The Factory Must Grow - [Book 1: The System Must Live]

Why the heck was everything so hard?

Oliver had, in the back of his mind, roughly assumed that getting his hands on metal would suddenly make everything so much easier. Now that he had metal, it was obvious that was wildly incorrect, because the amount of metal he had was… nowhere near enough.

Oh sure, it was enough to help, but enough to get them hatchets and knives made out of copper, but it wasn't enough to solve all their problems. Plus, he'd had to spread his bounty out, so he didn't even get it all for himself.

Right now, he had a couple kilos to himself, which would be enough for a couple of good foci, but he didn't really know what he wanted to use those foci for. He needed everything. Well, other than fire, he already had his copper fire ring Smelter and his Everflame Brazier. But other than fire, everything else was in direly short supply. He needed better materials, telekinesis, pliers, hammers, molds, furnaces…

The problem always returned to not having enough. They had plenty of reeds, limited only by how quickly they could be harvested and how much of it was going to various other projects. But regardless, for all that their future sleeping hut was slowly being constructed, reeds wouldn't work for a tower. Wood might work, but as abundant as trees were around here, they couldn't get workable lumber out of them.

Well, it doesn't have to be dried out to be a temporary structure... But no, he'd need to make the System node fairly Technology-heavy, and utilizing unprocessed wood was effectively shooting himself in the foot before he even started.

Fortunately, there was one other material present that they could use. One immensely abundant, and while it required a bit of processing, could be plenty strong – strong enough, even, to make a wizard's tower.

He considered himself lucky that he'd brushed up on how to source and treat most materials that might be needed in magic, and not simply assumed that he'd have Encyclopedia Systema access, because trying to figure out how to refine clay completely from scratch would be… annoying.

Almost as annoying as Henrietta interrupting him when he tried to create a dedicated clay-refining station. She'd insisted he do things the much sloppier way of… digging a hole in the ground.

Once the hole was dug, he piled up a bunch of dirt right above the hole, then poured a bunch of water on said pile. He was, he had to admit, rather proud of the way he got the water. After exactly three trips back and forth with a container that barely held a liter of water, he'd had the idea to take one of their reeds and use that as a pipe. One end went in the creek, the other on the dirt pile. It took a bit of finagling, and a miniature dam in the creek to direct as much water as he could down his reed, but the end result was so worth it.

Once he'd gotten his pile of dirt suitably wet – enough that it had a puddle of substantial size nestled in it, but not so much that the entire thing threatened to collapse – Oliver knocked open a channel in the dirt, thereby allowing the very dirty water to drain out of the pile and into the prepared pit below.

He'd already compacted the dirt in the pit as much as could feasibly be managed with the aid of Jacob and some fairly sizable rocks, so there wouldn't be anything more dissolving into it. The principle was fairly straightforward, all told. Clay was made out of the finest – which was to say, smallest – pieces of dirt and silt, and was therefore the first to be dissolved by the water he poured over it. Anything larger, such as stones, roots, or sand, would instead be left behind when the water drained out, meaning he got acceptably refined clay with absolutely no additional tools required.

He just needed to let it sit for a while to settle, and then scoop it out and place it on some flat rocks to dry enough to be sculpted.

While he was waiting for the clay to get dry enough to sculpt, Oliver got started on making a kiln to fire the clay in so that they could make things like pots and bricks. It had worked for ancient humans, creating absolutely gigantic structures, so it would work for them.

But it was just so much labor making anything out of clay. For some reason, Oliver's mind had vaguely classified making clay bricks as being 'easy, primitive' stuff, because of just how cheap they were in the modern day, and because obviously anything invented more than ten thousand years ago could be trivially recreated with minimal effort by 'superior' modern-day humans like himself.

With the benefit of retrospect, the thought that it would be easy was almost laughable. In the modern day, people made things out of concrete, steel and glass because they were absurdly easy to make in bulk for their respective utility. If given the option, nobody worked in clay or stone or wood, because unless you needed the specific properties of those materials, it was just far too annoying to refine and work with them.

And here he was, naively thinking that because he, oh excitement of excitement, had a Class he could just bypass that fundamental truth of society. But no, making clay bricks was still the absurdly time-consuming and labor-intensive process that it had been for his ancestors thousands of years ago, and there was nothing he could truly do about it. Each brick would need to be handmade, with refined clay shaped by a mold then allowed to dry out, then fired in a kiln until it tempered, and only then could he actually do the true work of, oh, building the damned tower.

