Chapter Twelve: A Feast for the Palate, Perfect with Rice

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12. This Chapter Is Best Served with a Meal

After capturing Dubrak-Kunto and his band of smugglers, everything settled back into peace over the following week, and the colony continued to develop steadily.

The number of mining stations built around the gas giant had risen to four, providing the mothership with ample helium-3 fuel for its fusion reactors. However, the mothership carried only four modular mining stations. Any additional stations would have to be constructed from scratch.

Of the nine moons orbiting this gas giant, which was also called Endor, three were rich in various metal ores. The Engineering Department was currently working around the clock to build an interstellar mining site on one of the smaller moons, supplying raw materials for construction projects in space.

The surface colony was developing just as rapidly. On Dawnstar, the colonists had already completed one thousand modular two-story residential buildings. The population had grown to more than seventeen hundred, while the colony as a whole could now accommodate ten thousand residents.

Daphne Clement of the Administration Department was constantly selecting suitable residents, awakening them, and sending them down to Dawnstar to join the construction effort.

At present, the colony faced two major problems. The first was the pressure on available jobs caused by the rapidly growing population. The second was a shortage of transports traveling between the mothership and Dawnstar. The mothership had only five small transport ships, each capable of carrying just one hundred passengers or fifty tons of cargo at a time—nowhere near enough to meet demand.

Moreover, these transports were about thirty meters long, placing them in the light-frigate class. They could not be built on the mothership’s internal production lines. To construct more of them, they first had to build a small starship dock. Work on it had already begun, but even with the modular materials carried by the mothership, a structure of that scale would require another week to complete.

To make matters worse, one of the transports had broken down…

All these problems left Tang Xiao in a constant state of panic. When the colony had first begun construction, there had not been many difficulties. But as its scale grew, so did the number of problems. For the past several days, he had not had a moment to spare for matters such as the plot of Star Wars. He was constantly shuttling back and forth between Dawnstar and the mothership, making one decision after another.

Still, there was an obvious benefit to all this. His mind had originally been filled with an enormous amount of knowledge, and after putting it to use for so long, he had managed to unlock a considerable portion of it. Many tasks had become second nature.

If someone had told him a little over a week earlier—before he crossed into this world, when he was merely an ordinary college graduate—that he would one day be managing a growing interstellar colony, Tang Xiao would have assumed they were describing the plot of a science-fiction novel.

In any case, under Tang Xiao’s leadership, the colony continued to develop in an orderly fashion. They established hunting parties, allowing the marines to gain practical combat experience while supplementing the colony’s meat supply…

They searched Dawnstar for mineral deposits and mined limestone, coal, and metal ores…

They opened farms and orchards to cultivate native plants, while also constructing sealed hydroponic farms to grow rice, wheat, corn, and other crops brought from the mothership.

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They built steel mills, cement plants, sewage-treatment facilities, power stations, waterworks, and all manner of other factories.

They also built roads and airfields, and laid pipelines and electrical cables.

Then there was the most difficult task of all—waste disposal. On this pristine planet, determining how to discharge and manage industrial waste, wastewater, and domestic sewage was an extraordinarily difficult problem.

The greatest obstacle was that ninety-five percent of Dawnstar’s surface was solid ground. As a result, most of its water was underground, which made waste disposal even more challenging.

There were no rivers into which they could dump sewage, nor any oceans to process it. If they released it into the underground water system, then within a year, every living creature on the planet would probably be drinking toilet water.

So, during one inspection tour of the colony, Tang Xiao happened to see residents digging drainage channels and latrines. A sudden flash of inspiration struck him. Once he returned to the mothership, he began earnestly discussing an extremely serious matter with Daphne Clement.

He intended to build a gigantic shit collector on the mountain beside the colony, gather all the sewage and excrement in one place, and then construct a dam to generate electricity from it.

His idea was not entirely without basis. He had done something similar in a certain game before. Since they had already managed to bring spaceships from a game into the real world, he reasoned, surely a shit collector that worked in a game should be possible as well.

