The days went by quickly. I was once again constantly doing something which I thoroughly enjoyed. While I had learned to accept waiting, I’ve never enjoyed it. Making bows for the United Freeholds wasn’t as profitable as just making bows for myself. I was still getting paid a decent amount, but this way I could help my nation without just donating money.

Making so many second-rank bows and with a new design also helped increase my bow-making level. Depending on the material, making a bow could take anywhere from two to four days.

My life was quite simple for a while but I enjoyed every moment of it. It took almost a month until I was able to level up my bow-making skill to the advanced tier. From the offered three abilities, there was really only one choice, weapon core.

It was a complex ability and unfortunately not usable on already completed weapons. To test the ability out properly, I decided to make myself a throwing spear. This weapon didn’t require a lot of metal so I should be able to make it a second-rank weapon if I combined the correct unique metals I had access to.

This crafting process needed to be uninterrupted as I needed to constantly have a connection to the weapon with my weapon core ability which required constant upkeep of energy. The drain wasn’t too bad and I could easily handle it. It made the whole process a bit more complicated, especially when I modified the energy paths inside the metal. The making of the throwing spear only took about a day but 2/3 of that time was spent on the energy side of the throwing spear and not the physical build.

The end result was a bit different than I expected. Currently, the core did nothing more than be a battery for energy. This will definitely help with the first strike, allowing you to perform a more devastating attack. I think this was just the start. Continuing to use the weapon constantly, the core will start to refine the weapon itself, improving its properties, but that's a long-term benefit.

What I found more interesting is that the weapon core could have elemental inclinations. My elemental seeds would need to develop a bit further but I think I could use them to modify the weapon core, giving elemental affinity to the weapon itself. This could be incredibly powerful or just a waste of a weapon if the element is chosen incorrectly.

I was a bit sad I wasn’t able to add a weapon core to my current bows. The real question was whether to use this new ability on the weapons I was making that were going to be sold in the city-state. Showing off too much ability wasn't a good idea and I also think it was a good idea for me to take a small break from bow making.

I packed up the finished bows. I still had enough materials for another month of work. This brought a smile to my face but it was time that I started to work on some other things as well. My crossbow book was coming along nicely but I still needed some time to finish it.

The more concerning part for me was the last meeting that I attended where the main topic was road building. At first, they wanted to make regular dirt roads but I wasn't having it. There was a lot of pushback for my idea on how to make roads but slowly I won them over, especially when I told them that the legion was going to also help with the manpower.

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The legion had grown a lot, now having over 1000 members while only about 700 were proper soldiers. We needed a lot of supporting staff. They were currently training and building the legion's headquarters or the wall around the town.

With the current speed that they were going at, we were going to soon be done with the wooden wall. The fortress that the headquarters was going to be needing a lot of stone and while stone production was quickly ramping up, most of it was going to be diverted into the road project.

My plan was to make proper Roman roads but that required a lot of work. I was so glad about my better memory as I clearly remembered the diagram of a cross-cut of a Roman road showing all the different layers. It was going to be a lot of digging and transporting materials which would take a lot of work hours to complete. It should, however, guarantee an excellent road network that should last for thousands of years.

The meeting to actually figure out how we were going to do it would start in a little while but first, I wanted to give Roger all the bows that I had finished and hopefully convince him of another crazy idea I had. "Good morning, Roger," I said after he called me into his office when I knocked. "Good morning to you as well. What brings you here, Rich?" he greeted back.

"As you know, I will be a bit busy in the coming days and possibly weeks so I don’t know how many bows I can make. So just in case, I brought the ones I have currently made. There is, however, another matter why I came here. One of the things that was mentioned in your report caught my eye," my words made him quite curious and he indicated for me to continue.

"You mentioned that the land prices were quite low. Why don't we use a large portion of the profits to purchase a large piece of land so we could set up a compound for our nation?" Roger looked at me skeptically but he also didn't seem completely against the idea.

"Not only would it be good to have a place to store our merchandise, but it could also be an important connection point to the wider world and a place to recruit promising talent. You are our first connection point to the outside world and I want you to think more about the future and not just our current needs."

I sat back and waited until Roger could process my words. Finally, he started to slowly nod his head which turned into a firm nod. "I can see a need for it, Rich. You are correct that I hadn’t thought about the future, just our current needs and I will fix that mentality, I can promise you that. You have more than enough bows made for another trip but I will delay it a little bit longer so I can think everything through properly," Roger answered.

We talked a bit more until it was time for me to leave, otherwise, I was going to be late. With a firm handshake, we parted ways, both of us knowing a lot of work was ahead of us. With the treatment Roger got from the Verlon official bank, we should be welcome there even if we wanted to have a bigger presence there. That city was a connection point to the rest of the world and even more importantly, it was connected to many academies that could help our young succeed more.

One thing I was glad about was that every other council member also agreed, even when they were a bit reluctant, that we were not going to hold talent back. While there was a concept of childhood in this world, it was infinitely less than back on Earth. Here you had a lot more freedom when you reached 14 and you were considered an adult at 16, but those two years from 12 to 14 when you already had access to the achievement page were quite crucial. Usually people so young were held back from doing anything too dangerous.

It was extremely rare for us to change that but we did decide on a case-by-case basis if a person could, for example, join the legion. Currently, there was only one 13-year-old boy who was in the legion simply because of his incredible talent.

In the future, I could see that number being a lot higher as we were starting to give a proper education on the system and general knowledge to the younger generation. The next logical step would, of course, be to send them to world-famous academies so they could continue their advancement.

But now it was time to stop thinking about that and focus on the roads and how to make them. Just down the hallway was the meeting room that we were going to be using and I could already see many people that were waiting near it. This was going to be an incredibly large project but our first road wasn’t going to be the long one to the swamp dungeon but the proper road from the mountain to the town.