Agri-World 496b, located near a hive city on the equator—on the plains, the Planetary Defence Force was fighting rebels.
Because an Ork invasion had begun on a neighboring forge world, the Departmento Munitorum demanded aid from Agri-World 496b, and the planetary governor ordered taxes increased.
The already unbearable levies made the farmers' lives intolerable—and now, with the tax hike, half the farmsteads rose up against the authorities.
The rebels seized many agri-complexes, turning machinery into weapons, and went on the offensive against the PDF.
After crushing several garrisons, they captured large weapon stockpiles, quickly grew stronger, and challenged the very hive city itself.
Hundreds of thousands of rebels attacked the fortifications on the plains before the city, but were beaten back by the PDF. The fighting on the cratered, trench-scarred plateau dragged on for many years, turning the war into a long, grinding standoff—one with room for people like scavengers.
Eighty kilometers north of the hive, ten rebels were resting in a trench. Suddenly a heavy shell fell on them and tore them to pieces.
One rebel-made automatic rifle tumbled end over end into the ploughed earth—and caught the attention of Li Qingyu, who had been crawling through the mud nearby for some time.
"It looks decent. From the looks of it, it fires second-category ammo... On the black market, a fixer should pay fifteen hundred fertilizer coupons for it."
Muttering this, he crawled toward the weapon.
Li Qingyu was originally from the 3k Era. He had been playing Escape from Tarkov at home when the AI roared, "Turbo Bitch! Two hundred meters! Homemade buckshot—headshot!", and the screen went dark.
Furious, he deleted the game and switched to Arena Breakout, but there ten "six-hundreds" with HK416s loaded with 995 ammo burned him down together.
After deleting that too, he tiredly launched Delta—at the exact moment the scandal over the "Sphere of Collective Imprisonment" and the evacuation limit exploded!
He was angrily scrolling his phone when he came across a feminized image of the Emperor with the caption: "Whoever sees this image voluntarily goes to Warhammer 40,000 to serve the Emperor." That was when "Lucky Li" ended up here—on an Imperial agri-world.
There was no need to explain how a person lives in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Luckily, the "Scout and Clear" System came here with him as well.
It digitized Li Qingyu's body, turning his characteristics into parameters, allowed him to gain experience, strengthen attributes, and granted him a personal Hideout—a safe space beneath the Underhive.
Most importantly—he can respawn infinitely.
No matter how he died, an instant later he would revive in the Hideout at full health, but without any gear.
With no fear of death, Li Qingyu began living by game principles: go onto the battlefield "with a knife," search for valuable trophies, return to the Underhive, sell the haul to gang fixers, and upgrade his Hideout.
Back to the present. With only a dagger, Li Qingyu finally crawled up to the homemade automatic weapon and hugged it to himself, inspecting it.
It was a heavy, rectangular rifle weighing about seven kilograms—a cobbled-together rebel piece with atrocious ergonomics and poor balance.
He checked the barrel. It had rifling—lucky! A piece like that sold for more.
He pulled the magazine—twenty rounds. Judging by the size, the rebels' homemade cartridges were 9×65 mm—an enormous caliber, not everyone could handle it.
But in Warhammer 40,000 there was no other way: the good old 5.56 and 7.62 were simply useless against the monsters here.
After making sure the weapon was intact, Li Qingyu activated the System interface to check the stats.
Name: Rebel homemade autogun
Estimated value: about 2000 fertilizer coupons
Weight: 7.2 kg
Vertical recoil: 54
Horizontal recoil: 42
Ergonomics: 41
Weapon stability: 42
Accuracy: 50
Hip-fire stability: 61
Effective range: 500 m
Muzzle velocity: 950
Fire mode: automatic
Rate of fire: 550
Cartridge caliber: 9×65 mm
Shot power: medium.
Li Qingyu was pleased. Two thousand fertilizer coupons. A lowborn farmer spent only one hundred and fifty a month. This gun was worth a year of quiet living!
He slung the weapon on his back, lay low for another ten minutes, made sure nobody was around, and carefully dropped into the trench—right where the shell had burst.
A dozen rebels had been turned into bloody mush. Chunks of flesh and fragments were everywhere.
Li Qingyu spat, suppressing the urge to vomit, and began searching the corpses. In the end he found: a twenty-round magazine, sixty 9×65 rounds, a dagger, an axe, a wrench, four packs of dry rations, and a full canteen carrier—worth a total of one hundred and twenty fertilizer coupons.
Dumping the loot into a synthetic-leather bag, Li Qingyu continued his search.
The trench lay right out in the field—it had once belonged to the PDF, but now it was held by the rebels. And who knew whether the defence forces would decide to take it back tomorrow—so he had come to take advantage of the lull between battles.
Moving farther along the trench, Li Qingyu realized it wasn't a front line at all, but a lone fighting position that held only about ten people. All dead, no danger—he could calmly "harvest."
After a quick search, there was nothing valuable. At most, he had about two thousand three hundred fertilizer coupons' worth of stuff in his pack, most of it his autogun.
"Tch. What garbage..."
Grumbling, he turned the finds over in his hands. Junk, food—nothing rare, nothing valuable. Time to leave.
But then footsteps sounded. The noises were getting closer—Li Qingyu tensed and snapped his weapon up.
From the direction of the hive! Carefully peeking out of the trench, he instantly pulled his head back down.
"Holy shit... It's a PDF patrol!"
Ten troopers—in PDF combat helmets and light armour, armed with standard autoguns; their sergeant—with a lasgun and grenades. The most basic Imperial contingent.
Li Qingyu bolted the other way. He wasn't a rebel, but nobody would bother listening—any suspicious person would be shot on the spot.
He dashed for the exit, planning to skirt the field and return to the Hideout by a roundabout route—but the moment he stuck his head out the other side of the trench, he ran into a half-hundred rebels advancing his way.
"That's it, we're done for! Caught in a pincer!"