Chapter 506: Warhammer: What Do You Mean You Conquered the Zerg

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Protagonist:

Lin En

Lena

Gunshi chose to cooperate.

He slumped to the ground, his broken leg temporarily immobilized, sweat beading on his forehead from the pain, yet he dared not play any tricks.

Gunshi could tell that this fellow who looked like a little girl was more ruthless than the madmen of Hei Tie Cheng.

So he explained everything thoroughly.

A gang like his was naturally not an independent "Wild Dog."

The Outer Areas merchants of Hei Tie Cheng supplied them with ammunition and cheap stimulants, and also bought people and scavenged supplies from them.

If a settlement developed too quickly, dug up something good, or its population grew too fast, Hei Tie Cheng would send someone to "remind" them.

Hei Tie Cheng would absolutely never allow a second force capable of matching them to rise outside.

After hearing this, Ayla's first reaction was direct: "Destroy Hei Tie Cheng."

Mei looked at her and asked, "And then?"

Ayla: "?"

"What about the people inside?" Mei counted on her fingers.

"Who repairs the water purification station? Who maintains the generator? Where does the grain come from? How is sewage drained?"

"Once the city falls and chaos breaks out, with looting and killing, the number of dead might even exceed those crushed by Hei Tie Cheng's oppression."

Ayla stood frozen in place.

She had never thought about these things before.

Killing a bad ruler seemed like the right answer.

But if killing him led to more deaths, was destroying Hei Tie Cheng still the right solution?

She frowned, silent for a long time.

"You have to think about this problem yourself." Mei said no more.

While processing the confiscated equipment, Ayla came alive.

Engines, motorcycles, exoskeletons, power units, hydraulic parts...

She had them all dragged to an open space and disassembled piece by piece.

Parts covered the ground, oil stained her hands and face, but she didn't care at all, her eyes shining frighteningly. Others saw scrap copper and rotten iron; she saw the use of every part, the strengths and weaknesses of every structure, which piece could be modified for use elsewhere.

Mei called her to eat, calling three times with no response.

Finally, the woman brought over a bowl and stuffed it into her hand.

Ayla chewed on hard, dry starch crackers while still gesturing with her hand about the size of a gear, calculating whether it could be modified for the exoskeleton's joints.

Ayla chewed on a hard, dry starch biscuit while gesturing the size of a Gear with her hand, calculating whether it could be modified onto the Joints of the exoskeleton.

Only when touching machinery did she seem like a child who had found a toy.

The first beneficiary was Ha'er, the scavenger with the broken leg.

Ayla used confiscated exoskeleton parts, adding some off-road vehicle hydraulic structures, to make him a powered prosthetic leg.

Using Confiscated exoskeleton parts and adding a bit of the off-road vehicle's hydraulic Structure, Ayla made him a powered prosthesis.

The power output was set too high; when Ha'er took a step, his whole body flew straight forward and he fell face-first into the mud.

The onlookers beside them shook with suppressed laughter.

Ayla was not discouraged; she squatted back down and adjusted the parameters for a few minutes.

By the third version, Ha'er leaned against the wall and slowly stood up, one step, two steps...

He stood in the open space, looking down at the mechanical leg, and tears streamed down.

This leg had more strength than his original good leg.

"Ayla, can you... replace the other one too?"

Ayla looked up at him.

"Why?"

"Machines are stronger." Ha'er's voice trembled a little. "Flesh legs break; this one won't."

Ayla was silent for a few seconds, then reached out and pointed at the mechanical leg. "It will break too."

Ayla was Silent for a few Seconds, then reached out and pointed at that mechanical Leg. "It will break too."

"Bearings wear out, power runs out, transmission structures break—nothing is unbreakable."

"But it's still stronger than my leg."

Ayla looked at his intact leg and said calmly, "Your other leg isn't damaged."

Looking at his intact Leg, Ayla said very calmly, "Your other Leg is not damaged."

"So there's no need to replace it."

She couldn't explain why.

There was no complete reasoning, no rigorous derivation—just an instinctive feeling that it was wrong.

Ha'er, cowed by the dignity Ayla had just established, said nothing more.

In the afternoon, several people worked together to move a large old generator set.

In the afternoon, several people joined forces to move a large-scale old generator set.

Ayla stood to the side calling out commands, left a bit, right a bit, lift how much.

But the more she directed, the more chaotic it became; some were afraid of crushing their feet, some couldn't keep up with the rhythm, some felt they had done too much and got upset.

Ayla grew visibly irritated; her commands were precise enough, so why was the execution efficiency so low?

Suddenly, she recalled the funeral, recalled those people carrying the coffin.

She paused, then changed her words.

"Once this equipment is installed, Ha'er can work on his own."

The few who were exerting themselves froze for a moment, subconsciously all glancing at Ha'er standing to the side.

No one spoke, but from then on, the movements suddenly smoothed out.

They started calling out chants themselves, or proactively went to steady unstable spots; efficiency rose by far more than ten percent.

Ayla stood to the side, clearly capturing that faint resonance.

She suddenly understood.

Commands can only tell people how to do something, but people seem to also need to know what the purpose of doing it is.

This was the second seed regarding "governance" she had grasped.

