As the third month drew to a close, the weather in Castle Horizon began to cool.
A cold wave from the arctic ice cap swept across the wasteland, yet it failed to lower the temperature of the underground core industrial zone.
It remained a scene of bustling, feverish activity.
Ever since assimilating the two thousand-plus crew members from the Scavenger, the demographic structure of Deep Space Industries had undergone a fundamental shift.
The original small industrial park of a few hundred people had expanded overnight into a medium-sized industrial entity with thousands of industrial workers.
To absorb this sudden influx of population, Andy was forced to dedicate most of his energy to expanding infrastructure.
Mess halls, dormitories, water supply systems, and ventilation shafts.
Though constructing these facilities wasn't as thrilling as manufacturing guns and artillery, they were the indispensable foundation for maintaining organizational stability.
Yet beyond their assigned production tasks, this new batch of workers displayed a level of fanaticism that Andy found utterly baffling.
The source of this fanaticism was Gamma-9.
Sub-Level 2, First Staff Mess Hall.
It was lunchtime.
Several hundred workers sat along long tables, spoons in hand, ravenously devouring steaming bowls of broth and starch blocks.
To Andy, such food was merely emergency rations barely capable of maintaining vital signs.
To these Zais natives, however, it was a rare delicacy that only the noble lords of Fortress Odin could ever dream of enjoying.
There was no grit, no sickening sour rot—only the pure aroma of carbohydrates and protein.
Gamma-9 did not dine in his private compartment.
Carrying a stainless-steel tray, he squeezed directly into the crowd of workers.
He still wore his black commissar coat, which, coupled with his glowing red mechanical eye, gave him a formidable and intimidating presence.
Yet at this moment, an unusually gentle smile hung on his face.
"How is it? Is today's broth to your liking?"
As Gamma-9 passed by, he clapped the shoulder of a young technician nearby.
Flustered and overwhelmed by the honor, the technician nearly dropped his bowl. "G-Great! It's fantastic, Lord Preceptor!" he stammered in reply.
"I've never eaten anything this good in my whole life... Is this meat... real meat?"
"Of course it is real," Gamma-9 elevated his voice so everyone nearby could hear.
"This is the grace of the Sage."
"In the Sage's homeworld, during the holy and glorious Dark Age of Technology, such food was merely the most basic ration."
"And here among us, only the most devout, hardworking faithful are worthy of partaking in it."
The surrounding workers halted their spoons one after another, gazing at Gamma-9 with eyes bordering on pure veneration.
For these bottom-feeders struggling to survive in a hopeless universe, abstract concepts like science or engineering principles were meaningless.
Whoever could fill their bellies and grant them security was a god.
And Gamma-9 was the god's spokesperson in this world.
Gamma-9 thoroughly enjoyed these looks.
As a low-ranking Tech-Priest hailing from the Underhive, his actual technical proficiency was abysmal. In the Middle Hive, where true technical masterminds gathered, someone like him sat at the absolute bottom of the food chain.
Yet here, before these wasteland technicians, he had somehow found his self-confidence.
He didn't need to display complex code-writing skills, nor did he need to repair intricate servo-arrays.
All he needed to do was recount Andy's sensational, awe-inspiring feats to these people.
"Do you know about the Molecular Reconstruction Instrument?"
Gamma-9 pointed toward the ceiling. "That is a divine relic the Sage summoned from the void."
"It can turn the filthiest garbage into the purest metal."
"And what does this prove?"
Gamma-9 paused, sweeping his gaze across the room.
"It proves that as long as your faith is devout, even scrap iron can become steel!"
"Work hard alongside the Sage, and the day will come when you too can shed this filthy mortal shell and step toward holy ascension!"
"Praise the Omnissiah! Praise Sage Andy!"
Tears of emotion welled in the workers' eyes as they raised their spoons high, shouting in unison.
Driven by Gamma-9's efforts, Castle Horizon was no longer just a shelter in their minds—it had become the gateway to heaven.
In another corner of the mess hall.
Tech-Priest Zor sat alone at a table.
Before him lay an exquisite synthetic steak—a special meal authorized by Andy specifically for senior technical personnel.
Yet within a five-meter radius around him, not a soul was to be seen.
The workers actively avoided him. Even when passing nearby, they took a detour, their eyes filled with awe mixed with deep alienation.
As Zor sliced his steak, his cybernetic eye coldly watched Gamma-9, who was surrounded by the admiring crowd in the distance.
"Hmph, grandstanding charlatan," Zor muttered internally, though no sound escaped his lips.
As a true High Sage of the Adeptus Mechanicus, Zor possessed the pinnacle of industrial technology on this planet.
He could manually calibrate laser lens arrays down to the micron level, and his mind could process over thirty complex production commands simultaneously.
Logically speaking, he should have been the one worshipped by these technicians.
Yet he was far too arrogant.
Whenever a worker approached him to ask a question, he would simply toss out a string of complex data models and binary code, glare at them as if looking at a fool, and add insult to injury with a line like, "How can you not understand something so simple?"
He could not fathom the stupidity of mortals, and mortals could not comprehend his genius.
Over time, Zor, the technical mastermind, was left out in the cold, while Gamma-9, the half-baked charlatan, was idolized by the masses.
