Different from what people in this realm seemed to believe, opening up space on the wild lands was incredibly simple. You just had to challenge whatever laid claim to the area, win and fully establish your own mark on reality.

While those following a more instinctual path could choose to settle in such a way easily enough, because instinct guided them to some simple benefits, such knowledge would not disappear when they reached a higher level of intelligence like in the case of awakened spirits or atavistic beasts.

Outside of the gods, some weirdly lucky spirits and the ancestral beasts the grandfathered the beast kin, perhaps only him and the ancestral dragons actually learned this technique the hard way, and even then it was impossible to tell when they went over any sort of hurdle to figure it out.

Not that he qualified as a sufficiently powerful mage to inherently figure it out or had struggled with the idea of how to imprint his aura onto reality. It came quite naturally due to his path actually.

As much as that actually did him though, if the territory he claimed remained unoccupied or was constantly challenged it'd be absorbed into another's local domain or just straight out reclaimed by the realm.

Sans his four stage plan for colonization.

First he'd kill everything in a straight line that could form a metaphysical domain between the smallest straight line he could draw in a map. With his attack power and active detection capabilities it was not too hard even when level fifty beasts showed up, though that only happened once.

Then he went forth and cleaned double that same amount of land towards both north and south from the straight line, flooding the outermost quadrants with death, ice and salt so as to avoid migrating beasts seeking fertile land but still leaving plenty of space for expansion of the colony while nature fixed it's balance.

After destroying domains over these several hundred square kilometers over the course of a whole day and several mana pools later, Aki finally started clearing a physical path to the middle point starting from the demon kin territory. At this point his beautiful daughter was probably still a whole day of marching the settlement caravan from the nearest teleportation-able town. Surely she'd be impressed when the nearby villagers sang his capabilities praise and awe even if they were terrified.

He had warned the locals living close to the forest (who he did not know to be a legal and sanctioned settlement or not) that there would be plenty of rumbling and that they should beware either an increase or decrease in game and predator animals in the region, but it was unlikely they'd actually understood what he was going to do.

By the time he had cut up and stored the lumber, removed the ground vegetations and rocks and beaten up the earth and rock into a two way avenue with enough space for two carriages going each way all the way to the circular area he'd delineated as the city starting premises it was already nearing midnight however.

And truth be told, his healed pathways were starting to complain even as he used the land, his path and several consumables to keep going at this enterprise while at full throttle.

So after opening up a clearing that reached into the secondary perimeters he'd cleared, he instead decided to speed up the fourth part of his building plan instead of actually connecting a big fat lane between two warring nations.

Meaning he went and started building up a fuck ton of buildings from the ground up. While the easiest part was certainly setting up the holes for the foundations and preparing some good tree trunks to act as support beams, what with him being no trained engineer, he still had to take out the rock slabs he had purchased for this occasion and set up the basic settings of a longhouse which he had a blueprint for, though he did make the whole thing cheaper by using the liberated plant matter and magically grafting it to the support beams and molding the mass of wood into the necessary composition of floors, walls and roof of the two story building.

His pockets aside, going through with this was turning out to be a lot more tiring than he'd first expect, something he only admitted when the first building had working windows and doors, the small amounts of metal necessary for small parts all present abundantly both in his storage and in the surroundings.

Sure, it was a great chance to improve his crafting capabilities, especially since his domain was currently helping him by reducing costs all around as his opinion that there should be a village where he was building was rather strong and dissipating through the metaphysical bubble, but out of nowhere he was starting to realize how bad ass those crafting focused main characters truly were.

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Not that he wasn't going to force himself into finishing all of this so he could give his daughter an easier time, the construction of the first residential district proceeding incredibly fast even by the magical standards of this realm, but although he intended to stop before reaching a point where he'd need to take an unreasonable amount of time to recover, he was probably going to take a break before finishing his project in it's entirety, and it was unlikely he'd even have the strength to jack off at that point, nevermind fight.

This type of attitude could probably turn into a problem later on in his life, but looking upon the half built housing district as several new spells automated any small operations he could possibly hand off, Aki was unsure if this wasn't fine.

………………….

Even hours deep into the forest trek, the entire expedition had yet to suffer a single wildlife attack. And yet they could not hear the supposedly distinct sound of her master construction efforts.

No villager had been able to properly explain it, but something that was consistent across all testimonies was how much worse it was than anything normal construction and the fact that it could be heard hours away from how loud it was.

Rather than reaching said noise however, the next sign of him was actually a strange stone wall in the distance, something that kept rising in their view until it reached close to the height of the capital's outer wall.

Despite the thirty meters tall and fifteen meters thick wall of gray stone that had very likely sprouted from the ground in only a day or so, what instead held Asa's attention were the two wooden plaques at the portcullis gate.

'To my dear daughter: you can do it! By the time you are reading this I will be done resting and started preparations on the other side of this town, so we will meet as soon as I can bring over the human representatives. Take your time with settling in, I've sped some things up for the expedition, so don't be shy about publicly torturing the first few dozen idiots to offend you.'

Considering the fact that the giant, clearly reinforced wall, extended left and right on a rather slight curve following the immense clearing of naked dirt, she was momentarily convinced that he meant the prohibitively expensive construction, that might or might not be enchanted, standing in front of her.

She did not need to look inside the settlement to shatter that notion before it was shattered for her.

Other people did not have nearly as much mental flexibility as to accept the truth before them however. Even without trying too much, it was easy to hear a few conversations rapidly picking up speed as many theorized when this wall was built and how such movement of resources was kept secret, especially in a place as dangerous as this one.

It was easy, that is, until the unstopping procession came into reading distance of the signs by the gate.

While she understood that he was likely being literal in his words, Asa did appreciate the effect that the public sanctioning offered. Especially since she did intend to go through with it if given the chance.

Some of the leads of the caravan… they saw this as an opportunity instead of a task, and in the way that only those playing into the trappings of society could do, ended up competing and infighting despite her presence.

While she did not know what their reward for such a task was supposed to be, she imagined that despite the crown's best attempts, there would still be some kind of plotting and game of benefits despite the seriousness of the affair. Still she would use them.

Ilidia, the head engineer, was sent forward to inspect the readily visible longhouses, mansions, what seemed to be a hospital and a squat stone building.

Ferdin, head of logistics, was to inspect (together with some engineers) what were obvious warehouses and form a plan to facilitate the access, security and longevity of both what they had brought with them and whatever they could take from the forest.

Garko, head of security, did not take long setting up groups of scouts to look for anything that might have entered the town while the gates had been open for them. Setting up guard details was mostly unnecessary at the moment due to the teams already serving such function, but soon enough a new rotation and more assignments would become important.

Sereplirting, head mage, was just looking around with the gaze of a little girl seeing pretty bugs fly around, something rather strange for the haughty noble, but then again, most of her team was doing the exact same, and the rest was fervently discussing ever since they'd seen the dirt roads leading here.

Jacks, her impromptu secretary, was by her side, looking as impassive and bored as ever while jotting down every minutia he seemed able to perceive.

For now, she had nothing but possible grunt work to possibly occupy her attention, but something she'd learned in her early days was that such an action from leadership figures was looked up to by the common people, but neither was it the image she wanted, nor did that allow for those of higher birth to continue to see her as a proper threat, though she doubted that unless she asked Aki she'd come to understand such phenomena.

She was no stranger to waiting however. Problems would come in their own time and she would keep to her mission when they came.