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

First Tower was a really cool place.

Obviously, Clark loved the stream that was right next to it. Sure it might not have been shining, but it was still a stream, and Clark was the prince of such. Not that there had been anything wrong with the pond back at Shelter, but flowing water was and always would be Clark's preference.

Unless the water was flowing really really strongly anyway. Though even then, he mused, if he'd been a high enough level, whitewater swimming would be cool to do again.

Though wasn't it supposed to be really unsafe, even for high-level people?

Not that it mattered. He could make it work, he'd just need the right skills and right safety gear. Because safety was important, and it was good to make sure that what was inside your head stayed there. It didn't matter how strong you were, drowning was drowning and brains were brains.

Not that it mattered at First Tower, because the water here wasn't flowing so fast that you needed all of that! You could just swim, and things were great.

Sure, there had been a couple of incidents back at the start, when things had attacked him while he was in the water, and the muddy water didn't do much to clean him off, but they'd set up a bunch of really sturdy reeds as posts to keep anything too big from swimming through a certain section of the river – and doubled in a few places as a net to catch food – and they'd managed to dig out a pool that was filled by filtered river water, so Clark could just use a jug of clean water to get all the muddy water off once he was out of the river!

It really was awesome how much clean water they had. And he'd been able to help! Mostly, it was a pipe made out of reeds buried a few feet underneath the level of the river absolutely stuffed with sand, charcoal, and fibers to catch any and all impurities, then further enhanced by magic and something Oliver had done to let Clark [Unblemish] the entire pool of water in a single go, which he did a couple of times per day. It refilled slowly, but it was still plenty for their current needs.

It had also started attracting a few small critters. Well, probably the scraps that Clark had tossed in the woods had done that to start with, getting a few cute and cool scavengers as he broke down the game Alyssa brought back. He wasn't great at it, but he was learning and wasting less and less proper meat with each passing day. These days, it was mostly the properly-inedible things that he was tossing to the scavengers.

His favorite one was a bold little raccoon-thing with a plume of smoke for a tail. The little boldoon was practically fearless but very polite, waiting on the outskirts of Clark's butchering area for whatever he tossed its way, never trying to take anything that he still wanted for himself. That was unlike the squawkbirds that kept trying to steal his meat and he always needed to shoo away, but even those were fun in their own way. There was a bright blue one and a red one that always squabbled with each other and as often as not got in one another's way when trying to steal scraps of actually good meat, always ending in a hilarious display of tangled feathers and, of course, squawking.

Clark also didn't need to spend nearly as much time tending to the fire as before, either, because Oliver had relented and adjusted the fire-circle underneath the brick kiln to be 'less industrial' and therefore safe to cook food over! He'd been moderately annoyed when Henrietta had told him to do that, and the process had required him doing a lot of work on the inside of the brick kiln for… some reason? But it sounded like doing that had been good for other reasons too, and Henrietta was happy and Oliver wasn't actually upset despite his grumbling, so Clark was happy.

Jacob had taken to foraging for stuff as well as Alyssa, now that they weren't having to fend off vinebeasts every day, which was also good. He wasn't as good a hunter as Alyssa, so he didn't get meat as often, but he was stronger and able to bring back much larger things than she could.

There was also a sense of renewed purpose to them all, something that would take them far further than simply rebuilding what they'd lost. Father had often spoken about the importance of a unifying direction among the populace, how a disaster could often be beneficial for communities as in the wake of such things, people would rally and far exceed anything they had built before.

Clark had never really understood it, because surely it was better for people to just, well, start when they were already doing well and go from there? But now he was seeing what Father had been speaking of. All five of them knew exactly what needed to be done, how it should be done, and could take the opportunity to do it even better than before. But then they hadn't stopped at merely recreating their hut from Shelter, but had expanded their basic survival setup into something that could more comfortably be called civilization, even if a very primitive one.

Even their latrine was better, on the other side of the river and with an actual seat constructed out of reeds. Why the old one hadn't been wasn't fully clear, but if he thought about it maybe it had to do with the fact nobody really wanted to do extensive work around the latrine once it had been used semi-regularly, but creating a new one was easier?

Cause and effect! Teacher Elsson would have been so proud.

Meanwhile, Oliver had been working on lots of different things, but hadn't yet recreated a copper smelter for some reason. It meant their supply of copper tools were slowly dwindling, but the topic seemed really hush-hush so Clark had stopped asking about it.

The pillow he'd made for Clark had been absolutely amazing, though. It wasn't as good as his pillows back home were, but that wasn't really a fair comparison, given how epic his pillows at home had been. It almost made up for his loss of [Bed of Clouds], but it probably didn't actually.

Of course, the pillows were so good that Oliver had immediately after making a full batch been, by unanimous decision, consigned to making mattresses for them all with the same tech. That was apparently hard for some reason – why Oliver didn't just put a bunch of pillows next to each other wasn't clear, but Clark figured the Artificer knew what he was doing.

