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

A massive river cut through the landscape, millions of gallons of water rushing by in an unending, muddy torrent. The water itself wasn't traveling that fast, but clouds of sediment had been disturbed by its passage, and turned the entire thing the same reddish-brown color of the local dirt.

Alyssa stood at the top of the riverbank, or rather on a tree growing on the edge, and assessed her options.

The river itself was a good twenty to thirty feet below the normal forest level, its banks a steep decline held together by shrubs, vines, and the occasional young tree. Then, three or four hundred feet away, that sight was mirrored. And in the middle… clear skies. The same lack of trees that she'd noticed from the massive vine-pile tree was just as if not more obvious when standing on the edge of it, and the looming wall of trees may as well have been extensions of the same riverbank, simply towering high into the sky, as the outer layer of foliage filled in at a steep angle that matched the drop-off of soil into the river with surprising accuracy. It was like a massive 'V' had been cut out of the forest to allow water to pass by.

Alyssa wasn't really sure why she was surprised. There was enough water in this forest to fill many rivers, but something about the size of this particular body of water surprised her. Maybe it was that she'd gotten so used to ignoring anything smaller, having a river slam its presence into her face all at once was disorienting? There were plenty of rivers in the forest, after all. She'd harvested reeds from one of them, and she'd easily passed over several others. Heck, their main base was built on a river. But none of those had presented any sort of obstacle for her. The Reed River was slow and shallow, the Shelter Creek was basically just a thing that she could get her feet wet in, and the others that she'd passed over hadn't even slowed her down, thanks in large part to the tree branches that had thus far always connected each side, making a natural bridge for her to pass over.

This, though? This required attention. No tree was large enough to provide a bridge – at least, none that grew here – and she didn't trust any water she couldn't see through to be safe enough to swim. Aquatic creatures could be savage, let alone any dangerous tangles of branches and rocks which could easily ensnare her and tear her body to shreds, as well as unseen eddies in the current could suck her underwater and hold her there until long after she drowned.

So no, swimming or fording the giant river with no visibility was out of the question.

Do I just leave it? She idly wondered. Do I treat this as the edge of my current ability to range, and just search elsewhere?

Under other circumstances… she might do so. Certainly, if she hadn't seen anything particularly promising, she would have. But she had seen what could well be the perfect site for Oliver's tower, certainly better than any of the other sites she'd yet to investigate, and she wasn't about to turn back until she at least checked it out. The stone would be an excellent foundation, and it had been right next to one of this massive river's tributaries, one large enough that she'd noticed a gap in the trees where it had passed. Given how cloudy this river was, it was almost certain that the banks would serve as a rich source of clay, one of the best she could reasonably expect to find. Then, once they made boats, it would be easy to get to, and… yeah.

She wasn't going to say that it was definitely perfect quite yet, but she was already getting excited about the thought of it.

From what she recalled, the river that bordered the rocky hill she was currently looking for was downstream of where she was currently at, so she headed in that direction while looking for a convenient way to cross. What, exactly, might be sufficient she wasn't entirely certain of. Maybe a ford, where the water was shallower, or perhaps two of the hundred-foot-tall trees would have collapsed on either side of the bank in a place where the river was slightly narrower… that one was unlikely.

The wind brushed against her skin as she followed the river, a cool breeze accompanying the water as it flowed down its path to the sea. All kinds of cacophonous animals made their calls, this being a section of the forest that was one of the louder places she'd encountered. Oddly, if she went more than twenty or thirty feet into the underbrush, that sound dramatically cut down, but perhaps she ought to be getting used to this world's odd microclimates by now.

Alyssa hopped up onto a fallen log and balanced along its mossy, partially decomposing surface. The wood felt good against her bare feet, both because the feel of the moss's Wood magic and the lingering traces of the same in the dead log felt nice and because doing so provided a reprieve from the sharp twigs and rocks that stuck up past the heavy carpet of fallen leaves which most of the forest was covered in.

The feel of the Wood, though… There was a certain something to it here, that she'd grown to appreciate. Sight and Sound were the most popular forms for people to develop their mana sense, yes, but even as a kid she'd felt that it was just kind of impersonal, and not really for her. Mana was everywhere, and everything, but mana senses tied to your eyes and ears couldn't really pick up on that. What they 'gained' in range, they lost in sensitivity, and they just didn't get the subtler nuances of mana the same way that Touch really could convey. The times she'd experienced mana sight, she'd always felt a bit let down at how comparatively flat everything was.

If she'd had mana sight, she certainly wouldn't be able to feel how the moss beneath her feet was slightly clingy, how it wanted to reach out to her and be one with her. Or how to the Wood mana inside of her, it felt sticky and grabby and icky.

So she certainly wouldn't have been prepared for the moss to spring up like some kind of verdant net, leaping off the decomposing log like some kind of snare and tangling her limbs in it. Were she not prepared, it would have taken a moment longer for her to respond, taken a moment of processing before her brain properly realized the kind of danger she was in, instead of instantly responding with a single command.

[Ignite]

The moss didn't catch on fire immediately, but Alyssa could feel as the Wood mana around her suddenly twisted towards Fire, only to be wrenched back to Wood by the moss's soul. Her skill wasn't strong enough to set something that was actively alive and actively fighting her on fire.

