chapter 1095 – tier 5 guild hall 1 – complete overhaul


    evacuating everyone for the purpose of reshaping the entire look of the guild hall had to include the group itself. once every building was confirmed empty, every sentinel golem had completed its area scans, and every fairy and every elemental had returned to their home, the gamer and his haremettes made their way to the harbour. after they boarded the boating seaquence, john navigated the vessel to the edge of the guild hall’s water space and started his work.


    the size of his game-mechanic granted base had been upped from a maximum diameter of five kilometres to ten. that was less of a comparative size increase than the last upgrade, having gone from one to five back then. regardless, it was an impressive amount of additional space. a doubling of the diameter meant a quadrupling of the surface within the circle.


    john already had a rough idea of how he wanted the guild hall to look like, the question was just how to properly distribute the space he was given. ‘i’ll need to keep a fair bit of the water around,’ the gamer thought. ‘in case i ever want to move the guild hall inland, it’d be best if a sizable moat stayed. that would allow ships to be used defensively at all times. plus, for the fishery to perform optimally, i need more than just rivers. the hudson also benefits if it shares a pool of water with the guild hall due to the cleaning mechanisms.’


    because of that rationale, john decided to go with an elliptic shape rather than a perfect circle. that would create narrow straits where bridges could be easily erected if the guild hall ever got relocated inland. those same straits would make for easily defensible chokepoints, while north and south about a kilometre of water would protect them.


    putting the basic land reshaping together alone cost john about an hour and almost a billion in usd. the good news was that practically all the usd fusion had at the moment were just sitting around anyway. the government was paying in tokens wherever it could, but received plenty of dollars through taxes, john’s grinding, and exports. a general reserve was necessary to deal with those foreign guilds that did not accept tokens as payment. otherwise, he could use fusion’s billions however he wanted. the guild hall was expected to give a return fairly quickly anyway.


    john stroked his chin and considered how to continue. ‘obviously all of this needs more detail,’ he thought and went over each segment independently. he remade the forms of the elemental islands to be expanded versions of the thematic shapes they currently had. there was no reason for this other than aesthetics. his skill at mapmaking had increased drastically since the first guild hall and he had a lot more space to work with. with that being said, there was only so much detail work he could do with the tools provided to him. finally, he arrived at a second iteration he was satisfied with.


    ‘i’ll revisit some details as i go on,’ he thought and started giving the islands their basic colours. there were essentially three different kinds of biomes: the main islands, the elemental islands, and the beaches. the simple reason for this was that john had no cause to add a desert or anything like that, except for novelty. having a nice, green, temperate place was surely the preferential environment for most to live and work in.


    ‘so far so good,’ john thought and rubbed his eyelids. all of the detail work was eating away at his time. the sun was getting dangerously close to the horizon. ‘i could call it a day here and evacuate people again tomorrow... no, that wouldn’t do...’ “momo, did you do the emergency housing arrangements?”


    “did i plan for the worst case? around you? always,” the fairy support responded. “you sure you won’t get done today?”


    “i have entire landscapes to sculpt, so definitely not,” the gamer told her.


    “alright then,” momo wiggled her way out of the bench and floated upwards, “i’ll be back in like two hours.”


    “thank you,” john said and watched the sassy maid fly towards the mainland of the hudson barrier. doubtlessly this would cause some annoyed attitudes. there was nothing he could do about that now though. “can i get another steak?” he asked, feeling the urge to eat something for his nerves.


    “one steak coming up,” salamander said and added a new piece of meat to the grill. all of the haremettes had to entertain themselves somehow while he was moving buildings and districts around. for the moment, the answer to this was a bbq. occasionally it had been sex. at the current speed of events, it was pretty likely that he would have to spend the night on the boat and finish up tomorrow.


    he was entirely right in that assessment. not only did it take him the entire rest of the day, but the majority of the next one to get most things how he wanted them to look. there were loads of small imperfections no matter what he tried. roads that didn’t quite line up, asymmetries, little bumps along otherwise smooth rivers – none of which john could effectively eliminate. when all else failed, he just regretfully moved on.


    which, eventually, led to the whole thing being done. john could hardly believe it when he had finally managed it. it felt like he had been chipping away at a mountain for hours at end and finally managed to carve a road through it.


    district for district, he examined his work and ran through the mana calculation numbers once again.


    [author’s note: i would like to remind everyone again that i am using inkarnate for these maps and that i am limited to the icons and tools provided. representations are therefore not all around accurate or, in some cases, wildly off. keep that in mind]


    palace district:


    guild heart (room slot cost: 0, mana production: 1’000’000): remaining underneath the palace, practically impossible for anyone to reach who didn’t know exactly where it was, the guild heart continued to produce the majority of the mana the guild hall required to function. for its last tier, the guild heart had increased its output twofold. john already knew this wasn’t going to be enough to cover the new demand, as the upgrade had also brought with it an additional 2000 room slots, bringing the total up to 4817.


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    newman shire:


    midnight forest (room slot cost: 25, maintenance cost: 25’000): upgrading the fairy lantern one more time created two notable phenomena. first, the court methenia had brought with her, the bramble court, was going to be renamed to the midnight court. john was not entirely sure why this was, but the description assured him as much. if he had to guess, ‘midnight’ was a fairly important concept to fairies and a court claiming that as its moniker had to be fairly sizable. which a court large enough to separate into seelie and unseelie definitely was.


    seelie fairies were, simply put, the friendly forest spirits that one was safe when meeting. safe being the operative word. they weren’t necessarily helpful; it was just that they weren’t malevolent in any way. uncontrolled, they could still whisk a child away for years.


    unseelie fairies, on the other hand, were definitely not the kind of creature one wanted to run into. in the best case, they were protective of their woodlands, causing the trees to twist to bar any unwanted visitors from entering. in the worst case, they had a very intense interest in the shape of someone’s intestines.


    both varieties of fae would be governed from the midnight court. john’s behavioural code (or the law of earl newman, as they called it) had been abided by so far and the gamer trusted the fae enough that they would keep it that way. that might have been nai?ve. thankfully, getting rid of them was as easy as deleting one building, and while they stayed, they did provide additional defensive forces, rare resources, and the occasional fascinating insight. as bad as fae could be, if confined in a specific area and barred from murder, they could be dealt with.


    district balance:


    25 out of 4817 room slots (4227 remaining)


    produces 0 mana, costs 25’000 mana, balance -25’000 mana.


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    fusion administration:


    fusion administration (room slot cost: 0, maintenance cost: 0): for the final tier of the guild hall, john separated the great archive and the guild bank. while the latter was brought back to its original purpose and was located in the commercial district, the great archive was expanded to a complex of buildings that was the new fusion administration. several more offices could operate on the island, particularly those headed by people close to john, like the financial ministry and the chancellor. because this was a building granted by guild perks, it required no upkeep cost despite having electricity, water, and all the rest of it.


    newman private island: an island with nothing on it except a nice landscape and a teleporter for easy access. it existed because john had more space than he knew what to do with and he wanted a place to have outdoor sex at undisturbed. also, his own beaches.


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    residential district:


    residences (room slot cost: 500, maintenance cost: 75’000): the residences of people living in the guild hall. generally, the residences were apartments, although nothing was stopping someone from renting an entire building and then adjusting the insides via selective editing rights. houses in this area were granted either to whoever paid the rent or to people working permanently in fusion’s various industry or production buildings. as labour demands rose, the latter would grow more numerous.


    district balance:


    500 out of 4817 room slots (3727 remaining)


    produces 0 mana, costs 75’000 mana, balance -125’000 mana.


    continued in part 2