397 Future of the small world

Sure, I could just tell them to somehow survive for about one or two days without shelter or food, but with how my warehouse in the outside world was already filled to the brim with resources, I could as well just spend a single hour, creating more of the housing for everyone!

The blueprint of my city was already in place. With how little I knew about building a city, I already decided to go with the grid scheme, making small neighbourhood, ten houses long, with two rows attached to a single, small road. But this kind of structure could only be expanded so far before the future traffic congestion would kill the entire society.

Instead of multiplying the number of houses in a single area, I just added a middle-sized road at the end of a neighbourhood, running perpendicularly to it and allowing the expansion of the city outwards from the tower in the distance.

With the new grid base in place, I could extend this road, slap another area with twenty houses and repeat the steps. Considering how much resources I could fit inside my storage outside of the smaller dimension, there was enough stuff for me to reach the breaking point for this middle-sized areas, with ten neighbourhoods on each side of the middle-sized road!

In fact, I could create a few houses more, but considering bothersome it would be to decide the further layout of the city with the need for the town centre, proper services like running water or electricity and the large-sized roads that required the resources that I simply didn't have in production at all, I could only put this plan on hold for now.

Going back to the outside world, I simply opened the gates to my warehouse and made sure that anyone entering the small dimension would carry a small amount of concrete, metal or other stuff required for my system to actually build those houses instead of just planning them out.

While I initially wanted to go to the island as soon as possible, I now realised that while all the previously mentioned reasons for doing so didn't change nor disappear, if I were to just leave those refuges to themselves right now, by the time I would come back with an even greater amount of people, this whole dimension would turn into a mess.

"Helia, Gabriel… Follow me."

By the time we arrived and the construction site, more than half of the resources required by the system to actually expand this single already existing neighbourhood into a proper district with twenty of them, with exactly four hundred houses capable of fitting an entire family at once, were in place.

"Listen up guys. I'm leaving it up to you to decide who will live where, but there is one rule I want you to implement. You see those streets?"

Pointing my hand at one of the small, inner roads connecting all ten houses on both of its sides together with the greater area, I took a look at their faces in order to check whether they understood what I was speaking about.

"Those that are directly connected to the buildings? Yeah."

Instead of trying to understand the underlying concept of the grid, Helia simply caught up on the most important fact. Thinking about this, this kind of approach allowed me to keep the explanation even shorter and simpler!

"When you will be deciding who will live where keep in mind one thing. The first house of each neighbourhood from your right will be a house where the leader of the said neighbourhood will live with his family. All twenty leaders from the entire district, I mean, all the houses connected to this middle street that will be here in a moment, will form a district council. Give me a moment now."

With the newcomers bringing enough materials for me to accept the building of the houses, I made sure to chase them away from the building area before accepting the transaction with this resource-sucking system. 

I couldn't care less about the reaction of the crowd when in a flash, once empty land suddenly filled up with the uniformly looking buildings. With all the materials that were stacked in their respective places disappearing, a row upon rows of houses appeared, with the soft earth below our feet turning into a proper, concrete road. As we were standing on the middle-sized road right now, there was actually twelve meters wide area, marked in four distinctive lanes three meters (about 3.3 yards) and additional lane width worth of walkways on each side of the road.

For people used to living in tents and roaming the forests, this kind of street had to appear as the waste of space, but with how grand this city would become at some point, I had to strain my initial self in order to not be forced into tearing it all down later on.

"For now, I want you to move to this house."

Pointing my hand at the closest building to the tower, I gnashed my teeth before wasting the entire twenty energy points on upgrading it. In a flash, a single-storey home with a basement rose up from the ground, adding not only the second level to itself, but also turning its once flat roof into an attic, covered by a pitched roof. With a huge balcony handing from the wall of the second floor, it was visibly far greater than any of the other buildings in this dimension outside of my own tower.

"Since you were chosen as the leader, it will be your burden to decide who will live where and who will be the leader of each of the neighbourhoods. I want them to take care of their own turf while reporting directly to you on a weekly basis unless something will require your immediate assistance. Is that clear?"

While explaining my governing idea to Gabriel, I was actually picturing the future look of this entire area. In my head, I could already see a big road surrounding the tower at the exact distance of one kilometre, with more and more districts just like the one I made sprawling outwards from it, with only the leaders of each of it allowed to live on the inner side of the road. 

Just a single layer of districts all around the place would be enough to house nearly a hundred thousand people when considering each house to be capable of sheltering four people. Just by running the numbers through my head, if the city would be continued to be built in the same manner, there could be actually fifty-six districts like this surrounding it in just the first layer alone, and with a bit of space between them as well!

But the reality wasn't as simple as one would want it to be. Even with all the housing available, even after neglecting all the resources, one had to infuse into this small dimension in order to build all that, there was still a huge demand for arable land, production areas and basic types of the industry! Just by adding taverns, granaries and other buildings of everyday use, the space available for housing would turn from hundreds of thousands to just a few of them!

All in all, this dimension had huge prospects, but I was still lacking the crucial resource for its development.