In the underhive of Cthonia's hive city, gangs were the rulers at the grassroots level, responsible for supervising and controlling the workers' daily labor.
As long as there was no unrest in the underhive, the nobles in the spires might go their entire lives without ever inquiring.
Among the hundreds of gangs of various sizes, the Viper Gang was the largest in the underhive.
News about the Viper Gang required no investigation, walking down the street, one could hear Viper members bragging about themselves without restraint.
At the Viper Gang's core stronghold, two gang members were leaning against the railing of a watchtower, chatting idly.
"Heard about it? The city wall was breached by invaders!"
"It was so loud even the deaf heard it, what's the point of you yelling about it?"
"So do you know who did it?"
"You know?"
"I don't either, but the gate isn't far from here. What if they come this way?"
"What can we do? Run. Don't tell me you actually want to be loyal dogs for those noble bastards?"
"No way, no way."
They chuckled merrily, but their laughter ceased abruptly the next second.
Both of them tilted their heads sideways, dead.
Crack!
The stronghold's massive steel gate was torn apart by an invisible force. Hearing the commotion, gang members grabbed their weapons and rushed toward the entrance.
"Someone's invading!"
"Where are the sentries? Why wasn't the alarm raised in advance? What were they doing?"
"Enough talk, get moving!"
The gangsters cursed and crowded toward the gate. Yet strangely, behind the gate there was no one, only two bodies lying on the watchtower.
But before they could look closer, these fierce thugs all stiffened at once, their necks snapping rightward with a crisp crack.
Thump!
Bodies fell one after another, landing with dull thuds.
Just like the Corpse-Grinders, death had come too fast, they had not anticipated it, nor had they spotted the enemy.
No fear, no pain, they died peacefully.
In the underworld, death was a commonplace.
Durm had never feared corpses. He believed these people deserved to die, and he felt no sympathy.
By reading the memories of the dead, Caelan found the storerooms with ease.
The heavy blast door was pried open by psychic force, releasing a wave of foul, moldy air.
The armory was neatly stacked with smuggled lasguns and solid-slug weapons. The wine cellar was filled with cheap alcohol brewed from promethium, corpse-starch, and other ingredients.
The granary was piled high with mountains of corpse-starch bars, all extorted from the commoners by the Viper Gang.
The underhive gangs had no real legitimate way to make money, nor did they dare compete with the nobles for profits.
Even when they acted as the nobles' dogs, the nobles would not throw them a single scrap of kibble.
So their method was simple: further squeeze the workers, plunder their corpse-starch rations, and then sell those bars at rock-bottom prices to the factory managers.
The price difference was their source of income.
Though this method of exploitation was inefficient, the underhive had hundreds of millions of civilians, and over time, the accumulated wealth was considerable.
These funds, squeezed from the common people, would eventually flow back to the nobles through the purchase of expensive weapons, completing the loop.
For nobles with lineages stretching back millennia, these revenues were a mere drop in the bucket compared to their family fortunes. Their true aim was to maintain the poverty of the underhive, thereby cementing their own superior social status.
After all, if the underhive commoners could accumulate wealth and gain economic freedom, who would willingly work in the factories?
As for raising wages and rewarding productivity, that was simply not in the nobles' consideration.
The nobles' thinking was different from the commoners'. It did not matter whether they themselves made money, but even if they lost money, they could not allow the underhive rabble to profit.
In the nobles' eyes, there was no such thing as a win-win. If the commoners won, the nobles lost.
They could lose, but they could not let the commoners win.
Only when the commoners could barely sustain their own existence would they lack the strength to challenge the existing order.
In the eyes of the nobles, underhive commoners were the most cost-effective production units.
They required no wages, only the bare minimum rations to survive; all the surplus value they created could be squeezed dry by the rulers.
Slaves were private property; if they fell ill, the owners had to spend money to treat them.
But workers required no such expense. If a worker fell ill or died, it did not matter, the nobles did not have to spend a penny.
The underhive had no shortage of people. If one would not work, another would.
