A New Kind Of Grind

We landed in a clearing in the middle of the Red Forest, touching down softly and safely.

I had, initially, wanted to build an Osprey-style tiltrotor VTOL airplane, so that I could take off and land inside a fucking forest, while also having the speed and flight ceiling necessary to cross the ocean stealthily. However, some testing revealed that a twin-prop tiltrotor was unusually difficult to fly, and also the takeoff and landing bits were unusually tricky, even for a twin-prop helicopter, which was... uh... not desirable.

So what I instead did was say "I am a high-level sorcerer, and I am going to use telekinesis to do the takeoff and landing bits on an otherwise perfectly normal airplane." I then built an airplane similar to the Updrake Mark 2, except that it could fold its wings back and be driven into a portable hole for storage and on-the-ground transport, and it also had a flying carpet enchantment on it. Dead simple, and hardly any real way to go uncontrollably wrong.

I opened the door of the plane, which unfolded into a staircase to the ground, and stepped off, into the grass.

From the treeline, a perimeter of on-edge elves emerged, bows in one hand and arrows in the other. They all looked... eerily similar. Was this going to be a problem, going forward? Was I going to have to work with the Carmine while being utterly unable to tell them apart? I mean, at least the common form they shared was searingly hot- fat tits, killer hips, pouty lips, the works. They also possessed the most wonderfully vibrant red hair, and most sported freckles, with the common arrangement, shared by a full half of them, was a band of freckles across the bridge of the nose and top of the cheeks, and a band of freckles across the top of their breasts

Ah, there we are. Another elf emerged from the treeline, who did look notably different from the others. She was taller than they were- as tall as I was- and nowhere near as much of a bombshell as they were. She was, also, visibly aged, whereas the others were all fresh-faced youths, which- if I understood elven aging properly from Nel's explanation- meant they could be anywhere from actually 20 years old to around a hundred and fifty.

And, in fact... I recognized her. She was dressed differently, in a simple green uniform much like her royal guard, her crown replaced by an ordinary hat, but I recognized the aged face of the Red King.

"So, Miss Updyke," King Rachel said, stepping past the perimeter of her guards, but only just by a foot. I wasn't unconditionally trusted, it seemed. I appreciated being treated like a liar acting in bad faith about as much as anyone else, but... oh well, I'll live. "You've brought your trade goods?"

"I did, yes," I said, nodding as everyone else disembarked the plane- Cecilia, Usagi, and Haruna, all possessing the Breed Speed 3 Trait, had all just given birth the other day, and were, currently, staying with the Purpleheart Collective, who furnished a lot of babysitters to help out with the three entire kids they'd had at once. "The plane can be packed up and moved on foot, if there's someplace that'd be better for conducting business."

"Mm. Fair enough. There's a ruin not too far from here that still has a roof over parts of it; we'll head there."

"So... the ruin..." I muttered, standing in what was once a grand hall with a high, arched ceiling, but which was now mostly a twisted pile of scorched rubble, with only a square of it about twenty feet on a side remaining anything close to standing. "...What was this place? Did you just abandon this part of the Red Forest, or..?"

"The war with Vega is catastrophic," Rachel said. "A crusade is called every time a monarch takes the throne, to cement their military prowess. Vega has more land than we do, and better land than we do, and they have sole access to the singular Level 11 Dungeon Gate on this continent. Every crusade kills nearly nine in ten of every elf in the Red Forest, and destroys nearly every building. We only build from wood, these days, because we cannot afford to spend any more time than strictly necessary to rebuild so that our population can survive."

"Ah," I said, realizing I'd severely underestimated the scope and severity of Vega's war against the Red Forest.

"I'm sure you've noticed how nearly every other elf is young, and looks like an unawakened elf bred for looks?" Rachel prompted. "That's because, to rebuild our population fast enough to stand a chance at surviving and repelling the next crusade, every elf in the Red Forest is drafted into military training up to Level 5, and then given an unawakened elf as a familiar, with whom they're expected to produce at least two, but preferably more children. We used to have much greater genetic diversity, when I was younger, but now, we have to do things this way, or else we won't survive. I hate it. I hate its necessity, and I hate what it has done to us. So. Roxanne. If you have anything in your pack that could possibly save us from this cycle... I will give you everything. I will give you the crown to this kingdom, and my hand in marriage. I will get on my knees and suck your dick, here and now, in front of everyone present."

"That... uh... Can I take a rain check on that?" I said. "Because believe you me, I've got a lot of shit, but... uh... I'd rather not feel like I'm taking advantage of your desperation."

"I will do nothing to discourage you from saving us."

"...Anyhow," I said. "I've actually developed a lot of useful technology as far as both military and industrial applications are concerned. I've made firearms that can punch through an inch-thick plate of adamantine, and machines that can make those and the ammunition they require without any operator intervention. I've also got the tooling to make quick and easy prefabricated buildings if those are still a concern for you, and also, a bunch of machines that automatically produce food, as well as pretty much any other resource."

