Finn, curious and eager to test things out, placed a small mountain of iron ores on top of the pattern. To hasten the transfer from the ore pile to the Delivery Room, he used his space, transferring the ores in his space rune and they taking them out when he was already inside the Delivery room.
[Detected 421 kilograms of items. Would you like to spend 421 Hearth Points to send to the Main Node?]
Oh look, he had a weighing scale now.
So it was 1 hearth point per kilogram, which felt a bit more affordable than he thought. Considering how each transaction gave at least 100 points a day, as long as customers were consistent, then he might be able to use this to instantly transfer resources from Level 1 to Level 2.
He wondered if it’d be practical for daily stuff like food. Still, it’d be wise to plan for their self-sufficiency regardless. Who knows? What if they were too busy in the main side and didn’t have time to transfer stuff. Would the people here starve to death?
In Level 2, it was too dangerous to forage outside. Should he just expand the place and build gardens? Seems feasible?
Sadly, the building slot for the gardens had been consumed by him, so if they were farming it’d be manually done. The good part was that they were in Level 2 Danger zone which had a stronger essence, so it should still grow well.
He placed them a distance away from the easements, of course, more or less along the mountain walls. The monsters here were much stronger and needed a bit more space to be dealt with.
For efficiency, while he was planning on planting a few from seeds, it was best to transplant for now. First, it was an immediate harvest, and second, doing it from scratch wasn’t practical because, well, there would be no one tending to it! Who’d water the seeds? The Thornbull?
When he got staff here, then he’d teach them some more plants. Fortunately, during the past few days, he had determined a few good options.
The basics of self-sustaining farming were staple carbohydrates, vegetables, and fruits.
For the first one, he fortunately found tubers. Thornroot was fairly common, so he recognized it immediately and found a bulk of it nearby. Since the place was richer in essence, the thornroot looked healthier too, so he decided to take it home and just plant a few. For the one planted in the extension, it should be able to survive on its own.
There were also a lot of tuber vegetables like the Macrot, which was like carrots except redder, a bit on the chubbier side, and less in mass than the modern earth carrots. There were also plenty of herbs that could serve as vegetables and also for tasting.
Finally, for fruits, there was something called Plean fruit, which was a low-growing tree that was basically a shrub. It bore an oddly shaped fruit that tasted like a cross of peach and star apples.
These were the plants placed in the (manual) gardens, and his friends helped him out a lot.
He also found some more familiar plants like the Matis plant as well as some berries, which were the best to replant since they’d keep growing fruit on their own.
The party took turns guarding him while he was foraging, wherein each stop took a while because he had to carefully uproot the crops.
This meant that there were a lot of monsters while he was gathering, and it was amazing how none of the monsters managed to touch him during this time.
One had to know this was not easy. In these parts, the occasional tree-climbing monster and the rarer ground-crawling ones also appeared, which was really interesting.
That said, Durgan had the earth affinity, and he had a technique called [Vibration Mapping], so he was more aware of what was happening and what was approaching compared to most of his peers in the same rank.
"This will really be another outpost in the future, right?" Marcus couldn’t help but ask when more and more edible plants appeared within the barrier.
It felt so surreal at first, but remembering how those bastards fainted just by the impact against the shield made it feel real.
Having an outpost here meant that they would have a comfortable and safe fighting location in Level 2 as well! Since they were already toughened level and higher, they could only use the main inn as a resting place after a day (or more) of fighting far away from it.
They had always been jealous of the awakeners who could fight and gain the necessary cores while in the safety of the barrier.
They would have to treat it as a proper camping spot without the luxury of the insulated rooms, however. Then again, combining the high regeneration given by the rooms with the natural regeneration of powerhouses felt a bit cheating, so Finn shrugged, thinking the world was just being fair.
They would just charge rent for the tents and sleeping beds, but open-air camping was actually free for all as long as they followed the rules and paid the initial 1 gold entry fee.
Soon, it was finally time to leave. Although they were relatively self-sustaining now, there were various matters to report, and none of it seemed trivial enough to delay.
He blinked, realizing there was a bit of asymmetry. He added just a few more extension modules, just to balance things out. The monsters here were much stronger than where the inn was, so the fighters needed a hell of a lot more space to move, lest they accidentally stepped outside the barrier.
He should get Tumble to make more markers.
That said, while he was in the middle of adding modules, an unexpected notification popped into his head.
[Sufficient number of independent Extension Modules have been detected. Simplified versions of buildings can now be activated.]
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A/N: Oasis story moved to March 2026! Alien apocalypse moved to June 2026!