Sleeping on the ground had been really rough, and while the bunks they'd made in their hut were better, it was nowhere near the quality of a half-decent mattress. Alyssa had been joking that she'd been actually sleeping worse since she'd gotten her pillow, because it was so comfortable it made her acutely aware of how hard and uncomfortable their bunks were.

She hadn't been serious, of course. But Oliver had still asked her, with deadpan seriousness, whether that meant she wanted him to take her pillow back for some kind of experiment. Her refusal had been so emphatic that Clark was still laughing about it nearly a week later.

He just hoped the mattresses were coming soon, because that laughter was becoming sadder and sadder with every passing 'night.'

Far less sad was the ways in which their food stockpile kept growing. Between the larger river, not having a cliff to their side, and with both Jacob and Alyssa hunting and foraging, it was nearly to the point that they ran risk of spoilage without preservation.

Oliver had 'preservation enchantments' on his to-do list, but mattresses were far more important so he hadn't made any yet. So right now, Clark was experimenting with different ways to make food last longer.

He knew that biological disease was caused mostly by germs, and germs usually died to high heat, so one thing he did a lot of was to keep a pot of soup constantly boiling. That way, he could put any spare scraps of meat in there and know that germs wouldn't be able to grow in it.

The enchanted fire didn't make any smoke, so he couldn't smoke anything with that. And Henrietta had warned him away from using 'industrial' smoke anyway, and had said that just because the fire was safe to cook over didn't mean it was actually safe enough to eat. Which was interesting! He'd never known that the type of fire mattered that much. Sure, burning different things meant you got different types of fire, and the kinds of smoke that fires made could range from 'smells nice and clears out your lungs' to 'even a whiff of this will send you to the healers,' but he'd never connected that with the ways in which fires could be magically different from one another. And an 'industrial' flame, even if it was completely clean-burning with no smoke and using the same fuel as a 'cooking' flame, could poison whatever was cooked over it.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

It really was so interesting, and even though he didn't understand a lot of the explanation, he'd still learned something new. And that was why this whole thing was so great.

"Hey Clark!" Alyssa waved him over, "You doing anything?"

"I am not at this particular instant, how can I assist?"

"Awesome. So, Henrietta told me that we need to make some rope, because Oliver is preparing to start working on the tower and he'll need a better way to get clay and bricks up the spire, and that means he needs a crane of some kind, and a crane needs rope, and she says she's nearly to the point where she can make fabric, so she wants me and you to start trying to weave together reeds, because she finally figured out a good way to break down into long fibers, and this will be far easier with an extra set of hands at the start." Alyssa gasped for air. "I think that's everything. You catch all that?"

"You need help with... rope?" Clark hesitantly tried. He'd absolutely gotten lost about halfway through the explanation right around when Alyssa's voice had started changing pitch due to how much it was running out of air.

"Whatever. Just come with me and do what I tell you to."

Clark checked his memory to see if there was anything he was forgetting, and couldn't remember anything, so he dutifully plodded along with Alyssa as she brought him to some wickedly complicated-looking reed contraption.

"So this will be what we use to make rope. You'll hook some of the longer fibers around here, and then we'll be twisting and braiding with this and this, then you need to grab this to tie off the ending, and once you've got that all down, grab this thing and push it like so and… you know what, why don't you just watch to start?"

"That sounds like an excellent idea," Clark wholeheartedly agreed.

"Yeah yeah. Mmm… how about you work on preparing the string instead? That's not too hard, just a bit tedious."

"Wherever I can be most helpful," Clark reminded her. All of his tasks resulted in him having a lot of waiting, whether it be waiting for another minor injury or waiting for food to cook or arrive, none of Clark's surviving magic was in that high demand. Not like the stuff the others could do, so it was great to have something where the primary need was time!

"Do you have any Dexterity?"

"One point," he replied, mostly certain. It had been weeks since he looked at his status last, and his status then hadn't even been his status now! But grace was important for a [Prince of Shining Streams], so it definitely included some alongside Aura, and that made sense to Clark about why he should have Dexterity, so her probably did. He wouldn't have picked a class that didn't make sense or didn't properly prepare him for the role it was designed for. Even if his level had made base stats mostly irrelevant, they still helped to explain the idea of the class, and should always be paid attention to.

"Great," Alyssa continued, "That's going to make this a lot easier. So, what you need to do to make threads is to take a reed at least this thick."

She picked up one about as thick as her forearm and showed it to Clark, "And then take the outermost layer off, all the part that's green."

She procured her copper hatchet from somewhere. Had that been stuck up her shirt? Was it really a shirt when it covered that little of your upper torso? Had it been under her skirt? It seemed like it wouldn't work well to hold something as sharp and pointy as an axe.

