While those problems could pose some sort of challenge to me before, with the entire damned factory set just outside the entrance gate to this dimension, all I had to do was to step outside!
This short trip was supposed to allow me to just grab the resources I needed because every minute spent outside my small world, would translate to two minutes inside! But as soon as I stepped to this once deserted and almost entirely empty place, I was struck by the raw and chaotic beauty of this new factory of mine.
Just as if I was in the game I loved to play, back on the earth, that allowed one to build his own, efficient factory in the first person point of view, I couldn't help but just walk around all those automated machines. There was something insanely alluring in their monotone and repetitive movement, that resulted in the raw iron turning into molten iron, only for it to turn into small piles of nicely formed, square iron plates, travelling down the belts towards the storage area just like any human would venture on the road of his life, only to be stored as a memory in the minds of those who deemed him important.
After finally getting my fill of the epicness of this place soured by the constant nagging of my perfectionist side that requested me to remake this entire place with a proper factory floor, walls, conveyor business and all, I went to the storage area to grab just enough materials to create the first modern home in my small world.
And that's when the realisation struck me.
If I was going to be the only one carrying the ready goods, it would take me forever to develop a proper city, especially with how the prices of different buildings skyrocketed with their continuous upgrades. Regretfully, no matter how hard I tried to connect those two places together, I had no way of doing so!
Even if the solution to this quandary was actually quite easy and obvious, I had no way to create a damned storage ring before procuring proper materials! It wasn't like that factory could extract or even create something like dragon steel I used back in the cultivation part of the world, isn't it?
With this question continuously ringing in my head, I stopped in my tracks and immersed my consciousness back into the stronghold creation tool. Focusing on the factory category, I set the sorting mode to the cost and scrolled all the way down.
Only to retract my actions and raise the scrolling bar near the beginning, before the mana costs for the most advanced machines were couple digits longer than my current total mana limit!
And there it was.
Urbonite ingot.
Just by looking at its described statistics I could peek at in the recipe window, made me get close to fainting.
Who cares about my mage stick? Who cares about all the weapons I made so far in my life? I could achieve far greater results just by smacking this ingot on my opponents' heads!
But such a great power actually had a proper cost to its creation. Without even looking at the necessary backbone for the factory that I would've to set in order to provide the resources necessary to create a single Urbonite ingot, I actually had no access to the most of the basic resources that this item required!
Infused crystal? Katerian steel? Leiterian wire? Solidified mana brick? Every single of the items required to create a single piece of Urbonite was way better than anything I ever had my hands on! But checking this all out made me realise, that I was actually able to create Katerian steel right away!
Of course, if not for the insane mana costs of all the buildings I would've to set in order to craft it!
But thankfully, most of them could be bought with the basic resources that my makeshift factory was already producing, with just two more, only slightly more complicated items that I could make from those basic resources!
It meant, that just by putting enough effort into expanding the factory to cover all the necessary resources, I could finally get my hands on a material capable of bringing the most of my crafting abilities!
Turning the toll off, I returned to the reality only to grab several bags of the concrete, stacking them on top of each other before going back to the small world. What supposed to be just a quick mission to go and grab some resources, turned to a nearly half an hour of time passing in the subdimension of my tower!
With the hole in the ground prepared for me long ago already, I dropped a single bag of concrete inside, before jumping down after it. Ripping apart the linen bag that somehow was made with the usage of pure rock alone, I started spreading the concrete dust on the walls, while instructing some of the females to bring the water.
While the task was supposed to be easy, it took me over forty minutes to properly cover the entire hole with it, making sure to not let others waste this time but ordering them to prepare the meat from the beasts.
As soon as the walls were equally covered with the concrete, I poured all the water inside, before reinforcing the sides of the hole with my barrier, while enclosing it with one more on top. In a normal situation, this way of turning the concrete into cement and only then into a proper stable form of concrete would result in its liquid form flowing down the wall.
But I was too prideful to admit to my mistake, so I just spammed my shockwaves inside the hole covered from all sides by my barriers, forcing the evenly spread of the wet concrete all over the earthy walls!
After making sure that it dried to the point of sticking to where it already was, I used my fireballs to help it dry even faster. By the time the hole turned into its end form, all the beasts I hunted back on the Overlord's island were already turned into a pile of meat, bones and a small pool of blood, slowly soaking into the ground beside us.