Gunshi was still fairly honorable; after being released, he soon brought new intelligence.

"Those people in Hei Tie Cheng, what truly overwhelms the surrounding forces isn't the city walls, it's that they have a fighter jet." Gunshi took a sip of cold water and said.

Ayla's eyes sharpened instantly: "Model?"

"How would I know."

"Propulsion method?"

"Don't know."

"Wingspan? Weapons?"

Gunshi thought for a long time, finally squeezing out: "It breathes fire."

Ayla was clearly dissatisfied; the intelligence value was far lower than expected.

Gunshi hurriedly added: "That thing is extremely precious; it only moves once every few months or even years, every flight burns money like crazy, it's their town-guarding treasure."

But it wasn't entirely useless information; according to him, this thing is connected to the Seventh Dock.

Decades ago, Hei Tie Cheng people dragged out many parts from inside there, afterwards strictly forbidding outsiders from touching those ruins.

The reason is simple: ground roads can be checkpointed, can be blocked, but if someone gets a plane, the city walls become mere decorations.

Ayla made the decision that very day: no more attacking Hei Tie Cheng, first go to the Seventh Dock to see if they can get a plane working.

She gazed toward the starry sky.

Conquering the sky sounded like a pretty good challenge.

During a scavenging run, Ayla fished out an old data crystal origin from an iron box.

The interface was long since ruined; she found a way to read out a small segment of residual data.

The coordinates pointed to the depths of the Seventh Dock, and there was a line of fragmented ancient inscription, written in Old Imperial Standard:

【THEFLESHISWEAK.】

The flesh is weak.

Ayla looked at her own hand, then at Ha'er's metal leg not far away.

Reason told her, steel is indeed more solid than bone, more powerful than muscle, more durable than flesh.

Then, why not replace it all?

She stared at that line of text for a long time.

For the first time, seriously, genuinely contemplating this question.

The Seventh Dock was even larger than imagined.

A fractured runway tens of kilometers long stretched across the wasteland, like a giant scar.

The collapsed command tower leaned to one side, the huge Imperial double-headed eagle sculpture only had half a wing left, covered in rust stains.

The cargo hold was big enough to fit an entire settlement; now inside were packed the scavengers' shacks, people making a living inside the corpse of an ancient civilization.

Wind carrying sand and dust blew across the empty helipad, making a wailing sound.

Once upon a time, massive transport aircraft took off and landed here, Space Marine legions were deployed, Titan God Machines capable of tearing the earth were maintained.

But now, people would fight until heads were broken and blood flowed for a single intact bearing.

When Ayla brought people over, the scavenger armed groups occupying the place were very wary at first.

Hearing she came to repair planes, the leader laughed, saying many had wanted to do this over the decades, none succeeded.

But he still cleared a path.

Everyone wanted to know, could these iron lumps buried in the ruins still move.

The underground entrance was at the deepest part of the cargo hold, a thick bulletproof door sealed shut, power long since cut, the lock core rusted dead.

Others said this was a dead door, couldn't be opened.

Ayla crouched by the door feeling around for a long while, then examined the door frame structure.

It wasn't locked dead; several sets of mechanical locks had lost pressure, needed manual release.

She spent half an hour making a simple tool, succeeded on the first try.

The iron door let out a muffled "Boom—" and shifted aside, opening a crack.

Dust rushed in the face, carrying the smell of machine oil and rust.

Inside was an ancient mechanical maintenance station.

The walls still bore the blurred "Iron Hand" legion insignia, scattered with damaged armor repair logs, expedition numbers, troop logistics files.

Ayla flipped through a few; the time span was terrifyingly vast, the earliest tracing back to the expedition era over ten thousand years ago.

This place was once a front-line maintenance node of an Imperial Expeditionary Force; later the war shattered it, the facilities were buried, and it was slowly forgotten.

The deeper one went, the more intact the equipment became.

In the center of the hall at the deepest part stood a massive core device, half-buried underground, its wiring dense like blood vessels.

Ayla connected a temporary power supply, and the moment it activated, the entire hall flashed with red light.

A huge translucent iron-man silhouette projected above the core — tall, cold, expressionless.

Its first words, voice without inflection, like a mechanical announcement: "Detected subject: organic structure proportion excessively high."

"Optimization space: significant."

As if evaluating Ayla.

Ayla looked up at it and replied: "Your power supply design also contains a large quantity of redundancy."

The core's red light flashed twice, and it actually froze for a moment.

Ayla spent some time figuring out what this thing was.

It was not a living person, not the soul of any Primarch.

It was called the 【Gore Geng Yi Xun He Ice Cold Heart】, originally just a training database, engineering database, and tactical analysis core, storing the ancient Legion's combat experience, maintenance solutions, and human enhancement data.

But over tens of thousands of years, generation after generation of Iron Hand members, Technical Priests, and successor Commanders kept adding things into it — their own understandings, deductions, and doctrines.

Layer upon layer, piled into a complex thought sediment.

Some entries were frighteningly ancient, some clearly later additions, some even mutually contradictory.

It was not Ferrus himself.

It was the "ghost" piled up from all the answers of countless people over ten thousand years to the proposition of "steel and flesh."