The storm lasted for four full days before finally clearing, though I wasn’t sure how long it would be before the next one hit. From the way the villagers acted, it seemed as though autumn storms were simply a common part of life in this region, returning to normal business as if nothing special had happened.
The construction workers returned to work while Jamie sent off the first regular batch of goods from the village. The goods being sold this time were redflare pods, various flavors of soda, as well as crates of packaged salt, pepper, and sugar from the general store. According to her, these were all currently our most valuable exports.
Jamie herself accompanied this shipment to Corvath, as she had to submit the signed contract to the Merchant’s Guild for it to be considered official. After that, anyone caught reselling the products from the village(which had been officially named as Cain village due to a slight misunderstanding), would be charged a heavy fine. Depending on the scale of the operation, they might even be directly turned into a crime slave.
Yeah… that was apparently a thing in this world. To prevent overcrowding in prisons, those prisons also ‘sold’ their prisoners to prospective buyers for the duration of their sentence. To do so, they used special collars that would only be removed after the criminal’s sentence had been completed, and forced them to obey the one that purchased them, so long as their orders did not cause them to commit additional crimes.
Either way, it wasn’t going to be hard to identify people reselling our products. Soda was something unheard of in this world, as none of the other people that had been brought over here had apparently been given forms that would allow them to create it. Similarly, the salt, sugar, and pepper were all in special packaging that itself was iconic. If anyone tampered with it to change the packaging, that would also drop the value.
The only item that could theoretically be resold without obvious evidence was the redflare pods, which didn’t grow in this area to begin with. If someone nearby was caught reselling those, they would have to divulge their supply chain to the Merchant’s Guild to avoid being seen as a criminal.
Over the course of the storm, my reach had slowly stretched into the forest. Although I only claimed plots one hectare at a time, this was a monster-infested forest to begin with, so it was a matter of time until I started getting extra monster ‘population’ from there. Currently, it wasn’t enough to make a significant change to my monster point income, but it would add up over time.
Wesley sat in his office within the treasury, keeping an eye on the point income of the Land. He was personally quite eager to see some of the new buildings that had been unlocked in this tier, but knew that it wasn’t time yet. The village had been in a state of rapid development thanks to all of the original buildings appearing, so this temporary lull had actually been good for the villagers to help them get used to things.
Given what we’ve seen so far, they’ll need to really prepare themselves for what’s coming, he thought as a knock was heard on the door. “Come in.”
The door opened, and a young catfolk adventurer entered, looking at Wesley. “Sir, I just wanted to let you know, I spotted evidence of monster activity in the forest earlier. It’s small now, but it seems as though monsters have returned to the forest.”
Wesley nodded his head, assuming that he was referring to the goblins. “That’s perfectly reasonable. It was only a matter of time until they started showing up again. I assume that there are no monsters above C-rank so far, Liam?”
“It’s a monster habitat, so they’ll show up sooner or later,” Wesley confirmed. “I heard that there was originally a horned viper in the area. Do you have any idea where its original nest would be?”
Serpent-type monsters were known to nest together in large numbers, so Wesley was quite curious. If the Land could occupy the territory where a viper nest was located, it could earn monster points even faster.
However, Liam was unsure. “I haven’t seen any evidence of horned vipers since we arrived, but I’ll keep an eye out for them.” After that, Liam bowed and left, leaving Wesley alone in the office.
Monster habitats were naturally occurring areas that were a hotbed for monster activity. The reason for this was because there was a mana core at the heart of the habitat, acting as bait to lure the monsters in. The stronger the mana core, the more powerful the monster it could lure.
These mana cores were also the foundation of dungeons, meaning that monster habitats could be considered a type of outdoor dungeon. The only reason people wouldn’t destroy these mana cores was because they wanted to take advantage of the habitats as a way to keep monsters from running wild. As long as they remained in their habitat, they weren’t attacking villages or travelers.
However, if a high-ranking habitat appeared near a city, the local guild would not hesitate to issue an order to destroy its core before powerful monsters were drawn in. Otherwise, they could have a far more serious problem on their hands.
Monsters spawning was not a phenomenon unique to this Land. Any monster habitat could spawn monsters at regular intervals, though they did so through a slightly different mechanism. When a monster lived within a habitat, its own magic stone would resonate with the core of the habitat. Once a sufficient level of resonance had been achieved, monsters of that type would spawn within the habitat. They would appear at random intervals until reaching a saturation point, at which time they would no longer spawn in. Instead, once fully saturated, they would begin to strengthen themselves, sometimes evolving into higher forms.
