Mountain of the Immortals

As I walked toward the portal, I saw that Artemis had brought quite a few more than twenty mortals. The men and women just kept coming. I was starting to wonder whether Artemis had misunderstood something because the flow of people through the portal had no end. And to my surprise, all of them were men and women in their prime years. No elderly or children.

Once the men and women had taken in their surroundings and glanced over at me, they immediately fell on their knees, keeping their eyes on the ground as if they expected me to strike them dead if our eyes met.

“Stand up proud, people of Dion,” I said, as Artemis herself stepped through the portal and signaled with her hands that this was the last of them. “You are, and always will be, welcome in my home.”

At once, they all stood up and I noticed that every one of them, from the tallest and most muscular to the smallest and leanest of them, was puffing out their chests with pride at my words. These were the first people to cross through the magical portal that led to the top of the mountain they’d grown up admiring and hearing stories about.

“You are the first ones to reach the peak of Mount Olympus,” I said, further bolstering their sense of achievement. “You are the chosen ones, personally selected by the goddess of the hunt.”

I pointed at Artemis and the mortals threw down the sacks they were carrying and started cheering for the goddess that had recruited them.

“You will be the select few that help build the greatest settlement the Greek world has even seen,” I continued. “The Mount Olympus guildhall, house of clan Zeus.”

The crowd cheered even louder now, and whether because she was curious about the increase in noise or the fact that she wanted to make an entrance, Aphrodite appeared out of the house we’d spent the night in and walked toward me in all her beautiful glory. Looking at how casually she approached me, I had no doubt this was her making an entrance.

“Live here, grow with the settlement, and you just might be able to lay eyes on the most beautiful woman ever to walk the Apocosmos,” I announced, and pointed at her, “the goddess of beauty, love, and sex, Aphrodite.”

The cheers were much fewer now and came almost exclusively from the women, which was exactly what I was expecting to hear. No man dared celebrate Aphrodite’s beauty so openly, at least not in my presence. That brought a smile to my face but I quickly sent the thought away and looked to Artemis.

“How many people have joined our ranks?” I asked.

“One hundred and seven,” she said. “All of them skilled workers or willing to learn.”

She had really outdone herself. This number was not yet at the maximum we could accommodate in the all the houses, especially considering the new limits and all the upgrades we could do, but was probably enough to get the place running at full speed.

“What are their qualifications?” I asked her.

“Everything we might need to grow this place,” she replied, and started pointing at the people. “We have hunters, gatherers, and farmers. Then we have builders there, lumberjacks, and miners. There are also quite a few fighters among them.”

“This is great,” I replied, already thinking about how I could best utilize them. “Alright,” I said a bit louder, to the crowds. “Everyone go find a place of your own. The houses can fit between four and six people in them right now and we will be upgrading them. You can take whichever house you want for now, but keep in mind that at some point we might have too many people and someone may need to move in with you. So you might as well live together from the start.”

A collective cheer rushed through the people that had just arrived. Apparently being gifted a house by your patron deity was considered a great honor, so I let them enjoy it as they picked up their sacks and ran to get the best place possible.

“You did a great job,” I said to Artemis once the crowds had dispersed.

“There were a lot more people on the verge of coming but weren’t quite brave enough yet,” she admitted. “Many of them wanted to see how it would work for these folk first.”

“I’m sure once they find out that there’s plenty of work, food, and free houses, they will come around.”

“Don’t forget the protection of their gods, who live next door to them,” Aphrodite noted. “It’s one thing for gods to walk among mortals and another for mortals to live with the gods, even if they are serving them.”

“They’re not serving me,” I protested. “They’re serving this place and themselves. They’re becoming part of something bigger.”

“I don’t mind what we call it,” she replied, “as long as this place keeps growing and so does our follower base.”

“I think that will happen organically,” Artemis said. “Once people start visiting Dion again, word will spread and eventually reach outside the city, travelling around with the merchants.”

“Or we can let the merchants in here,” Aphrodite mused. “If they swear fealty to Zeus, of course.”

“We can worry about that in the coming days,” I said. “Right now, we have to find work for all of them.”

“Do you want me to round them up and bring them back?” Artemis asked.

“No need,” I replied. “Perhaps just make sure everyone’s behaving and there’s no trouble between them. And let them know that once they’re done with the houses, they can come here for instructions on what they need to do.”

“As you wish,” the huntress said, and left to get on with it.

