Walking into a camp full of strangers was admittedly an unpleasant feeling, but I had a task to do, and I would do it. I spotted a man sitting on the rundown remnants of what was once a wall, reading a book. I approached him, pulling up my settlement owner’s mark and politely asking if he’d be willing to tell me where his boss was.

Despite seeming slightly flustered at my appearance, he did one better, saying he’d fetch his boss for me. He ran off into one of the larger tents, and I stayed put.

Soon after, a stocky man exited the tent and headed straight for me. He looked to be around his fifties, with close-cropped graying hair and a stubbly beard. Like most of the citizens of Ftheran, he had dark skin, his a few shades lighter than Cal’s.

We moved to meet one another and he quirked a brow upwards. “You’re not the owner are you? I mean, no problem with me if you are, but how would a youngster like you get roped into owning a mess like this? Name’s Tuk, by the by.”

“Tess. And yup, I apparently own all of this! Kind of a long story. Anywho, just wanted to see how things were going, ask if you needed anything, and figure out what the plan is. Are you all settling in okay?” I wasn’t completely sure what the palace had told the builders, and I was hoping they weren’t taking their new surroundings too poorly.

“Well Tess, I’d be lying if I said this was my idea of a fun getaway spot, but you know what? We’re doing fine. Your forest pals are keeping us nice and fed, we’re getting some good pay for all this, and pretty soon we’ll be raking in the experience. We’re doing fine.” He wore a wide and easy smile, putting me at ease.

“Happy to hear it! Do you need anything from me?” I knew pretty much nothing about building, so my goal was to help however I could and let him run the show.

“Well, tell me how this sounds. Right around here, we’ll start working on a town hall tomorrow. We have more people than we can use on a single building, so we’ll start a house or two too. You know how many people we’re building for yet? Or how much time we have?”

“A town hall? What’s that for? And I think a couple hundred should be coming in a month, but Amak would know better.” I doubted we’d need a full blown administrative building if we were just here for a short while.

“Eh? Where’d you grow up? A tiny village? You’re not gonna get people to generate any real settlement energy for you without a town hall.” He appeared more than a touch baffled at my ignorance, but by now, that was something I was used to. “Any case, we can do that in a month. Definitely can’t build people individual houses, but they’ll have a roof over their heads at least.”

Well, that was something. “Perfect. Need anything from me?” Truthfully, I wasn’t sure what I could do, but it didn’t hurt to ask.

“Hmm. If you can get your hands on some more showers, I wouldn’t say no to that. We only have a few, and it’s a lot of us doing sweaty work. But I wouldn’t worry too much if you can’t.”

I could always ask the forest shadows for some, although I couldn’t be sure they’d have any to spare.

Actually, if it was hygiene the man was worried about, it was possible I did have something for him, though it was a long shot. I reached into the pouch out my side, pulling out a piece of parchment.

“Probably doesn’t make sense to build this seeing as you’ll only be here for a short while, but could you do anything with this?” I handed him the plans for the bathhouse that I’d gotten after the fight with the shower elemental.

The moment he looked over the blueprints, he became incredibly animated. “You have a- How? From where? Screw the town hall, I’d build this in a heartbeat.”

That hadn’t quite been the reaction I’d been expecting. “Is the bathhouse really that big of a deal? Is it really more important than housing?”

He rather emphatically shook his head up and down. “First off, this building is Rare. Do you know how often I get to work on a Rare building? Almost never, and when I do, it’s just for repairs. Actually building one from scratch? This kind of thing would complete class quests for everyone here. Hell, I’d almost pay you to work on something like this. Almost.”

All right, I could understand why he would want to build it, but was it really more important than getting a roof over everyone’s head? Anticipating my question, he continued.

“Second, how fast we can build depends a lot on your city’s morale modifier. Tents for houses, no choice in what we eat, nothing to do, and freaky sunless skies? Well, like I told you. We’re doing fine, but we’re not doing good. We build this puppy? We can just about make up for all the lost time it takes to build it.”

Quickly verifying what the man was telling me, I pulled up my settlement interface, searching through it until I found a section for morale.

Morale: How happy the citizens of your settlement are. Greatly affects their productivity, fighting ability, and social skills.

Current Morale: -50

Yeesh. On examining the number further, an itemized list appeared detailing exactly why the number was so low. Not that I would have expected much else: The city wasn’t really even a city right now. At the bottom of the list were a few lines, making it clear what the score meant in concrete terms.

There are 9 stages of Morale: Miserable, Dejected, Sad, Discontent, Neutral, Content, Happy, Delighted, Elated

Your city is currently Discontent. Current multipliers:

Productivity: 0.75x

Chance of making a serious mistake while working: 2x

Fighting strength of city guards and militia: 0.9x

Chance of lashing out and acting unkindly: 1.25x

Chance of helpful and kind behavior: 0.85x

Yikes. If I was reading that right, the builders would only be working three fourths as fast as they normally would. Worse yet, they had double the chance to make mistakes. Admittedly, that probably wasn’t that big of a deal, considering they were professionals. If they normally only made a big mistake once every hundred buildings, for instance, even with the multiplier, they’d still only be making mistakes once every fifty. Nonetheless, it wasn’t a great sight to see.

