More realistically, if this terrifying cycle were to stop, where would the mountainous piles of daily corpses be placed?
If they were all buried, a new mountain range would emerge within a month, gravestones would spread like a forest to the horizon, and the living would have no place left to stand.
The energy consumption of the incinerators would be enough to cripple the warships of half a Star District.
What's more fatal—how to feed the billions of mouths, constantly proliferating like cancer cells, forever hungry?
A rumbling of empty stomachs perpetually echoed in the lower levels of the Hive City, a time bomb more terrifying than any riot.
Hungry people would devour everything, including those who tried to help them.
Every distribution of rations at the relief stations would devolve into stampedes and brutal fights, and the most desperate would even turn to darker food sources—the vagrants who disappeared in dark alleys never appeared in any official statistics.
The surplus brought by the Orbital Ring and hydroponic farms was merely a drop in the bucket in the face of an exponentially expanding population and an insatiable demand for flesh fuel.
Those carefully cultivated crops were put on the rationing list before they could even be harvested; what eventually reached everyone's hands was merely an energy bar, processed through who knows how many steps—bland, hard, yet labeled "Standard Nutritional Unit," as if that could conceal the cruel reality of supply and demand behind it.
"What to do? Eat."
This simple solution has been repeated too many times in the Empire's ten-thousand-year history.
Every famine, every siege, every time expedition supplies were cut off, this choice would appear like a ghost, becoming the final bottom line—no, perhaps it could no longer be called a bottom line, but a customary rule of survival.
When morality and survival were a choice between two, the Empire always chose the latter.
The Empire's logic was cold and efficient: the living were more useful than the dead, and the dead could at least feed the living.
Thus, those comrades who once fought side by side, those fellow workers who spent day and night together, eventually became another process on the assembly line, another piece of fuel to keep the Empire running.
Eat the fallen comrades.
The cafeteria menu would not specify the source of the ingredients, but every worker knew deep down.
They queued in silence, took their trays, and stared at the unappetizing gray paste—it could be legumes, fungi, synthetic protein, or something else.
No one asked, nor was there any need to ask, because this was even public information in the Empire, not a secret.
As they chewed the suspicious gray paste, they would unconsciously think of the colleague who was still standing at the next workstation yesterday.
Where did that person go? Why didn't he come to work today?
No one mentioned it, but every gulping motion of their throats felt like swallowing an unspoken answer.
For ten thousand years, hasn't the Empire "efficiently" solved "problems" in this way?
Corpses need not be buried, and hunger is alleviated.
This was a perfect closed loop, a cruel mechanism that had been lubricated with blood for ten thousand years.
From a certain perspective, this was indeed a perfect closed-loop system: workers produced weapons, weapons killed enemies, dead workers fed living workers, and living workers continued to produce weapons.
No waste, no excess, only eternal efficiency.
Although most "corpse starch" might not directly originate from human bodies (at least nominally so), since the Dark Age of Technology, "cannibalism" has been like the Empire's original sin, an inescapable, dirty secret that sustains its vast body.
In official documents, it was called "organic recycling," but in the nightmares of every Hive City resident, it had a more direct name.
Under the suffocating density of the Hive City, even the lowest death rate meant the end of tens of millions of lives daily.
If these corpses piled up, they could fill the space of an entire galaxy within a year.
Incineration? Enormous cost with no output.
Every joule of energy was precious to the Empire; how could it be wasted on economically worthless cremation rituals?
Burial? Limited land and overwhelming accumulation.
In the Hive World, where every inch of land was precious, even the living had to be squeezed into beehive apartments like sardines; where was there extra space for the dead?
Thus, the Empire found its "ultimate solution": to recycle corpses and feed them into the perpetual grinding wheel of production and consumption.
This solution was so perfect; it solved the corpse disposal problem, alleviated the food crisis, and improved resource utilization.
From a purely logical perspective, it was simply a genius invention.
Using the flesh and blood of the deceased to feed the bodies of the living, maintaining the operation of this giant corpse processing plant called "the Empire."
In this terrifying ecosystem, everyone was potential food, and also a potential diner.
Today you eat others, tomorrow others eat you, in a cycle that continues until eternity—or until the day this machine called the Empire finally collapses.
Perhaps there were more "humane" methods?
Those proposals forgotten in the corners of data-slates, those reform plans whispered in noble salons, those forbidden technologies sealed in Adeptus Mechanicus secret chambers—theoretically, there were indeed countless more civilized ways of survival.
But within the Empire's unimaginably vast zombie body, this terrifying blood-based cycle was already the "most suitable" survival logic, applicable "universally."
Any attempt to change it would be like a pebble thrown into a sea of rot, swallowed whole before even a ripple could be stirred.
"Honestly, this was never what I wanted." Alex's gaze swept over the torrent of workers, mixed with more stiff Servitor, stumbling towards their respective "execution grounds" below, his voice filled with helplessness and bitterness as he whispered to 32 beside him.
His fingers unconsciously dug into the observation platform's railing, the silent deformation of the metal speaking of his inner struggle.
Among those hunched figures, perhaps there were once people who cheered for his triumph, but now they had become fuel for this meat grinder.
32 responded to his lament with only a jest: "Are you going to set the galaxy ablaze too?"
Her mechanical voice deliberately mimicked a tone from a certain audio-visual record, but the flashing blue light in her electronic eyes betrayed her similar emotions.
Behind this joke was their unspoken understanding of Horus's past.
"There's only one chance to save the Empire, and we can't miss it." Alex responded with a heavy sigh, though he was imitating Horus's lines, he was also stating a fact.
His gaze pierced through the factory's murky air, as if seeing a more distant future—that critical juncture of either rebirth or destruction was approaching, like the final calm before a supernova.
The predicament he faced, how similar was it to Horus, who raised the banner of rebellion back then?
The same idealism, the same burden of the Empire, the same dilemma.
The only difference, perhaps, was that Horus ultimately embraced the abyss of Chaos, while he, still stubbornly believed he walked upon the thorny "righteous path."
Every step on this path trampled his own moral bottom line, yet he had to keep moving forward.
"Yes, if we don't seize it, the Empire and humanity… will be completely finished." 32 shed all traces of jest, a rare solemnity on her metallic face.
They knew full well what kind of end awaited the Empire as the galaxy was torn apart by the Great Rift.
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