Rather than listening to Zor lecture on unintelligible mathematical models, the new workers far preferred listening to Gamma-9 spin tales of how Sage Andy obliterated Titans with a single punch and hand-crafted Gloriana-class Battleships from scratch.
Zor let out a sigh and shoved the last piece of steak into his mouth.
"A bunch of unsalvageable fools."
He decided to return to his fourth-floor laboratory as soon as he finished eating.
Even staring blankly at cold machine tools was better than watching these idiots indulge in a cult of personality down here.
On the third level of the Research Tower, in Andy's private workshop.
Andy watched everything happening in the mess hall through the surveillance feed.
He hadn't put a stop to Gamma-9's proselytizing, effectively granting a tacit, forced approval of the trend for now.
In a hopeless universe like this, giving people a shred of faith—even blind faith—was an effective method for maintaining organizational cohesion.
As long as they worked hard and obeyed orders, whether they worshipped the Machine God or the God-Andy didn't really matter.
Yet Andy himself felt immensely uncomfortable.
Setting aside the fact that he personally held nothing but disdain for abstract ideas like "hope" or "faith"—believing that only ultimate efficiency could build the future—that was secondary.
The primary issue was...
Whenever he heard Gamma-9 down there bragging about how Andy "radiated golden light" and "could calm the Warp with a single glance"...
It was cringe!
It was cringey beyond belief!
"That old bastard missed his calling—he really should've been a pyramid scheme leader!"
Andy angrily clicked off the monitor and shifted his attention to a report resting on his workbench.
It was a detailed inventory regarding the resource recovery from Area A.
Area A was the salvage site of the land-ship named the Fuck Your Grandma.
After continuous cutting and dismantling by Engineering Division 1 and hundreds of drones, this tens-of-thousands-of-tons steel leviathan had been broken down into sorted piles of components.
"Adamantium recovery amount..."
Andy's finger slid down the page, coming to a halt at a specific figure.
Adamantium (Impure): 32.5 tons
Estimated Yield Post-Refinement: 15.8 tons
"Only fifteen tons?"
Andy frowned, thoroughly dissatisfied with the number.
The Fuck Your Grandma was, after all, a land-ship displacing tens of thousands of tons, modified from the wreckage of an ancient frigate.
By all rights, a vessel of that scale should have contained a substantial amount of adamantium within its keel.
Reality, however, was harsh.
Over the long centuries, this ship had long been stripped to a hollow shell.
The truly high-value adamantium keel had likely been salvaged hundreds of years ago by some warlord to construct another vessel.
What the bald warlord had acquired was merely a husk drained of its core value.
Most of the adamantium recovered this time had been extracted from a few scrapped macro-cannon barrels and that massive main drive shaft.
"Fifteen tons..."
Andy calculated rapidly in his head.
For his newly designed Warp drive, casting the pressure hull for the inner wall of the core reactor—to withstand the scouring forces of Warp energy—would require at least ten tons of high-purity adamantium.
It was barely enough.
And he would have to use it sparingly, without a single speck wasted!
"What about the ship's hull?"
Andy pulled up the blueprint for the starship's keel.
To build a battlecruiser capable of navigating freely through Warp turbulence, the vessel's main keel required a specialized alloy with an adamantium content exceeding 70%.
According to Andy's design, the starship's total length was around six kilometers, meaning the keel alone would require at least two thousand tons of adamantium.
Two thousand damn tons...
Looking at the pitiful fifteen tons in hand, Andy felt the crushing weight of a massive wealth gap.
"This is way too far off."
Andy tossed the report onto the desk.
The situation at the remaining two salvage sites, Area B and Area C (the Shit-Bucket and the Pile-Driver), was likely similar, if not worse.
Even combining all three ships, he'd be lucky if they gathered fifty tons of adamantium.
That amount was enough to build an engine, or perhaps barely eke out a base frame for a Geller field generator.
But building a whole ship?
What kind of galactic joke was that!
Without sufficient adamantium, he couldn't build a qualified hull.
And without a hull, his envisioned battlecruiser would forever remain confined to blueprints.
On this wasteland planet that had been over-mined for thousands of years, trying to gather two thousand tons of adamantium through scavenging was like searching for a needle in the ocean.
The only remaining path was to plunder it.
Andy shifted his gaze toward the south.
Based on the intelligence gathered from scavengers over the past few days, Andy now knew that the south led toward the Lightless Sea—and was also the territory of Zais's most powerful warlord, the site of "Fortress Odin."
Fortress Odin itself was a super land-ship twelve kilometers long, converted from the wreckage of an actual battlecruiser.
If it was a vessel of that caliber...
The adamantium reserves inside would undoubtedly be an astronomical figure.
"Looks like I'll eventually have to clash with Odin after all," Andy muttered to himself.
Not right now, though.
Deep Space Industries didn't yet possess the strength to challenge a behemoth like that.
The current priority was to make full use of the adamantium currently on hand.
He could consider building the engine first.
Once the engine was built, the ship would have its heart.
As for the skeleton... he'd figure that out when the time came!
Worst-case scenario, he could settle for materials like ceramite to forge a budget-version keel—it wasn't completely unacceptable.