Naho, the 22th, 10,391
The sewer system would consist of three parts.
The flush.
The vessels.
And the processing facility.
The flush was essentially a reservoir built somewhere up the mountainside that Six could release and have flood the sewerways. From one end of the city all the way to the end of the sewer system.
The sewerways would run under the eventual city and carry the waste away. If they ever became clogged or needed the contents moved, being able to flood it with water would be a useful option.
Then it would be the vessels.
Six began with working with Franklin to perfect the sewer installation process. This was another task he would need to delegate to scale it effectively and that meant making sure his site-super understood what he wanted.
Six had never been a road guy but he talked to a few in his time and they all stressed the importance of prepping the earth and making sure the ground is properly set before laying pipe or asphalt. She agreed, and then advised Six on another ten practical tricks she thought they should employ on the pipe work. Her Journeyman level skill in Construction showing clear.
So Six worked with Franklin who had her own ideas about how things should progress but they soon hashed out a workflow for what Six wanted to create.
A large sewer, capable of containing two walkways and a wide channel between them. Ensconced by golem melded rock, supported by stone pillars.
The overall section would have a diameter of about twelve feet.
It would be a big fucking pipe.
But Six wanted to future-proof against huge population increases and wasn’t even sure if the current dimensions were big enough as is.
Once they hashed out his design, they worked to perfect its installation within Franklin’s works yard. A fenced off area on the river near Gatbark’s.
The process was optimized and improved over several iterations but by the end of the day her crews had all been trained on the construction standards. Golems, ley workers, and people with shovels were used to excavate a trench. The golems shoring up the weak spots as Franklin's crew used large, almost black limestone bricks to build the cylindrical arches. Golems melding them together for extra strength.
Her crews were a mixture of races all working together, skilled tradesmen, golem operators, and straight goons. All focused on the new task, maybe gaining a level construction skill while learning it.
He observed their work during the final practice installation and felt confident that they could provide the quality he was looking for. Six didn’t want to tear this shit up for a long while.
And he wouldn’t, this would last for a long time. All Six could ask for would be some rebar.
The main stem began at the base of the mountain, close to the west end of the palisade, this was where the flush would connect and would travel through the center of Mountain’s End. Secondary and tertiary sewer pipes could then be built off this main system and the structures tied into all of it.
The next day Six was when ground was actually broken but so was the nature of large scale projects. Delays were inevitable. He didn’t do the ceremonial executive shovel full. He showed Franklin where to begin and her crews set off on a slight grade to intercept the eventual location of the processing facility.
That location was past the lake and further down the river, far away from any current living. it would take her crews a couple of weeks to reach it. He wished he didn’t have to pull her away from the housing and other necessary projects and such but they needed to improve their hygiene and it started here.
After getting them started Six went and began the flush system.
At first Six considered using Stone Wall and golem melded stone to create an artificial reservoir but he didn’t trust the transmuted to hold the lateral tension weight of the water without rebar to support it. He wasn’t about to create an artificial hazard for his people to have hanging over their heads, this needed to be safe.
Instead he decided to search for a section of glacier melt that pooled somewhere up in the mountain. It took a day of searching and an irritating fight with a weird moth monster but he eventually found a suitable mountain side pond that might work.
First things first he needed to prepare his workspace, which meant emptying this pond. He began by diverting the glacier melt that fed it. Using Poh Doh Six had the stone golem move stone and earth into the stream to block it completely and then he commanded Poh Doh to plough a trench to another nearby melt.
Once the pond was diverted Six used a simple water golem to initially pump the water out but eventually the little water golem needed to transition to carrying volumes out of the deeping hole.
Six killed a ton of established habitat doing this and a part of him cringed at the riparian damage but the spice must flow and progress had to march forward.
He at the very least had the fish and edible plants sent down into town via Ley Workers. Even if he was doing damage to the environment they would maximize the return for the sacrifice.
Six spent some time using Poh Doh to dredge some material up from the bottom of the pond Increasing the volume by increasing depth of the pond bed. He didn’t want to retrofit this in a decade or whatever, so he built it as big as he dared.
From there Six used earth golems to core a pipe half as small down the mountain. The smaller pipe should be less disruptive to the state of the mountain side and provide more material to wear upon, not that the flush would be used all that much or at all.
After he married the pipe to the sewers Six went back up and worked on bank stability of the material he dredged up. He didn’t want to create a landslide risk so had the Poh Doh partially meld the dangerous loose stone and boulders he dumped on the side of the mountain. He also selected some wide rooting shrubs and trees, placing them strategically for what their species would grow into. Plant Growth ensured they survived to take root and actually do their job
Ravna was busy with some more delicate commissions for the warriors of the town so he sent out a contract to Gatbark’s burgeoning works yard and the meteor dwarf pulled out all the stops to get it done for Six as soon as possible.
On the last day of the flush project Gatbark came up the mountain with a crew, ley workers carried a series of long metal screws. The mechanisms for opening and closing the sluice gate.
