Babalu carried a power hammer in one hand and a wrench in the other, truly embodying the spirit of a worker leader.
He was surrounded by more than a dozen strong human and Lumina men, all carrying sturdy, heavy... tools! They looked like a group of young workers in their prime, heading to work.
Their steps were firm and full of enthusiasm and vitality, as if they were striding towards a new world.
However, Buska, standing to the side, had a completely different view.
"In a moment, when you meet him, you must remain calm! Even though he directly entered A Factory, he is still a Central Special Envoy!"
Babalu said seriously, "You're overthinking it. I just want to show the Special Envoy the workers' spirit! Besides, everyone also wants to see the Central Special Envoy's spirit!"
"Then can you put that gun away?"
Babalu thought for a moment, then put the pistol back into his backpack, and instructed his fellow workers, "All those messy things in your hands, put them away! Hammers and wrenches are fine, but what's with the knives? Wait, that's clearly a carbon military saber, isn't it? Where did you get it from?"
"Big brother, who said this is a military saber! It's a machete, used for logging!"
"Yeah, boss, this thing is just a crowbar, it can't start fires or generate electricity!"
Everyone quickly approached their destination with a formidable aura, but upon seeing the factory buildings in the distance, they slowly fell silent.
For these teenagers who grew up in Red Maple Factory and Maple City, Red Maple Factory was their home.
This place, which they and their fathers called A Factory or Factory No. 1, was the giant that supported the small world of their hometown.
But this giant was about to die...
However, it didn't die, Big Brother Babalu said it didn't die, it was just sleeping. He also said he would definitely find a way to reawaken this giant.
At the factory gate, Babalu didn't say much to the few old men who were already there. He walked directly through the main gate and soon saw a young man in a white navy officer's uniform.
He was actually a Captain? Although Babalu hadn't read many books, he could recognize military ranks.
But this Captain was only half the age of the previous General Headquarters military representative, which slightly surprised Babalu.
This one must have connections.
"We've already sealed off this factory area, visitors are not allowed!" Just as Babalu was about to say this, he saw that the other party didn't seem to notice he had entered the room. Instead, he was hunched over the machine's control panel, tapping and knocking on it with his hand.
Babalu barely resisted pulling out his pistol and shooting the other party; if he hadn't been worried about truly breaking the machine, he very likely would have already fired.
"Officer, this is important equipment for Red Maple Factory, please don't mess with it!"
"I'm not messing around! I'm here to find a way to solve the problem with everyone." The Navy Captain turned his head, revealing a brilliant smile, his bright white teeth seemed to be glowing: "My name is Yu Lian, you must be Mr. Babalu. Let's unite and make this factory even greater!"
Babalu's eyes widened. He didn't feel any surge of passion, but only felt that the person opposite him must not be very bright.
"Red Maple Factory is a testament to the friendship between the Lumina and Earth people. Only when it becomes great again can the current situation end. Only when the machines here start running again can what you recall from your childhood reappear. And this is my main purpose for coming here."
Yu Lian looked directly into the other's eyes. For some reason, witnessing those heavy but seemingly endlessly fervent dark eyes, he didn't want to use any rhetorical tricks, or even psionics.
So, Yu Lian said in a sincere tone, "Red Maple Factory is the core of everything. I hope to keep the machines here running, to make electromagnetic light flicker in space, and to turn the Taeon Ore sleeping in the mountains into the driving force for us to change this planet, and even the entire Far Shore Star Region. At the same time, I also hope that the airport in the southern suburbs of the city will have an endless stream of cargo ships coming and going every day. I hope that this city becomes a center radiating across the entire planet. I also hope that the children of Red Maple Factory do not hold onto everything here merely out of sentiment. You are loyal and hardworking laborers! And laborers deserve to be rewarded!"
Babalu finally froze. Of course, he had imagined such a scene, dreaming about it every day. But even he, who was full of confidence in the future of Red Maple Factory, only dared to imagine it.
Someone even crazier than me actually came! However... that sounds really good!
"So, Mr. Babalu, will you join me?"
"What... what will you do?" the Lumina asked.
"First, let's get it moving!" Yu Lian slapped the control panel hard, making the metal lump tremble directly, and also making Babalu's little heart tremble.
"Hey, easy there!" Babalu quickly went up to dissuade him: "What if it's completely broken?"
"You don't even know what's broken, yet you're serving it so carefully. It's not like workers handling production machines; it's more like slaves serving their master! As laborers, you must have the resolve to break these old ways to have the courage to build a new world!"
Babalu felt that Yu Lian's words were quite pleasant to hear, but he really didn't understand what it had to do with the Present situation.
"Give me three months, and I'll give you a great Red Maple Factory!"
