Matt had often wished that the sun would set on Gaia, mostly because constant sunlight had done absurd things to his sleep cycle. Sometimes, he’d go days without sleeping at all, driven on by stat-weirdness and the ever-present need to grind more estate credits. Other times he’d sit down for a quick breather and wake up ten hours later covered in nap-sweat, having almost forgotten his name.

It had become better over the last half year or so, possibly because of stats, or possibly because his poor circadian rhythm had finally given up and died, neglected and alone in some obscure portion of his brain. But he still would have done just about anything for an entire night of darkness, or even for just a sunset. He hoped for a natural, honest-to-god defeat of whatever the Gaian equivalent of Apollo was in favor of whatever their Nyx happened to be.

But rising from his sleeping bag and exiting his imperial tool shed that morning was the first time he wished he had a sunrise. The view that greeted him deserved at least that good of a herald.

Off in the distance, on a single plot of land selected to be close to Matt’s estate plot, was a village. Matt thought of himself as a pretty polite guy, one who got along with people fairly well. But the Gaians were a people who had known centuries of peace, plenty, and overall gladness. Over that time, they had evolved social considerations into a kind of simple, brutally effective art form. They would sense when Matt wanted something but was too polite or shy to talk about it, and give it to him before he even asked.

Matt had known people who steamrolled other people on Earth, and even when they were pretending to be kind, it was always in a way that resulted in the other person’s expense. Here, everyone was so genuinely nice, it was almost unsettling. The worst, Matt thought, were the old ladies.

One of them had eyeballed him while they were determining the location for their new town. She had somehow figured out that even though he liked the Gaians, Matt's newly recivilized psyche wasn't ready to be around large numbers of Gaians all the time yet. Then, she somehow determined he also wanted them close enough to see and visit but not literally next door. In the end, she took in on herself to explain all of this to everyone else, essentially ordering the former president of her country to relocate a town to be nice.

And then the Gaians had done exactly that without a single question. Like it was the most normal thing in the world.

With Matt’s elevated perception, he could see that the Gaians were already up and about their day. As a social group, they had quickly decided on what would be daytime and nightime hours for the town as a whole and had kept mostly to them. Matt had quickly followed suit to the extent his messed-up sleep schedule would allow him to but tended to either wake up a few hours before them or lag behind a similar amount of time.

They were all already busy. The adults were beginning to check moisture levels in soil as children put last night’s refuse into bins for composting. A few people had been assigned to keep bees, and they ran back and forth doing various things Matt didn’t understand to optimize the health and productivity of his ape-iaries full of simian bees.

For the first few months, that natural busyness saved them. Matt had been growing far more food than he needed for himself, but nowhere near what was needed to sustain nearly a thousand Gaians long-term. Luckily, as they emerged from the dungeon-like museum that had held them in stasis for centuries, they came bearing seeds. Literally.

The Gaians had somehow saved the majority of their important flora, including some incredibly quick-growing but edible weeds. They quickly implemented a program to get the fastest-growing food crops into play. Aided by all the improved Gaian soil Matt could buy, they managed to produce enough calories and nutrients to keep themselves going, using the plentiful Ape-honey to fill in whatever mana-content gaps the food didn’t quite cover.

Even luckier, they were able to do this without being constantly attacked by monsters and off-world assassins. When Matt had finally flexed his long-unused Global Authority powers to tell the system to stop, it had obeyed so thoroughly that Matt’s dungeon-system-running-but-not-quite-an-AI friend Barry strongly suspected he had died. Or left. Or been buried so deep in some stagnant state that he might never emerge again. After a year or so of constantly dodging the System Instance’s murder attempts, Matt found it hard to feel sorry for it in any case.

When the Gaians ran out of agricultural tasks to work on, they turned to improving their lifestyles in other ways. Matt had been busy grinding dungeons for estate credits, turning them over entirely to his System Guardian friend Lucy and the Gaians for spending. Despite being in many ways a little girl, Lucy was surprisingly thrifty and had a well-earned encyclopedic knowledge of the various items Matt’s estate could purchase. She and Ramsen, the Gaians’ former leader, had discovered that raw building materials like bricks and mortar were not only available to buy, but were orders of magnitude cheaper than buying pre-built buildings.

As the Gaians were happy to build their own homes, Matt was happy to do his part in providing the raw materials for them to do so. Between his reckless grinding to take down the second coming of the world-ending Gaian Scourge, and the semi-random stat growth he had obtained from leveraging his Palate of the Conqueror eating skill, he was easily strong enough to not be in much danger while earning credits.

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Matt Perison

Level 15 Battlefield Survivor

Class XP: 280 / 12,000

HP: 410

MP: N/A

STAM: 225

STR 73

DEX 126

PER 81

VIT 132

WIS 87

INT 10

Class Skills: Survivor’s Reflexes (LV15), Advanced Survivor’s Combat (LV15), Spring Fighter (LV15), Rub Some Dirt In It (LV15), Pocket Sand (LV15), Survivor’s Digging (LV15), Palate of the Conqueror (LV15)

All those stats didn’t mean he was good at everything, however. When Ramsen and a few other Gaians had first come to inspect the work Matt had done, they had walked very politely around the central plot he was the most proud of, then the various fields he had planted, irrigated with magic water-producing stones, and tended as best he could. He beamed with pride, then asked Ramsen what he thought.