“All right, I’m sold.” Even if it did end up taking some extra time, I was sure it would make the people from Drawgin much happier to be here. The last thing I wanted was a few hundred disgruntled fighters on my hand. “Do you have everything you need for it?”

Tuk’s face visibly brightened at my agreement, and he began to scan the parchment in greater detail. “We’ll have to salvage a lot of stone from the ruins since we couldn’t carry all that much here. But it looks like we have everything el-” He stopped with a grimace. “Ah, never mind. Looks like you can’t just fill it with water. Need some high level water enchantment to finish it up. Damn, and I was getting all excited too.”

High level water enchantment? “I mean, it’s up to her, but we could probably ask Elphaea to do it.” As far as I knew, she was pretty top-notch when it came to life, earth, and water spells.

“Oh, you have a water mage? Says they’d need to have at least level 40 in the Water Magic skill. This ‘Elphaea’ of yours that high?” He appeared doubtful, not yet giving himself permission to get excited again.

“Pretty sure. She’s, you know, a dryad and all that.” After all, she had somehow grown an entire forest in a dry wasteland.

This was apparently news to the foreman. “You have a dryad? There’s a dryad living in a city?” He took a few seconds to recover before regaining his composure. “I can’t even tell if you’re yanking my chain, but you know what? You get a dryad to enchant one of my buildings? I don’t even know what I’d do.”

Well that settled it then. I’d try to get the okay from Elphaea, and then everything would be good to go.

One last time, I asked the foreman if there was any other way I could help, but this time he shook his head. “You just sit tight and let us get to work. A month from now? We’ll be set.”

The man’s confidence managed to fill me with some as well. As he didn’t need anything else from me, we said our goodbyes, and I headed back to the forest.

As I walked away from the builders’ camp, I couldn’t help but feel excited: Everything was coming together!

In just a month’s time, the final pieces of the puzzle would fall into place. Then, with any luck, my quest would nearly be complete.

For the first time in what seemed like forever, I was bored.

Week after week of fighting, training, and being thrust into completely new cultures had rewired me to expect some level of constant stimulus. Now, with a lull in all of the chaos, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself.

Still, it was a good problem to have: The only reason I had so little to do was that everything was going so smoothly. Five days had passed since I’d returned, and everyone had since comfortably settled into a rhythm of sorts.

The shadows had set both Cal and I up with spare tents, and I quickly readjusted to forest living while Cal acclimated to it for the first time. I’d been a bit worried about her seeing as she’d been raised in a palace her entire life, but it turned out that my fears were unwarranted. Being the stealthy fucker that she was, Cal ended up being right at home stalking through the trees, and she’d taken to spending her days exploring the forest on her own.

For my part, that left me with a lot more time to catch up with Hartha. Much like we had before this entire dark-god debacle, the two of us would venture into the woods, chatting and hunting as we went. Not one to hold back, she eagerly pressed me for details about my journey as well as launched into a host of stories about her progress with her new class. It was comforting being able to talk with her again, and it made me realize that I’d truthfully missed her presence over the past few weeks.

Ultimately, though, there was only so much chatting and hunting that could be done in a day. I’d left Hartha a few hours back, and Cal was off exploring, leaving me with some time to kill by myself.

Presently, I was seated on a large hunk of stone debris, idly carving at a chunk of the forest’s dark mana-infused wood. My attention was only half on the craft, while the remainder of my focus was spent watching the builders as they went about their work.

Had I been on Earth, the entire process probably wouldn’t have been too interesting to me. With magic and class skills thrown in, however, things became a bit more gripping.

I watched as one of the workers hammered the head of a chisel into a large hunk of stone at his feet. Instead of chipping into the rock as expected, the chisel glowed blue for a moment, and I could see mana flow from the tool into the rock. A moment later, the stone split, falling apart into six separate bricks.

Elsewhere, another worker stood by the rapidly-forming bathhouse wall with a pile of bricks at her feet. She stooped down and picked one up, laying it atop the rows of the wall beneath it. As she did so, two of the bricks still in the pile glowed blue for a second before disappearing, reappearing a moment later next to the brick the woman had just placed.

All around, there were signs of mana being used to make the builders’ work faster, easier, and simpler. Only about twenty of the workers were currently building the bathhouse, with others starting on the town hall and others yet building some simple housing, but everywhere I looked, there was a startling amount of visible progress being made.

I kept watching for a while more before deciding it was time to find something else to do. Before I could get up from my seat, however, a notification popped up.

Watch and Learn Activated: You have gained the skill Construction.

I blinked at the unexpected line, surprised to see my new ability activate. I’d gotten it directly after my fight with the shower elemental when my Intelligence had hit the 25 mark, but thus far, it hadn’t activated once.

