Chapter 31: Making Hard Decisions
I use one last 500 mile scroll to return to the University Campus library. Time for some quick research and yes I guess theft of some picture and travel books. I also grab a couple of world atlases and other maps to help plan my Great Game cities plan.
After working on it all night I have had to make some hard decisions. I am going to try for 18 Hub cities, and 24 Satellite cities only. Nothing smaller will be built to start with. The grand total for these basic set ups will be 300 million gold pieces. With what I already have this should be a realistic amount to scavenge before the end of the week.
I need 67 million gold pieces to set up the hub cities teleport network and another 72 million gold pieces to add in the satellite cities to the teleport network. It will be around 21 million gold pieces for a Great Game sewer system for all of the cities. I also realized that I will need an additional 10 million gold pieces worth of supplies in order to hold the population over until the first harvest. Prepared fields and seeds with equipment would be another 42 million gold pieces.
So to set up everything right the first time I am looking at an initial outlay of 492 million gold pieces. Thank god that is only a one time expense. However, I have to keep enough in reserve to pay the hired help from the Great Game so I still come back to the 500 million gold pieces figure I originally had.
I will probably have to compromise and not have somethings immediately, but it hurts to know that as much as I might try, this is one situation where I cannot fix everything. The Great Game changeover itself will cause a huge loss of life for people. I expect no matter how hard I try that another 25% of survivors will die due to lack of infrastructure in my kingdom and probably closer to 50% of survivors will die due to lack of food and facilities outside my kingdom.
I have to think of the larger picture and what can help the most people long term. I did have one positive piece of news during the night. Around 3 a.m. I received the following notice from the Great Game.
“Your kingdom has grown large enough to be considered a tier 5 kingdom. As the first tier 5 kingdom on Earth you can select from the following kingdom perks.
1. Universal Language
2. Improved Housing
3. Improved Fields for 1 year
Please make your selection now.”
I chose the Universal Language perk. The Great Game help explained it as a common language that all Great Game participants would have implanted the moment they entered into my kingdom’s claimed area. It would not replace any existing languages or skills but would rather be a bonus so that all intelligent species found within my kingdom’s borders will be able to communicate with each other regardless of background.
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I hope that as I grow my kingdom, especially since I have a head start on the rest of the world, I will be able to secure some more kingdom freebies if I grow the kingdom into the next tiers before anyone else. I could not find out anything from the help section on what size or requirements a kingdom needed to reach each tier. So I will have to continue improving as fast as I can to get the bonuses that will keep my kingdom as the greatest.
After a nights deliberation I have also decided that I need to go for quality of quantity in my hiring, even for the 1 week temporary positions. I hope to hire 20 resource teams of no more than 50 people each and teleport them to 20 different large cities throughout the United States. I thought about sending them world wide, but the time it would take to explain about different currencies, and how to recognize banks in other lands was not the best method. Instead I will target the 20 most populous cities in the U.S. according to the books I got out of the University Library.
While these scavenging teams are working on the U.S. I will teleport across the world to various areas and clean out as much as I can where I can find it. I will revisit several sites I went to previously and finish the clean out of the precious metals and gems. I estimate I can still get about 50 million gold pieces worth of precious metals by the end of the week this way. If there is time I will also try and locate several other gold and gem reserves I had read about but either felt were too dangerous to get too or were too hard to find. With everyone gone for the tutorial all that is left is physical defenses an with my magic I can get through those quite easily.
I have high hopes for the Russian gold and diamond reserves, the Swiss banks, the Netherlands gold reserves, and the Dubai gold reserves. If I can locate them quickly the estimate from my past and current research indicates a possibility of over 10,000 tons of precious metals which would transfer into 300-350 million gold pieces. That is without the diamond exchanges I hope to find. There are no specific maps to these places in foreign countries. So I will have to teleport to the city and search with my gold sense and just rob banks of their paper money also to get as much as possible.
If I am lucky I might be able to hit every goal I have for money. However, even if I raise twice as much as I estimate I need, it will still never be enough to eliminate the pain and suffering that people are going to go through world wide. I just have to do the best that I can and pray that I can stay ahead of the curve in infrastructure, management, magic, and safety. The task seems impossible, but If I take it one step at a time I can make the new world a better place.
I am really regretting the time I wasted preparing some of the magic items and vehicles before the changeover. I should have realized that an equivalent or better system (such as teleportation for travel) would exist in the new world.