Standing right in front of the line of trees separating the beach from the proper forest, I made sure to keep the princess behind me as I created a single, one-meter long strand of entropy. I didn't even realise where using this destructive force that once almost killed me transformed into the first tool I would use in almost any situation as if my other forms of magic didn't exist.

While it was worrying that I lacked any creativity when it came to using my tools, it was a surprisingly good thing for now. WIth how I had no idea who and when would watch me working, limiting myself to just one form of extraordinary means could give them the wrong idea that it was all I was capable of!

Just like the way of the war written by a certain Chinese war philosopher, if you know yourself but don't know the enemy, for every victory, you will suffer a defeat. Just by extrapolating this idea, making any potential enemies of mine, underestimate my capabilities was the best way of securing my future!

"Okay then. Now watch how the hero does his job."

Freeing my arm from the hold of the princess soft hands, I spread my hands out as if I was some kind of sorcerer from the kid's books, before simply moving the entropy strand along the line I came up with a moment earlier.

While some of the weeds and herbs were capable of absorbing the energy in order to turn into medicinal herbs of immense value as a resource, I couldn't help but think that so far, all the tress I ever saw only used it to further their natural growth. While it was quite puzzling as to why some plants were capable of using the energy in the proper way while some others were stuck with only their natural means, it was actually nice for me in the current situation.

After all, I didn't want to waste half of my mana just on trying to down a single, powerful tree!

Turning my focus back to the task at hand, I pushed the entropy in a move akin to old farmers mowing their land with the use of simple scythes. Starting from as far as my control of the entropy could reach to one side, I pulled it low, through the line of the threes for as far as I could hold it on the other side.

With how entropy was corroding everything along its path instead of trying to overcome its natural resistance, I only had to wait for a few moments for the entire line of threes to fall towards me with a loud thud, before moving a few steps forward and repeating the process.

Even if some might consider this a completely useless activity in terms of the practice of my control over the entropy, I was actually able to finally gauge how much mana I had to spend in order to recreate the entropy used to corrode the wood matter.

And it wasn't as low as I hoped it would be.

With my insane rings of mana long gone, I was stuck back at my previous maximum capacity of my core reaching around thirty-six thousand points. Even if there was no way to gauge exactly how much mana it took to take down a single tree and regenerate my strand of entropy to its state before the action, just by counting the fallen trees, substracting my current amount of mana from my full potential, and divining the spent amount by the number of trees, I ended up with about five mana points per tree.

Nothing much, doesn't it seem like that?

At first, I was happy about the results myself, but only when I realised that if I wanted to keep things going at any reasonable pace, I had to cut at least five hundred threes, before carving them all out… Even though I had no precise idea how much said carving would strain my mana reserves, but considering the fact that I had to basically cut the insides of the entire log away or just eradicate it whole, even my conservative assumptions were far from enjoyable!

But there was simply nothing that I could do!

With one line of trees falling after the other, I stopped only when my mana count reached the exact amount it would if I were to take down five hundred threes. With just a single gesture of my hand, a huge group of burly men instantly jumped forward and started carrying the logs aside, stacking them in orderly rows and columns. Now the hard part of the work was about to start.

This time I couldn't just sweep my entropy from one side to another, but had to adjust its form for every other log, making sure the sides of those canoes to be would be thick enough to withstand the pressure of the water. The last thing I wanted was the boats I made myself failing and causing the death of anyone. As long as the batch made by the craftsmen while I would be gone with the first group of the people would fail, no fail would fall on my head.

"Incredible."

Unable to utter even a single more word, the princess has fallen to her knees as soon as I finished the first boat, with her fingers tracing the even edges of the cuts. With how she was leaning over the canopy, I had a perfect opportunity to admire her cleavage, but with the seemingly endless amount of work before me, I couldn't care any less about such details.

Only by the time I went through half of the logs and calculated that carving just a single one cost me about fifty mana, did the craftsmen finally arrived with the first batch of the stone tools.

In that instant, I ordered the men that were patiently waiting around to get their new tools, and just hack at those logs and carve them out. Even after repeatedly stressing out how unimportant it was to keep it nice, I still had to send some of them flying before they finally achieved any level of efficiency in their work.

Freed from the manual labour, I could finally sit back and relax my head on the lap of the princess while trying to stop the pain spreading from my heart through the entire body whenever I looked at the insane mana points I wasted just to make those primitive boats.

With five hundred logs stolen from the forest and half of them being carved by my entropy, nearly half of my entire mana pool was gone! At first, I thought it was only my impression, but as I approached the halfway mark on it, I could bet that my mind seemed to sink deeper and deeper into the state of strange focus that I already knew from the ancestral grounds of those primitives.

Did lack of my own mana weaken Bogner's ability to suppress the effects of the evolved predator's mindset?

Whilst this question was quite important, by the time I gathered the strength to even think about it, the men working around the clock finally finished carving out the last log that I provided before and moved to cut even more of the forest's lungs. As the supply of the tools steadied, allowing for more and more people to join the fray, it would only take them about three days to reach the point where they would take a day to make what I did in a matter of an hour!

But while I could be pained about the progress of the work and prospects of the Overlord growing impatient and setting out with his army to face the rebels himself, there was literally nothing I could do.

Outside of bringing the wounded and weakest away on the boats that were already made!

Forcing myself to stand up from the comfortable pillow of mine in the form of the princess exposed thighs, I had to only send a single messenger before a huge group of a thousand people condensed in a single spot on the beach.

With each canoe capable of carrying two people, that was the absolute limit of what I could manage to take care off during the travel on the sea. While the number of boats increased five-fold as compared to my previous journey, without the hard turn against the current that starting from another side on the island kind of forced on me, I could only hope that this travel would be as simple and uneventful as the last time!