“Damn. Would have been nice to have something like this back in college. Hell — would have been even nicer to have it before I’d spent all that money on college.” Certainly would have made my life a lot easier, but then again, I guessed most of the skills and spells in this world would have been overpowered back on Earth. I imagined pairing Watch and Learn with the wide variety of YouTube tutorials online and becoming wildly skilled at everything.

I dismissed the thought and scanned the buildings again, this time realizing that I had a fuzzy idea of how to finish building them. I hadn’t suddenly become a master of the craft, but if I’d been asked to do some minor DIY projects on my apartment back on Earth, I felt like I would be more confident now.

“Should… Should I be helping?” I doubted that my singular level in the skill would put me on par with the professionals, but if they could use an extra set of hands, it seemed worth a shot.

I spotted Tuk circling the construction site of the bathhouse, critically eyeing it for any flaws, and I made my way over. He soon caught sight of me and dropped his inspection, waving to me with a grin plastered on his stubbled face.

“Oi! Tess! You come to see how things are going? This beauty is really shaping up, isn’t it?” He patted one of the stone walls and beamed a bit wider as I neared him.

“Honestly, it really is! Can’t wait to see it when it’s all finished.” Hopefully the adventurers from Drawgin would feel the same too.

“A Rare building like this? You and me both. I’m itching to see this one done. But enough with admiring the building. You come for anything in particular? Anything I can help you with?”

“The opposite!” I replied. “I actually have a bit of construction experience, and was wondering if there was anything I could help you with.” Calling my skill activation “construction experience” was perhaps stretching the truth, but I decided not to call attention to the fact that I had a bizarre ability teaching me new skills.

He hit me with a funny look, pulling a hand up to scratch at his stubble. “Huh. Can’t say I’ve ever heard of a settlement owner who's done construction work, but maybe. What’s your level? And you just have the skill, right? You don’t have the Builder class, do you?”

“Only level one. And yeah, just the skill. No related class.” I had to imagine that made a pretty big difference, but I was hoping I’d still be able to do something.

He frowned slightly at my admission. “Probably not much for you to be doing then. Already got as many people as I can working on this and the town hall, and most of the good construction skills — the ones that make the job go a lot faster — are class skills. Can’t use ‘em unless you have the Builder class. Appreciate the offer though.”

Ah well. Worth a shot. I opened my mouth to thank the man and excuse myself, but he chimed back in.

“Although, I don’t think you ever told me how you got the bathhouse plans. You buy ‘em?” He stared at me inquisitively, and I returned the look, not quite sure what the question had to do with the topic at hand.

“Uh, no. They fell from a dungeon boss.” Did that make a difference?

While I didn’t think much of it, Tuk quite clearly had a different take on the matter. “Well for all that’s hellish and holy, why didn’t you say so! That’d be a nice vertical bonus we’d get!”

I nearly slapped myself for not considering the fact earlier. In my defense, I’d just learned about the concept a few weeks ago, and the only time I’d seen it in effect was on my wood bracelets, where I’d made or looted every material that went into them. The idea that such a thing would apply to an entire building hadn’t occurred to me.

“We’d really get a vertical bonus from me helping, just because I looted the plans?” It wasn’t as if I’d made the bricks or any of that.

“Of course!” he practically hollered. “You’d get the biggest bonus if you were the architect that first made the design for the building. But you also get a nice bonus if you win it from doing something hard instead of just buying it, you see?”

Well, it wasn’t something I’d expected, but I’d take it! “So… does that mean you want me working on the bathhouse?”

Tuk hit me with a broad smile. “You’re damn right I do! Let’s put you to work!”

Stat & Level Updates:

Construction 0 → 1

Character Sheet:

Name: Tess Age: 26 Race: Human Class: Arcane Arsenal Level: 7 Experience: 4611/7250 Prestige: 759 Health: 190/190 Mana: 200/200 Stamina: 200/200 Stats: Constitution: 19 Strength: 21 Endurance: 20 Dexterity: 19 Intelligence: 25 Wisdom: 20 Perception: 26 Charisma: 17 Luck: 23

Skills:

Weapon & Armor Spears: 8 Archery: 8 Small Blades: 4 Unarmed Combat: 4 Swords: 3 Hammers: 2 Staffs: 2 Axes: 1 Medium Armor: 4 Heavy Armor: 1 Movement Dodge: 3 Magic Life Magic: 5 Water Magic: 5 Fire Magic: 4 Spells: Minor Healing: 6 Conjure Water: 6 Flameploof: 4 Resistances Trauma Suppression: 9 Poison Resistance: 6 Heat Resistance: 2 Detection God's Eye: 6 Detect Trap: 5 Detect Secret: 4 Tracking: 2 Social Drinking: 4 (+5) Conversation: 4 Trade: 3 Flirt: 2 Deception: 1 Gambling: 1 Craft Woodworking: 6 Jewelry Making: 5 Herbalism: 2 Alchemy: 2 Construction: 1 General Reading: 1