Chapter 24

"Alright, well, welcome to the Purpleheart Collective, everyone," I said.

I was met by the stony faces of forty people who were humoring me solely because I had already proven that they could not in fact take me in a fight.

Well, also the inattentive face of a Level 15 delver who'd really rather be doing system research right now, but was here and bankrolling my dumb community service co-op because I asked nicely after sticking my tongue down her throat.

"The financial information of the Collective will be available to everyone present, whenever they want," I said. "Everyone gets paid in shares of the Collective's revenue, so it's important that everyone know how we're doing."

"That's nice," one of the former Dock Snakes who hadn't been one of the original four bandits who tried to mug me began, "but what the hell are we actually going to do?"

"First things first, we're going to address a material shortage," I said. "We're going to make an absolute fuckload of iron."

There was a lot of loud groaning.

"Yeah, I know, nobody wants to be a Miner, swinging a pickaxe all day to get rocks out of the ground," I said, nodding. "That's why you won't be. We've got at least a few Blacksmiths present, right? Hands up if you're a Blacksmith." Three people raised their hands. "Great. You three are going to help me put together a mechanized mining tool, so that the poor bastards who have to be Miners don't break their backs. We'll be needing a Mystic Artificer, too, but even if none of us are one of those-" The wizard-boss raised her hand, as did one other. "-we still have a Level 15 Spellblade who feels obliged to help us out.

"And, in addition to the mining," I continued, "we are going to need Farmers, so that we can feed ourselves. Which is also going to need enchanting, for creating a big enough internal space to farm in. And when we combine that with all the other renovations we'll have to do... most of you are going to be doing something like construction work, I think."

There was some groaning.

"Yeah, yeah, I know, I know," I said. "C'mon. Let's get cracking."

One of the Blacksmiths ended up having to go on construction duty, to help massage some fittings and joints, but the other two Blacksmiths were plenty to crank out our first prototype mining machine.

The way that mining often worked in this world was that Miners, as in people with the Miner    class, were able to craft things called Resource Nodes, which would yield mineral resources when struck with mining equipment. Resource Nodes didn't really deplete, and the only real limit to how much ore they could yield was how fast you could hit them, and how much mineral they'd give when struck.

To me, this was delightfully exploitable, because the rock we had to hit in order to get iron ore wouldn't move or go away. As such, our mechanized mining equipment didn't have to be something so cumbersome and tiring to use as a portable pneumatic jackhammer, like a real miner might use. Instead, we could just use a stationary machine that the Miner didn't even have to touch, and which could be... honestly, insultingly crude. This prototype? Absolutely sucked. Just an absolutely dogshit auto-miner. It was one of those old-school Da Vinci hammers, raised up and then dropped by a spiral-shaped cam wheel. Very simple, and very mediocre in comparison to pretty much any other powered hammer design.

However, for those to work properly, they had to be made of metal. Which we did not have in any great quantity. Da Vinci hammers, meanwhile, could be constructed mainly of wood, and work... well enough, for a little while. They'd need to be replaced, soon enough, but they were simple enough that our first prototype only took half an hour to build, and one of the Blacksmiths working alone could crank out the next dozen in only ten minutes a piece.

Meanwhile, the other Blacksmith and I worked on the next crucial bit of machine infrastructure: conveyor belts. Which was... honestly, not actually all that hard; it was sturdy fabric on some rollers. Building a framework for the rollers to sit in was the hardest part, and frankly even that was more tedious than actually difficult.

The finished design was, actually, pretty nice, to my sensibilities. The mechanical miner itself would hold the Resource Node in the middle of a gantry beam, so that the ore that popped out of it when struck would fall off and down, onto a conveyor belt running underneath the gantry. I'd thought, at first, that this made auto-miners that were like Factorio's, in that they would conveniently output in one direction directly onto a belt, but then realized they were even better. They didn't just output onto a belt, they included the belt. These sumbitches could be chained together.

How many of these it would take to saturate one of our extremely rough quick-and-dirty conveyor belts, I wasn't sure. We'd find out, though... and, also, learn what constituted "saturation," because real life had very different ideas about how conveyor belts worked than Factorio and Satisfactory do.

