A cold shiver went up Theo's spine.
It was a weird feeling, as if so sort of half-corporeal energy surged through his flesh, starting from the very ground where the soles of his feet rested, only to shoot up his height and arrive at the top of his head.
If the sense of this surge was slightly weird, though, then what happened next was an outright spectacle of what Theo was quite used to seeing in gas but never expected to see with his own two eyes.
At first, a small light started to shine right in the middle of his chest, only to then shoot forth, leaving behind a faint, glistening trail of light of seemingly no origin. A light that then coalesced into tiny chunks of purely light-based projection.
Those chunks continued to gain more and more details, soon turning from but a bunch of fuzzy particles into fully-fledged, three-dinsional renditions of the icons Theo was already familiar with—for he saw them quite often both in his chests and in his personal inventory.
'That's… wood?'
It wasn't just the several stacks of planks Theo had personally crafted from the wood that would shoot out from his chest. Nor was the light originating from his chest the only one that appeared.
By the ti the chunks of light from the first of the streams of lights finally manifested into tiny holograms of plank cubes—holograms that freely frolicked in the air as they sped up towards the array of boulders Theo picked for the location of his mansion… A new light suddenly streaked through the air, drawing a beautiful, shiny arc through the air only to then land right in the very sa spot as its younger cousin.
Precisely in the middle of the area marked out by those ancient boulders!
Then, a third streak of light appeared, delayed by but just a slight instant and coming at barely any different angle. Then another one. And then one more.
And by the ti Theo managed to blink his eyes, several more lines of light appeared all over the place, so of them rushing from the direction of the forest's edge, while others originated directly in the chests he planted all over the place to store the wood he gathered!
'Does it an whatever I decide to build can draw materials from the chests I've planted?' Theo thought, his eyebrows moving up as all the streaks of light had now fully ford into orderly streams of floating holograms of planks.
Yet, as soon as he paid this miraculous vision closer attention…
This process wasn't as simple as it first appeared, for there were so cubes of unprocessed wood that would split into four cubes of planks before hitting the dead center of the designated building zone.
The zone itself didn't remain the sa either, as a faint glow of a half-transparent projection started to rise up from the ground up, perfectly filling up the holes between the massive boulders as it used them as a foundation—an anchor of so sort—for the construction of quite the sizable building.
Second by second, more and more light-based projections of wood continued to bombard the place, accelerating the growth of the thick, wooden walls.
This whole process was so unbelievable, so unrealistic, so… out of place, Theo couldn't help but just stare while rooted in place, his mouth agape.
The young man couldn't tell whether the whole thing lasted an hour, a minute, or maybe but a few seconds. Yet, by the ti the see-through projection of the building reached its final stage… This holograph-like building suddenly started to gain essence, with the wood quite literally materializing out of thin air to replace the see-through projection.
"Woah…"
Theo finally managed to utter a small, shocked moan roughly around the ti the floors and the walls of the first story of the building had fully co to be, blocking the insides of the mansion-to-be from his sight. And what could be either a mont or an eternity later, the whole mansion finally materialized…
Only to suddenly jump in place a bit while condensing down to around a tenth of its total size… before dropping right back as it decompressed with a satisfying thump.
[Wooden Manor: Completed!]
[You have now unlocked access to tier 1 of mansion features!]
[You can now upgrade the mansion by adding the following rooms:
- Dining hall – slightly boosts taste and effectiveness of the food and drinks consud inside
- Bedroom – a furnished, designated sleeping area that improves the quality of your sleep, decreases hostile attraction during sleep
- Drawing room – a place of work and study, gives access to the basic blueprint chanic
- Storage room – a place to store all your non-perishables, allows remote access to all your chests within the manor's claid zone and remote access to it through the manor
- Workshop – crafting space, upgrade to the basic crafting bench, unlocks new recipes]
[You can now upgrade the manor by adding the following structures:
- Well – a source of fresh, clean water that taps into the local water vein, providing unlimited access to drinking water
- Small Palisade – provides a minor defensive bonus to the manor by keeping all unwanted guests out of its periter
- Watchtower – grants the user a localized and auto-updated map of the manor and its imdiate surroundings, expands the threat-detection range to a small radius around the manor grounds
- Garden Plot – provides a small, designated area where the growth, yield, and quality of the herbs and small crops will be boosted. Besides the planting and harvesting, the rest of the growing process happens automatically
- Training Ground – a designated spot within the manor for training, provides a slight boost to physical and martial growth, increases the odds of obtaining new and improving existing combat-related skills]
For the very first ti since the system first appeared before Theo's eyes, a notification appeared to not only fill two-thirds of Theo's vision… but also co with a scrolling feature, allowing him to move up and down this wall of text-described options at will.
As such, before he could even take his first step into the wooden manor he just… crafted out of thin air, Theo ended up just sitting down on the ground while he helplessly fell into the rabbit hole of studying the details of his new opportunities.
"So of those are quite damn insane…" he muttered upon taking a closer look at the list of options, seeing not only the face value explained by the system but also the value it indirectly implied.
Just like an infinite well that could be used as a source of drinking water… or as a source of water for Theo to water his crops, possibly boosting the output of his designated garden even more. Or the watchtower, when exploited to the limits of reason, potentially serving as a much steeper replacent for the small palisade…
Then again, even without all the hidden perks Theo could see through the lens of abusing the dissonance between what the system provided and how things worked in real life, even the basic perks offered by those expansions were enough to make him salivate over his future!
"If that's what I can get on just the first tier, then I can't help but think, what about the second tier?" Theo raised his head up, as if longing to pin his eyes on the sky, only to realize that the trees surrounding his freshly built manor gave him quite the limited view of it.
Still.
While one hell of a reward for all his efforts thus far, all those opportunities didn't co without a cost. And while so, like the garden, the palisade, or most of the rooms, were within his reach, so of the options—like the workshop—required him to either craft… or actually find a whole slew of new items!
And even those things that he could afford each cost an amount of resources that forced him to make a careful, calculated pick between all the options.
"Well, even if the insides of this building are all empty, I still have to prioritize the practical side of things," Theo sighed before quickly settling on the two most vital upgrades to his wooden manor.
The palisade and the watchtower. The two manor-type extensions that consud pretty much the rest of his stock of wood—sothing he naively thought would last him maybe not until the end of his days but at least until the end of his exile!
Yet, as soon as the strings of light arched through the air and started to coalesce into projections of the items Theo's initial expansion required, Theo already moved his thoughts to the next and most logical step, if not the actual goal, of his whole manor experience.
A goal for which getting the wooden tier one was just an optional stepping stone.
And so, before he could even take a step inside his new ho for the very first ti, Theo took a breath and, without standing from the ground, looked up at the solid, two-story-tall building.
"I wish to construct a stone manor."
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