Talking to Dean reminded Bath that he should probably call his parents one of these days. 'Not now,' he thought ruefully to himself. He had plans for them, though he wanted to get COTD a bit more established before he brought his family into the fold.

He did send his Samantha, his mother, a text acknowledging the explosion on campus and saying that he was fine.

"It'll suffice for now," he reckoned.

Technically, it was still only day two of Basalith's existence. Bath recognized the need to build up the fledgling city into a powerhouse capable of outward expansion. To do this, he was spending a lot of time with a few exotic, predatory plants. Bath knew that he needed to develop a sustainable city that would function without his presence. This was of pinnacle importance as he conquered worlds and made his way toward the Core, Ildr.

The reason why this task was proving so difficult was that Bath needed to construct a lifeform without any kind of consciousness. With dragonleaf, all he needed to do was create a somewhat-sentient plant and then program the thing to believe that its optimal shape, normally that of a hedge, was actually that of a large house. This wasn't as far-fetched as it sounded; making the plant have a level of sentience had been the most difficult part and that which had taken up most of his time. After that had been accomplished, the rest was history.

He originally planned on using a similar kind of quasi-sentience framework to make the city capable of expansion both horizontally and vertically while also ensuring the city's defense. However, he was starting to realize how flawed such a plan was. Now, when the only kursi present were under his control, having conscious plant species like dragonleaf as the backbone of infrastructure was fine. But what about when Bath expanded out to other worlds with their own kursi? What if powerful entities from the Core came and attacked already-established cities?

Bath knew that anything susceptible to kursi manipulation couldn't be used. This, then, ruled out using dragonleaf as the framework for his city's defense. If he wanted to continue using dragonleaf cities going forward, he would need to ensure that the cities be protected from all hostile kursi by some kind of outer layer, lest he risk said invading kursi destroying his cities from the inside-out.

This meant that Bath needed to create a biological organism that acted solely on instinct and in response to physical stimuli. He was working now on incorporating venus fly trap reflexes with giant, extremely sticky, spined tendrils that would comb the air. Finding a way to make the spines distinguish between local wildlife and hostile entities like drones or attackers was proving a nuisance.

Then, also, was the issue of providing walls. Bath was well aware that almost all worlds had developed flying vehicles thousands, if not millions or billions, of years ago. In that sense, walls wouldn't be helpful in keeping sapients out. He needed to design some kind of spherical bubble that could cover an entire city and keep it physically separate from the outside, while not totally isolating the city from natural phenomena like rain or starlight. He was working now on a huge, spider-web-like net of plant fibers that could potentially cover a city in a barely-visible layer of extremely sensitive cords. He was studying pitcher plants now, with the intent of having the fibers chemically process anything that might fly into the net. He planned for the net to be able to cocoon anything caught within its clutches. Then, it was to excrete certain digestive juices that would specifically corrode anything metallic or plastic. Finally, the cocoon was supposed to let anything struggling within its grasp break free and enter the atmosphere of the city below.

He planned to have a layer of combing fronds above and below this net. Bath planned for the net itself to serve as touch sensors for the fronds below. The spined, sticky fronds would reflexively pass over newly-escaped lifeforms and deign whether they could enter the city. In other words, it would work in a similar way to the fronds above the net and serve as a tertiary filter.

This whole setup was giving Bath a headache. How the hell was he supposed to have a non-sentient plant do all this? However, he had a few ideas, and continued to work while simultaneously viewing the progress of the new recruits through tapping into the eyes of his avatars.

One location that lightened Bath's contemplative mood was the Apprentice close combat training room. The cheater from the Close Combat Trial was placed into Apprentice level, a clear mistake given his current-displayed ability in close combat. The cheater's annoyance gave Bath a great deal of hilarity, especially because Bath continued to adjust the difficulty of the avatars to stay one step ahead.

However, Bath wasn't focusing his attentions on any of the rooms related to combat. Combat was something that would become relevant later, after Bath encroached on more-developed worlds like Illudis. Right now, he was most astutely watching the people pursuing professions child educator, chef, and land-shaper. These were the people who Bath believed were currently most important. Especially chef.

One of the unfortunate aspects of having eyes and ears everywhere was that Bath heard endless complaints about anything that was wrong. Of course, lots of people said nice things about Basalith, such as that it was "so big," or, "so awesome," but these kinds of general exclamations didn't mean much. In contrast, the criticisms were always specific. He heard things like the vivid, "this soup tastes like my mother's ass," to the frequent, "These bathrooms don't even have actual toilet paper!" (Bath had stocked them with a sustainable, leafy-plant-fiber toilet paper of his own creation). These complaints left him even more put out than usual over humanity's unsurpassed ability to whine in the face of tremendous fortune.

