Mountain of the Immortals

Happy with the state of what was available for me to build, especially the number of new houses, I tried to calculate how many people we would be able to fit in our city now. To do this, I needed to know how many citizens would be able to live in each building.

I looked at my own house and pulled up its status window.

* * *

Name: House #1

Level: 4

Occupants: 8/16

Level-Up Requirement.: Settlement Level 5 (Met)

Level-Up Cost: 180 Lumber Units (1,800 MP)

30x Stone Units (300 MP)

18x Misc Building Units (180 MP)

Level-Up Time: 7,680 minutes (4,608,000 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 sixteen humanoids while it also has two bathrooms with magical toilets operating with small void portals.

* * *

The goddesses must have left already and I had told the people who maintained our home that they should take a walk until I worked on the house. Not that it would matter much if there was still anyone in the house while I upgraded it. Instant upgrades on buildings that were occupied would take place just as fast, and any people still inside would first be teleported out of the building for the few seconds that the upgrade took before being returned to their previous position afterward.

Essentially, anyone could sleep through the upgrade of their own house, if they didn't mind the sudden burst of noise from materials clicking into position and being bound together. Everything was safe, and the whole city had been waiting for this day for a while now either way.

This time, I didn't need to purchase the materials like I had done on the previous level. Instead, they would just be taken from our storage. I could therefore have paid for a mana worker to start building it, but I wanted my answer instantly and not in five days.

I focused on the "Level-Up Time" and was presented with a new notification.

* * *

You can completely skip the construction process of House #1 at the cost of 10 MP per second.

Would you like to do so for a total of 4,608,000 MP?

Yes No

* * *

I opted for "Yes" and all of the materials that had been waiting patiently in our storage facility for just this moment suddenly appeared around our residence. Wood and iron flew in complicated patterns through the sky before resting and becoming part of the shifting form of my house.

The whole process lasted no longer than three seconds, but once the dust raised by the flying materials had settled, the appearance of the building had completely changed. The house didn't look like a small residence anymore, but rather a mansion similar to the one my father lived in.

There were perfectly trimmed hedges, large windows that allowed the sun to flood in, and it looked like each of the floors in the multistoried residence was large enough for a small giant. Focusing on the Dark Energy information about the upgraded house, I saw that it wasn't just my opinion that the building resembled a manor house. The name on the prompt had actually changed.

* * *

Name: Manor #1

Level: 5

Occupants: 8/64

Level-Up Requirement: Settlement Level 6

Level-Up Cost: 720 Lumber Units (7,200 MP)

120x Stone Units (1,200 MP)

72 Misc Building Units (720 MP)

Level-Up Time: 15,360 minutes (9,216,000 MP)

Description: A lavish manor with a multitude of amenities, twenty separate bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining area, and a living room. This building is able to comfortably house sixty-four humanoids, and it also has twenty-two bathrooms with magical toilets operating with small void portals. This building is considered above average in terms of living conditions and all individuals living in it get an additional quality of life and happiness boost.

* * *

My eyes shined with the possibilities as I saw the number of people each manor could house. It had quadrupled since the last upgrade. This meant our city could take more than ten thousand permanent residents once everything had been upgraded.

The amount of MP I was going to need in order to upgrade all of those houses was not lost on me and I wasn't going to make any rash decisions. Getting more people into our city was my number one priority though, so a mix of mana workers and normal mortals building them would probably be my best bet.

Each house required a bit more than four and a half million MP to be built instantly. If I used a mana worker, the cost would fall to one tenth of that amount, around 460,000 MP, and it would take a bit more than five days straight. Having mortals build the houses made the calculations slightly more complicated. These people needed to rest when they worked, and I was told by Aphrodite and Artemis that in general it wasn't a good idea to have any of them work for more than eight hours straight for a long period of time.

Honestly, all this sounded like a bunch of crap to me but they were pretty adamant about it so I gave in. This was the exact reason our resource gatherers worked in shifts. We did want people gathering lumber, metals, and precious stones twenty-four seven, but that was only possible by having three times the number of the workers needed assigned to each building. This, along with the people working in other posts such as wall sentries, maintenance, guards, farmers, and the like, meant that we wouldn't have enough people to start building all of the houses at once.

It looked like mana workers were the best option we had if we wanted to increase our population as quickly as possible. On the other hand... Aphrodite did say that the waiting list of applicants for our city was quite extensive. It would surely only make sense to utilize our soon-to-be citizens.

The sudden stroke of genius made me smile. Things would be so much simpler if we did what I had in mind. If people wanted to become a part of the grandest city in all of the Greek realms, they would be happy to work on their own houses. They would feel like they were working on something that was going to be theirs. And I knew that something done with love was going to be the best version it could be. And getting the future owners of the manors to do the actual building would mean we could have people constructing the houses around the clock.

Once the first shift was done, they would be able to go back to Dion or camp somewhere in the vicinity of the city, giving their place to the next shift of home-owning workers. The only thing I would need to worry about would be providing them with the resources, which--even if our own deposits ran dry--wouldn't cost that much.

I instantly sent a message to Aphrodite in the guild chat and let her know about my plan. At first she wasn't exactly happy about it, because it meant she would have to shuffle things around quite a bit in her schedule, but of course she saw the benefit of what I was suggesting in the end.

She told me that she would head down to Dion and call for the top people on the waiting list to come and start working immediately, so I placed the blueprint for each house in the position I wanted them in the town.

Since the first level of the houses were just tents, it cost me next to nothing to place them and watch as the city plan slowly began to form. At first I thought about creating one residential area but I quickly understood that things might get a bit too crowded and I wanted people to move around the city as much as possible.

Having two residential neighborhoods would take care of that and additionally create a competitive spirit between them, which I thought would be a good thing in terms of growing larger and becoming better longer term. But competition could also be a stepping-stone toward hostility, especially if there were only two sides.

The best solution at the moment seemed to be dividing the residential buildings between three distinct neighborhoods, each one with fifty-three houses. Our own would remain where it was, a bit detached from the rest of them, where we could oversee the city. Walking among mortals was one thing, but living next to them was quite another.

I placed the tents exactly where I wanted them and let Aphrodite know that she could take over the building of the houses from now, even purchasing materials if they needed them. Getting the new residences to level five from scratch would take more than five days, but I didn't mind that too much. What was most important was that things were moving again after some time.