It took about three hours to do all the conveyor belts for our mining operation, which left the Blacksmiths with only one big build left, which, thankfully, they kind of just instinctively knew how to do. After all, what kind of Blacksmith doesn't know how to smelt their own ore?

(Probably a lot, actually. Smelting ore is a complicated enough task that warranted its own specialized professionals who only turn rocks into metal. But, fortunately for me, we didn't have to give a shit about that; the System says that Blacksmiths know how to smelt their own ore, so these girls are perfectly capable of building a big ol' furnace. It was probably not a blast furnace, which would be a lot more efficient than a traditional bloomery, but most of the effort in iron production was in mining, so automating that away would have to be good enough for now.)

Of course... that's what I was doing. There were other people building shit in here.

"I gotta say," I began as I walked into the much, much bigger-on-the-inside agricultural room, "I was not expecting this."

Right now, in the name of expedient construction and also cheapness, the subdividing construction that split the interior of the warehouse into individual, purpose-built rooms was constructed mainly of bamboo poles and rough canvas panels, with the bamboo having been pre-cut to two meter lengths, and the canvas... having required a lot of sewing to get it into a state usable for constructing what was, ultimately, pretty much just an Unreasonably Large Tent.

Still, despite the structure just being bamboo poles connected with cheap-ass tin junctions, a combination of other people being smarter than me and adding some additional bracing into the structure and Cecilia being a Mystic Artificer with a lot of magic to throw around resulted in the agricultural room being, on the inside, an impressively vast tent with about a hectare and a half of usable space inside.

I... am pretty sure that you'd need more than a single hectare of farmland to feed a group of forty people with regular agriculture, but thankfully, the Farmer class means we can circumvent that pretty easily.

"We're getting a few surprises of our own, y'know," one of the former bandits said, grabbing my attention. "Look at this!"

I followed their gesture, and beheld what looked to be an apartment complex made of cube-shaped tents, carefully stacked together, and with scaffolding added to provide walkways to make the upper levels accessible on foot. The complex consisted of two identical buildings, with each floor of each complex seeming to be identical. First was a row of five rooms (really, two meter cube tents), then a row of five empty scaffold spaces to act as a hallway, and finally a row of four rooms, separated in the middle by a somewhat cramped stairwell that most definitely was not up to code, but would have to do for now.

Each building was three floors tall, which, at two buildings and nine rooms per floor, brought the total room count to fifty four.

I'd known, when designing this thing, that it'd be overbuilt by at least fourteen rooms, but I hadn't really given a shit. What were they going to do, complain that I'd given them too much housing? Besides, at some point, someone might wanna move into this place, and it'd be nice to already have somewhere for them to stay.

"Have y'all seen the interiors yet?" I asked.

"That bunnygirl of yours is still working on 'em," she said. "We did look inside the first one she finished, though. Did you two just... overshoot, on the space? Or..."

"I'm gonna level with you," I said. "Just because I think that giving y'all productive jobs is better than prison time does not mean that I think I'm doing something good, here. You don't really have a choice in working for the Purpleheart Collective, and that is, y'know... kinda bad. So... In order to feel better about what I'm doing here, I'm going to try very, very hard to give y'all an actually decent standard of living. Which, yes, starts with giving you big, roomy apartments, and plenty of free time to enjoy those apartments."

She grunted. "I didn't really have a choice in joining the Dock Snakes, either. At least you're-"

"I get that you're either trying to make me feel better, or just complaining about how being poor sucks," I interrupted, "but I'd really rather not hear about the conditions that lead you to feel like indentured servitude in a company town represents an improvement in your quality of life."

She snorted, grinning a little. "Who knew the big bad Wizard was a big bad softy?"

"Literally anyone who's talked to me for longer than ten minutes."

Lunch was cooked in a giant communal pot, and consisted mainly of carrots, onions, and potatoes, with the three miscellaneous fish we added serving mainly to provide a meaty-ish stock, rather than for their actual meat content. I mean, sure, there was meat in the soup, especially after we took the fish out to filet off all the meat and put that back in the soup, but the bulk of it was root vegetables. And, well, dinner was going to be the same thing, since we didn't yet have a bakery set up to turn grains into bread, and all we had was root vegetables and whatever we could fish out of the harbor.

Still... it was hearty food, and in large quantities. It'd do for now.

But I couldn't wait to see how this place developed.