Homesteading in a fantasy world

After the funeral, things quieted down quite a lot, especially because of the constant rain. While being home was nice, I couldn’t hide away much longer without attending to my other duties.

Teaching was quite relaxing, and it seemed that even more people wanted me to teach them energy control, especially to acquire the energy storage stat. I looked at my achievement page with a bit of sadness.

During the war, I was a bit too busy, and afterwards, I hadn’t noticed, but I didn’t receive my achievement for getting the three main stats to the 3500 milestone, which would have normal given me access to the third tier of energy.

It turns out there was a reason for that. Apparently, you can only get the achievement if you don't put too many free stat points into the three main stats during one rank. If you did, you would only gain access to the next rank of energy and wouldn't get the free stat points or the achievement.

I was a bit disappointed about this. Okay, not a bit disappointed, I was really disappointed, but it was necessary. If that bastard had realized he had achieved rank three and I was still at rank two, things could have gone a lot differently.

Apparently, getting the higher achievements for most was basically impossible. There were only so many stat points you could gain, and everyone would eventually reach the limit of the stat points you could gain from a class.

My train of thought was interrupted when the few final students left my classroom, and I started to follow them out. During the war, it became abundantly clear that the energy storage stat was incredibly useful for an army, as it kept us in the fight a lot longer and allowed us to deal our maximum damage for longer than should be normal. Because of that, gaining this stat would be mandatory for every army personnel.

I, of course, couldn’t teach everyone, especially as time went on. So, as I reached my office, I quickly finished the little bit of paperwork that had piled up during the day and then started to write my second book.

The first one that I gave to the goblins had become quite popular, not only with them but with the people of the United Freeholds as well. It turns out that during the war, when goblins helped patrol and keep the monster population down in the nearby lands, they also struck a deal to copy the book I gave them.

Apparently, the goblins were quite happy to get the book copied for free, but the bookseller could also sell it to anyone else. I could see problems with that deal, especially how the bookseller could be left with the better end of the deal, but it seems that both sides were quite happy.

So, not only was I not going to interfere, but I think I wouldn’t have interfered even if the deal was bad for the goblins, as they would need to learn to be more careful.

The second book I was writing detailed the steps, different exercises, and my personal experiences and comments from how to start with energy control and detailing the path all the way to gaining the energy storage stat.

Of course, there's a lot more to learn about energy and how to control and manipulate it, but if I were to start writing that down, I think I would do it in another book. This one would already be quite thick. Because of this, I was going to name this book ‘Beginner's Guide to Energy Control and Manipulation.’

There are already many books with the same name, but the quality of those books is not judged by their names but by their authors. And I hope that in the future, whenever someone is looking for a book like this, the first recommendation they would get would be to find one that has my name on it.

The weather continued to be rainy, but now it also started to become colder. It was interesting how time flew by when you start to get comfortable and into a routine. This Monday was also like that, as I was completely caught off guard when my secretary announced that I had a development meeting in two hours.

The last time we spoke of this meeting was months ago; how was it already happening? I looked down at the book that I was working on; it was about halfway done, but I was quite happy with the outcome, and actually writing things down helped me refine my teaching methods even more and give me some different perspectives.

The meeting started quite normally. The beginning was like every other Monday meeting: a summary of the current situation, how much food we had left, and if anything significant had happened.

It was business as usual, but I was glad to hear that the hunting efforts were going well, allowing us to stay ahead of our food minimum projections. Life generally was quite good in the United Freeholds, and I was incredibly happy everything kept working well.

"Now that the regular part of the meeting is over, let's start talking about the longer goals we have," David said, as he was currently leading the meeting. He continued after a small pause.

"The capital is already overpopulated, and in the new territory we gained, the villages and towns there are also quite full. We also have a need for quite a lot of basic, and well, let's be honest, every resource we can get our hands on. So the plan is to start quite a few small villages near important resources, probably in places where there's more than one important resource."

David then pulled out a map that wasn't as large as in the war room, but it still covered a large table we all sat around. "We have an incredible need for food, lumber, and metal, but other needs that are quite high are glass, clay, coal, textiles, and stone.”

“For stone we already have a quarry that's good enough, but as we know, we plan on making multiple regions that are under the protection of different legions, and every one of those needs a fortress. Transporting all that stone across our nation would not be advisable, so local quarries would need to be made."

David could talk quite fast if he wanted to, but fortunately, we were all used to him speaking so fast, especially when he got excited about something. He pulled out a bag that was filled with different wooden miniatures, with different ones for each of the resources, villages, outposts, legion headquarters, and even for dungeons.

He started to place them on the map while everyone watched. The end result was quite impressive, as I hadn’t even realized we had so many possible places to gain those resources.

"Of course, some of the resources like lumber could be gained in hundreds, even thousands of different places, which is why I haven’t placed any of the miniatures representing things that we can build.”

“We now need to come up with where we want to focus our efforts. We should also take into account that we will not be able to accomplish all of this in one year, so we need to prioritize. The most important being lumber and farmland," David finished explaining his thought process.

We all silently observed the map, and as soon as someone gave their opinion, the arguing started. I let them continue while I looked at the map. This was not just the map of the United Freeholds land we currently owned, but also the agreed-upon lands that we divided amongst the three nations. It was a stupendously large area, and we would need to focus a lot of our efforts in a few corners, as otherwise we would be spread too thin.

"We have a less than stellar road connecting us with our allies that will need to be fixed. A part of this route will also lead to our newly gained holdings that will also need a road. When the road will split in two different directions. The one going to our new holdings will need to go past that dam we built.”

“All along the roads are quite excellent farmlands, not to mention the forests there. The only thing missing would be the metals," I said while I stood up and pointed to two different spots on the map.

This helped bring the discussion from a straight-out argument to a more productive one. It didn’t, however, take long for everyone to agree with the basic plan, but the locations of everything were still quite hotly debated.

There was also a problem of metals, and quite a lot of people wanted to go quite a ways to the West. The mountains that bordered our land towards the West had different metal deposits all over the place, but toward the very edge of our land, there were incredibly rich veins that seemed to go very deep.

I allowed the others to continue to argue about the farms and the lumber villages while I tried to figure out a way to safely get metals. The problem was that it was quite far West, well outside the legion stationed at the capital to properly defend.

There was a reason why we needed to make different regions that would be under different legions, as getting an army to a location took time, and if someone was raiding, they would have plenty of time to steal everything and get safely away.

We, however, didn’t have the manpower or resources to build another long road this year and also safeguard a place so far away. I knew there was a solution on the map; I just needed to figure it out.