The young Lumina worker leader was a little tempted. Although the guy in front of him was a delicate and fair-skinned pretty boy, even more so than his good friend Buska, and his education had taught him that pretty boys were not to be trusted.
But what this guy said was really too good to hear, so why not give it a try. Anyway, the current situation couldn't get any worse.
To be honest, the current situation of Lumina Star and even the entire Far Shore Star Region, when viewed against the macro background of the future galaxy, really wasn't that big of a deal. But no matter what, in the future, this was also one of the epicenters that caused the Commonwealth to completely collapse, and Yu Lian knew some of the circumstances.
In addition, as we have mentioned before, Feifei's internship area last year was in the Far Shore Star Region. Although she mainly served at the fortress in I Earl Star Gorge, as a cultivated and responsible good girl, she still conscientiously investigated the largest source of deteriorating public order in the entire Far Shore Star Region—namely, the current situation of Lumina Star and the Lumina people.
Many people believe that the reason the Lumina people are unruly is that they believe they should be collaborators with the Earth people, should have the right to become an independent nation, and should not be a member of the Commonwealth, becoming lower-class citizens in a nation dominated by Earth people.
But Feifei proposed that the core of everything should be Maple City, the only modern (sci-fi) city on Lumina Planet, and the huge industrial enterprise next to Maple City, Red Maple Factory.
Yu Lian felt that Feifei's words made a lot of sense and indeed aligned with his understanding of politics. However, as an excellent disciple of Teacher Li, who was pragmatic and believed that there was no right to speak without investigation, he had still thoroughly investigated the situation here during this period.
Red Maple Factory is an enterprise that has been established for over sixty years. Its full name is Red Maple Mining and Smelting Group Company, and its history is even longer than that of the Commonwealth. It was founded by Mr. Coleman Tiak, one of Marshal Li's comrades during the Independent War era, a famous patriotic businessman, and later the first Minister of Industry and Deputy Prime Minister of the Commonwealth.
Because its establishment location was a place called "Red Maple Plain" by the local Lumina natives, which is a plain terrain surrounded by low mountains. The lush red-leaf trees are very similar in appearance and biological form to maple trees on Earth, but their colors are richer and more beautiful, looking like a large cloud of rosy mist covering the ground at first glance. It was simply a dreamlike beautiful scenery.
The factory was named after it.
Observers beyond the vast universe all knew that, generally speaking, the vegetation on mountains where large-scale metal mines were located would not be too lush, but it was later proven that this theorem only applied to Earth. The situation was different on different planets.
Dense Red Maple forests extended over the mountains, storing large amounts of Taeon Ore. This was a natural mineral discovered by the Commonwealth scientist Telno over six hundred years ago, containing a large amount of sub-metallic substances. By using special methods of smelting and purification, high-quality superconductor materials and alloy materials could be obtained.
Of course, the smelting methods for this special mineral were indeed quite sci-fi, but compared to the complex processing procedures of ordinary metal ores, it saved a lot of steps.
Furthermore, beneath the Red Maple forest spanning hundreds of kilometers, lay an almost inexhaustible supply of Taeon Ore. Beyond the mountains outside the Red Maple forest, there were even larger metal mineral deposits of iron, titanium, vanadium, and so on.
Anyone knew that this was a natural treasure trove for establishing heavy industry bases.
During the Empire’s rule, the Tangheisser Duke family, who governed this area, had limited strength and focused most of their resources on the development of Tanghauser Gate, which is now the New Seville planet. Thus, when Coleman Tiak appeared as a senior partner of the Toss Merchant Group, expressing his willingness to invest in developing Red Maple Plain, he naturally received the Tangheisser Duke family’s approval.
The Toss Merchant Group, rather than being an independent national entity, was more like a vast organization of itinerant merchants with no fixed territory. Or rather, its territory consisted of dozens of super-large space cities drifting throughout the galaxy. The personnel of such organizations naturally changed frequently, and it was quite understandable to have senior partners born on Earth.
Under Mr. Tiak’s decisive yet flexible operations, the small mines and metallurgical factories previously picked up by the Duke family were quickly integrated, and the Lumina natives, who had been used as slave laborers by the Duke family, were recruited as legal workers by the new enterprise.
“When it comes to business, I am the expert. Slave labor is inefficient! Extremely inefficient!” Mr. Tiak declared to the Duke’s retainers with overwhelming authority.
Perhaps the martial-minded Empire nobles were all masochists of this type, thinking that since Mr. Tiak was so authoritative, he must have a solid backing, and decided to wait and see.
Later, the newly established Red Maple Factory provided a very generous dividend to the Duke family in its first year, and they completely left it to him.
