Time was a funny thing. It could, at certain points, feel like it moved at a snail's pace, like how the three months of the tutorial had felt like 3 years. Or, at other times, fly by faster than you thought possible.

With the bare necessities taken care of and our pylon placed, there wasn't much we needed to do with great urgency. We were where we were supposed to be, our travel was over.

What came now was the hard part.

The construction effort wasn't a speedy process by any means, and I wanted to make sure it was done right. No corners would be cut and everything would be done to the utmost perfection.

One thing I refused to do was conjure the walls from the ground like I had seen Tracy doing. Buildings made that way weren't as strong as ones made of natural stone and I didn't come all the way North with dreams of a Castle to create something not as strong as it could be.

Using that method also wouldn't take Runes or Formations as well, making them significantly weaker to attack. Also something I refused to let happen.

Instead, I had all Earth affinities who were willing to do so out searching for a good quarry site. It wasn't hard to find decent stone but I wanted the best.

As we grew in strength and received better skills or better techniques, our current methods would be obsolete but that wasn't an excuse to not build something to the best of your ability now.

It would be years before people reached D-rank and while it would be a hassle to redo everything, I was willing to do it.

An attack wouldn't come with a warning that would give us time to change it.

Either due to luck or general availability, a massive vein of Granite was found which was perfect for our tasks. It was the hardest stone in the world and would make for perfect fortifications.

It also took strengthening enchantments well which made future Formations that much better.

Hauling it only made the process take longer but I was fine with that.

To pay our workers, regular runs into the dungeon had to be made. We didn't restrict entry into them and anyone could delve if they wanted to, but our income from taxing what came out wasn't enough to pay everyone.

Especially for the back-breaking labor I was asking of them.

Crafters and builders made special wagons for stone transport along with cranes and winches, but it was still a Herculean task to do it for multiple hours a day.

Many received an increase of strength weekly through the exertion, or daily in some cases of weaker people.

Regular delves into the dungeons to make some coin was necessary to keep everything going, which fell to my family. Everything I pulled out of the dungeon went to paying our workforce and most of what everyone else did as well.

It reminded me of fighting the fallen pylons to farm points as the principle was the same.

I needed money, or points in the previous instance, and I got it through killing beasts. Having both dungeons there was a godsend in that respect and gave us enough to keep everything going.

As the days went on, it was easy to fall into a routine. Every morning I would wake up, eat a meat-filled breakfast, and then gear up for my daily dungeon runs.

While beginning every day with a decent amount of bloodshed wasn't the best, I liked to think of it as training. It wasn't a wave I was forced to endure or a beast coming for my head.

It was my prerogative to go into the dungeon and that put it all in a different light. The fight wasn't forced upon me, but it was me searching it out.

It took most of the tension out of it and made it easier to face every day when I woke up. If I had to face a wave every morning like in the tutorial, I wasn't sure how long I would make it.

It reminded me of something I said to Gabriel, how I looked at it mattered.

Looking at my morning dungeon runs as a chore would make me dread them over time and see them as nothing more than a way to make income.

With that in mind, I chose to look at them like training sessions. Not many in camp could be my sparring partner and fighting the usual crowd got stale after a while.

I knew their fighting styles and it wasn't enough to keep me sharp. Austin was flighty and quick, keeping distance with his speed while chipping at you with his spear. Fighting him made me favor my cold and the environment to get an advantage. While his spear had a longer reach than my hammer, he still had to get close enough to use it.

To counter that, he would use his longer-ranged skills so he wouldn't have to brave the cold to approach me. My ability to tank damage was too much for him to get through and the whole song and dance would repeat.

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Jonathan was the embodiment of a turtle and calling on his bloodline only made it worse. Using his bloodline, Law, and Spirit Anchor, he could tank my hammer using my full strength and [Avalanche] built up.

I could overpower him if I went all out and his defense would crumble but his ability to stop my hammer cold was impressive, to say the least.

Rachel was my least favorite to fight. She and Hal fought similarly enough but she was infinitely worse than Hal. While both kept their distance and fired off skills at me, Hal's were easy enough to block.

My manipulation of the Wind wasn't a match for his, but it blunted some of the damage and what was left was easy enough to let my armor handle. His damage was mostly physical, as the arrow carried most of the energy, and my ice dealt with it well.

Rachel, on the other hand, turned every battle into a contest of mana control and it was a battle I always lost.

