Mountain of the Immortals

I had every intention of constructing this wonder of a project as soon as possible. But suddenly I was also extremely wary of anyone finding out about it. An item that could save you from certain death would fetch an incredibly high price if I was to sell it. The place where such an item was created, though, would surely only be bought with blood.

This absolutely had to be kept a secret. So secret, in fact, that I didn’t want any of my own believers to know about it.

I retreated into the first house we had built, which served as the permanent residence for Aphrodite, Artemis, and myself. After selecting the ambrosia tower to check its size and realizing it was no larger than thirty inches, I formulated a plan. The first step was to immediately upgrade my house so that none of the mortals would get close to it in the near future. I purchased the necessary materials and looked at the cost of upgrading it instantly.

* * *

Name: House #1

Level: 3

Occupants: 3/8

Level-Up Requirement: Settlement Level 4 (Met)

Level-Up Cost: 90x Lumber Units (900 MP)

15x Iron Units (150 MP)

9x Misc Building Units (90 MP)

Level-Up Time: 3840 minutes (2,304,000 MP)

Description: A spacious wooden house with three separate bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining area, and a living room. This building is able to comfortably house eight humanoids while it also has two bathrooms with magical toilets operating with small void portals.

* * *

It was an extremely steep price to pay but nobody would bat an eye since this was my own house. I bought the instant upgrade and watched as the lumber and iron units floated into place, creating a lavish house that finally started to look more like the palace I’d lived in on Mount Orthys.

Now that I had the privacy of my own place, I’d be able to hide the ambrosia cell tower here. I decided on one of the rooms in the middle of the house, surrounded by walls and without any windows, and started taking out the hardwood flooring.

Once the ground beneath it was bare, I charged my spear and used it as a kind of shovel, to breaking down the larger rocks and dig fast and deep into the ground. Having reached a sufficient depth, I selected the ambrosia cell tower and placed it in the hole. Another 2,400,000 MP instantly vanished from the guild core and the small tower made of hexagonal cells materialized exactly in the position I’d envisioned.

Falling back to just one Divinity Point sure made me feel uneasy, but all the bad feelings quickly subsided when I picked up and ate my very first portion of ambrosia, which was ready for the taking as soon as the project was finished. It was an explosion of sweetness and, had I not known its magical effect, I might have spat it out.

The texture was similar to that of honey but the taste reminded me over-sweetened cherries, sprinkled with vanilla. The power of it left me with a profound need to drink water. But none of that mattered really. Not when I knew I’d found yet another way to cheat death.

Consuming the ambrosia had definitely done something to my body, but I couldn’t be sure about the exact effects since I hadn’t received any notifications or buffs. Regardless, I left the room with the cell tower, locked the door, and decided it was high time I saw what else was available for building before the day ended and the goddesses returned with the mining expedition.

I stretched my back after stepping out of the front door, breathing in the fresh midday air of the highest peak in all of the Greek world. It was hard not to let the success I’d had in this place go to my head but knowing there was a lot more work to be done had definitely worked to keep me humble. I looked around at the constant movement of mortals working to grow our settlement and then accessed the new construction projects that had been made available.

* * *

Available Construction Projects:

Tent (31/80)

Storage Shack (1/4)

Farm (8/16)

Lumberyard (1/1)

Mining Camp (1/1)

Blacksmith’s Workshop (1/1)

Melee Fighting Barracks (1/1)

Ranged Fighting Barracks (1/1)

Walls (0/1)

Mana Generator (1/2)

Magic Thunder Coil Defenses (0/2)

Warmage Academy (0/1)

Academics and Research Institution (0/1)

* * *

The amount of houses, or rather tents that could be upgraded to houses, doubled again and this time so did the number of storage shacks—not that we had even filled the one we had yet. On the other hand, I could completely understand why a settlement would need so many storage locations.

Leveling up the guild core, building new structures, and then leveling them up too required an immense amount of resources and not all clans had this much stored mana available to them. As a matter of fact, most new clan halls were created on the ashes of another, which meant that the guild core was completely dried up.

Finding a place of power that had been sitting unused for thousands of years was unheard of, and it had taken three gods to make it up here. Which was exactly why we couldn’t afford to wait for our believers to gather all the necessary resources and instead bought them with mana.

That didn’t mean I was planning to do this forever though. That was why I had all four farms fully upgraded and why I was planning on doing the same with the four more that were just made available to us.

The additional mana generator would probably be the first thing to build, as well as upgrading the existing one, since I wanted to make sure all this mana I was throwing at upgrading things would eventually come back to me. But I was in absolutely no hurry.

The magic thunder coil defenses sounds like something out of an old sorcerer’s book of enchanted inventions. I had no doubt it would be some kind of large defensive building that would strike enemies once they got within proximity. As useful as that might be, we were in no immediate danger up here and so I pushed it to the bottom of my to-build list.

The warmage academy looked like it would be to spellcasters what the barracks were to our fighters. A place to practice spells, increase proficiency in casting them, and make them as efficient as possible. Once we had all three of these buildings and fell into the routine of everyday life, perhaps the goddesses and I could even teach there for an extra bonus to the boosts the buildings provided.

Aphrodite would make for an excellent instructor at the warmage academy, and Artemis in the ranged combat barracks, while I could easily teach close-combat tactics in the melee combat barracks. Especially if that meant an even greater bonus before a big battle.

Lastly, the academics and research institution was something that I had only ever heard of in passing. The titans claimed they had all the knowledge they needed and so had never bothered constructing and leveling up a building like this. Which meant that I had never seen it on Mount Orthys, nor when visiting the guildhalls of my father’s siblings.

I wouldn’t make the same mistake though. I knew full well that knowledge was power and I needed every little edge I could get if I ever wanted to defeat my father. The research institution would be high on my list of new things to build.

I summoned the workers that were currently working on building new houses, as well as those working on the farms and lumberyard, and ordered them to stop what they were doing for now. We needed to keep up with the new buildings that had been made available to us.

I sent the first group to build the second mana generator, ordering them to copy exactly how the first one had been built but to place it on the exact opposite side of the valley. This way, it wouldn’t be as easy for a saboteur or other enemy to nullify both of them in one go.

The second team of mortal workers was sent to upgrade the first one, though I hadn’t yet ordered the necessary materials for the job. I looked at the menu of projects available for building and selected it to absorb the information.

* * *

Name: Mana Generator #1

Level: 3

Level-Up Requirement: Settlement Level 4 (Met)

Level-Up Cost: 400x Iron Units (4000 MP)

Level-Up Time: 2000 minutes (1,200,000 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.

* * *

Thankfully leveling up the generator didn’t require any additional MP and since I wasn’t going to use the instant leveling option, I only needed to provide the materials. Four hundred units of iron was almost all of the stash we’d collected over the past few days but it didn’t matter too much. The important thing was that, for the first time, I was able to use our own materials to upgrade something instead of buying them with mana.

I sent the squad of builders to the site of the first generator and ordered them to pay extra attention to this upgrade, even if it meant they would be working on it for longer than thirty-four hours. The men and women, happy to receive a task directly from me, nodded in agreement and went on their way.