How many bricks would that be? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Ancient peoples had built wonders, but they'd taken thousands of people decades of solid work to do, and he… had neither of those things.

A weariness fell on Oliver all at once, and he stopped.

His limbs, previously only a little tired, suddenly felt like they were covered in so much clay, lethargic and weighed-down. His train of thought felt like it ran into a stone wall, utterly derailing and leaving him with nothing but a vague sense of fuzzy static. His stomach simultaneously complained of not having enough food and like he couldn't eat any more food if he tried. His mouth was parched, and he struggled to remember what he was doing in a way totally separate from his overall fuzzy feeling.

Almost unwillingly, Oliver fell back, first on his butt then on his back entirely, simply staring up at the sky.

It was a shade of blue a few shades deeper than the one at home, and utterly cloudless. That particular factoid had disoriented him for so long, just like the complete absence of any sun, but he'd gotten used to it at this point. The sky was blue, no more and no less. Whether it was some kind of seasonal thing, or the sky didn't have any weather on this world, he didn't know.

Of course, the sky wasn't the only thing he saw. The dull red wall of stone stretched into the sky at the edge of his vision, an imposing natural monolith that dwarfed any efforts he could ever muster with his own two hands.

Scraggly and tenacious plants clung to that wall, and off in the distance he could faintly see the green line that was what few trees overhung the cliff. The raucous sounds of animal calls invaded Oliver's ears, wormed their way into his mind, in a way he'd until now never experienced. The buzz of insects, the caw of birds, the howl of wolves, and then the babbling brook and the crash of waterfalls. All of it fell upon Oliver at once, leaving him grasping for something – anything – that would save him.

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The ground wasn't especially comfortable, but it was Oliver's only respite as he slowly curled into a ball. Even that much exertion left his body protesting, but Oliver decidedly overruled his biology on account of it drastically exaggerating for no reason whatsoever.

He wasn't entirely sure how long he laid there, nor if he fell asleep at any point, because the next thing he remembered was a foot nudging his back. "Hey. You dead?"

With a groan, he rolled over and cracked his eyes open to see Alyssa looming over him.

"Go away," he groaned.

"Now why would I do that?" Alyssa responded. "You don't look busy."

"Is this harassment?" he mused, hoping that the oblique threat might get her to leave him alone. He really, really didn't want to be talking to anyone.

"Nope," she dashed his hopes, "This is normal conversation."

"Even though I want you to go away?"

"If you wanted that, you shouldn't have fallen asleep out in the open. Now you've fallen prey to me. Mua ha ha."

Oliver had the sudden realization that he didn't actually have to talk to Alyssa if he didn't want to, and steadfastly rolled back onto his side.

"What? Oliver, don't be like that. Come on," she nudged him with her foot, but Oliver held firm in ignoring her. The action almost brought forth a small degree of amusement, which he likewise decided to ignore. Amusement was trumped by his rapid-onset exhaustion, and he really didn't have the energy to deal with Alyssa at the moment.

He might have dozed off again, or might not have, because the next thing he was fully aware of was Henrietta's voice grabbing his attention.

"Smith?" she asked, "Are you alright?"

For a moment, he debated the merits of fully ignoring his Commander in favor of lying there in self-pity, but rationality reasserted itself as his brain woke up more. With a fair bit of hesitation and soreness, he pushed himself up into a sitting position, a tortured groan pulling itself out of him at the same time.

"Fully hale and healthy, ma'am," he gave as a more proper reply.

"I asked too much of you," she replied.

Oliver blinked, "Was that a question?"

"No. It was a statement. And an apology. Have you taken any days off since the Jump?"

"None of us have," he pointed out, "We're in full survival mode, and I came ready to do weeks of hard work nonstop."

Henrietta shook her head, "Out of everyone here, you're the one working the hardest and you don't even have physical stats to help with it. I just didn't realize how much you were overworking until you did all of that," she waved towards Oliver's clay pit, "Completely by hand. So, I want to apologize for making you do that."

Oliver looked at her, somewhat perplexed, "I'm just doing my job. Like all of us."

Well, except Clark, but that's why he would sometimes help me.

"I haven't," she countered. "My job is to ensure that we're all working as a team, and a proper team leader wouldn't make you do that much manual labor all on your own. I apologize."

"I had help."

"Not enough. Having Clark lend you a literal hand is nowhere near sufficient. This isn't what your class is for, and I forgot that. Do you have anything that really needs to be done by someone else? Something that we could set up to be done autonomously with some inklings?"

"The clay," he immediately responded, then paused. "Wait, I need to make sure that's true."