Clement, however, was horrified. She desperately suppressed the urge to have Tang Xiao taken away for a brain examination and explained to her administrator with utmost seriousness that this was impossible in reality. The pressure produced by sewage would not be sufficient to turn the dam’s turbines, and the excessive impurities would easily clog the system.

After all, you never knew whether someone might be constipated, right?

They would also have to account for the seasons. What if the sewage froze inside the collector during winter? Wouldn’t they need a heating system? All of that would cost money!

To strengthen her argument, Clement dragged over Guan Yan, an energy-science expert who had been in the middle of eating. Guan Yan was entirely innocent. Although she immediately vomited up the lunch she had just swallowed upon hearing the subject under discussion, she still did her best to help Clement persuade Tang Xiao.

When it became clear that generating electricity from sewage was not feasible, Tang Xiao asked how many water-treatment plants they would need to filter it into drinking water through repeated purification.

Clement and the others were stunned by the depths of Tang Xiao’s imagination. They summoned Qu Xuewen and Feng Yongwang, then joined forces with several experts to earnestly dissuade him. Only then did Tang Xiao abandon his plans for sewage-powered electricity and waste recycling, narrowly avoiding taking another step down the road toward being shot.

They still had to reach a conclusion on this rather pungent subject, so they continued discussing it for most of the day. In the end, they decided that the giant shit collector would indeed be built—but not on the mountain. If it ever burst, the results would be amusing in the worst possible way: a flood of sewage pouring straight into the city.

Its purpose would not be to generate electricity. Instead, it would make it easier, once they had large interstellar transport ships, to send all that waste into outer space—for example, into one of the two stars at the center of the Endor system.

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Then Tang Xiao, whose imagination had clearly gone completely off the rails, raised another issue. Once this plan was put into practice, wouldn’t the Endor system, where Dawnstar was located, effectively become a star system orbiting two stars that smelled like excrement?

Of course, that was a matter for the future. In the end, they decided to establish a Department of Public Health to deal with the whole affair. When Tang Xiao made this decision, he had no idea that he had just founded the most terrifying department in the history of the galaxy.

Fortunately, Tang Xiao soon moved on from this pungent subject. At that moment, he was contentedly stirring a bowl of semi-liquid chocolate with a spoon, eating a spoonful now and then while discussing a very important matter with an elite sociologist who had just been awakened.

There were hardly any snacks aboard the mothership, so Tang Xiao had no choice but to satisfy his cravings with this semi-finished product.

“Administrator, the matter we need to consider now is the colony’s cohesion. At present, our population is still small, and everyone is gathered around you. That is a good thing. But if we continue to develop, it will be far from sufficient. Please take a look at my proposal…” The sociologist, Norris Barry, spoke to Tang Xiao in a grave and earnest tone.

At that moment, Guan Yan happened to pass by carrying a boxed meal. Seeing Tang Xiao there, she casually said, “Ah, there you are, Administrator. Oh, and one more thing—the analysis of the infrared laser weapon is proceeding very smoothly. We should be able to finish ahead of schedule. We’ll be conducting the first weapons test this afternoon. Would you like to attend?”

“Sure. I’ll be there this afternoon,” Tang Xiao replied.

They had completed the preliminary analysis of the infrared laser weapon in just over a week. He felt that he ought to praise her, but the words suddenly failed him. So he lifted the bowl of semi-liquid chocolate toward Guan Yan and asked, “Want some?”

Seeing the sticky brown substance, which Tang Xiao had stirred into a spiral, Guan Yan’s expression darkened. She quickly refused.

“Er, no. I’m not really hungry…”

“Ah, what a pity. This is pretty good.” Tang Xiao shook his head regretfully, stirred the bowl a few more times, then scooped out a large, sticky spoonful and stuffed it into his mouth, smacking his lips as he ate.

Guan Yan’s face turned from black to green. She abandoned her boxed meal, covered her mouth, and ran away.

Bonus Chapter Illustrations 1 and 2: Various Shit Collectors.