"All of that sounds individually amazing, and collectively, like you've shown up with an empire in a box, and all that's missing is people."

"More or less, I suppose. Where do you want to begin?"

"Subsistence is... mostly solved," Rachel said. "People are hungry, but... surviving. Housing, however, is the biggest complaint, and being able to let people live in buildings that aren't the most tightly-packed barracks imaginable would be a vast help to morale."

"Alright, well..." I hummed quietly. "...Tell you what: I've got a vehicle technology that'll let you move to anywhere in the Red Forest within an hour, but which will not provide the same advantage to your enemies like a portal network might. How's about we rebuild this place, and connect it up to the existing population centers before we start expanding those?"

"Might as well, we are already here," Rachel said. "Although... would your vehicle work in the Red Forest? We don't have roads, here."

"We can run them through underground tunnels," I said. "Bury 'em deep enough and hide the access points, and the Crusaders won't even know they're there."

"That'd take a lot of mana, and we're pretty short on that as it is," Rachel said, frowning.

"Mana?" Akane asked.

"Magic energy, I'd presume," I said.

"Yeah, that," Rachel said, nodding.

"Anyhow, I've got generators that make a ton of magic energy, so we don't have to worry about that."

"...What sort of fuel do they consume?" Rachel asked, quietly.

"It's a closed-loop system," I said. "A given amount of magic energy, in a particularly efficient system, can produce more magic energy than it started with, in the form of magic recharge potions. I've gotta kickstart them with magic, but once they're going, they are going."

Rachel nodded, silently.

"I want those, before anything else," Rachel said. "If I had those things..."

"Duly noted," I said, nodding. "So, magic generators, then pre-fabricated housing, then everything else."

"Precisely. And, as for your payment..."

"Access to an elf with Extra Class Slots 4," I said.

Rachel blushed a little, then spread her arms wide.

"...Really?" I asked. "You got both of the mutated genes?"

"Indeed," Rachel said, nodding. "Very, very rare, and... we thought, when my System awakened, that it was auspicious. That my reign would see the Red Forest rise in prosperity. But instead..."

"Better late than never," I said. "Right, well. We're not gonna do the harvesting right now. We've got setup to do, and I'm assuming you'd rather we get to work right away."

"Right, right. Yes, please."

"Do we have your permission to cut down some of these trees, and clear away the rubble so we can build our facilities?"

"You do, yes. Good luck."

Anzerath had apparently, in a fit of boredom, gone through the trouble of developing a bespoke spell for assembling and riveting a semicylindrical tube house together in a matter of seconds, without any real conscious intervention from the wearer aside from where the house should be and at what angle it should be pointing. She also had developed a version that'd do the same with the larger, peak-roofed hangar buildings, and while she cast those spells, I could see some of the royal guards start to drool, their eyes dilating to the size of saucers as they watched the era of having to share a room with forty other people come to an end.

The houses would be... well, housing, and at some point before nightfall we'd go through and spatially expand the interiors to an insane extent, but right now, the priority was building factories in the hangars, and spatially expanding those to be absurdly large on the inside.

The first factory, true to my word, was a factory that made the infinite potion engines. I had a standard design that would passively self-replicate, if it wasn't being used, but assuming that they wouldn't be used was dumb, and so I made a production line that churned out and assembled all the parts en masse. Since the machines could be a lot bigger, they could be more productive and more efficient, and overall, this one factory would outperform the self-replication for the next decade or so, at which point the exponential growth curve would finally cross this quick-and-dirty setup's initial production volume.

Next, though, came a factory for more pre-fabricated homes, and since I had the space, I also set up two more production lines; one would make flat-pack plywood furniture, and the other made a combination oven and stove. The thinking there was, if people suddenly have a lot more housing, they're probably also going to want things to put in their housing, like chairs and tables and something to make food with.

From there, we split up, and built three more factories. I built a factory that'd combine an infinite potion engine with another autofarmer and spit out all manner of edible plants in large quantities. Meanwhile, Akane, Nicky, and Lisa built a clothing factory, and Anzerath, Nel, and El made a 'miscellaneous home goods' factory- cookware, lamps, cushions and pillows and bedsheets, indoor plumbing so that people didn't have to go outside to get water or make water. All that good stuff.

The end result, ideally, was that, for every prefab home kit we shipped out, it wouldn't just be a house in a box with a flat-pack table-and-chairs set and a cooking range. It'd include a full wardrobe, a bunch of assorted home essentials, and a machine that made endless amounts of food. The struggles of subsistence, all gone in a flash.

And as the sun began to set, and I handed the guards one of the first house kits to see how people who hadn't already put one together would do with it... King Rachel approached me.

"Are you ready?" Rachel asked.

"I am," I said.