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

Towers had been a part of magical culture for nearly as long as mages existed.

In the truly ancient days, mountains had been where the divine touched the mortal, sites for revelation and communion, places where gods walked the earth and demonstrated their might. In imitation of those original mountains, humans built ziggurats and pyramids, practicing their rituals upon those summits.

In time, those original temples were refined and adjusted into ever taller and more imposing structures, columns and reliquaries alike. While often constructed for more mundane purposes, any time that a tower was built a mage would soon follow. During the Age of Oppression, that only became more pronounced as castle keeps and lighthouses frequently would serve as prime disguises for wizards seeking to practice their craft without being attacked or smote.

The entire time, the highest constructions were still monopolized by religions, but that was neither here nor there. Eventually, the flourishing of mundane construction ensured that skyscrapers appeared, so numerous that soon merely having a tower was insufficient, and it soon became important to have the highest skyscraper, and so mage towers quickly grew even more and more extreme in height, yet they were so numerous that for the first time they outnumbered the wizards that wished to use them.

That status quo didn't last long after the Age of Oppression ended, of course, and mage towers became a staple in nearly every town, alongside the veritable forest of skyscrapers and towers to be found in every city.

Now, a mage tower wasn't just a status symbol, and while modern mages absolutely didn't care about the former association the sky held with the divine, there were so, so many advantages to a proper tower that it didn't matter they stuck.

The main benefit of the tower was its magical isolation, something it maintained even in the middle of a city. After all, spells of all sorts were intensely affected by minor disturbances in the Tapestry, so having a primary ritual room vertically isolated from the hustle and bustle and overall chaos that was the ground was a simple yet effective means of insulating a mage from the outside world. On a mundane level too, workshops on the ground were prone to all kinds of random disturbances, most obviously noises, but elevating the workspace helped to cut down on the more direct disruptions to work.

The practicality of having a large building with a small footprint on the ground was also not something to be underestimated. Because enchantments worked best when contained within a magic circle, odd-shaped buildings were suboptimal choices for mages, but creating a runic circle that could simply be extended upwards had many advantages. And that wasn't even including the ways in which a building might benefit from being built over a small area on the ground innately, such as when trying to construct something directly on top of a leyline conflux. In both cases though, having a small footprint but large internal area was massively appealing.

Building upwards: like spatial expansion, but infinitely easier.

Thirdly, towers were the building type most receptive to absolutely massive magical workings. Much like how circles were the optimal shape to enchant inside on two dimensions, cylinders were the optimal three-dimensional shape to enchant with. The same magical principles which led rise to wands and staves applied to cylindrical buildings, and the rest came from there.

There were lots of other benefits towers had as well, both practical and performative, but those three were the ones most applicable to Oliver's current considerations. Well, he didn't care that much about the second point, honestly. He was fifty-fifty on making the tower be a basically solid pillar until it reached the primary ritual platform, so 'additional space inside' wasn't something he cared about that much.

No. He cared far more about the isolation and enchantment-prone aspects of tower-making, here. He didn't need to make the entire thing blind, thankfully. That would have been genuinely impossible, to pre-plan everything to the extent required for this project, but he did still need a fairly solid idea about how things would generally work.

Oliver sifted clay through his fingers as he thought, doing his best to sense the elemental composition of the earth he'd be working with. He preferred working in concrete, but he couldn't just wish about everything he wanted to be different. He was a wizard, not a whiner. If he didn't like something, it was his duty to change it.

It's pretty wet, obviously, so the Mud isn't surprising. I think that's Wood mixed in with the Water. Lots of Nature, of course, that's only to be expected. Refinement into bricks will take most of those out… Gah, I think I just need to see a sample once it's done.

It would, at minimum, be pretty heavily 'Earth.' Anything made from clay had a strong attachment to the element, but he hoped that he'd also see some Technology and Crystal enter the picture. If they didn't, it wasn't the end of the world, but a building made without any Technology-based materials was something he didn't have much experience with.

What about Wood-based buildings?

Other than wood. But he only knew how to work with those because he'd had to learn how to work with the element for foci-making.