Bath hoped that by putting all the tasks that people were complaining about in the hands of humans, he would be able to more enjoy his role as ruler and Dragon.

The way that these kinds of profession paths worked was fairly specific. Bath had created powerful boons for each one that he felt would enable them to quickly progress and start making useful additions to Basalith. For instance, for the land-shaper profession, he gave each person the boon of dragonleaf manipulation. This enabled them to communicate with dragonleaf despite the fact that none of them were kursi. Technically, what it did was give each person their own dragonleaf frond integrated directly into their bodies. They could then use this frond as an intermediary to communicate with other dragonleaf plants. In this way, like kursi, they would be able to control dragonleaf to do certain actions.

The Apprentice group was currently spending their time solely on this boon. The Beginner Tier was working on both that and a boon for improved spacial cognizance. Considering the other boons Bath had for the profession, he was eager to see what an Expert-level land-shaper human would be able to do.

The chef profession was also fairly interesting in its own right. After all, Bath wasn't teaching these people how to prepare food: he was enabling them to do so. The best case scenario, in his mind, was to provide boons enabling a person to create delicious, safe food from completely foreign ingredients.

The Advanced Tier humans, of which there were an unprecedented (and, to Bath's mind, glorious) one-hundred and three, where currently working on boons for smell, taste, poison resistance, and hand-eye-coordination. Smell was the most basic level of all, and Bath hoped that skilled individuals would realize its potential when deciding whether to mix certain ingredients.

Finally, for the humans pursuing the child educator profession, Bath had carefully picked the following boons: body language reading, empathy, body awareness, vocal quality, and visualization.

The first two were self-explanatory in their utility. Body awareness was to help adults understand how to present themselves in ways that draw children into learning. Bath was acutely aware how much a teacher's presentation affected how well their pupils paid attention. Vocal quality had a similar use, intending to aid teachers in keeping student attention by having an awareness of how to control their voices' inflection. Finally, visualization was the most powerful and the most important boon for the child educator: the ability to represent ideas and abstract concepts as pictures and visual representations.

Bath could only hope that humans would be able to grasp all the many uses of these boons. The entire point of this profession exercise was to give all COTD members a foundation and in turn give the kind of enhanced body Bath himself considered the bare-minimum for use.

---

As the day came to a close, Lepochim was becoming more and more annoyed by his status as "Central Marketplace Guard." He was an elite, special forces operative from a world adjacent to the Core. Even if he was a sealed kursi, he was still physically powerful. And yet, despite all this, he was helping people pick out furniture!

He'd been touching Bath's little communication node beneath his ear for the past several hours, only to be met with silence. Lepochim wasn't an idiot; he knew that Bath was simply ignoring him. This opinion was reinforced by the fact that Bath had only stopped answering Lepochim after the tenth time the sapient had contacted him to complain about the ridiculously picky and temperamental humans.

Lepochim hadn't even gotten the opportunity to ask Bath to remove the false coloring on his eyes to make them look human. Lepochim felt like yellow-on-black eyes would give him a new level of authority over these obnoxious worms who treated HIM like a servant.

He did take pleasure in the fact that each furniture-seeker would first endure the constitution boon bestowal, a process that Lepochim had quickly realized could only be classified as mildly agonizing.

Lepochim once again touched the communication node as he watched a new couple of humans looking for furniture get hoisted into the air and thrown onto the boon bestowal platform above.

As he grinned weakly to himself at their misfortune, Bath actually gave him a response. Or, rather, an order.

"Lepochim. You need to assign the Advanced chefs to kitchen duty tonight, as in right now. You also need to issue notices to the land-shapers that the Apprentices are to begin working with the community garden and livestock tomorrow. Those above Apprentice level are to go house to house and help people customize their homes." Practice makes perfect, after all.

Lepochim listened closely as Bath continued to issue him detailed instructions, eager for any task besides watching the Central Marketplace. He was expected to delegate to the kursi watching over each training room and ensure that everybody knew their place come tomorrow: day three.

---

Lisa was unsurprised to find that the number of people trying to enter Basalith was increasing over time. The line of people was wrapping around the restored outer wall of the city, with many people establishing tents and miniature campsites in preparation of perhaps multiple days of waiting. Though Lisa was far away from the crowd, she felt a general sense of pressure from the sheer number of people beyond the city that indicated to her that their numbers exceeded 100,000.

She'd mentioned to Bath earlier that they were going to need to expand the city out, to which he'd promptly agreed. When asked how, he simply told her to wait a day.

Lisa had full faith in his abilities to physically expand the city. However, she was more concerned with the reaction of the U.S. government to both the impending expansion and also the "attack" on the Virginia base. So far, the government had been silent, and this worried Lisa more than it comforted her.