That was why, even though the guild approved of the existence of monster habitats, they still issued regular quests to hunt the monsters within them. If a monster grew beyond the lure of the core, it would no longer feel any attraction to its habitat, and could easily wander away.
As for why monsters would leak out of dungeons, that was also easy to explain. The lure of a habitat was not absolute. It just made monsters feel instinctively welcomed in that environment. If a monster left, it was often either because it was pushed out by other monsters, or because it was having a hard time finding food.
Since there were hobgoblins, and even a goblin shaman when I first arrived here, this forest definitely has a strong resonance with goblins, Wesley thought to himself. Even without the Land’s spawners, they will have already appeared somewhere in the forest by now. Though, if his spawners count towards the saturation of the habitat, it will make it easier to control their population.
By the time Jamie returned, I had reached far enough into the forest to create my second goblin nest, and my monster points had been capped out at one hundred. As a first experiment, I tried to place a second goblin spawner around the first nest, just to see if I could. However, it seemed like I could only apply a single spawner of the same type to one hectare of land. So, while I could put a grovine spawner there, I couldn’t put another goblin spawner.
With no choice but to accept this, I made the spawner at my second site, which was at least a kilometer away from the edge of the forest in every direction. Now, I should have enough goblins spawning over time to gradually increase my monster population to the point where it’d be useful.
This also meant that I could return my focus to developing the village. There were many new buildings I’d like to try out, though I had to wait for my points to build up again. Although I had the option of just absorbing the money that Jamie brought back with her exports, I didn’t want to get used to that. Currently, although we were exporting goods to take in money, we were not buying anything to send it back out into the economy. This chapter is updated first at novelping . com.
If I got into the habit of absorbing gold coins for points, those coins would be permanently removed from circulation. A few hundred coins wouldn’t cause a problem for now, but if I kept doing it, there could be issues over time. Better to nip the thought in the bud now, and save stuff like that for when we have people selling us enough items to warrant such a thing.
The next day, I purchased the ‘Food Shop’, and placed it across the street from Jamie’s shop. As I had planned, this shop was designated as a bakery, which gave it a few stoves and plenty of space to make whatever flour-based goods the chef attending it wanted.
One thing to note, however, was that the bakery didn’t have the tavern’s endless supply of ingredients. Instead, it had a built-in storage that could preserve ingredients. At first, we thought this would be our ultimate warehouse tool, until we found that the ingredients stored in this way could not be extracted normally. The only way to pull them out was as part of the cooking process.
Because of this, there would forever be a bottle of shampoo in the bakery’s storage that had been bravely sacrificed as part of our testing process. Farewell, brave soldier, you most surely will be forgotten.
Regardless, I assigned another one of our talents with the Cooking skill to the bakery, allowing them to start producing bread and cakes using the flour and materials harvested from the grovines. We didn’t have any of their ‘honey blood’ yet, since we needed more time before we could start thinking about killing one to butcher it.
The day after the bakery was completed, I placed a watchtower in my starting area. I could have put it closer to the forest, but I didn’t want people to know that I had expanded that far yet. As soon as the watchtower was built, I felt as if I had a camera installed within it, allowing me to observe from an elevated point.
This was one of the buildings that I had been most looking forward to, ever since I saw that it was an option, because its description stated that it allowed me to perceive through the watchtower.
Without hesitation, I sent my avatar out of the manor and towards the road. I was greeted by several of the villagers along the way, who seemed surprised to see me, but I only offered brief greetings in return. There was something that I desperately wanted to test.
Once I reached the road, I looked at the western edge of it, the area that still marked the border of my territory on this side. I had never purchased more land to the west yet. Not for any major reason, just because I hadn’t gotten around to it.
Now, I took a step forward with my avatar, uncertain if it would just be teleported back to the manor as it had been before. This was the time to see if I was truly bound to my domain, or if it was just a matter that I needed to be able to ‘see’ where my avatar was.
My answer soon came to me as I felt my avatar’s foot touching the grass on the other side of the road, with no sensation of blacking out or being respawned in the manor. So, Prim and the others are unable to leave the territory, but I’m simply unable to leave the area that I can actively perceive? It felt like I was starting to become more and more familiar with the rules that I now had to live by.