The date was January 21st, 2049, and the sky was overcast, threatening rain, while Mark was inside, sitting in his new living room, staring at a long list of items on his tablet that was, in fact, ten different lists, a dozen various specialty options, and altogether more than 2,500 entries. Probably a lot more than that, too. Most of those entries had sub-entries.
It was the list of items, services, lessons, and money, available for contribution points.
It was daunting.
Where to even start? With the magicraft weaponsmithing lessons, that required Mark to go out and find magical shit and bring it back to town, and then learn how to turn that shit into flying swords and other things? Or maybe with the actual magic lessons, available for purchase and to take place over a whole year, but with a required Mage Secrecy Oath before you could even begin? Or maybe Mark needed to look at the artifacts for sale from the Artificer’s Guild?
… It was too much, actually, and Mark wasn’t quite sure why.
Mark set the tablet down and laid back in his chair as a certain sort of weight settled upon him. He wasn’t sure what the weight was, at first. He was overwhelmed, for sure. Two thousand, five hundred options, at the base level, were a lot of options.
With thoughts swirling, Mark looked around the apartment.
Eliot had built the place well, but Mark had seen the same apartment over 4,000 times, now.
Mark’s party’s room was located on the first floor of Castle One, one of five different living castles and two working castles, all located together, on the north side of the settlement, north of the lake. Their room, like many others, was a big central room, with only slight variation for personal needs. They had 4 separate personal spaces with one double space for Sally, seeing as how big she was, with most of the other stuff in the apartment on the bigger side, just a little. Doors were 9 feet tall to make way for Sally’s 8 foot height, and stuff like that.
Every room had a stove, running water, a fridge, basic internet connections; the Basic Income package.
Usually, settlement living was a lot worse than this, but Eliot was here and trivializing much of the initial building, which everyone was thankful for. Mark liked the view from here, too, even if they were on the ground floor.
The big porch windows looked out over grasslands between here and the lake. It had been forest, and then burned craters, and now it was simple grasslands. Eventually, it would be a lot more than that.
The lake wasn’t even a lake. Not currently. Just a meter-deep mud hole in the center. The tributary had yet to do much more beyond that, though not for lack of trying, or for lack of people trying to make the lake viable, even though it was nowhere near viable yet. Everyone had carved up the whole city over the last three days, with Eliot and various land Shapers putting together the pieces into a cohesive whole.
People were talking about transferring water from the Shine into the lake, but only vaguely. Reeni Thumb, the overseer of Agriculture and Resource Management for the settlement, was against moving water around like that, and so that option probably wouldn’t happen. Her reasons given were about parasites in the water of the Shine, and various contaminants that they simply didn’t need to risk. ‘One good month of rain will give us enough water, so let’s not rush it’, she had said. They had enough water to start farming crops, though, and so that is what they were doing at the western edge of the city, north of the tributary…
Well.
Mark thought of it as a tributary, because it flowed into the Shine and the Shine was so damned massive that it made every other moving body of water small by comparison. It was the Daihoon mirror of the Mississippi, after all. The veritable river running through the settlement would have been called a river in any other part of the world. The ‘mud hole’ the tributary fed into was a lot bigger than a normal lake, too, so it would take a while to fill.
Reeni had already set up some fishing zones in a small part of the would-be-lake, though.
Mark had already helped to feed those fish yesterday, but he could probably take a walk and go feed the fish again. Mark grinned at that thought. Feeding fish was a fun little activity, and it earned him…
Mark checked the tablet.
“Feeding fish,” Mark softly said to himself. “Worth 10 points for a full feed, using provided materials, or 50 points, using your own materials or Skills. Bonus of being first in line to eat fish on the menu when it becomes available.”
It was worth fewer points than what Mark was currently doing, but the promise of first-in-line for fish outweighed the opportunity cost of missing out on his current job.
Mark’s heart beat with a Union of resilience and weakness while he reached out and connected to everyone inside the building, and to the gardens set up to the north, in the center of the 5 apartment castles. Of the 11,000-ish people living in the settlement right now, about 1,800 lived here in Castle One. Most people were elsewhere, though, working or whatever, just like Mark.
Eliot had put up 80% of the buildings of the settlement in the last three days, which meant housing for 11,000-ish people, the settlement walls, the main Castle South, and also the secondary Castle North, where the majority of business and organization was being done, for now, and also all of the sewer systems and all of the intricate flooring everywhere. The land Shapers in the settlement, of all kinds from water to stone, had done the majority of the rough work, but Eliot is the one who made it all livable.
