Chapter 108: Construction starts (1/2)

Once Layn finally picked a spot where his future academy would be, things started to quicken.

Layn himself no longer looked like an archmage, but more like a foreman of a shift in some kind of shady construction company, pushing all the few people who were unlucky enough to get coaxed into this work well beyond their limits.

But that was how the situation would look to someone who wasn't aware of all the details of what transpired here and who was working on this strange project.

”Hey, put those logs on the secondary stockpile,” Layn shouted when he noticed a small mistake on Antion's part. ”The main one is already full!”

Not daring to protest or even whine, Antion only nodded his head before obediently carrying a huge log away.

”The first area is full?” alerted by Layn's words, Irea asked after rushing to his side.

”According to my calculation, yes,” Layn replied, not daring to move his eyes away from the small group of ants that diligently pushed his plans forward. ”The first batch was already taken for the burning, the second one is already distributed for the construction. The second batch for burning is already prepared in the stockpile, so I can't allow the construction to stall by mixing the two.”

Wood was wood. Given how all the wood that Layn's small group managed to obtain was coming from exactly the same place, there shouldn't be any problems if two different batches were to be mixed.

And in all honestly, there wouldn't be. That's it, if not for a serious lack of manpower that Layn's group had to face.

While five out of seven mercenaries were tasked with bringing more and more logs from the forest, one of them would collect them before burning them down, while the other would carve each of them into planks and then into the exact same shapes as what Layn requested.

In terms of construction itself, it was all done with Layn's magic.

Without any discovered sources of iron or other useful elements, Layn had no way to create nails and proceed with building in the more traditional way. In fact, even creating mortar would be quite hard, even in its primitive form, due to the lack of people he could assign to mining the stone around the place. As such, only by carving the planks into specific shapes and then perfectly fitting them together with just a slight use of force, Layn could hope to create a single place for everyone to sleep in a single day.

”Great, then I will poach five logs from it, okay?” Irea took a moment to ask, simply staring at Layn's perfectly focused face in the meantime.

”Sure, off you go,” Layn nodded his head and replied.

In the entire group, Irea was the only woman. The natural instinct initially pushed Layn into finding some easy, auxiliary jobs for her, just so that she wouldn't feel forced out of the picture…

Yet, she disagreed. In spite of all Layn's efforts, Irea decided to take the same if not greater burden than everyone else, not only doing the same work as one of the mercenaries in cutting the logs into correct shapes, but she took it one step further.

She was making furniture.

As basic as it was, there was an urgent need for all sorts of things to be made. From doors, through window-shutters, through chairs, and even simple, plank beds for people to sleep at. And Irea quickly proved that for some reason, she was quite efficient at quick with the work she chose.

Before Layn could even dream about finishing the first, simple hut for both their remaining supplies and the people themselves, Irea already created a huge pile of all kinds of applicancies. Yet, it wasn't her insane productivity that gave her the right to occupy the most central point in the entire ongoing mess.

It was her insane power.

Irea was slightly lagging behind Layn in terms of cultivation. Even though she had access to an endless amount of energy, the pool of which she could replenish whenever she liked it, she still slightly lagged behind Layn.

It was all because of a small bottleneck she faced when she finally reached the barrier between the first and the second dimension of her cultivation. The barrier that separated body cultivators from the mind cultivators. While she managed to easily overcome it after Layn's extensive explanation, that single moment of the stall was enough to put her behind Layn's progress.

But that didn't mean she was weak. Not at all.