That was what triggered my sudden exhaustion, he noted, And it's what I'll be needing the most of. But how would an inkling be able to help with that?

Oliver halfheartedly nodded, still thinking, "Yeah, the clay. Clay bricks especially. But you said to not overdo the supporting infrastructure needed to make things. Why does the tower get an exception to that?"

Henrietta rubbed her forehead.

Is that frustration with me, exasperation, or a random headache? Probably not that last one.

"Smith… You're not making just a couple of bricks. Yes, we want to offload the brick production, but what you don't need to do is to devise some massive, reusable magical circle that you can use to assemble as many towers as you need. Make something to make the bricks, and then use those bricks to build the tower."

"Oh."

Yeah, that makes sense.

"Remind me. How big does the tower need to be? How tall, first."

Oliver rubbed his chin habitually, then changed to drumming his fingers against his leg – he did not like how his beard felt – as he thought. "Ten meters, probably? Well, that's in a field. It needs to be at least ten meters prominent above its surroundings. With some minimum for the enchantment-work."

"Would building on top of a cliff help?"

Oliver looked up, "...Yes."

Henrietta nodded, "Alright then. We have enough of a stockpile right now, I'll send Ride out to look for somewhere near a good source of clay, and already prominent above the landscape. Stone foundations are best, right?"

Oliver nodded.

"Excellent. Once that's done, then you and I can set up a clay brick foundry over there, one that only needs inklings to run, and we let that do its thing for a while and only after we have a lot of building material will you need to start work on the tower itself, does that work?"

"You're the boss," he deflected.

"It's a legitimate question. Would that work for you? If you were able to show up at the work site and have all the bricks you'd need all prepared, and you can from there build your tower."

"I can probably make it work."

Henrietta looked at him, "Well, I suppose that's about as good as I'm likely to get from you. For now, go take the rest of the day off. And tomorrow. You need rest. When you're back, I want you to make your staff. I know you can do it better in a week, but I want to see how good you can do now. I think it's better than you're expecting."

"I can keep going," Oliver's protest to Henrietta was much quieter than the protest Oliver's body was presenting, but nobody else knew about the latter so it didn't matter. He wasn't going to be made useless just because his class was literally out of its element. Besides, he was an Archmage, he didn't just stop when things got hard. "I could work for that time, and then my staff would be better at the end."

"Your arm is trembling," Henrietta rebutted.

Oliver crossed his arms, ending the tremor.

"You don't have anything you need to do right now, anyway. You'll need to wait for Alyssa to keep building the tower, or the brick kiln, and though I want you to be ready to go once she comes back with a location, staff in-hand and with the initial bugs worked out, that is to only be worked on when you're in top form."

"We still need pots," Oliver countered. "I was specifically asked to make a pot for soup. Also cups, I want an actual cup instead of that coconut thing."

"You were asked? By who? Don't answer that, it doesn't matter. Do you have clay that is ready to be sculpted?"

"Maybe?"

"Once it's ready, then and only then can you go to make your pots and cups. Actually, belay that. I'll make the pots and cups. You're not the only one who can make things."

Henrietta had another expression on her face, and Oliver sorely wished that [Perceive Emotions] wasn't something he absolutely couldn't get without a Passion-element class.

"I want your body and soul to both be fully rested and ready for work two days from now. Do whatever you want until then, but I want you to be absolutely certain that your muscles and mana are both in completely top form and ready to make your staff at the end of it. Is that clear?"

"Yes, Commander," he sighed.

"Good man," she clapped his shoulder, much to his surprise. "Go enjoy your time off."

That might be difficult, he thought, but didn't want to protest. It wasn't like he'd worked for… had it been three weeks yet? Weeks straight without a pause just because he knew it needed to be done. There also just wasn't anything to do. But if the Commander insisted on him sitting around doing absolutely nothing for however long it took him to get tired, then tired again, he was in for a very torturous time.

He couldn't even truly play with his magic, because he needed to be in top form for once he was done, and playing around with his mana stood a risk of crossing his internal mana flows in such a way that they'd need a couple of days to heal. It wasn't a big risk, but working the mana as 'raw' as he would be made it extra risky, and he couldn't be absolutely certain that his mana would be in top form at the end of it. So mostly, he'd just been sentenced to a day with absolutely nothing to do, except hang around the shelter and….

"Oliver! Are you alright? I heard that you were feeling unwell, and Henrietta looked so somber when she began to speak with you, and now you look so despondent, however can I help you?"

Kill me now.