A simple turn to raise the block, releasing the water. Turn the other way to lower the block and stop the flow.
A simple task, with a large amount of responsibility.
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Golems and Gatbark’s crew made installation of the screws pretty simple. Gatbark refused to let Six install them himself, coming somewhat close to what Six would label insubordination but the craftsman in Six could appreciate Gatbark’s desire to place his stamp on some piece of the project, not to mention they installed it counterweighted so perfectly, the turn was basically effortless. Six was basically overseeing the final piece of the puzzle, he felt like he needed a white hardhat.
He brought Franklin up there to double check his and Gatbark’s work and when she found no problems he released the diversion and the reservoir filled up perfectly.
Nice.
That took him almost a week.
He had expected for the solo construction work to make him relax but by the end of it Six felt like he wasn’t getting enough done, quickly enough. The golems expedited alot of work but it was endless. Six knew that he wouldn’t ever really ‘retire,’ he would be one of those old dudes with a project always on the go but he did want to relax.
He wasn’t growing fast enough though. The world was scary, full of danger, he needed to be the biggest guy with the biggest stick before people really started to look his way.
At the very least there were other threadlings out there. He needed to progress his level and skills as fast as possible.
But the people needed this.
Six inspected Franklin’s progress and found nothing lacking. She was a professional and understood that Six expected his regulations and specifications to be followed. Six also doubted a person of her skill would risk wasting time on subpar work, such things would never push her skill past its previous limits.
Her crews had made amazing progress. They had already passed the town hall and were almost out of the village.He could leave them be, he had already asked Franklin about creating a dedicated sewer maintenance and installation crew, but she said “not yet,” and left it at that.
Six was her lord but she was the boss so he just trusted she had reasoning.
He moved past her crews to the secluded spot on the river he selected for the waste processing facility. This was past the glade and deep in the old growth forest.
Old growth, Six felt a little guilty cutting down some of these specimens but the spice had to flow.
He got to clearing an area of the trees. He loved land clearing back in his old life, taking an overgrown lot and getting it ready for development was hard work but slaying some monster trees made him feel manly.
He paused and considered the fact he died in the line of this work but waved the thought away. It might be that the failure was caused by the apocalypse of the system taking over earth. He also needed to get this done and he was probably the most skilled to clear these massive bad boys out.
So he spent a day clearing the lot. He used his chainsaw to place his falling cuts and Poh Doh and a few ley workers acted as the excavators.
He felled them into the forest, crashing them down and watching for hangers before skinning the branches and cutting the giant logs into length.
He ended up with a giant pile of logs and an even bigger pile of branches.
Those branches would be an epic burn pile so he had the ley workers gather them in an open spot of the glade.
He was left with stumps and Poh Doh made quick work of those, ripping and tearing the stump into pieces or sometimes right out of the earth. Now he had a little salient of sky above with the canopy removed, blue sky and white clouds streaming past.
Poh Doh began the excavation and Six had it dig a huge pit. Ley workers were carting in slabs of dark limestone which were placed then melded via golem. Limestone was porous, so Six made sure to use Stone Wall to create a sealed layer on sections he thought would be exposed to moisture as it appeared more granite than limestoney. The various chambers he was going to create needed to be watertight.
Now, Six was no engineer but had a few ideas on how he wanted this to work.
First was the waste reservoir, where the sewers would be able to pool and gather as an overflow or stop gap measure if the processing slowed or ceased.
Then there were the skimmers, a series of increasingly fine filters that served to filter the waste water to a significant degree before it reached the cleansing chamber.
The final cleansing chamber would be where the end stages of wastewater would be distilled into vapour and separated from the super fine contaminants.
This would be done via water and fire golems. Water golems to control the movements of the waste water and fire golems to bring it to boiling.
Hopefully it would create a better effluence than just routing the sewer water straight into the river. Six could have done that and it would be far more simple but fuck pollution.
Earth golems would remove the caught material from the skimmers and cart it to a furnace to be burned by more fire golems.
Fire cleansed everything.
The smoke stacks he created were topped with air golems that caught the emissions and kept the particulates from going into the atmosphere. Stealing only the air from the smoke caused by the furnaces and shunting the rest all into a collection chamber.
Six didn’t know what he would do with the ash. Probably bury it or something. He wasn’t sure if it was entirely safe, safer he knew but he wasn’t about to try and use sewage ash and expose his people to something accidentally.
The waste heat from the furnaces was used for drying kilns he built adjacent the plant, as they needed proper dry lumber more than ever now and it was the only thing he could really think of using the waste for. It's not like this place needed heated floors or whatever.
The only reason he could be so… flippant with golem use was his enchanting evolution, Sovereign Restoration.
Sovereign Restoration powered the golems he created so there was no need to constantly feed them mana cores. If he had to pay that cost this would be an unaffordable luxury and he would have had to either cut corners on pollution or effectiveness.