Not yet, anyway.

But it did get the thing to pause for a moment, its control slipping in its re-assertion of Wood across its body, and Alyssa wasted no time in jabbing her elbow into the curtain around her, moving her arm enough to grab hold of her hatchet and rip it free as the moss tightened its grip once again.

But now she had her weapon, and even a weirdly mobile moss-net creature was still superficially moss. The copper axehead easily cut through the thing, and with another use of [Ignite], she got enough freedom to make the hole large enough for her to get out, and subsequently stab and cut the thing to pieces. It took a surprising amount of effort to get it to stop wriggling, and Alyssa was only properly content that it was dead when her [Ignite] actually took, the green moss turning black and beginning to smolder.

She didn't want to risk a forest fire, so she used her hatchet like a hook to toss the lightly smoking mossy blanket into the river.

The decomposing log was less comfortable without the fuzzy feel of a moss-net on it, so she hopped back off it a moment after returning.

Stupid me, not keeping my guard up. That was basically a slime, and I literally walked into it.

If she wanted to be fair to herself, it wasn't like she knew what a mossnet would look like, and everything around here was unfamiliar enough that she couldn't truly tell what was or wasn't dangerous. She'd probably be able to spot another mossnet, as at least magically it had felt pretty distinct and it had a few characteristics that looked species-wide, but she'd literally just faced a reminder to not get too cocky. This was an alien world, and just because nothing she'd come across so far had wanted anything more than for her to get out of her territory didn't mean that nothing would.

And may the gods take me before I die to something as stupid as a slime.

She would have liked to keep her hatchet out and at the ready, but that really wasn't as practical as she needed it to be, when staying mobile. Her hands needed to be at the ready, and she really, really couldn't risk randomly throwing her only weapon into the river because she unexpectedly had to grab a branch or something. Her hatchet may have technically been weapon-like, but it was not suitable for combat.

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She fidgeted with her clothing for a moment to stow the axe again, needing to deal with the hassle of having torn the ink-cloth in her haste, and continued on her way.

Now that she was on the lookout for them, Alyssa saw a good half-dozen mossnets along her path, clinging to various surfaces. Most of them were on fallen logs of various kinds, just like the first one she'd encountered, but one was on a flat rock nearer the water's edge.

It really was impressive how well they blended into their surroundings. Somehow, they always chose places that looked like they should have moss already, but there was a faint undertone of black that served as a dead giveaway to her eyes.

They were at least easy to avoid. They only moved if something organic was on top of them, with rocks and dirt eliciting no reaction whatsoever, and all Alyssa needed to realistically do was keep her eyes open and go around any that would otherwise be in her path.

The river to her left, alas, was not quite so easy to avoid. There were no convenient giant boulders sticking out of the middle, no floating logs that she could balance on, no places where a giant archway inexplicably connected the two sides. Even the patch of reeds she spotted growing on the river's edge only grew in a little alcove where the riverbank had collapsed in a way that produced a sheltered section of water, where the current flowed slowly and with much less sediment than the main branch. And while these reeds were just as tall as the ones they'd been harvesting for their shelter, thirty feet was not three hundred…

Hmm.

Did the reeds float? Maybe she could make herself a boat? Or just a raft, more realistically. Something that could keep her above water, and then she could use one of the longer reeds as a pole to push herself along the riverbank and get her to the other side.

Alyssa slid down the bank, her feet splashing into the water and sending a small, lizard-like thing she hadn't noticed scurrying away from her, and felt the reeds there.

They were plenty strong, that much was certain, but the younger ones had a bit of flex to them… she loosely wished that they were a bit more like bamboo, and grew in sections, because then she'd have premade flotation devices and she'd just need to lash a bunch of them together to get a raft, but it should still work?

A bit of testing proved that there was potential here. Her original idea had been to use a bunch of smaller reeds, tie them up into three big bundles, then use those as pontoons, but that failed when she couldn't find a good way to keep water out of the open base. Also, lots of the smaller ones were damaged in ways that didn't obviously compromise their integrity but nonetheless stopped them from being sufficiently watertight.

But once that failed, she tried using a smaller number of the bigger reeds, the ones as thick as her arm, and even though she had to cut off two sides in order to make it a manageable length for her creation, Alyssa could stopper it up with enough random stuff and cap it off with clay that it stayed floating all on its own!

...For just long enough to lull her into a false sense of confidence, apparently. Less than thirty minutes after she set it afloat, while she was in the middle of lashing together five similar reeds into a larger configuration, her trial abruptly sank. One moment it looked fine, the next there was a giant hole in the clay, it was tilting, the rocks and reed pieces she'd used as filler were falling out, and then it was dragged to the bottom by the filler that hadn't fallen out.

The sight made her freeze, but then she thought again. Is that good enough? I can probably get to the other side… wait, I'll need to get back too.

Half an hour was also lots of time if everything went great, but not much time at all if anything went wrong. Plus, ideally this would last a day or two instead of less than an hour, so that she wouldn't have to make another one to come back. There was no guarantee that she could find a suitable patch of reeds for her return journey, after all.

