Going back in time a bit, we reach the point where the ball really started rolling.
A few hours after giving her speech to the assembled people of her fledgling nation, Lyrhea retreated into the cabin to finally deal with the nagging annoyance of the last bit of the Tutorial. It was about damn time to claim those rewards, and she did so then and there in order to get that damn system to shut up and leave her alone.
During that time, she selected the Divine Manifestations and, to her mild annoyance, found that she was only given two options, both of which were the aspects of her biology that she had not selected long ago. She used her two rewards of that category to gain them, and as she suspected not much, if anything at all, changed. Perhaps she would need to sleep a bit to encourage any transformations?
Next up were the Exp, which of course did nothing, and the Evolution Percentage, which again did nothing, though mostly because Exp and Levels did next to nothing for non-humans and Evolution Percentage was a double-edged sword that only made itself valuable when certain conditions were met. The more valuable rewards were the pack of materials and supplies and other such things that she got via the Rewards.
These actually had an impact, as they could be used to help jump-start her burgeoning civilization. It was the last piece of that whole bit of nonsense that was the real prize of it all.
The ‘Beacon’ as it was called, was a simple cube the size of a rather large Rubik’s Cube, maybe one designed for people roughly 2.5 to 3 meters tall. As she held it and shifted it around, she felt a pull in her head, urging her to set it down and leave it.
“Well.” she said, a small smile forming on one side of her mouth. “If I were an idiot, I would obey you, little cube, but I’m not one, so I won't.”
She could almost feel the dissatisfaction from the cube, but she didn’t care.
“It’s not like I don’t have a plan, inanimate object in my hands.” she spun the box on one finger like a large ball, catching the object before its momentum would have sent it to the ground. “Just hold on a bit longer. I’ve got plans.”
“Uh, Great Mother?” a Lesser Lyrhean was obviously confused. “What are you talking to a box for?”
Lyrhea shot her a glance, tilting her head slightly and smiling. “Once I am fully healed, I need to ‘put this somewhere safe’, so to speak.”
And a few days later she would do just that, reaching a place that was high atop the series of plateaus that made up this starting point for her civilization. This place was the most defensible location, and she finally gave the box what it wanted and set it down softly on the dirt.
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To those who were watching, this seemed a bit of showmanship and theater that would seemingly have no reason behind it. That was until the box began to shudder and shake, slowly and slightly at first before violently becoming a rumble machine.
The box eventually stopped shaking and levitated up into the air, ceasing its ascent at roughly eye level with Lyrhea before the panels of the box separated and a bead of light inside the object flashed brighter than any light anyone had ever seen before. The panels vanished, and the light shot up into the sky before stopping and ramming itself down towards the ground and into it, leaving no impact damage or sign it had even been there, to begin with.
Everyone, including Lyrhea herself, either thought that was the end of it or that something had failed, but this disbelief quickly faded away as the ground around where the bead of light had struck began to reshape itself and a wood and stone structure of much higher and more ornate quality than any that anyone here had built themselves began to be assembled from nothing by some unseen power.
When the construction finished, a structure that blended the look of a temple and a house had appeared roughly where the bead had struck, with that precise location being the absolute center of the building’s total floor space. The architecture was a cross between Hellenic, Aztec/ Mayan/ Incan, and Indian styles, with a clear lean towards more ‘exotic’ and ‘serpentine’ forms, and this suited Lyrhea just fine.
It was easier to have a style given to her to work with than to have to make one up from scratch, after all. She also figured that this building would grow and change on its own as time progressed. After all, this world was more game-like every day, so a bastion that grows with its owner wouldn’t be out of the question.
The only downside she could see was that the temple-house was absurdly vulnerable to attacks. It was entire defensible should a foe get this far, with large open windows with no glass or shutters or bars and a trio of entrances/ exits that had doors that a rather determined unarmed Human from Old Earth could probably break down with a few good full-force shoves from a complete stand-still.
She mused o this, thinking of ways to add a bit of extra protection, but then it occurred to her that if someone got this far then they would likely be unable to be stopped by anything she could throw at them anyway. Besides, it would grow with her, at least if her hunch was correct, and that would likely make it a bit of a tougher nut to crack.
She entered her home, the doors opening and closing to allow her entry on their own, all while preventing any others from following her. This did startle her a bit, and she got an even bigger surprise when a rather determined human cultist tried to climb through one of the windows and found himself yeeted back with enough force to send him flying more than five meters.
Then she heard the pounding on the doors, and her fears of her home being a vulnerable place vanished as the banging ended when she opened the door to reveal that the physically strongest of her ‘daughters’ had literally ripped a large log from a pile and had been banging it against one of the doors with force enough to reduce a super-heavy tank made mostly of depleted uranium and tungsten to a cloud of shredded metal over and over again.
She gave one of her hunches a try and tried to will the home to allow others entry, but only if certain conditions were met, and sure enough the home obliged her request. Smiling to herself, she instructed her subjects to return to business as usual and retired to her new bedroom, and went to sleep.
And while she was off in dreamland, those Divine Manifestations made their effects known, not just on her body, but on all those who served her.