She started out with a better mana control than me and only got better at it. I trained the skill, but not to the extent she did. Gabriel was the only one I knew that could give her a run for her money.

While I could lean on my better Law, it only evened the playing field somewhat. After that, it came to who had more mana and that was not me.

It only got worse after she got her bloodline. Where before I could attempt to challenge her, it was impossible now. The Draconic bloodline she managed to get did more than increase the potency of her fire, but also increased her already good mana control.

Fighting her was still a challenge, but it didn't really feel like a fight to me. It was more of an intense training session. That was fine, but training in the dungeons added that edge that sparring lacked.

It had stakes that fighting the others didn't and kept me on my toes. The eighth floor had some monsters that could challenge me and was by no means a walk in the park.

It was also a steady stream of essence every day and gave me a steady way to gain levels. My progression had fallen off during our journey and now was the time for it to pick up again.

Currently, I sat at level 66. Austin had pulled ahead to somewhere in the 70s and even a few others had caught up. My Legendary Class took more essence per level and both [Body of a Barbarian] and [Frozen Fortitude] took a bit extra per level.

The debt holding me back was gone, but they still took a little extra essence per level to give me the extra stat points.

I was used to getting up early during the tutorial and I carried that with me until now. The dungeons took a while to repopulate with beasts to fight and I made sure I was first in line every day.

While I could have barred entry until I went through, getting up a little earlier to make sure I was first wasn't that difficult and was the better thing to do.

There were occasions when by the time I got done with one of the dungeons, the other already had people lining up but they were nice enough to let me go first.

Running both dungeons took a few hours every morning but it was a routine I would try to stick to. Not many chose to run through both and even fewer delved every day, but I needed to make sure I kept progressing.

The world wouldn't stop just because I had and the months getting here were enough of a break already.

I didn't feel the crushing weight to keep leveling up like in the tutorial, but I knew strength would be needed for the times to come. Humanity was just beginning to get its feet under them.

Troubled times would come once the immediate threat to everyone's lives was dealt with. When the seas settled and the barest hints of civilization were re-established, the fighting would start.

And when the time came for someone to march against me and mine, I would be ready.

Both in personal strength and the strength of what I had built.

Only the barest hint could be seen right now, but time would change that. Every day we spent toiling over it now would save lives in the future. I was sure of it.

Once the foundation was readied, my job would shift to something other than construction. The Builders, Architects, and Engineers could handle that side of things, I was in charge of the Wards.

I hadn't spent all those points and hauled the precious materials all the way here to make a lackluster formation.

Gabriel and I were already coming up with different solutions to the problems we would face. With superhuman strength and abilities, climbing the cliff to attack from that angle was a very real possibility.

It would be extremely difficult, getting attacked the entire way up, but the cliff wasn't the impossibility it was before skills were a thing.

Another thing we had to account for was simply jumping over the wall. We were planning to make the wall quite high already, but with ever-increasing physical strength, the possibility was there no matter how high we built it.

In the later Ranks, flying would be an issue as well but that headache would be left for when that became possible.

The other two issues were what we focused on solving first. While there were many ways to fix those problems, not all were practical or feasible. Grinding the entire cliff face down to a smooth finish to make it impossible to grip was certainly an option, but it wasn't a permanent one.

Anyone with an Earth affinity would be able to morph the smooth stone into hand holds easily and bypass all the hard work we put into it.

What made our job the hardest, was the sheer plethora of skills people could possibly have. There was simply no way to come up with a solution that would work for everything.

The good thing was we had the time to think about it. We didn't have to come up with the answer right this second and we would be able to brainstorm for a while longer.

While we allowed other people to give their input for the construction side, I only spoke to Gabriel about the enchantments we would put down. The physical layout of the building would be easy enough to steal through espionage, but what the Formations did was a defense secret I wasn't willing to divulge.

Most weren't able to read Runes in the first place, but I planned to keep them secret for as long as possible and had plans to make that so. Building the Formation while construction took place would allow me to carve them inside the walls.

Doing so would make it nearly impossible for people to find out what they did without getting extremely close and spending a lot of time searching through the stone.

It was in this period of time that flew by faster than I thought possible. The Winter's peak came to the apex and began to wane with Spring close on the horizon at a moment's notice.

It was like I blinked and our weekly meetings went from discussing food stores over the winter to our plans for the farmers and where we would put the fields.

Our progress as a smaller group made me wonder how the Pylons around the world were doing. The Cities with over a hundred times our number had to be built by now.

Right?