While I would normally just throw everything into the pot - or in this case, cemented hole - add the water and slowly heat it up, with how I was unable to provide the heat in a stable matter, we had to begin with pouring the water first, before using my firewall to make it boil.
At this point, I just cast several tier-one fireballs while cursing at the side effect of the entropic constitution, that caused more than half of them to fail to form. With the water boiling, meat and bones for the stock prepared, and herbs completely dried all the time of being displayed to the sun from the moment of plucking, through our journey towards my island and all the time they were left on the ground in my small world.
Despite how long I was going for all the ingredients to boil, just a few moments after everything got thrown together inside the ground pot, I could already feel my mouth feeling with the saliva, as the insanely attracting aroma spread through the air.
"Its the rabbit. I told you it was valuable!"
As if reading my mind, Heila appeared on my side and explained while pointing at the bits of meat with a slightly more reddish colour than the rest, floating at the top of the pot. Even after it was cut into pieces and boiled for a few good moments, I could still feel strangely potent energy coming from it!
With how great the smell was only after a few moments, I decided to splurge and ran for a quick trip to the higher floors of my tower. Upon reaching my private garden, I plucked some of the herbs that turned out richer in energy with each, a new generation before dashing down, back inside the small world.
Even being away only for about five minutes, caused me to almost faint from how powerful the aroma of the boiled meat was spread through the entire area, making even the male workers stop their digging in the construction site, as they directed their eyes towards the pot.
I didn't even need my improved sight to see their dreamy and hope-filled expressions!
Noticing how the energy contained in the meat influenced the strength of the meat's flavour, I couldn't help but wonder how would my own, fresh herbs react with the rest of the stew!
Approaching the pot with the boiling soup, I made sure that no poisonous substance was extracted from the boiling meat of the beasts, before tossing the herbs I brough into the pot.
As if shockwave hit this entire realm, the smell seemed to contract for a moment with the threads of the condensed aroma mixed with the energy from the rabbit's meat forming as they travelled through the slightly yellowish water towards the herbs, only for them to soak it all for a moment, before releasing it with a newfound strength!
I could stand only thanks to my body powerful statistics, but that didn't apply to anyone else in this dimension. While the men could somehow manage to handle the hit of the insanely compressed and alluring smell thanks to the distance separating them from the pot, but the women who lacked my resilience or the benefit of the distance, dropped to the ground like cards from the formerly epic structure built by some diligent kid, only for it to be destroyed by their rude sibling!
With this single pulse being enough to carve out all the energy from my herbs right into the stew, this pleasant torture didn't continue for long, leaving us to just wait for the soup to boil out a bit more of its water before I could announce the start of the feast.
"Everyone, gather up!"
Going by myself to the pile of canopies, and bringing two of them to the side of the ground pot, I started carving the simple bowls out of the wood. All I had to do was to cut the entire canopy in a set of more or less equally sized cubics, before turning the strand of entropy that I was using to do so into a circular one, sinking it to the half of the cube and rotating it a single time. In the end, one cubic was enough to create two big bowls and two medium ones, with just up to five moves of my strand!
Leaving the bowls aside for the people to just pick them up, I kept working until the count of the bowls reached one hundred, before finally rising back to my feet.
"I know that moving to this island, working under my orders and overall, everything that you went through so far, might feel overwhelming. But I believe, that as long as we will work hard, we will be able to strive for the greatness!"
Kneeling beside the pot, I sank half of my bowl into the soup, before raising back to my feet and holding the bowl over my head.
"I want everyone to fill their bowls now. In order to avoid chaos, you can pass your bowls to the females, as they will be the one to fill them! But remember, do it one by one, as we will all start eating at the same time anyway!"
There was no way I would allow any shenanigans in this important moment. Everyone worked hard, I managed to figure out the incredible use of the stronghold system, and we even managed to create this insane soup together! Instead of trying to rally them all up while spouting some nonsense about the ideas they couldn't give less crap about, or hinting about the new houses that I would grant them as soon as the resources would allow me to do it, I decided to just go with this soup.
Food was something that everyone understood, it was simple. Everyone worked hard, so everyone is rewarded. The insane amount of energy contained in the stew with how energy-rich was both the meat and the herbs that I provided, would serve as yet another enticement for them to continue working hard under my orders!
Not to speak about how more than half of the ground pot remained filled with the soup and meat parts after everyone got their bowl filled!