Chapter 105: The City

Several weeks passed, and Althoff stopped looking like a town surrounded by construction sites. It began looking like a city being born. The change was clearest at sunrise, when the first shifts arrived and hundreds of separate movements started almost together.

The sawmill roared beside the forestry road, its mana-assisted machinery cutting another procession of logs into standardized beams, boards, rafters, and planks. Wagons queued outside with fresh timber while others departed beneath carefully strapped loads.

Across town, quarry wagons rolled in from the west carrying grey stone coated in pale dust. Stonecutters waited at the yard with hammers and chisels, shaping rough blocks into foundations, drains, steps, curbstones, and wall sections. Blacksmith forges were already burning.

Carpenters were already measuring. Teamsters were already shouting at oxen. Althoff no longer woke slowly. It woke like an enormous workshop, with every road carrying something needed somewhere else.

The roads made the transformation impossible to miss. The first major avenue now stretched from the Historical Core toward the developing Commercial District as a broad, firm route capable of carrying two streams of wagons without reducing every meeting to an argument.

Secondary roads branched east toward residential neighborhoods and south toward future workshops, warehouses, and agricultural facilities.

Some remained compacted foundations awaiting their final surfaces, but their lines were permanent enough to change how people moved. Drainage openings followed completed sections at regular intervals, and spring rain no longer transformed those streets into brown rivers.

Beneath them, Edric’s first water routes had expanded farther into the new districts. Public fountains were being connected where population justified them, junction chambers waited for later branches, and work crews continued extending conduits before buildings sealed the ground above.

The city was acquiring systems people would rarely notice once everything was finished.

The eastern Residential District had changed most dramatically. The first hundred houses no longer existed as stakes and foundation trenches. Rows of completed homes stood along proper streets, their tiled roofs forming orderly lines broken by courtyard housing, larger family homes, and small public spaces. Smoke rose from chimneys that had been cold weeks earlier.

Laundry hung behind houses. Children ran between doorways. Vegetable patches appeared in small yards because apparently giving farmers houses did not prevent them from immediately planting something beside them. Families were still moving in.

Raymond watched a Logistics wagon stop before one completed home while a mother, father, three children, and an elderly grandfather unloaded chests, blankets, cooking pots, stools, and baskets.

Two streets away, however, the neighborhood remained a forest of timber frames and scaffolding. Masons worked on walls while roofers climbed overhead. Beyond them, fresh foundation trenches marked another row. Finished, unfinished, and not yet begun existed beside one another.

That pattern repeated everywhere. The Warehouse and Logistics District had gained permanent structures beside Corvin’s numbered temporary stores. Covered loading yards filled with timber, tools, stone, food, and construction supplies. Wagon pools occupied marked compounds instead of whatever empty ground drivers could find.

The Large Grain Warehouse remained under construction, but its stone base and heavy timber frame already dominated the Agricultural Processing District. Workers were raising roof trusses while masons completed ventilation channels and loading platforms.

Nearby land remained empty but staked for future mills and processing workshops. Raymond liked seeing those gaps. Empty ground meant they had remembered growth required space. Building every available plot merely because they could would create tomorrow’s demolition work.

The Commercial District was louder every week. Temporary stalls had multiplied along approved sections while permanent market construction advanced behind them. Bakers sold bread before sunrise.

Tailors displayed work clothes beside merchants selling rope, tools, pottery, lamp oil, leather, salt, and imported goods. Food sellers competed for laborers leaving construction sites. Teamsters negotiated transport contracts beside wagon yards.

New workshops occupied leased plots near the Artisan District, and apprentices carried materials between buildings with the frantic importance of people who had recently discovered somebody would pay them.

Scaffolding covered the first permanent commercial structures, while the planned central square remained mostly open ground bordered by stakes, stone piles, and temporary stalls.

The market had not waited for the city to finish building itself. It had simply grown around the hammers.

Beyond the streets, Althoff became green. The original fifteen-hectare basin was almost lost beside the agricultural expansion.

The first hundred upgraded hectares carried ordered spring planting, and additional portions of the Tier IV land had entered cultivation wherever labor, animals, water, seed, and tools allowed.

Grain fields stretched in long rows. Vegetable plots occupied better-watered sections.

Fodder crops had been planted near future livestock areas, while stakes marked pasture boundaries and orchard zones that would take years to mature.

Hundreds of hectares remained unused, but they were mapped, divided by purpose, and waiting for Althoff’s population and agricultural capacity to catch up. Oxen pulled plows across distant fields while irrigation crews extended channels.

