NOVEL NEXT Chapter 41
The problem was that I didn’t have enough Divinity Points at the moment so it would have to wait either way. But I didn’t think it was imperative to build it immediately since Cronus wasn’t going to be able to divine my position up here.
He would, of course, eventually hear about a new thunder god having occupied a place of power in Greece and would likely put two and two together. But that would only happen after we’d leveled up the settlement enough to be able to withstand an attack. Or at least that was the plan.
* * *
Tent (20/40)
Storage Shack (1/2)
Farm (4/8)
Lumberyard (1/1)
Mining Camp (1/1)
Blacksmith’s Workshop (1/1)
Melee Fighting Barracks (0/1)
Ranged Fighting Barracks (0/1)
Walls (0/1)
Mana Generator (0/1)
* * *
At fucking last. Things were starting to become interesting now. The mana generator was the first thing I needed to build in order to increase the guild core’s mana regeneration rate. The MP pool available right now was immense but it was not inexhaustible, and I needed to think of the future.
I selected the construction option without a second thought and gasped at the initial cost.
* * *
Name: Mana Generator
Resources Needed: 40x Iron Units (400 MP)
2x Lumber Units (20 MP)
Mana Spark (10,000,000 MP)
Construction Time: 500 minutes (300,000 MP)
Description: Mana Generators are large devices that, once ignited, can concentrate mana particles around places of power and push them into their core. Generators are the only way to increase the passive MP Regeneration Rate of places of power besides leveling up their cores. Increases MP Regeneration Rate by 100 MP/minute.
* * *
I had an inkling about how these large devices worked and that they needed an initial jolt of energy but I had no idea that it would cost this much. Yet I couldn’t ignore the long-term benefits this building would offer us.
A one hundred MP per second increase in the core’s regeneration rate would mean that the generator would pay for itself in one hundred thousand minutes, considering that the initial spark cost ten million MP. That would only be around seventy days and, in the grand scheme of things, I was keen to start making my return on investment sooner rather than later.
I materialized the iron and lumber units it required and hired a mana worker to get on with building it immediately. Despite knowing this was the smart thing to do, I couldn’t help but feel a bit uneasy when I saw the guildhall’s MP pool drop by a whopping ten million.
I placed the mana generator near the south end of the valley and watched the mana worker get started. It began by building the wooden frame that would support the metallic pyramid body of the building and which would eventually hold an iron sphere at its top.
Having taken care of that, I considered my options. I could just continue building and leveling up everything I had but now that I had a generator ready, it did not seem like the rest of it was as important. Sure, having forty houses instead of twenty would be great but I did not really need them, or rather I didn’t know yet whether I would need them.
Building new homes would need to be considered again once I had seen how many people Artemis brought back with her. What I would love to have at some point would be solid walls around the whole settlement. But even this wasn’t a priority at the moment, so perhaps I could wait for my believers to gather some resources before initiating its build.
More farms would need to be built at some point if we wanted to increase food ration production but I didn’t even know if we’d have enough people to run four of them yet, much less eight if I decided to build the ones that had just been unlocked.
There was absolutely no reason to build another storage unit yet either when the one we already had was completely empty, and so this project took a low priority score on my list as well. Lastly, both of the barrack options sounded useful to prepare for what would eventually come but they weren’t necessary right now either, unless they were prerequisites for leveling up the whole guildhall.
Before I checked what I needed to raise the guild core’s level to four, I decided to put some workers on upgrading the Lumberyard and the Mining Camp. I focused on each of them at a time and purchased the necessary resources.
* * *
Name: Mining Camp
Level: 2
Output: 100 Units/hour
Job Slots: 8
Level-Up Requirement: Settlement Level 3 (Met)
Level-Up Cost: 200x Lumber Units (2000 MP)
100x Iron Units (1000 MP)
Level-Up Time: 240 minutes (144,000 MP)
Description: The mining camp is the beginning and the end of every miner’s working day. This is where ores will be crushed, ground, roasted, smelted, refined, and cast. Owning a mining camp significantly increases the metal and ore unit production rate.
* * *
The lumber required to upgrade it—which was enough to partially hide the building—appeared in front of it, right next to the pile of iron units that looked like they partially pressed into the soft ground. The mana worker though picked up the pieces and moved them around without any issues, triggering the countdown timer.
Next up was the lumberyard, so I focused on it and saw its unique window appear in front of my eyes.
* * *
Name: Lumberyard
Level: 2
Throughput: 100 Units/hour
Job Slots: 8
Level-Up Requirement: Settlement Level 3 (Met)
Level-Up Cost: 200x Lumber Units (2000 MP)
Level-Up Time: 240 minutes (144,000 MP)
Description: A lumberyard is the focal point of a community’s woodworking business, be it imports, exports, treatment, or processing. Owning a lumberyard significantly increases the lumber unit production rate.
* * *
An equal amount of lumber appeared next to the existing lumberyard and I sent a mana worker to start it immediately. Lumber seemed to be used everywhere and once I had people actively gathering lumber and iron in my mining camp and lumberyard, I’d probably have enough to carry the settlement for a few more levels.
Having set the building process in motion for all the things that I needed to be created fast, I thought I should look into what was required to level up the settlement. It was at that moment that I heard voices coming from the direction of the portal.
Artemis had likely returned with the people that decided to join us but I wanted to get the leveling-up process up and running as soon as I could, so without paying her much attention just yet, I swiftly pulled up the clan hall management options and instantly absorbed the information provided.
* * *
Place of Power: Primary Guildhall - Divine Realm
Name: Mount Olympus
Level: 3
State: Idle
MP: 327,499,932,391
MP Generation: 100 MP/minute
Timber: 0
Iron: 0
Food Rations: 0
Building : Mining Camp (0.01% completed)
Lumberyard (0.01% completed)
Level-Up Requirement: 20x Level 3 Houses (0)
4x Level 3 Farms (0)
20 Citizens (0)
10000 Food Rations (0)
10000 Lumber Units (0)
10000 Iron Units (0)
Level-Up Cost: 100000 MP
Level-Up Time: 64 hours
* * *
By now, I was starting to see a pattern in what was needed to level up the guildhall. I needed to have more houses that were of the maximum level each time, an increasing number of farms on the same level, increments to the power of a hundred on the three basic resource units, and something new every time.
The first time I’d leveled it up, the new thing was farms. This time it was a number of citizens, which meant that Artemis couldn’t have returned at a better time. I would need them to fully utilize the farms, lumberyard, and mining camp, build more farms, and level up the existing farms and twenty houses to level three.
First though, I needed to get them settled into houses of their own so they would register as citizens and count toward the twenty I would need to start the level up process. I could only hope that Artemis had brought more than that.