Chapter 399: As Long as the Whip Is Swung Fast Enough

"I am the Emperor's guardian! My duty is to protect the Emperor!"

"How dare you come and make me farm! How dare you!"

Custodes Officer Koken raised his head from the muddy field, shook the black mud off his hands, and said through gritted teeth.

He could not stand it — how could farming, the work of mere mortals, be something for a dignified Custodes like him to do?

How could his hands, forged by the Emperor's sacred gene-alchemy, be used to grab seedlings? To toss dirt? To hold a hoe?

No, his hands could only be used to hold a spear, hold a pen, hold a shield,

Farming, such a lowly task, should be left for lowly mortals to do——————

"Crack!!!"

The whip's whistle suddenly rang out, like thunder,

Generally speaking, how could a mere whip possibly harm a Custodes like Koken,

And that whip had only been swung once in the empty air, never actually landing on Koken's body,

Yet a sudden pang of pain welled up inexplicably in Koken's body, then his foot slipped, and he crashed heavily into the paddy field, his face slamming hard into the dark soil.

【Item Name: Heaven's Punishment Whip】

【Place of Origin: 22nd Century Earth — Future Department Store】

【Production Date: 275. m3】

【Function: Shaped like a small beast-tamer's whip. When the user sees someone nearby doing something bad, they only need to flick the whip in the air, and that wrongdoer will receive a corresponding punishment — the worse the misdeed, the heavier the punishment.】

"Custodes Officer Koken's misdeeds: disrespecting labor, discriminating against farmers."

"Punishment: falling in the mud, falling painfully."

What a wonderfully useful whip, making my Custodes black slaves spin.

Zhou Yun shook the whip in his hand and sighed.

This item had originally been prepared by him to deal with Erebus, the chief villain foretold in the Emperor's prophecy to stir the fate of the galaxy in the near future,

As long as someone near Zhou Yun did something bad and Zhou Yun saw it, he only needed to flick the whip once, and that wrongdoer would receive punishment on their own,

After all, in this world, who could be better at doing evil than Erebus?

But after redeeming it, Zhou Yun found this whip unexpectedly useful,

Because this whip's definition of "doing bad" was very plain — acts like wasting food, disrespecting labor, or insulting others were also defined as doing bad, and would receive a certain degree of punishment,

Especially after Zhou Yun decided to have the Custodes farm, he found this thing was simply too useful

"Custodes!"

"Are you solid now or not!"

"Are you going to farm or not!"

"Say it — say that you are going to farm!"

Custodes Officer Koken gritted his teeth, veins popping out one after another on his face,

"I am the Emperor's perfect creation! The Emperor did not create these hands of mine for farming————"

"Crack!" Another whip-sound rang out,

Before he could even get up, Custodes Officer Koken crashed heavily once more into the muddy earth he despised and found filthy.

This Custodes, who had just been promoted to Custodes Officer before being shoved onto Zhou Yun by Trajan to farm in the underground palace, raised his head resentfully and looked,

He cast a hateful gaze at Zhou Yun, which made Zhou Yun's eyebrows lift slightly,

Nobi Huang Huang Daxiong, standing behind Zhou Yun, took half a step forward, standing behind Zhou Yun, looking down at Koken from above.

Koken instinctively met that gaze, then could not help but shiver,

Whether it was an illusion or not, Custodes Officer Koken seemed to feel the Emperor's glance within Nobi Huang Huang Daxiong's gaze,

It was only for an instant, almost making Koken suspect it was his own illusion.

But even if it was an illusion, the appearance of Nobi Huang Huang Daxiong made the Custodes present hold their breath slightly,

They had all witnessed before the Lion's Gate what this great demon of the Holy Doraemon was capable of.

A single bullet killed Scarbrand, making the Blood God Khorne limp

"My duty is not farming, my duty is to guard the Emperor!" Koken still said stubbornly.

Then he closed his eyes, waiting for that whip to crack, waiting for the pain to come.

But the whip's sound did not ring out; instead, only Zhou Yun's voice rang out,

"Guard the Emperor? That body of the Emperor does not need you to guard it."

"But humanity needs it, the myriad living beings of Terra need it."

"The Emperor is humanity, humanity is the Emperor, the two have always been one."

"Protecting humanity, raising humanity, feeding humanity — that is guarding the Emperor, that is what it means to guard the Emperor!"

Zhou Yun's words made the Custodes freeze slightly for a moment, but soon the whip's crack broke the surrounding silence.

"Gowork!" Zhou Yun roared in High Gothic.

The Custodes lowered their heads one after another, picked up the seedlings on the ground, and began to plant,

Even Custodes Officer Koken, his face flushed red, joined the farming work with some resentment.

Although Koken had spoken harshly just now, one had to admit that these Custodes were still the Emperor's excellent creations — they farmed the land quickly and well.

Zhou Yun toyed with the Heaven's Punishment Whip in his hand, nodding in admiration.

Sure enough, these Custodes should come to him to farm.

Currently, the main tasks on Terra are three: governance, supplies, and reconquest,

The duty of governance naturally fell to Luo Bote Guilliman, who had been enfeoffed by the Emperor as Regent, currently leading the surviving Terra bureaucrats to govern, while also gathering strength, preparing to begin reconquest beyond Terra,

The duty of supplies belonged to Zhou Yun — Zhou Yun had to manufacture enough food and water in a short time to feed Terra's current population of hundreds of millions, so that this human motherworld would not starve itself,

And the duty of reclaiming naturally fell to Saint Guilliman, who led the Adeptus Astartes and Astra Militarum into the hive cities of Terra, taking back the regions that had slipped out of control, and once more displaying his own figure to the mortals, rekindling their faith.

