes of buildings.
These sprawling complexes were not spread evenly across the planet's surface like jam. They had been carefully planned into long strips along the boundaries between ecological environments, such as grasslands and forests, or plains and deserts.
The planet's ecosystems were divided into distinct regions, each with its own characteristics.
Overall, this was a dry world, with terrain dominated by plains and deserts. This had also fostered an efficient lifestyle of "closeness to nature" among its people. Sports and large-scale military training were extremely popular here.
During the T'au era, this had been a place they despised. The people possessed extremely primitive technology and carried crude weapons through foolish, large-scale formation drills.
To the T'au, such backward tactical thinking merely gave artillery crews target practice on the battlefield. Troops gathered together could be wiped out in swathes with a single blast.
As for those sports, hmph, they were merely a sign of barbarism.
A group of descendants of the Imperial Fists stood silently at the perimeter to welcome Situval. They loathed the Iron Warriors, and over ten millennia, the two sides had clashed countless times.
Fortunately, they could accept certain circumstances. Stealing each