The cost to control the emissions alone would be hundreds of mana cores a year.
That would be hundreds more enchantments, enhanced forgings, recharges or whatever useful thing they could justify them being used on.
As it was, the cost was simply the construction of the golem, which for Six, was the mana core itself.
The building had staff rooms and such for the people that would have to operate the golem but with the finishing touches of Plant Growth grown doors and fixtures, the waste processing facility was finally complete.
-Waste Processing Facility-
Quality: Mundane
Rarity: Rare
Durability: 8500/8500
Traits:
Filters and cleans sewage. Greatly improving local hygiene and pollution levels. 97% reduction in emissions.
Six didn’t feel the need to add a reagent to this construction. It wasn’t of strategic or tactical performance and he could always have more built if they needed to improve the output.
He would need to staff the place with some golem operators to run things and some guards to protect against monsters as it was just too far away from the main settlement to be easily protected.
Through all of this he managed to get some combat training in, breakfast and dinners with Ravna and grinded out whatever monsters came to see the commotion. Boars, bristlehounds, A giant gliding snake, this weird seven antlered stag that shot fireballs at him. He was hoping to see the trolls and be able to take care of that quest but no luck on that front. Perhaps they had left the mountain valley.
A few more days and Franklin’s sewers crews reached the facility and the disparate parts were connected into a functioning waste system that functioned to Six’s minimum standards.
Overall the entire project took seventeen days which was insane when Six thought about it. Usually projects like this would take a city fucking months.
Things went fast when there was less red tape.
Hygiene should improve over time with this fundamental service. There should be a lot less shit and piss on the streets now.
Nice.
Next he moved on to the next priority. Jobs for the migrants. They expected food and Six didn’t want to just boot them in the face until they left, entitled as they were. He could leverage these people like big corpo.
He needed to create jobs for them and get their production in the green as fast as possible to justify his spending food on them.
They were living, thinking, breathing, yes. But resources weren’t endless.
So he decided to scale his mining industry and farming industries. More food, equated to more people, more steel equated to more weapons and armor. Both of these things would help scale the military he needed to nurture.
He selected a spot close to the southern mountainside where he would build a new housing complex, a mixture of parisian townhouse and communist block style. These would be built next to the budding mine, that was something that Six was sure he could expand near endlessly and would be a significant source of jobs for the people.
Instead of clearing the old growth this time though Six attempted to use them as center supports, utilizing Plant Growth and the Flowering Staff of Profound Verdance to essentially pull the trunk of the trees outwards and creating cylindrical apartments around the ancient trees.
Not exactly Rivendell style but they were huge, dry, and livable. Fantasy tree houses were one of the coolest tropes out there and internally Six had a strange sense of satisfaction being able to cross that one off the bingo card.
Six built to provide many different types of housing in the most dense way he saw possible. Studios to family townhomes. Ground floor spaces for commercial enterprises to set up and ply their trade. He designed this new municipality around the infrastructure that would serve as its vascular system. Franklin's crews coming in and starting the sewers here before heading off to marry it with the main line.
Only the sewer went in to start but Six had his new assistant, Elara, a well dressed halfling woman with tanned skin and light hair, mark down his thoughts for placement of services like transportation, hospitals, or even parks. They lacked the population for such things but his mind saw the future before them.
This whole saga of taming the land took over a month and Six’s pushing himself for maximum productivity led to skill increases across the board.
Skill increased:
Construction - Initiate - 16 - 19
Elemental Magic - Initiate - 15 - 18
Diametric Magic - Initiate - 9 - 11
Cycle Magic - Initiate - 11 - 13
Blood Magic - Initiate - 11 - 14
Blood Casting - Initiate - 13 - 15
Masonry - Initiate - 17 - 18
Chainsaw - Initiate - 9 - 12
Carpentry - Initiate - 15 - 17
Athletics - Initiate - 18 - 19
Meditation - Initiate - 18 - 19
Mindfulness - Initiate - 17 - 19
Perception - Initiate - 12 - 15
Survival - Initiate - 9 - 13
Six had so many skills on the edge of evolving that he considered just using the skill points he had been accumulating but, no. He knew he could push these skills and evolve them naturally so he would save those points for an emergency.
This could be fucking stupid, as he was confident that both Atheletics and Meditation would yield strong evolutions but Six was a late game kinda gamer and was willing to trade certain short term advantages for late-game ones.
If he could save 20 skill points that would push him into grandmaster enchantment.
The housing took weeks but as soon as Six completed it the slums outside the palisade of Mountain’s End began to slowly empty as the newcomers were given jobs, food, and shelter. People were still streaming in from Olisrosa but now they had a place to settle them.
Six felt proud at his work and justified in that feeling when he saw the town's hygiene had improved from deficient, through low, and back to acceptable.
Not everyone was pleased though. His developments also led to a conversation with an irritable Gatbark Gunnbjorn.