By that point, though, she was tired enough that just getting something basic working sounded tempting all on its own… which meant she should sleep, and see if she came up with any better ideas overnight.

Luckily for her, Alyssa had cut a lot of the reeds already, including some of the really strong ones. So, she set up a makeshift platform for herself by setting some of her larger reeds up in nearby trees, holding them in place and relatively level by putting them in strategically-chosen branch forks. Then, she spread out a bunch of smaller reeds to act as a floor, made herself as comfortable as she could get in the wild, and slept.

The following "morning" – the lack of a day-night cycle really messed with vocabulary – it was pretty clear that something had been around, messing with Alyssa's extra piles of reeds, but it was fortunately gone. She could tell that it had been big, but quiet, and possibly associated with Steam if the impressions she was getting from the nearby disturbed foliage were accurate. She gnawed on a tough fruit that tasted vaguely of potato and wax and reassessed the situation with fresh eyes.

The larger reeds were pretty clearly not an option, but she might be able to still use them. The problem with the smaller reeds was that, even though they were flexible, they just weren't as buoyant as she needed in small numbers, and she did not have enough time to weave them into some massive mat or something like that. She needed some way to prepare huge bunches of reeds, the ones no larger than her pinkie, into something that could support a decent amount of weight.

And she thought she had a way.

Alyssa's first step was to cut down the largest reed she could find. It was nearly as thick around as her calf, stretched what had to be forty feet long, and was at the dead center of the clump of reeds, necessitating her to essentially bushwack through some very tough reeds just to get to it. Even then, it might not have been the absolute biggest reed in the clump, but she wasn't going back for another.

This would do just fine.

Once she had it out and in a place where she could halfway-maneuver it, she used her hatchet to cut the bottom third of it into a dozen rings, each about a foot long and four-ish inches in diameter. Into those rings, she grabbed enough smaller reeds to fill about a third of it. Fortunately, they were in abundance, because she needed thousands of the things in total. Those were then bent over, looped in on themselves, and shoved back into the original ring, creating a flattened donut shape. Then, she pulled the reeds tighter until it was half the size it had been before, then passed those reeds through a second time, stuffing the reed-cuff as much as she could manage.

The end result looked something like a miniature inner tube, and while it did float, it provided nowhere near enough buoyancy to actually carry her.

She spent the next couple hours making more and more, and letting the older ones float around to test their durability. Much to her delight, it worked, and she was able to attach all twelve into a pontoon-like configuration, made herself a platform she could sit on in the middle.

This had actually turned out rather well, if she thought so herself.

"Take that, Oliver," she gloated to a tiny, bright blue pseudowyvern sitting on a branch close to her, "You aren't the only one who can make useful things."

Yeah, this worked really well. Heck! She wouldn't even need to navigate the forest on the other side at this rate. Her desired location was on a connected stream, after all. She could just use her boat to travel there directly!

She cut herself a navigation pole about twenty feet long, and… pushed off.

The start was relatively smooth, as she gently drifted into the river, only to experience a sudden jolt as the outermost pontoon got caught in the river current and yanked a startled curse from her as she started going downstream.

Navigating the river with her pole was way harder than Alyssa had anticipated, but despite nearly losing her grip on it a few times, she got a hang of it before she found herself in the middle of the creek without a paddle. Not that she functionally had a paddle in the middle of the creek, because her pole wasn't long enough to reach the bottom in the middle of the river.

Fortunately, she was able to shimmy herself enough to the side with a few frantic half-swimming kicks to get her pole working again without anything taking a bite out of her toes.

It took even longer to get to the other side of the riverbank, all thoughts of successfully navigating the side river abandoned, and Alyssa gratefully collapsed onto dry land.

She had to jump up a moment later to keep her boat from floating away, so it did somewhat spoil the experience, but the side of the river wasn't nearly as intense so at least she didn't lose the vessel.

Though…

She wasn't especially eager to get back on the misbehaving thing, but she did need practice, and if she kept to the sides, the current shouldn't be quite as bad?

Alyssa trudged up to her destination a full day later, dripping wet and mentally vowing to never try and go upstream in a pole-propelled boat ever again. The boat itself had lost a fair amount of buoyancy in the ordeal and had been pulled out of the river a little ways away to try and let it drain and dry out, to better prepare it for the way back.

But at least this locale looked promising, so she could be happy about that.

This smaller stream, only about thirty feet wide ran right up to the base of the stone, and had even clearly eroded into the rock somewhat. The rest of the riverbank, though, was reddish clay, and while the hill of stone wasn't trivial to climb up, she barely even registered the difficulty as she clawed her way to the top.

It was littered with a few medium-sized rocks and had weird weathering patterns, a few scraggly trees were here and there, and it technically wasn't above the full treeline – only above the treeline this close to the water – but at the moment, Alyssa really couldn't care.

"Yeah," she tiredly said, looking back at the cliffs Shelter was built against. It was both closer and further away than it seemed like it should be, considering it had taken multiple days to get here. "This'll do."

If Oliver wanted to complain about this, he could bite her.

Now she just needed to get back.