The guy was currently zonked out in bed and Mark was healing his stressed astral and physical body, along with doing the same for everyone else in Castle One.
Eliot’s work in the settlement wasn’t glamorous, or even that interesting after a while. Oh sure, the first apartment complex had been fascinating to watch, to see the floors flip into tiled ground and windows appear where there had been open air, but then Eliot did the same thing, over and over again. It was rote replication. It was all basic, and crafted repetitively, for the 11,000 people of the settlement project.
… Actually, how many people were here?
Mark tapped through the tablet.
Ah. 11,208 people was the current count. The number changed as Mark watched, going up and down and then staying like that for a while. Someone had just left and someone else had come in, and a few taps later, Mark pulled up the public profile of the new person. It was some guy from the Settlement of Xerkona, and the person who had left was… someone else Mark did not know.
More people were trickling in and leaving all the time, as latecomers showed up on their own, while others decided that they wanted out of their contract.
Mark kinda loved what was happening right now, though. Here he was, healing people, and planning his future in a new land, with new friends, and they’d be hunting big monsters soon, and that was all truly fantastic… But where to start?
With a grin on his face, Mark flipped back through the point-buy lists, looking at the page of listed artifacts for sale, for points. With a flick of his finger, he went past ‘antidote’ and ‘alchemy – specialty’, through ‘cleaning options’ and ‘food prep options’, to ‘travel options’. He clicked the option, and pulled up a list of enchanted items to assist with traveling. One more flick later and he was on ‘hoverbelt’.
There were a dozen hoverbelt options, from shoes that did little more than allow someone to walk on any surface and only barely sink, to actual hoverbelts, which allowed limited flight. One option in particular called to Mark.
The most expensive one, for 150,000 points.
‘Grand Magus grade hoverbelt. Will not break under almost all normal operations. Major resistance to tampering from tech-based Skills and other types of Skills. Reduced cost based on materials you can find yourself. Click here for a list of materials needed, and their respective point reduction cost.’
Mark clicked the link and saw a list of materials.
‘Gravcrystal, high grade, no impurities, 50 grams minimum: 12,000 points’.
‘Mithril, 500 grams: 50,000 points’.
‘Livium AI processing core, 50 grams. 50,000 points’.
If Mark went out there and got all of the stuff himself, which was a big ask because the livium core and the mithril were kinda beyond him at the moment, then he could shave off… Ah. He’d only save 12,000 points from the final price of the hoverbelt. The core and the mithril were the big necessities…
But he could sell some adamantium to the Metallic Bank in exchange for mithril, couldn’t he?
Probably.
It was a good fucking hoverbelt, and Mark kinda wanted it. A lot. ‘Grand Magus grade’ was the stuff an archmage or a superhero would use for fighting a kaiju. It would not fail under most normal circumstances. That’s why the price was so large.
Mark was absolutely sure he could buy a cheaper belt if he wanted to buy a cheaper belt, but who the fuck wanted one of these 10,000 point options? Mark checked out the cheapest one, for 8,000 points. The description read ‘a children’s flying toy, not to be used in combat’.
Fuck that.
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Mark was all about combat.
Mark flicked back through the menus, to the listing page for how to get points.
You could buy points, if you truly wanted the points. This was because you could only buy stuff from the lists with points; not with actual goldleaf.
One goldleaf was one point.
Sally had already spoken at length about how sketchy that was, and everyone agreed with her.
There were some economic shenanigans happening there, behind the scenes, but Mark didn’t really care how the settlement chose to make its money. Mark fully realized that these kill orders for monster hunts, and these chore bounties for feeding fish and the like, and all of this healing that Mark was doing and getting points for, were all undervalued, and the city was making money off of its settlers in large, massive ways. Mark hadn’t really realized that until Sally made a big talk about it. But that was fine. They were getting a home out of the work they were doing…
Mark let his mind wander through his options, as he fingered down lists on the tablet, and as he healed people far out of sight—
Ah.
Mark realized something about his earlier anxiety over all of these choices.
There were too many choices.
Too many paths to pick from. Too much stuff to buy. Too much of everything.
And Mark wanted it all. Everything. All of it.
He wanted the hoverbelt, and the mage lessons. He wanted to hunt monsters and drag along people with Harvester Knacks or Knowings or even Skills to dismantle the monsters for him, while they were still freshly dead, and he wanted to learn how to harvest monsters himself, so that they didn’t degrade instantly when he killed them. He wanted metal forging lessons and to help raise fish. He wanted…
He wanted.
