Monarch of Solitude: Daily Quest System - Chapter 233

Dividing the labour force that he gathered into three groups, Rino left the manpower distribution to Kamiya and Zerg to manage. Deezer and Bink were in charge of material logistics, and Rino would lead the foraging team to the jungle of doom.

The plan was simple. For the next two weeks, Town Zera was going to undergo a transformation. Pavements would be built based on traffic demands, new building sites would be in progress as Zerg assigned rooms to everyone. The hot spring would be rechanneled to these living quarters for everyone’s enjoyment in a public bath space, and the trolls will help prepare the land for farming expansion. Rino wanted to introduce new shrubs and trees with a greater variety of fruits, herbs and vegetables.

The only thing that Rino put on hold was the crafting guilds extension at the stone cottage by the river and marketplace. He was still wondering how he could improve on the existing design. It wasn’t a terrible idea to place the crafting guild right beside the cookhouse and blacksmithing workshop. However, Rino was thinking about the foreseeable future and how difficult it would be if the guild expanded.

Most of the earth gnomes were in charge of creating bricks with Ubel’s crafting team. The less powerful fairies under the soul contract with the magic trees remained behind while the more powerful genesis fairies followed Rino out of the town.

Placing his faith in Zerg and Kamiya’s ability to organise the labour forces, Rino led the genesis fairies accompanied by a small but powerful team of killer rabbits with him. Surprisingly, these monsters in their hybrid forms were able to keep up in speed with Mutt. The sabre tooth wolf was not holding back as he ran through the night. The sun had disappeared behind the rocky mountain range only a few minutes before they left the safety barrier of eternal night.

Leaving Town Zera behind them, Rino’s elite foraging team approached the dangerous jungle. The night was a time for hunting and hiding. Many dangers lurked, but Rino’s expert team remained undeterred.

The few killer rabbits who followed him were experienced from the horrifying death trap maze in the dwarven mine. They were used to dying and resurrecting, so Rino chose them specifically as shields for the genesis fairies if things went south.

Although the genesis fairies were powerful and could command superior magic spells, they were physically powerless against other things. Unlike Kamiya and his clan, these fairies could suffer physical harm. They were not undead and could not regenerate infinitely using Rino’s mana.

“If you see something that looks edible, grab the fruit or find the seed. Leave as little traces of yourselves as possible in this jungle.”

Rino’s stern reminder sank into the team as they went in different directions. The strategy that Rino had was fairly simple. He would remain at the edge of the forest with Mutt while sending the five teams with clones of himself using shadow magic. Mutt would guard him while he focused on assisting the teams with identifying what was good and what wasn’t.

Kamiya’s clan members assigned to each team had two duties. The first duty was to spot dangers and tell the fairies to avoid them before something happened. The second was to become a shield for the fairies in case things went south. Monsters had a better sense of danger than non-monsters. Fairies who were not native to the jungle could fall prey easily to any seemingly harmless vine. Rino knew how easy it was to mistake the hair of a sleeping monster as a vine from his previous experience.

The five teams filled their first spatial inventory ring with various seeds, fruits, and shrubs in two hours. Rino taste-tested over three hundred different fruits to decide what was poisonous and what was edible. He found certain flavours familiar, but most of the other ingredients they collected were strange on his palette. It felt like a combination of things he knew from his previous world, which could be convenient and frustrating.

The one ingredient Rino really wanted but found it hard to obtain was honey. There was plenty of honey in the jungle, and they were much tastier than the honey collected in Cypress County’s vicinity. However, honey wasn’t produced by plants. They were produced by monster bees in the jungle.

Even if Rino could take the bees away from the jungle and create a new hive for them in his town, the honey would not taste the same. The flowers and nectar that they made honey from in the jungle of doom were not the same as the flowers that grew in the meadows around Town Zera. It was a huge loss, but Rino tried to look at the bright side.

After returning to town, Rino and the fairies did an inventory count. From that brief trip to the jungle of doom, the town was able to obtain over two hundred new species of edible plant life. For a trip with zero casualties, it was an overwhelming success.

Thanking the crew for accompanying him on such a harrowing foraging trip, Rino remembered to note down additional tokens for their efforts. He gave them half a day off from work to rest up and enjoy the freedom as he sorted through the new findings to categorise them.

There were over a hundred herbs that Rino thought would grow better in a dedicated greenhouse vertically instead of openly in the field. The idea of building a greenhouse immediately went into the top priority as Rino looked at the fruits and vegetable variety the fairies gathered.

Fruit trees did not need a dedicated area for planting. He wasn’t making a plantation to collect fruits in bulk. If anything, Rino simply enjoyed seeing a variety of them for casual harvest. Seasonal surprises were great for kitchen creativity.

Instead, Rino wondered if he could introduce them throughout his town. A little greenery in a place full of stone would be nice. Rino could also line the other shrubs around the borders of his town as a perimeter. The grazing field could do without eye-catching fences. If Rino planted shrubs before the fences, it might give the animals in the barn a sense of grazing in the open fields more.

That said, Rino checked on the brick production. There were no kilns in Town Zera, so Rino decided to put the grand furnace room to good use and let Ubel take command. The wraith king already produced more than an eighth of the required bricks for building while he was gone. The trolls and earth gnomes were struggling to keep up with the wraith king’s speed of production. Rino decided to stroll around to the living quarter site to see how far they had come along.

Buckets of cement mixes, sacks of bone ashes and piles of completed bricks made from slag, rocks and clay were strewn all over the building site. There were no houses made, but Rino could see the scaffolding in place with a general outline of the building’s structure in the ground.

When Rino first suggested building a multi-levelled apartment tower structure to host all of the town’s population, Bink objected vehemently, claiming it was impossible to build more than two floors, much less fifteen floors without the building collapsing on itself. It took the lich a long time to convince the earth gnome how it was structurally possible with proper planning and careful material consideration. Moreover, Rino had genesis fairies around to help reinforce the buildings with magic.

Eventually, Bink gave in. Now, he was issuing instructions to the trolls to stack bricks and scaffoldings for these towers while Deezer oversaw the hot spring water rechannel project with some of Kamiya’s fastest miners.

Rino’s mana remained steady with no signs of rapid decline. It would mean he was powerful enough to keep up with mana regeneration at the rate of his subordinate’s usage or that his subordinates were going easy on him. Either way, it was great news for him. There was no need to assign other summons to gorge themselves silly in the name of mana regeneration.

As they worked, Rino walked to the reserved site for the marketplace and bank. He thought about the token exchange system and decided that a ticket exchange policy was perhaps the best way to inspire motivation and prevent gluttony.

Tokens could be assigned as part of a reward system, but Rino would not give them actual objects with values. Instead, the tokens would serve as a unique form of identification for every individual with records of how many credits they earned in the bank’s ledgers. These points could be accumulated indefinitely but not exchanged with others. It could be accumulated until the next festival when everyone’s credits were levelled again. However, they could spend the points on ticket rewards such as an entrance pass to the hot spring, a priority queue ticket to Noir Province or even a ticket to ask Ubel to create better-looking designs for their existing mattocks.

Services like house designing, special meal ticket requests for the cookhouse and even better clothing quality from the tailors or premium leather products from the tannery would slowly be introduced over time. Using this method, Rino could control the number of credits in circulation without splitting hairs over the manufacturing of precious metals as a form of currency. The token could be imbued with identification magic to prevent theft, making it an almost flawless economic system that could be used all over his kingdom.