“I’d better start preparing the buildings for our mortal working hands,” I said, and started to open the construction projects menu when Aphrodite touched my arm.

“Zeus, before you do that,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“What is it?” I asked.

She seemed to be having trouble finding the right words. “Before, when you announced me as the goddess of sex,” she finally said, her voice almost too quiet to hear, “you do not need to do that.”

“You mean because only a few women celebrated it?” I asked. “I think that was because they probably know about us, and the men didn’t want to—”

“What I mean is,” she interrupted, speaking faster now, “I don’t care about men, or women for that matter, celebrating me as the goddess of sex. I still plan on being the one true goddess of beauty and love, with all the sex that might come with that. But what the two of us are doing... It doesn’t feel like...”

“You mean you don’t see what we have as casual like that.”

“It’s not. And I don’t care how you see what we’re doing, but I want you to know that this is how I look at it,” she said, and nodded as if she was confirming her choices to herself. “I will celebrate love and sex with you.”

“Just with me?” I asked, smiling.

“Just with you,” she purred.

I took her by the waist and planted a deep kiss on her mouth, before we parted with a sigh.

“I’d better let you get back to work,” she said.

“Do you want to help organize the mortals?” I asked, but she was already walking away.

“Not really,” she shouted back at me. “I have absolute faith in your abilities.”

How incredibly nice of her, believing in me and letting me do all the work. On the other hand, she’d never signed up for any manual labor and I wouldn’t expect the goddess of beauty to get down and dirty with construction tasks.

I pulled on my mental reins and tried to get my head back in the game. I needed to set up the buildings for the mortals to start work on. And I needed to begin with the ones that would level up our settlement first.

Since Aphrodite was taking a walk around the valley now, I focused on the house we were living in and pulled up its status window. It would make for the best project to start with.

* * *

Name: House #1

Level: 2

Occupants: 3/6

Level-Up Requirement: Settlement Level 3

Level-Up Cost: 30x Lumber Units (300 MP)

5x Iron Units (50 MP)

3x Misc Building Units (30 MP)

Level-Up Time: 480 minutes (288,000 MP)

Description: A very simple wooden house. What this house lacks in luxury it more than makes up for in terms of coziness. This building is able to comfortably house six humanoids, and it also has a small fireplace for the purpose of cooking and heating, as well as a small privy chamber.

* * *

But looking at the materials needed for the upgrade, I realized that there was no way one mortal would be able to do the equivalent of one mana worker in the same time. Having seen them work before, I guessed it would take five mortals to do the work of one mana worker, which would mean we wouldn’t be able to upgrade all houses at once.

I decided to start with ten of them over the first eight hours and then do the other ten afterward to reach the twenty required to level up the guildhall. Thus, I purchased six hundred lumber units, a hundred iron units, and sixty miscellaneous building units, which seemed to be made up of tools and expendables used while building or upgrading.

I placed all of the resources next to the houses I wanted upgraded and then looked at the next item in the list of requirements for getting the clan hall to level four. And so I turned to the four farms that I had already constructed.

* * *

Name: Farm #1

Level: 2

Livestock: -

Crops: -

Job Slots: 4

Level-Up Requirement: Settlement Level 3 (Met)

Level-Up Cost: 30x Lumber Units (300 MP)

Level-Up Time: 240 hours (144,000 MP)

Description: A farm that allows for a variety of small and medium sized animals as well as a small selection of crops. Owning a farm increases the food ration production rate.

* * *

Since the farms started at level two, it would be pretty easy to reach this requirement. I wondered whether I should start building more of the farms even if I didn’t need them for leveling up, but I still had no idea what the food ration consumption would look like for the number of people that I had at the moment, nor whether they would be bringing any livestock or seeds of their own. The priority would have to be the lumber and iron ore gathering for now, since those were needed everywhere.

My original plan of upgrading everything to its fullest as soon as possible was quickly falling apart as I gradually became more frugal with the mana I was spending. Surely hundreds of billions of MP would last me for a good while but if a house required almost three hundred thousand to be instantly upgraded to level three, I didn’t dare think how much level ten houses might cost. I still wanted to grow the settlement as fast as possible, but a few extra hours spent building wouldn’t make much difference.

Or would it? Did I really want to wait sixteen hours for all the houses to be built and only then start the sixty-four-hour construction duration of the clan hall upgrade?

No. I wanted to do it faster.