Ramsen coughed, and smiled politely.

“Is it not good?” Matt asked, confused.

“It is… Not.” Matt had learned, through surprisingly few conversations, that the Gaians both didn’t like to lie, and weren’t very good at it. Mostly, they opted not to try. “I can tell you worked hard, but the work itself is unlearned. With your permission, we can do somewhat more.”

Of course, they could. I’m so stupid. Matt had thought. Agriculture is the closest thing they seem to have to a religion. Their children can probably do better than he did.

“Of course. You have that permission. If you like, you can get started changing it right here.” Matt waved at his central plot, where his first plants, trees, and Gaian Victory gardens grew. At the mention of changing that plot, the face of every Gaian present suddenly morphed in to horror.

“Change this? No, absolutely not.” Ramsen was aghast.

“Is it… would it hurt the other estate plots, somehow?”

“Not at all. It’s just, Matt, listen.” Ramsen drew Matt aside, something he thoughtfully did every time he was about to say something he suspected would embarrass him. “Matt, you have to understand. Everything is gone. All of our history is wiped out, besides what we carry with us.” He glanced back at Matt’s plot. “This is the garden that fed you as you defeated the Scourge once and for all. It’s the home of our people’s savior, Matt. It will never change.”

Matt gulped at that “never”.

“In generations to come, our children will visit and marvel at the humbleness of this shack, at the arrangement of the flowers…” Ramsen went on for a while, while Lucy tried her hardest not to laugh at Matt’s embarrassment. Eventually, mercifully, Ramsen moved on, then got to work.

At this point, every Gaian was well-fed, and had access to group housing. An increasing number of them had individual homes, chosen by lottery, with larger families receiving priority. And eventually, those houses would have running water, and would be attached to sewers, and dozens of other conveniences. Matt had seen the blueprints for what the town would become, and the amount of work planned was staggering.

So was the cost. The Gaians had planted groves of trees, but it would be a generation or more before they were large enough to consider harvesting. Besides what they could make from literal mud or grow from the ground, all raw materials came from estate points. Matt had been providing massive amounts of them, but now that the town’s food supply was secure, the Gaians were beginning to form dungeon raiding parties of their own.

For whatever reason, all the Gaians had emerged as the equivalent of level 1 villagers, classless and without any extra stats to rely on. Lucy and Barry had been working together to create patterns that the Gaian parties could run between dungeons that would slowly bring them up to respectable levels without putting them in much danger, and it had been decided that Matt would oversee every party’s first run.

If all went to plan there, raw materials would be a non-issue, and the Gaians’ already astounding pace of work would get even faster. Before he had known about the Gaians, Matt would have been content if he could have just established some sort of sustainable circle of life on Gaia, however small. It would have probably taken his entire lifetime, but he figured if he did it well enough, Gaia might be green again, if only in several thousand years. But with the Gaians returned to their home, he could imagine the entire continent being green again within his lifetime. Once they could defend themselves and farm their own dungeon-system resources, they wouldn’t need him at all. That wasn’t a bad thing. It made him smile to even think about it.

—

“Oh, look who’s awake.” Lucy was never all that far from Matt, and as far as he knew, she was always vaguely aware of his location. She tended to pretend towards being as human as possible, an illusion with frequent cracks that Matt dutifully pretended not to notice. She might be a hologram, or a hallucination, or a ghost bound to his soul, or something like that, but she was also his best friend in the entire world. If she wanted to pretend like she was a normal, non-guardian person, then a normal, non-guardian person she’d be. “Are you about ready to go into to town? They probably have breakfast going already. Or you could eat raw turnips here.”

“I could make food-cube soup, for old times’ sake.” Matt’s supply of centuries-old Gaian food cubes was a frequent joke for them now. His eating skill had originally been called Eat Anything!, and it had turned out that one of the features of the skill was that it papered over Matt’s perception of how spoiled the food was, something he learned the hard way when he had temporarily lost that skill and couldn’t eat the cubes.

What they hadn’t expected was that if he ate a cube, he had to thoroughly rinse his mouth afterwards before going into town. It turned out the Gaians were hyper-sensitive to whatever rot smell the cubes gave off to normal people. With Matt’s skill and Lucy’s inability to smell, they hadn’t known, but apparently he reeked like a lifeboat-ration graveyard after eating one of the cubes. “You could. I bet Gaian puke makes for good fertilizer.”

Matt broke. “Nope, okay, you win. I’ll pass. I’m giving up on cooking. And large-scale farming, and masonry. Anything the Gaians can do, I’m finding out I’m just a hobbyist at. At best.”

“If it’s any consolation, I think they do still find you impressive,” Lucy grinned. “Something about the whole ‘running into the jaws of a death topiary’ thing to save their lives seems to have sunk in.”

“Don’t remind me,” Matt grimaced. “Or them. It took me a week to convince them not to make a statue of it.”