As for the arrangement of the Custodian Guard, at the very beginning Guilliman had hoped to bring some of them into the administrative and command structure,

letting the Custodians' transcendent brains take charge of certain administrative activities, or hold a military post — but Zhou Yun reminded Guilliman: the Custodians of today are not the same as those of ten thousand years ago.

This made Guilliman grow wary, and he secretly had Ultramarines wearing the Blindspot Star infiltrate among the Custodians to learn the Custodians' present condition,

and the result made Guilliman fall off his chair in astonishment,

for ten thousand years the Custodians had held fast within the Imperial Palace, and the strategic awareness and thinking ability of many Custodians had grown dull; many had developed an inexplicable sense of superiority over mortals and Adeptus Astartes, and had even begun to discriminate against them,

which struck Guilliman as utterly absurd,

the purpose of administration was to govern the overwhelming majority of mortals and a small number of Adeptus Astartes — how could Custodians in such a state be allowed to join the administration?

As for Saint Guilliman's reclamation force — Saint Guilliman made it clear he had no need for those Jin Guang-flashing bodyguards; once they actually hit the battlefield, who would be protecting whom?

Rather than stuffing Custodians onto him, better to give him more Imperial Fists — the hive cities need people to do the dirty work!

In the blink of an eye the Custodians had sunk to the point of being unwelcome to man and despised by dogs, and Zhou Yun discovered their shining quality.

Come farm!

His Holiday Agriculture Set was just crying out for hands,

Terra's population was far too large; supplying food to the whole of Terra with the Gourmet Tablecloth required spending a sea of money,

but the Holiday Agriculture Set — the Holiday Agriculture Set only needed to whip the Custodians hard.

As for the ideological problem? Scorn for mortals and Adeptus Astartes?

No problem — just crack the whip hard,

as long as the whip is cracked fast enough, no problem is a problem.

"Sigh! Don't crush those bugs! Grab them whole!"

Zhou Yun watched the Custodians squeezing the bugs popping out of the field until they burst, and hurried to stop them, saying so.

This was a feature of the Holiday Agriculture Set: in order to let the user truly experience the feeling of farming, these rapidly growing rice paddies would automatically generate pests such as grasshoppers and locusts, completely defying the laws of physics and biology.

But these pests were, in fact, extremely valuable.

"Grab them, try to grab them whole — these are all protein! Grabbed whole and roasted they're delicious too."

These Custodians had simply been holed up inside the Imperial Palace for far too long,

Zhou Yun well knew that in the hive cities, roasted insects could count as a supreme delicacy, an excellent way to supplement one's protein.

As this batch of insects was seized up by the Custodians' transcendent physical constitution, the rice too matured at an astonishing speed.

For crops this was already a maturation speed far beyond common sense, and within this underground palace Zhou Yun had used the Frenzy Clock to adjust the flow of time,

so that the time the rice needed to ripen to harvest one crop, seen from the outside, was only a few short seconds passing by.

Outside the underground palace's doors, Roboute Guilliman, carrying administrative scrolls he had dug out from deep within the Imperial Palace, walked past; he could not help glancing toward the underground palace's entrance,

and from his vantage point the Custodians appeared to be working at tremendous speed, with rice piling up into mountains in the blink of an eye beside them,

and for a moment Roboute Guilliman, watching those diligently laboring Custodians, could not help but show an envious expression,

to be able to cast off those boring duties, to pour one's sweat freely among the fields — how worthy of envy.

"The other day, my sister who lives in the Niphon hive city sent me a tin."

"Inside the tin was a pile of white powder — thank the Emperor, I thought it was corpse starch so I ate it all."

"Then today my sister came, and she told me that what was in the tin was our mother's ashes."

"That made me absolutely furious!"

"That was our shared mother — how could she eat all the meat herself and leave only the ashes for me!"

A wave of feeble laughter rose up all around; hunger would not permit them to laugh too loudly.

And Ran Val, watching those people collapsed on the streets telling jokes, saw only envy in his eyes,

envy for the joke-teller who could still eat his mother's ashes, envy for these people who still had a shred of strength to laugh out loud,

his own mother had starved to death as well, but her corpse after death was quickly snatched up by people and divided and eaten — Ran Val did not even get so much as a single bone to gnaw on.

Hungry. So hungry, God-Emperor, please do not punish me with hunger. Ran Val thought, head hanging low.

Ran Val, summoning what little strength he had, glanced briefly around him, then lowered his head again, and as inconspicuously as possible began to pray in a small voice,

praying to a deity who had recently begun to spread suddenly through the hive cities, whom the nuns were also promoting — a god utterly different from the faith of the Hua Di Huang.

"Holy Doraemon above. I am Ran Val, of Lower Hive Block Twenty-Two, New South Wales hive city. Please grant me a little food."

Ran Val's voice was very, very small — so small that he himself doubted whether he could hear it.

But just at that moment, a fragrance he had never smelled before brushed past the tip of his nose.

(End of this chapter)