Chapter 68

The mood in the capital was... pleasant and unpleasant. It was one of relief; people were happy and hopeful and things were getting better, but it was abundantly obvious that they were only relieved because, until quite recently, things had been really fucking bad.

People ate and ate and ate in these continuous feasts, and talked constantly about food- that's something you only do when you're starving. They chattered and rambled excitedly about how they had a new house with an indoor toilet and they only had to share it with twenty other people, because it was a genuine improvement from having to share a house with a hundred people. I met a young girl in her early teens holding a factory-made t-shirt in her hands and weeping with joy because she now had more than a single thing to wear.

My heart ached. These people had suffered, and I'd done nothing about it until it suited me. How easy this had been for me, how simple and straightforward, and every day between when I first could do this and when I finally did it was a day when all four million wood elves in the Red Forest slowly died by inches.

I squared my shoulders, and exhaled.

Hating myself for not getting here and working fast enough wasn't productive. These people did not and should not care about how I felt about their plight; what mattered was that I was doing the work now, and would continue doing the work until it was done.

"I'm afraid I can't stay for very long," I told the mayor, who directly administered the city. "There's other people in the Red Forest who need my help, and they've waited for it long enough. I'm not resting until they all have warm beds, clean clothes, and full bellies."

She nodded in understanding, and I glided down the stairs to the subterranean train station. Each of the trucks had been given a kit for making another underground train station, and it was up to the soldiers and the mayor of whatever town they were in to figure out where, exactly, it should go. Once it was set up, though, it pinged the central hub with its location, and I could start boring a direct tunnel towards it with magic.

The tunnel borer itself was, conceptually, pretty simple: it removed stone and dirt in front of it, and then created a tunnel with a thick stone liner reinforced with a mesh of extremely fine adamantine wire, itself sheathed in a much thicker layer of steel plating just to give the stone more contact area with its reinforcement. Then, as it moved forward to continue creating more tunnel, its back half laid down another ring of the enchantments that made this whole system actually do anything.

A hundred feet to the side, there was another tunnel-borer, doing precisely the same thing, save for a single changed variable in its programming. Where the first tunnel-borer dug the outbound line in the direction trains would move, the second one dug the inbound line in the opposite direction trains would eventually move.

The end result was that it only took a single trip around the rim of the Red Forest- where most towns were built, to maximize military response times- in order to connect up all the major population centers to the network, in one jagged, curved line. A line that, once I reached the southernmost of the major settlements, became a badly-drawn circle, as I connected the far end directly to the hub.

I put the tunnel borers in storage; at some point there'd need to be a lot more tunnels, but right now, transport was fast enough. One of the benefits of nearly every adult wood elf being Level 5 in a combat class and possessed of some basic military training was that pretty much any of them could be pressed into service as short-range couriers, carrying heavy boxes laden with supplies to the surrounding villages.

With delivery trucks, of course. Akane had taken one look at my design, and started building Yet Another Factory for them, while I went out and made sure the tunnel borers didn't fuck up. They were already being cranked out, loaded with shit, loaded into compression crates, and then put on trains to go to wherever they were needed... which was, admittedly, everywhere.

"Ah, you're back," Rachel said as I admired the final stages of packaging and shipping the trucks. "I've detected a design flaw in your network, unfortunately."

"...Oh?" I asked.

"When a train stops at a station, there is no way for other trains to get around it until after it leaves. That isn't an intolerably long time, as the trains are simply removed from the tracks entirely when they arrive at the station, but it is a delay, and a bypass would remove it."

I blinked a few times, and then sighed.

"Of course," I said, eyes closed. "Ugh. Well, whatever. It's not a big deal, and it is fixable. It's just... gonna be a change to the logic of the central control unit, which I have to be very careful and meticulous about. Fuck. That's an amateur hour mistake. Thank you for catching that."

"Don't beat yourself up over it, Roxy," Rachel said, softly. "You are, in fact, doing enough. And... well, I've heard from the mayor, about what you said. That you won't rest until every wood elf has a warm bed, clean clothes, and a full belly. Well, as it so happens, I know how many wood elves there are, and I know how many houses, clothes, and autofarms have been made. It's not so many that we should shut off the factories, but it is enough that, even ignoring every existing building in the Red Forest, we can spread out to only twenty people a house, the autofarms have taken all the sharp edges off of subsistence, and there's nearly as many sets of clothing as there are elves; at some point this evening, there'll be more pairs of socks than elves."

I blinked.

"You do not fuck around," Rachel continued. "There are less than two million wood elves in the Red Forest, Roxy. You either built your factories to fill everyone's needs in a day, or simply wildly overestimated how many of us there were."

"That's... Fair, but still," I said. "Production could be stepped up, couldn't it?"

"Yes, but doubling house production would bring us to five elves per house only two days sooner, at which point you'd want to cut back on production for lack of people to live in them," Rachel said. "I understand that you hate the misery and squalor we lived in, but... we've survived three hundred years of it. We can survive a week of a rapidly diminishing version, as more houses and clothes roll off the production lines."

"You shouldn't have to," I protested. "Certainly not because I couldn't be bothered to spend a few hours duplicating a few designs that've already been built."

Rachel sighed.

"...You have two hours before I confine you to your quarters," she said.

Two days later, I took a few minutes to enjoy the view from a crystal ball as the towns and villages put up batches of prefabricated homes, while big square blocks of them stood already finished, and being moved into.

Pretty much all farming, foraging, and hunting had been put to rest; a few people continued to garden and fish for fun, but now, the produce of the river and the dirt were more of a tasty treat to supplement the plentiful food that came from every house's autofarm module.

Big crates of new clothing, fresh from the factory, sat in town squares; the notion that one should own more clothing than what they were currently wearing was something of a foreign one to the common folk, but... well, they'd get there eventually.

I'd... well, I'd done it. I'd successfully banished poverty from the Red Forest. Everyone had a bedroom of their own, plenty of clothes, and an ample supply of food. There were, naturally, other improvements to be made; at some point, people who weren't starving and desperate would start wanting houses that weren't metal tubes, and people would want goods that weren't strictly critical to basic survival, but... well, right now, it wasn't really occurring to anyone to want those things, and when it did, they'd have a lot more free time with which to make a good try at solving it themselves.

However, while butter was undoubtedly the far more important side of the equation, the Security Dilemma and the Red Queen Effect were quite real, and guns did still matter. While most of the population was focused on assembling house kits and learning to drive, the military- composed mostly of elves who decided to stick with the military even after their mandatory training to Level 5 was over and passed the strict examinations that were necessary because Rachel simply could not afford that many soldiers- had been installing infinity generators at every dungeon gate in the Red Forest to keep them fully operational at all times, making the only remaining throughput limitation the simple fact that a dungeon gate could only spin up a new instance after five minutes, which was still nearly three hundred times the one instance per day rate that the Level 4-7 gates had been restricted to, and a hell of a lot more than the once a month rate of the two Level 10 gates.

Soon enough, an announcement would be made. That the strict testing of the standing military would be lifted, and that anyone who wanted to continue to train to fight for their kingdom could do so, and that anyone else could be carried through a Level 10 dungeon twice to reach Level 10, with no further expectation of service.

But first, to cut way the hell down on the mortality rates of delving, because we simply could not afford losses...

...I had to start making guns again.