"Then dig it under the edge like so, and just pull. Be careful that you don't accidentally cut yourself on the fibers, they're pretty sharp, and I figure you don't want to be healing your fingers every five minutes."

"That most certainly does sound unpleasant," Clark agreed, hoping he could figure out what he'd missed later. It was just skinning some reeds, so it probably wasn't that hard. "And does explain your latest injuries."

"Hey! Those were obtained through legitimate experimentation and only a tiny bit of clumsiness. I'm not an idiot that just goes around slicing my fingers open all the time."

"I never said you were."

"Good. Because you better not," Alyssa jokingly huffed. "I know where you sleep."

"As do I," Clark responded with a beaming smile, which caused Alyssa to look at him curiously for a moment, then widen her eyes in understanding.

"Not like that!" her eyes darted around nervously, somewhat undermining her protest, but Clark graciously let her escape without further embarrassment.

"Anyway, once it's actually split apart, we need to soak the fibers, preferably in boiling water. That really should be extra easy for you because you're already by the fire and use water so much. How long you need to boil it for, we don't really know. Henrietta did some samples but she kept failing to get the fire to run consistently, but after a couple of days of occasional boiling, her fibers started to separate. Then you can fish them out, hit them a bunch with a mallet – we'll need to get you one – and then rub it a bunch between these two pieces of wood until the individual strands all separate. At that point, you can scoop them all up and hang them over this, where I'll take them and weave them into rope." Alyssa had learned her lesson somewhat, as she wasn't gasping for air this time.

"That all make sense?"

"You bet!" Clark shot her a thumbs-up. Boil the reeds. He could do that.

Though how was he supposed to boil anything long enough to make a rope?

He asked, and after a flash of what he thought might be shame, Alyssa assumed a bit of a haughty, disapproving look. She did that sometimes when she'd learned something new or was pretending to be more knowledgeable than she really was about something, so Clark didn't let it bother him. "String doesn't need to be that long, Clark. Most individual threads will be nowhere near as long as the rope that they're woven into. It's the weaving that provides most of the length and strength."

"Makes sense!"

Hmm. What color would the rope be? The threads were a bit of a whitish color, but boiling it might bring out any pigment inherent to the reeds? Would they become greener? Wood could be green, did that mean rope could be green? But green wood was bad for burning. And for making furniture maybe? But you didn't want rope to burn, and given you wanted furniture to be hard, did that mean green wood would be soft? And if green wood was soft, would that make green rope extra-soft? Did that mean Oliver was wasting his time making their mattresses if they'd be able to have green-rope beds?

Actually no, that was stupid.

Green fibers would be used for sheets, not mattresses.

Of course, that presumed that the rope would be green anyway, and not just white or yellow or something like that. But in case it did turn green, then he'd know what to do.

Actually, should he try to dye the water green so that it would be more likely to make green rope?

That was probably too complicated for right now, so he'd leave it as-is. Later on, they could adjust the color of rope as-needed for whatever project.

Were certain colors of green better for flexibility? Grasses were more flexible than trees, so maybe if the rope was grass-green it would have more flexibility than rope made out of green wood would have.

He'd also still try to make the threads as long as he feasibly could, of course. It wasn't going to be hard to make a trough of water under which he could build more connections. That would keep the water pretty much boiling for an extended period of time, so the rope might be even better than what Alyssa was expecting.

Fortunately, Alyssa had left him alone at this point to go spin what few threads they did have into rope, while Clark started working on the reeds.

Working on the reeds was so boring. You cut away the literal only interesting part of the plant, the outermost skin, and then did all the work with the boring white bits that refused to change color no matter what Clark had tried to put into it.

It also only took about a day of boiling to make the reed start to fall apart, Clark soon discovered. From there, if he let it go for another day then it became a lot easier to work with, both falling apart on its own but also collecting into clumps that were maybe slightly sticky, just enough for them to all gather together and be easier to work with.

Unfortunately, even the greenest piece of reed, once boiled and processed and stripped down, really wasn't all that soft. Apparently soft wood had lied to him, and how incredibly rough and scratchy and sticky the fibers were had meant Henrietta had rejected them entirely as an alternative to the kinda-stiff and kinda bad-smelling leathers they had when it came to stuff they could wear.

Yeah, the beds were rough, but at least you eventually got out of them. But clothes had no escape, and would be constantly and directly right up against their skin.

It made for great rope though, and Alyssa and Clark together looked on in pride as their product was rolled through Oliver's hands as he inspected it for quality.

Personally, Clark suspected that if Oliver rejected Alyssa for any reason whatsoever, she would have lightheartedly attacked him. But, it was flexible enough and strong enough for carrying a basket full of earth up the spire as they built a tower, and that was exactly what it would be used for.

Another successful and excellent step on their way, as was only to be expected from such successful and awesome people.