Ideally, though…

Oliver returned to the top of First Tower's bluff, closing his eyes and feeling out the nuances in the local mana to the best of his ability, augmenting his own limited sense with divination to get a more cohesive picture.

The Tapestry has a faint current bias going upwards here. That's good, because I don't then need to do any particularly strong redirection. The foundational enchantment can just act as more of a lens, focusing and transforming the elements into something more immediately useful.

He tapped his wrist in thought.

Okay, Oliver. Work backwards. What is the end product supposed to be? He asked himself. Proper planning wasn't really supposed to be a trick, but here he was.

The end result would be a System node. Well, a very basic one anyway. So maybe that wasn't even the right way to phrase it. He was going to make a place where someone could, with the proper training and discipline, touch their own Significance.

There was a bit of dirt off to the side, and Oliver sat down in front of it to try and scratch out a few magic circle designs. None of the glyphs he was squiggling were magically resonant in any way, but that wasn't the point, he was just trying to get eyes on the right layout for something like this.

With reference material on how similar things worked just a whisper away, he was able to quickly iterate through a few rough designs until he settled on something he liked. It was hexagonal, of course, and as such would at most be able to interface with either the physical or magical stats exclusively at any given time, but that was a perfectly reasonable limitation given he was pretty sure he could also design it in such a way that he could swap without too much trouble.

Besides, the design would probably change completely by the end of it, but he had an initial idea to iterate on. With a rough idea in mind for what he was aiming for, Oliver worked down layer by layer, his estimations growing increasingly fuzzy the further out he got, but if he looked at in the right way that might be a positive?

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

After all, if he didn't have an incredibly precise blueprint for exactly what every layer of the tower needed, that might mean he didn't need to worry as much about what each layer was, so long as it was overall headed in the right direction?

...No, that was just nonsense.

But, it was nonsense he'd have to deal with, and with his plans mostly finalized and committed to memory, Oliver returned to the riverbank alongside Henrietta and Alyssa as the pair discussed something about the clay-gathering.

The three of them had, earlier in the day, laid out the basic plan for what would be needed for clay-harvesting from the river. That had lead to the two of them going out hunting, looking for a partially aquatic creature that Henrietta could create an inkling of, because only taking from the riverbank wasn't entirely sustainable for… reasons.

Oliver didn't entirely get it, but he didn't need to. Henrietta and Alyssa had also disagreed about it in their own ways, but both seemed to agree that simply excavating from dry land wouldn't work, and now they'd been either vehemently arguing or amicably discussing and brainstorming their respective approaches for hours now.

Oliver didn't care to approach the duo as they were in the middle of their discussion, and instead decided to focus on the parts of the clay-refining operation that were his responsibility.

The area around the giant rock bluff was, unsurprisingly, fairly rocky. They'd taken advantage of that particular facet by clearing off a relatively flat area where just a few hardy shrubs had managed to sprout up on top of a mostly-stone section of the ground.

Ideally, the clay would then be filtered and poured out to dry on cleaned stone, letting the pure clay harden in the daylight for a while before being gathered up while semi-pliable, then formed into bricks.

Alas, reality insisted otherwise. The clay here was pure enough that mechanical filtering wouldn't do much, and because the entire facility would be running autonomously, minimizing discrete steps was to be the priority over optimal usage of resources.

Instead, the wet clay would be poured into brick-shaped molds and allowed to dry for a day or so. At that point, the mold would be removed and the bricks stacked off to the side to finish drying, freeing up the original mold for the next brick to be made. After… a while, Oliver would need to perform a couple of divinations to figure out how long exactly once they had examples to work with, those bricks would then be taken to a kiln and fired for the better part of a day, at which point they'd be relocated a final time to a stockpile of finished bricks off to the side.

That left them with four distinct phases to work with – wet, drying, firing, and finished, and Oliver's work was primarily concentrated in the 'wet' and 'firing' stages.

Chronologically, wet came first and so that's where he began.

Henrietta had talked to him about it during their discussions earlier, but even prior to that, Oliver had already made peace with the fact that these bricks wouldn't be perfect. He held himself to high standards, yes, but in this case that just meant that the 'factory' involved in making bricks needed to work very well. The end product mattered less to that. So long as bricks were coming out of the other end at a halfway reasonable pace, he would be content. Over time, he could upgrade portions of the assembly to improve the quality of the bricks, but his current goal was to create a fully functioning brick factory with stone age level tools and a couple of inklings to run it.

