Mountain of the Immortals

A wave of excitement rushed over me. Every time we leveled up, I got butterflies in my stomach just thinking about all the amazing ways I would be able to make our guild stronger. Curious and excited to see what buildings had been unlocked for us this time, I pulled up the list again.

* * *

Available Construction Projects:

Tent (80/160)

Storage Shack (2/6)

Farm (16/32)

Lumberyard (1/1)

Mining Camp (1/1)

Blacksmith's Workshop (1/1)

Melee Fighting Barracks (1/1)

Ranged Fighting Barracks (1/1)

Walls (1/1)

Mana Generator (2/4)

Magic Thunder Coil Defenses (2/4)

Warmage Academy (1/1)

Academics and Research Institution (1/1)

Intelligence Agency (0/1)

Sky Harbor (0/1)

* * *

The sheer amount of new houses we would be able to build made me drool as I thought about the potential. We could double the number of people in our city simply by constructing all of the houses up to the level of the ones we had already. And then we could upgrade them all to level five on top of that.

Then there was the possibility of raising another two storage buildings, which I guessed would eventually be something we would need but also something I would revisit whenever that need became relevant. There was no reason to waste building resources on storage at the moment.

The doubling of farm lots available was also a big boon, and one that would need to be taken advantage of as soon as possible. The sixteen farms we had so far had a wide variety of animals that could provide us with fresh produce as well as fields covering the vegetable needs of all our citizens, with some left over for a rainy day in our storage units.

However, we already had thousands of people on the waiting list, extremely eager to move into our city and with the number of new houses available, our need for more food rations would increase massively. This meant that the farms would need to be built and upgraded before the houses, just so our people wouldn't starve or be forced to find food outside the city.

My excitement reached new heights when I saw that we could now built two additional mana generators as well.

* * *

Name: Mana Generator #1

Level: 4

Output: 11,000 MP/minute

Level-Up Requirement: Settlement Level 5 (Met)

Level-Up Cost: 800x Iron Units (8,000 MP)

Level-Up Time: 4,000 minutes (2,400,000 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 11,000 MP/minute.

* * *

If there was one thing I was absolutely sure of, it was that the billions of MP we currently had in our guild core's pool would not last us forever. Purchasing the gold units needed to upgrade the dragon ghost protector project had already required an enormous chunk. And it was only uphill from here.

I wasn't going to purchase them with mana, of course, but rather with money or trade, but that one example showed how quickly things could scale up to almost unmanageable levels. I had to make sure our city would be equipped properly for the long run, and getting all available mana generators built and upgraded to their maximum levels had to be the first order of business.

When I'd initially built the first mana generator, it was level three and outputting 10,000 MP per minute. Once I upgraded it to level four, its output increased by a thousand. By this logic, if I upgraded it to level five, its output would increase by an additional 1,000 MP. Leveling it up manually would take four thousand minutes, which meant I would potentially be losing out on four million MP by not building it instantly.

With this in mind, and because its instant-building cost was less than two and a half million, I opted to build it immediately. By the time the four thousand minutes had passed--the time that it would have taken to manually upgrade it--I would already have made more than one and a half million MP from nothing.

I insta-built the two new mana generators and then upgraded all four we now had to level five. The upgraded versions of the buildings were much better than I hoped.

* * *

Name: Mana Generator #4

Level: 5

Output: 13,000 MP/minute

Level-Up Requirement: Settlement Level 6

Level-Up Cost: 1,800x Iron Units (16,000 MP)

Level-Up Time: 6,000 minutes (3,600,000 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 13,000 MP/minute.

* * *

The increase at this level was two thousand MP instead of just one, which made this move even more worth it. With these four generators pumping mana into our guild core, we would be gaining almost 75 million MP every day.

I really liked those numbers, but I also knew that the costs would soon start scaling as well. If I hadn't unlocked a building that would require MP to be continuously pumped into it during this upgrade, it would definitely be coming on the next one.

The next opening I saw in the list of available projects was for two additional thunder coil defenses.

* * *

Name: Magic Thunder Coil Defenses #1

Level: 4

Level-Up Requirement: Settlement Level 5 (Met)

Level-Up Cost: 20x Lumber Units (200MP)

30,000x Copper Units (300,000MP)

30,000x Iron Units (300,000MP)

Level-Up Time: 3,840 minutes (2,304,000MP)

Description: A gigantic metal coil-like structure that has the unique ability to condense the mana in the atmosphere and release it in burst of energy against enemies. The coils built in the guildhall of Mount Olympus use the element of their patron deity, the thunderbolt.

* * *

More defensive measures were always a welcome addition to our city's selection of buildings but I just couldn't justify constructing them at the moment. Not when I was trying to move away from building projects by using mana only. As much as I would have liked to upgrade them and have four instead of our current two, they would have to wait until after I'd finished taking care of our growing population.

Looking at the name of the first new building on the list, I immediately thought of something along the lines of a place where gifted individuals would go in order to cultivate their intellects. As I focused on the words "Intelligence Agency," however, I saw that the reality was completely different.

* * *

Name: Intelligence Agency

Resources Needed: 1,800x Lumber Units (18,000 MP)

Construction Time: 960 minutes (576,000 MP)

Description: Intelligence operatives serve their city in the darkest shadows and deepest crevices of the Apocosmos. When there is information that might be of benefit to their homeland, these agents would sacrifice even their own lives in order to acquire it. Having an Intelligence Agency means that a city is interested in becoming a major player in the web that is the Apocosmos. Pieces of information may start flowing toward the masters of the agency almost immediately after its construction, and targeted espionage becomes available during wartime or for financial gain.

* * *

I couldn't have been happier to be wrong. I wasn't exactly sure how much of the operation of this place was going to be based on magic and how much on people acting as someone they weren't in covert operations, but I already had a couple of ideas about how to utilize it.

First, of course, was to have someone infiltrate my father's guildhall and start feeding me information from inside it. Knowing what he was planning to do and whether he would try to attack me again, even though I beat his gigantic pet monster last time, would be hugely beneficial.

That aside, it would be useful to have people going out into the worlds neighboring our own to talk to the people there. Knowing what other clans thought of us, especially those who approached us to do business, might prove to be a big advantage for Aphrodite's negotiation tactics and our whole guild by extension.

Having given this project an average to high priority on my list of things to do, I focused on the second of the newly unlocked buildings.

* * *

Name: Sky Harbor

Resources Needed: 18,000x Lumber Units (180,000 MP)

6,000x Aluminum Units (60,000 MP)

100,000,000 MP

Construction Time: 1,920 minutes (1,152,000 MP)

Description: A floating harbor that can hold up to 4 flying ships. The dock and a building for processing flying vessels are permanently enchanted to float a constant distance above the surface the harbor is bound to. Individuals can access the harbor by any non-magical means that connect it to the ground.

* * *

I remembered seeing one of my father's titan kin arrive to visit us on a flying ship once and I was fascinated by it. Cronus simply dismissed the idea, saying that a ship that can sink in the sea can sink even more easily in the sky. I never told him how stupid and short-sighted of him I thought that was. Attacking from the air was not the same as bringing a ship to raid them by sea.

An enemy might have been prepared for a few attacks from the sky or a fleet of ships to come by sea. What I had never seen, however, was anyone preparing their defenses for a whole armada of flying ships.

This might become a major boon for us but we needed aircrafts to make it useful. I didn't see anywhere in the description that vessels would be included with the construction of the project, so this would probably need to wait until we had found someone who could craft them or at least point us to somewhere we could purchase them.