However, with the help of the Lumina tribes and Earth workers, Mr. Tiak secretly built an armor production line deep within the mountains. The alloys and superconducting materials produced by Red Maple Factory, besides supplying Empire freighters, were all transported to the armor factory nearby.
To avoid suspicion from the Empire, the factory’s original production plan also had to be completed. Both Earth and Lumina workers operated in three shifts, and the machines ran day and night without stopping.
Under these circumstances, Red Maple Factory officially had fewer than fifty thousand people, but at its peak, the true number of workers actually exceeded one hundred thousand.
Over several years, Mr. Tiak led over a hundred thousand workers and, right under the Empire’s nose, produced two hundred thousand powered exoskeletons, over three thousand tanks and combat vehicles of various types, and over a thousand low-altitude armored airships.
After the Independent War broke out, the workers transformed, driving these equipped vehicles, and cooperating with the local garrison fleet that simultaneously launched an uprising, thus completely burying the Tangheisser Duke family and simultaneously ending the Empire’s rule in Runa, and even the entire Far Shore Star Region.
...Alright! With such a tradition, it’s not surprising why the “unarmed” Maple City citizens could defeat the fully armed pirates, right?
That was Red Maple Factory’s most glorious moment, and also when the relationship between Earthlings and Luminans was at its best.
“Red Maple Factory belongs to the Commonwealth, belongs to the Commonwealth military, but also belongs to the Lumina people!” Prime Minister Tiak made this promise to the Lumina tribes who had helped him.
However, all of this changed after the earliest founding heroes exited the historical stage.
The year after Prime Minister Tiak passed away, the Commonwealth military planned to build a total of twelve large space station fortresses in I Earl Star Gorge and Luknar Corridor. This naturally required a large amount of superconducting materials and high-grade alloy materials.
Red Maple Factory, being close by and still considered military property at the time, was naturally the perfect supplier.
Due to the tight schedule and heavy workload, the newly appointed factory general manager demanded that Red Maple Factory triple its output.
Other things were fine; it was just a matter of increasing production and expanding scale. At worst, they could just discuss the land acquisition issue with the local Lumina tribes. Anyway, their relationship was still good then, so everything was negotiable.
However, when it came to Taeon alloy, that was another matter entirely.
The current production model was already at its limit. If they continued to expand, it could directly destroy the Red Maple forest on the surface! This was a place considered sacred by many Luminans.
Furthermore, geologists also believed that rashly expanding mining operations could cause irreversible damage to the ore veins.
The unruly Lumina workers began to resist the management’s decisions for the first time, even directly besieging the military representatives who came to supervise production, causing a huge uproar.
This matter ultimately did not result in an outcome satisfactory to both parties. The general manager who “forced” the Lumina workers to rebel was dismissed.
However, subsequent management teams also consistently failed to gain the workers’ trust. Distrust between the Central Government, the military, and Red Maple Factory thus intensified.
And the military representatives overseeing the construction of the fortress clusters had no time to wait for a satisfactory resolution to the incident. As a result, transportation costs increased, but since the Commonwealth Black Lock Design Bureau, which designed the fortresses, stated that if the Commonwealth military was willing to adopt their recommended supplier, they could offer a discount and provide comprehensive after-sales maintenance services.
Calculating this, the construction cost, though still significantly higher than originally planned.
By the time these fortress clusters, defending the two warp passages, were completed, it was already a year later. Due to prolonged confrontation with unreliable executives from various sectors, Red Maple Factory’s production work fell into a considerable degree of stagnation. Moreover, having lost the vast Empire market, the factory was already incurring some losses.
Many “traditional” Luminans who disliked Empire, and also disliked Earthlings, in fact disliked all humans and even rejected modern technology, also began to fan the flames.
“Earthlings have betrayed you! Humans are evil demons, enemies of the sky god! They are venomous insects that bewitch people’s hearts! Return to the embrace of the sky god! He is about to return!”
It’s sad to say that the above words, which sound embarrassingly cringeworthy, often manage to deceive quite a few people. Even developed countries, which are considered beacons of civilization, have people who fall for such tricks, not to mention the vast majority of Luminans who still live in tribal times.
Then, in a conflict, A Factory, which is where Yu Lian and Babalu are currently located, was affected.
The attackers were later identified as Lumina cult rebels who worshipped the sky god. In the counterattack by Maple City’s worker self-defense corps and the arriving garrison, they did not cause significant casualties.
However, Red Maple Factory’s most important asset, the automated production line introduced by Prime Minister Tiak from the Commonwealth, the only one in the entire factory capable of crude processing and purification of Taeon Ore, was indeed damaged and could never be restarted thereafter.
It was like a giant falling into slumber, waiting for someone to awaken it.