This model was especially prominent in Cthonia's export-oriented economy. The goods Cthonia produced were entirely for export, and the nascent interstellar empire's demand for war materials would only grow.
Thus, the ruling class never worried about sales, had no need to consider domestic demand, and saw no reason to raise workers' wages.
With a wave of his hand, Caelan loaded all the valuable supplies in the stronghold onto the Viper Gang's trucks.
A full dozen large transport vehicles were packed to the brim, not a gap left.
At this moment, all the trucks floated silently a few centimeters above the ground.
Durm had long grown accustomed to Caelan's wonders, but he still murmured under his breath: "It seems they can't see us?"
He noticed that pedestrians on the street paid no attention to this massive convoy, as if it did not exist.
Even when they nearly collided with the trucks, the passersby showed no reaction, still numbly crossing the road.
When the convoy reached the city gate, the situation changed.
A heavily armed Planetary Defense Force unit was urgently taking over the city's defenses, using portable defensive walls to construct makeshift fortifications to fill the breach.
The soldiers were all on high alert, lasguns trained on the darkness beyond the city.
Though there was nothing there, and the augur scanners showed no readings.
Yet even these vigilant soldiers were oblivious to the trucks floating before them.
Though Cthonia's hive had long enjoyed peace, its reaction to a sudden attack was extremely sluggish.
When the gate was destroyed, the Planetary Defense Force mistakenly believed the wall had fallen and had even considered abandoning the underhive.
Some nobles had already boarded shuttles and space elevators early on, ready to flee at any moment.
Thus, when the underhive enforcers reported that there were no enemy troops, the higher-ups' first reaction was that the enforcers had betrayed them and could not be trusted.
However, the Planetary Defense Force's own reconnaissance squads gave the same report. Only then did the commander believe that the situation was completely different from what they had assumed.
The gate had indeed been breached, but the anticipated large-scale invasion had never materialized.
The defenders could only hastily redeploy troops in the chaos, erecting makeshift defenses behind the damaged gate.
By now, a full day had passed.
But they had only just finished their fortifications when Caelan, with a casual wave of his hand, pushed the newly constructed defensive walls aside, crumpling them like sheets of paper.
The fully loaded trucks swaggered through the defensive line. The Planetary Defense Force showed no reaction from start to finish.
They saw only the defensive line suddenly torn apart, their eyes filled with terror at the unknown.
"Do not fear, plug the gap!"
The officer shouted hoarsely, though he himself could not understand the scene before him and kept his distance.
…
"Erwin, are we still going to wait?" The woman lowered her voice, her eyes uneasy.
Erwin was resolute: "We wait! Eileen, have patience."
Eileen hesitated, looking around to confirm no one was listening before speaking: "But you clearly said he isn't a noble, so why are we still working for him?"
Erwin said "We've never worked for the nobles either but we picked up that watch for them."
"We didn't pick it up for the nobles, we picked it up for the enforcers. The enforcers were the ones retrieving it for the nobles."
Eileen looked confused. "I don't understand."
"Whoever he is, he has power, and we must obey him!"
"We were the ones who brought him to the hive. We're in the same boat now. Do you think we can just jump ship and distance ourselves?"
"People like us don't even have the right to flip-flop. Since we've boarded, we have to see it through to the end!"
A flicker of fear passed through Eileen's eyes: "But what if we lose the gamble?"
"Then we die." Erwin's voice was eerily calm. "The nobles have never treated us as human. If we keep being junkers, we'll eventually rot to death in the radiation heaps."
"Think of our children, Eileen. Do you want Sonya to end up like Monica?"
Eileen looked back at her daughter sleeping in the vehicle, imagining her body covered in festering sores, and she shook her head frantically, her heart wrenched with pain.
But she still hesitated: "But if the nobles find out… we probably won't even be able to stay in the hive."
Erwin said, "We were never hive people, just junkers digging through garbage heaps. When have we ever been worthy of the nobles' attention?"
"I don't care who he is. Whoever gives us a bite to eat, we sell our wretched lives to!"
Eileen asked, "Will we win?"
"We will win." The voice seemed ethereal, yet also right beside them.
