Unsurprisingly, the first car that Rino made was a modified sky palanquin. The experiment was successful, and Rino recruited minecart drivers who were not afraid of heights to operate the first sky car.
Glowstones were mysterious objects, and Rino wondered how long the mana in there would last. For prevention, Rino made a secret second engine circuit in the form of runes engraved to the bottom of the car. As long as the carriage was within the range of the mana web array, it would not crash. Once a low mana output was detected, the carriage would automatically connect to the mana web array and continue its operation while sending the driver a notification in the form of a blinking light rune signalling it was time for a maintenance check.
The test drive monitored by Acht landed successfully in Noir Province and made its way back, carrying logs from the sawmill without issues.
Ping!
===
Daily Quest #32 (complete)
Objective: Build a Carriage
Time Limit: 10 Days
Tutorial here.
Reward: Mass Grave Locations
Claim your reward here.
Penalty: Deduct 24 hours of sleep upon failure and [Curse of Overtime] until quest is forcefully completed.
===
Rino's quest was marked completed three days before the intended deadline, thanks to the successful test drive.
The lich might have spent more time building the new car from scratch instead of modifying it if it wasn't for his existing sky palanquin carriages. Fate worked in funny ways, and he was starting to see his efforts returning with interest now.
He collected the reward and wondered if pilfering mass graves would increase Town Zera's overall population to the number he needed for that side quest.
===
Side Quest #23
Objective: Increase Town Zera's Population
3,252/10,000 Population
Reward: Harvester Information
===
Yes, there might be a slight increase in his population from receiving this side quest. However, Rino thought that the population growth was still too slow for his liking. At this rate, he might have to wait five hundred years before he could see ten thousand undead in Town Zera.
Sure, he was still constructing facilities to house that many people. However, Rino refused to put the cart before the horse. What was the use of making preparations for a bustling town when he could not fill its capacity?
More importantly, Rino eyed that reward. He had the intention to relocate to find some harvesters and observe them more. The dwarves studied the harvesters for years but still only knew so little. Yet, it was more than what Kragami could tell him and what Zerg's village could share.
Everyone only saw them as bringers of death, but Rino was more curious about their targeting habits. Why only target certain species or individuals in a species? If harvesters were like locusts, they should attack anything that resembled food indiscriminately, leaving nothing behind. Yet, Zerg was a survivor in his village, and those Rino resurrected lived less interestingly than zombies even if they learned things quickly.
Speaking of that habit, Rino could not understand why only Zerg recalled everything from his previous life before he died. The other villagers did not seem to remember their previous lives or how they lived before they died. They had no idea how to do the simplest tasks, and Rino remembered Fronzo telling him how they had to teach them everything from getting dressed to using a hoe. The villagers were slow to respond initially, but after living in Spudville and following the farm manager for a while, they started to mimic the hobgoblins and learned things exceptionally fast.
When Kragami taught everyone how to read and write, Zerg and his villagers were probably the fastest to grasp it. Erika was fast when Rino taught her, but according to his secretary, her learning speed could not be compared to them.
Putting that mystery aside, Rino looked at his newly claimed reward. It was a map function in his system's tab that showed him arrows pointing to the direction and the estimated distance to those mass graves. Rino liked the new navigation user menu as it was easily understood and almost instinctive to use. The gods must have put more effort into making this new function's design, and the magician found himself looking forward to the information they could provide him about the harvesters.
From above, Stephanie huffed. Since Phil and Ace took over the office's command and small world management, their business has been booming. The number of offerings they received daily helped her brother strike better deals, and they were starting to gain their fair share of regular customers among the lower levelled gods. The recent explosion of earnings was quickly reinvested to a better office and storage space.
Ace and Phil were working to increase the number of accepting offerings while they left Stephanie in charge of creating the newest reward for the final daily quest for this tedious long chain quest. Their mismanagement provided her with an opportunity to show Rino what she was truly capable of.
Not everyone was capable of becoming the goddess of life cycles and fertility. Stephanie knew that Rino's undead empire would face a population crisis without her help. Unlike the living, undead creatures were incapable of reproduction through conventional means. Even if the magic trees could birth faes, Rino's population grew too slowly to counter the danger of extinction in the small world.
From the legends of world trees, legendary creatures blessed with the power of gods could be created. Likewise, Stephanie spent a huge portion of her earned divinity to create a magic tree sapling that Phil would include in the final daily quest as a reward to help Rino increase his population.
Naturally, Ace explained that if Stephanie did well, she would be greatly rewarded in divinity with more people praying to her magic tree for her blessings of a child. Easily convinced, it was the only reason why she shells out over seventy percent of her divinity allowance to create this miraculous sapling.
Rino wasted no time and summoned Mutt to scout for the mass grave locations. He wanted to increase Town Zera's population as soon as he could to find out more about the harvesters and braved the damaging sunlight, taking purple soul flames to his face as they left the safety of his town barrier.
Mass graves were different from regular graves. According to the explanation provided, they were graves occurring due to a battle between two opposing clans. Sometimes they were humans, and other times they were monsters. Rino did not care what species they were as long as the graves were full of complete corpses that he could summon back to this world. Corpses with fully intact skeletal structures were the best. Rino did not want to deal with mutilated corpses because he needed healthy labourers to fill in the manpower crunch of his town.
As much as he hated to admit it, not everything in Town Zera was automated. A lot of his subordinates worked without rest to meet the deadline for his construction projects. The managers were often overworked, and there was still so much that Rino put on the back burner because of shifted priorities.
The marketplace and bank system needed more capable workers who were literate, and while Rino knew that most of his existing farmers were literate to certain degrees, he could not free them from their assigned tasks. It would be a different story if he had more migrants who were physically fit but unskilled for the intellectual task.
Rino did not want to deprive anyone of the chance of education, but society could not function properly if everyone was a leader with no workers on the ground to oversee that operations went smoothly. Hence, Rino's main aim was to bring back humanoid creatures, even if they were monsters. Creatures like goblins and trolls were great because they could carry bigger things. However, Kamiya's clan proved to be a little more challenging due to their smaller bodies. Rino had to find jobs suitable for their agile but weak physical builds.
The first mass grave Rino arrived at was slightly disappointing. No matter how Rino tried to think of how these creatures could be useful, he found that they might be better suited to work in Cypress County instead. There was no mistaking this bone structure with traces of dried up scales stuck to decayed skin. These creatures had to be human-fish or human-snakes. Both cases sucked because Rino did not think tailed creatures fitted in with his walking theme in Town Zera. He had plenty of stone pavements but little waterway for the tailed creatures to travel by.
Still, a body count would add to his population. Becoming a magician meant that Rino was automatically converted into a hoarder. If he had the space, he would never pass up on anything that proved even the slightest bit useful. It was a habit that drove his butler mad in the previous world, but Rino did not change.
Like this, over sixty new migrants were introduced to his empire, but Rino let them accompany Mutt in the shadowscape.. He had more mass graves to raid, and Rino refused to stop until he was convinced there were no more corpses to summon within this area.
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