Power, prestige, land, people, friends, family.
And a flying castle on top of everything else.
Mark grinned.
Well that revelation solved a few things for him, didn’t it. He was a greedy bastard, apparently. So… how about a hunt, today? When Eliot woke up, of course.
Mark checked out the hunting slots, which were really just the signups for escorting a Harvester-Skilled person out into the wilds to get the most amount of goods from monsters as possible. Sure, some monsters needed to be hunted because they were dangers, but unless you had a Harvester with you, then you’d be doing a lot of effort for a minimum amount of work…
Mark frowned as he saw that every Harvester was booked. Again.
So Mark switched over to monster targets, trying to find something that didn’t require a Harvester.
… Lotta interesting things to kill out there, for sure.
Dragonspawn, which were not at all related to dragons or demons, were spread throughout the lands east of the settlement. They looked like those gator-rexes that Mark and his team had killed days ago, and they were about as strong, but they produced naturally-occurring ‘mage foci’ —whatever those were— and they were not hunted directly, but instead tranquilized with either spells or Skills, and harvested while they still lived. Anyone could do that, provided they could knock the beasts out and then dissect them without killing them.
Mark’s skillset was perfect for going after those guys. Which was great! Mage foci were worth between 2,000 points to 30,000 points, depending on a lot of factors beyond Mark’s current understanding.
Hunting dragonspawn was suddenly at the top of his list for point collection options.
Another great target were the adamantium monsters out there, but only theoretically. Mark would have to find some, first. There were no listed sources out there, which was normal. They were incredibly rare, after all. But Mark should be able to sense adamantium… which was something he needed to work on, actually.
Later, though.
… Adamantium was a biometal that grew inside adamantium blooded people and monsters, which was sort of like these elemental mage foci that grew in the dragonspawn, so was it possible to make an adamantium mage foci? Maybe! What would such a thing even do, or look like?
Mark had no idea, but he kinda wanted to go out to the mage school that Eliot had set up yesterday, one district over from the War District, and see about those mage classes. Maybe he’d even send a kilo of adamantium to Archmage Blackthorn in Memphi and ask him what a ‘mage foci’ was… but that seemed overkill. Someone here could probably answer that question if Mark asked them.
There were mage lessons to be had, after all.
Flipping through a few pages of options, Mark came across the point costs for those lessons.
100,000 points for mage classes, which meant 1 day of class every 7 days. The entry read: ‘Paying in installments is acceptable. Mage Secrecy Oath required.’
“Too expensive,” Mark mumbled.
Mark went back to the hunting targets.
There was so much out there waiting to be found, killed, and harvested… but not today, Mark supposed.
Mark glanced toward Eliot’s room, where his vector was bouncing inward and outward erratically. He was dreaming.
Sally and Isoko were out at the settlement doing something. Mark wasn’t quite sure what they were doing, only that they were together. The whole settlement was on the buddy system right now, and it would be like that for a while. Maybe a year or more—
“Oh,” Mark said, as he realized something else about all of these options in his hands. He felt the world crystallize a little, as he said, “I want to kill kaiju and dragons. I should organize options based on that.”
Feeding the fish for meat was important, though, so that went to the top of the list.
Next came big monster takedowns, which was a whole category listed as ‘raids’. There were limits on the number and types of people who could fight various monsters, since the monsters were there for training purposes. There was even a gator rex, similar to the ones that Mark and his people had killed, which was listed under a D-grade raid for a limit of 4 people, and which was worth 10,000 points. Bigger monsters, for people like Mark and his team which were Grade B, were worth a similar amount.
Grade B monsters were all things like goblin encampments and super strong monsters, usually with speed-based Skills. Speed-based monsters were almost always higher ranked, just because something moving twice as fast as a normal person was always a dangerous prospect.
The third thing to go after was a tossup between magic lessons, weapon crafting, or maybe he could even sign up for general partying. Everyone needed a healer and Eliot was going to be busy with the city for a while —they wanted him to make a tram system, and the city absolutely needed a tram system— so Mark would need a temporary party now and then. Sally and Isoko would both be going after their own goals, as well. A temporary party to help people who needed a healer was a very valid option, and Mark would be helping others at the same time, and that sounded great.
But Mark, Isoko, Sally, and Eliot, would certainly be doing these big monster kills together...
Mark paused.
“… Am I forgetting something? Something important?”
Mark tried to remember…
Nothing.
“Eh! If it’s important I’m sure I’ll remember it eventually.”