Erwin looked up sharply, Caelan had appeared before him silently, like a ghost.
Erwin hurriedly lowered his head. "Lord Octavian."
He did not know how much Caelan had overheard, and his heart was uneasy.
Caelan said, "Do me a favor, help me drive these trucks out into the wasteland."
Erwin was startled, and then he noticed that over a dozen loaded trucks had appeared out of nowhere in the camp.
Erwin asked, "All of these?"
Caelan nodded, "The last two are your payment. The rest are mine."
"What's inside them?" Eileen whispered to herself.
"You can open them and see."
Since Caelan had given the word, Erwin quickly called people over to open the rear doors of the two trucks.
Dim flashlight beams crisscrossed in the darkness. When the doors were pulled open, everyone froze in place.
"What's inside?" people farther away called anxiously.
Erwin's voice trembled: "Guns, lots of guns!"
"Mine is corpse-starch bars, a whole truckload!"
The crowd stirred. Erwin turned to Caelan in disbelief: "Th-these are really for us?"
Caelan said jokingly, "Only two trucks are yours. The rest are mine."
"That's enough, more than enough…"
Erwin's voice choked up; tears already filled his eyes.
Half their townsfolk had died, just to find a noble's watch.
The noble had given them only two corpse-starch bars, and Monica never even got to eat them.
Now, just for giving Caelan a ride, he had given them an entire truckload of corpse-starch bars and a truckload of weapons. Those corpse-starch bars alone were enough to buy their lives!
If before, some had hesitated to help Caelan out of fear of the nobles' power, now all that hesitation had turned into unshakable loyalty!
The people were simple.
If you said they had to work overtime, no leave without penalty, and no overtime pay, then let whoever wanted the job take it!
But if you said they had to work overtime, with a 50% pay raise, overtime calculated from 5 PM, free cold drinks daily, and childcare provided, then who wouldn't work? Of course they'd work!
As long as the pay was right, everything could be negotiated.
Some nobles were unwilling to pay fair wages yet complained about low efficiency, dressing it up as "wolf culture."
But they did not need wolves, they needed dogs.
Others fed their wolves meat; they fed their dogs shit.
Corpse-starch was provided to the hive commoners, they were not hive people, so they could not even get corpse-starch.
The nobles found corpse-starch unpalatable; the hive commoners found it bland. But to the scavengers and junkers of the outskirts, those corpse-starch bars were already a rare delicacy!
In the underworld, a human life was worth less than a dagger.
But in the outskirts, a human life was worth only two corpse-starch bars.
Their starting point was so low that their threshold for happiness was also low. The cost of buying their loyalty was pitifully cheap.
Give them one truckload of corpse-starch, and they would sell their lives to Caelan.
But if the nobles were willing to give them two truckloads, they would still waver.
If the nobles offered five truckloads, they would betray Caelan without a second thought.
After all, they had no faith.
Those without faith saw only petty gains.
Only those with faith looked forward to the dawn.
But how could a group of illiterate scavengers have faith?
Faith was not innate, it was cultivated over time.
Standpoint determined faith.
The nobles had faith, they believed their authority was supreme, and that squeezing the commoners was only natural.
The nobles' sworn warriors had faith, the nobles themselves were their faith.
The key was who did the cultivating.
Caelan asked, "Erwin, how many people are in your town?"
Erwin answered, "About two thousand."
"How many children?"
"Two hundred."
Erwin remembered every person in town, dead or alive, as long as he had seen them.
Caelan said, "You can send the children to me. I'll provide food and lodging, and give them the same educational opportunities as noble children. In the future, they will achieve far more than scrabbling through garbage heaps like you."
Erwin nodded, "I'll try to convince the others."
Erwin understood that Caelan's offer was both a favor and a leverage. With the children in his care, Caelan need not worry about the townsfolk betraying him.
But so what?
Even if it was leverage, it was still better than letting their children rot in the garbage like them, right?
At least Caelan made a promise. At least their children would live. At least Caelan gave them a whole truckload of corpse-starch bars, not just two.