To that end, Oliver's first order of business was creating the brick mold. That involved finding long, straight pieces of wood that were ten-ish centimeters in diameter – not too hard of an ask in the middle of comparatively light forest – then in turn cutting those into rounds either a quarter meter or three quarter meters long. The entire process was exhausting, but it made him very glad that one of the few tools he'd managed to make out of copper was a hatchet.

Once he had his primary pieces of wood, Oliver split them in half, in total turning a meter of young tree into four half-logs of varying lengths, a task only barely accomplished before he got too tired to keep working safely.

But he wasn't tired enough to actually sleep, which left him in something of an awkward position. Sleeping would be done, they'd decided, on the top of First Tower's spire, where nothing dangerous enough to worry about was likely to get them. Yes, there were giant avian predators in the area, but the top of the mount wasn't so flat as to be without crevasses the right size to prevent a giant eagle from snatching you away while unconscious.

Regardless, being too tired to work with sharp tools but not tired enough to actually sleep, and not needing to distinctly keep watch left him sitting somewhat-awkwardly near Alyssa, who he guessed was in a similar state. He absolutely hadn't paid much attention at all to what she and Henrietta had done that day, but it had clearly been something.

She had red clay absolutely coating her body, like the Ranger had fallen in a mud pit. It was most pronounced in the lower arms and feet, though she'd obviously made some effort to wipe the soilage away from her hands, but the amount of red in every crease of her hands and underneath her fingernails told its own story. There was so much plastered everywhere on her he couldn't even see where her clothing ended and her skin began. Her hair was matted and spiky at the same time, a clump of clay dangled from her ear, and a thin film of sweat shone everywhere that her skin was visible.

"Long day?" he asked.

"Mmmmm," she groaned, then slumped down a bit further, "I almost lost my hatchet."

"You lost your hatchet?" Oliver immediately sat up, "Do you know how hard that'll be to replace?"

"Calm down there, Wizzy." she withdrew the knife from where it had been hidden, waggling it between her fingers, "I said almost. Also, I found out that there are basically feathered crocodiles here. Only about yea long, though."

Alyssa tiredly held her hands out to indicate an approximately meter and a half length.

"Anything fun happen with you?"

Oliver thought for a moment, "Does a bird dive-bombing my hair while I cut down a tree count? Or if we're using fun sarcastically, I almost cut my toe off."

"What, did you miss with your axe or something?" Alyssa probably-laughed.

"Yes… we can go with that," Oliver hesitantly agreed. "I definitely didn't put a log I was on something too unsteady, then hit it my chisel with a rock such that it got knocked out of the wood and knocked the log over simultaneously, so when I moved my foot out of the way of the log I moved it into the path of the chisel."

"Well," Alyssa smiled, "I guess that's not too-"

"Twice."

That was definitely a laugh. Score! At this rate, he wouldn't even need [Perceive Emotion] by the time he could actually get it.

Actually no, that was definitely untrue.

"Yeah," she eventually said, "That counts as fun."

"Remind me to never go to any parties with you."

"Ah yes," she made a big show of looking around, "All the parties. So many parties here in this desolate woodland."

Oliver shrugged, "I assume we'll get home eventually. And when we do, parties will exist once again."

"Ah, but those parties I don't think you'll be able to get out of attending with me. We're going to be heroes, triumphantly returning with incredible magic and with a whole new world under our care."

"Do those really count as parties?" he retorted, "Or at least, they're not the fun kind of party."

"Ah," Alyssa replied, "It doesn't really matter. You're stuck with my sense of fun for at least the next decade, so get used to it."

Oliver winced, "Great."

"Oh come on, I'm not that bad," Alyssa protested.

Oliver looked at her, trying to figure out if she was joking.

"I'm not."

"Hey, stop looking at me like that, I know how to be fun. You're the one who doesn't know how to be fun."

"Oliver, say I can be fun."

Oliver smothered a grin but still stayed silent. Maybe Alyssa could be fun.

"Oliver!"