Food wagons traveled between the city and worksites. What had once been dead land now looked capable of feeding people Raymond had not even met yet.

The transformation did not stop at the visible city. Kael’s survey teams continued leaving through the gates with hunters, guards, measuring equipment, provisions, and blank maps.

Some disappeared for days into the wider territory, returning with information about streams, woodland, elevations, abandoned tracks, stone deposits, clay sites, future settlement locations, and areas better left alone until they understood them. Territorial markers pushed outward.

Forestry zones became better defined. Resource maps gained details every week. Raymond could open The Lord’s Eye and watch uncertainty retreat slowly from Althoff’s recognized territory, not because the System revealed everything freely, but because people had physically gone there and learned what existed.

Defense grew at the same deliberate pace. The future outer wall remained mostly an outline across the landscape, but it was no longer imaginary. Stakes traced the perimeter over ridges and fields.

Trenches marked sections where foundations would eventually run. Near the Residential District, a completed strategic stretch of stone wall protected the most exposed occupied area, connecting with temporary earthworks and timber palisades.

The southern gate site had deep foundations and enough masonry to reveal its eventual width, although no grand gatehouse stood above it.

Watch platforms overlooked vulnerable approaches, patrols moved between temporary posts, and signal beacons linked distant work zones with established defenses.

From certain roads, someone could stand inside what would someday be Althoff City while seeing nothing nearby except grass, trenches, and defensive stakes.

Public buildings were beginning to rise as well. The future Administrative District had foundations and scaffolding where permanent structures would eventually replace converted merchant houses.

Public Works crews shifted between roads, drainage extensions, water lines, residential construction, warehouses, and repairs without pretending everything could be completed simultaneously.

The Medical Hall site had been prepared but remained behind higher priorities. The academy was still lines on a plan. The Military District had graded ground and preliminary roads but no monumental barracks complex.

Raymond had learned to enjoy unfinished things. Every incomplete structure represented sequence rather than failure. Althoff was not summoning a city into existence. It was building one the only way a real city could be built: piece by piece, crew by crew, wagon by wagon.

One evening, after the construction bells signaled the end of the main shift, Raymond climbed the highest tower of the old castle. Althoff spread beneath him in layers.

Closest stood the Historical Core, still recognizable despite widened roads and repaired buildings. Beyond the old wall, new streets extended through neighborhoods that had not existed at winter’s end. Roofs caught the orange light.

Scaffolding surrounded larger structures.

Smoke rose from workshops and kitchens. Wagons continued moving while labor crews headed home. Beyond the buildings lay fields, roads, survey markers, timber yards, quarry routes, temporary defenses, and the distant line where the future wall would someday close around everything.

Raymond activated The Lord’s Eye.

[ Family Authority Activated: The Lord’s Eye ]

Then he integrated the Master Blueprint.

The ghost city spread across reality, and Raymond went still. Before construction began, almost everything in the overlay had been translucent possibility. Ghost roads had crossed empty fields.

Invisible neighborhoods had occupied barren ground. Warehouses, drains, districts, walls, and squares had existed only as luminous outlines showing him what Althoff might become.

Now portions aligned perfectly with physical reality.

The main avenue sat directly beneath its planned route. Secondary roads matched their ghostly counterparts. Drainage lines glowed beneath completed streets.

Residential blocks occupied the correct plots. Warehouses stood where the blueprint expected them.

Agricultural zones spread across designated land. The beginning of the Commercial District had gained real streets, stalls, foundations, and permanent structures. Even the first strategic wall sections overlapped the future defensive line.

A notification appeared before him.

[ Althoff City Master Development Blueprint ]

[ Construction Progress: 8% ]

[ Infrastructure Compatibility: Excellent ]

[ Population Capacity Increasing... ]

[ Economic Activity Increasing... ]

Raymond stared at the number for several seconds.

"Eight percent?"

After the sawmill, quarry, roads, drains, water lines, houses, warehouses, farms, markets, workshops, foundations, and defensive works, the System had looked at everything they had accomplished and calmly awarded them eight percent.

Then Raymond raised his eyes.

The ghost city continued far beyond the roofs below. Entire residential neighborhoods remained translucent. Most of the Commercial District was still empty.

The Artisan and Industrial Districts were barely beginning. The Military District waited.

The Administrative District remained mostly foundations. Future squares, schools, workshops, warehouses, processing facilities, water lines, roads, defenses, and neighborhoods stretched toward a wall that existed mostly as stakes across distant ground.

The city shown by the blueprint could hold many times Althoff’s current population.

Raymond slowly smiled.

They had not built Althoff City.

They had only started.