After Surviving the Apocalypse, I Built a City in Another World

Anyway, now that Alterra had upgraded to a Town, they would no longer have to ’block’ visitors from coming en masse. However, the requirements for residencies would definitely increase.

This was something they had planned a long time ago in order to control the burst of population inevitably coming in. They didn’t want to get into a situation where they had to block people again just to stop an upgrade.

Speaking of population, they got a lot of Prisoners of War this time —thousands of them, excluding the ones dead and on death row.

They did not expand and did not need to build new buildings (for now), but it didn’t mean that such a large new labor force wasn’t needed.

They could actually use a lot of new miners because they found a nice resource in Alterra for them to mine.

A few months ago, a group of goblins—led by Iko, one of the first goblins they received from Guia—was tasked to dig the mountains to get to the hot water under the mountains.

Alterra did not have volcanoes, but there was a good amount of geothermal activity underneath. This allowed the heating of the underground water reservoir to just the perfect temperature for it to be considered hot springs.

This was to be pumped and siphoned out for their upcoming Hot Spring Luxury community set to open in a couple of months.

After a large amount of planning and zoning (as well as underground surveying with the tools they had), the geology experts decided on certain areas they’d use and sent the goblins to work on them.

A few months ago though, the goblins came across an interesting mine. The walls were lined with soft rocks with unusual color, and the goblins took a few samples and wrapped them up in a blanket—just in case.

Anyway, the goblins found them beautiful and brought them up to share. The rules in Alterra were strict, and people couldn’t take resources outside of what was allowed by the rules.

Like how people weren’t allowed to build anything without approval—preventing the formation of shanties—the rule for this worked in a similar way.

Of course, even if there weren’t such rules, the goblins were honest critters and would’ve definitely reported it regardless.

Anyway, the goblins didn’t think much of it. It was only when a Terran saw the stone that the word ’Purple!’ was called.

It was a saturated purple mineral. It had a matte finish and was softer to touch than typical minerals. When the Research Center studied it (undergoing various safety checks of course), they found compounds that, when processed, could yield a vibrant purple dye.

There might still be other uses, but a different team was assigned to figure those out.

From Oslo, they knew that it was a very rare color. He had a girlfriend who had family in Cloth City, so he knew a bit about it.

Anyway, they obviously had to inject a bit of manpower if they wanted to mass-produce it. Whether it was the mining work, the processing of the product, and factory work for the various end products—all these things would need some manpower.

They could also free up the menial tasks in other factories and give them to the newcomers too, giving more complicated (and better paying) jobs to their current employees.

The arrival of the new prisoners was actually quite convenient.

Anyway, just before the upgrade, Althea’s last update about this was that the initial version of the dye was being perfected so that it would completely bind with the fabric.

It was a finite resource so they couldn’t be careless with the experiments, so a lot of calculation and planning had to be done before every step. For now, the color tended to fade away after a couple of washes, so it’d take a bit more time before it could be sold.

The only thing they could guarantee was that the color and saturation itself could be more or less maintained—at least at first.

Speaking of color, Oslo had been pulled in as a consultant and he may or may not have hinted that the vibrancy of their purple was far superior than what was in the market.

This was great news, and this would definitely guarantee another avenue for Alterra to make money.

In Xeno, purple dye was even more expensive than the blue dye—which was already quite costly. Apparently, in cities, a bolt was bought in increments of gold.

It didn’t really surprise many of the history-aware Terrans though. Back in their home planet, there was a period when purple dyes were even more valuable than gold! It was why it was synonymous with royalty. It seemed like it was the same here in Xeno.

In the end, the item was called amethystite powder, and the fabric should be available in the market within a few more months, though probably for internal or exclusive use only.

Speaking of colorful fabric, the research team had also figured out a good way to use Jacoba Town’s Isatis Flower. After holding on to it for months, Alterra could now make rare and beautiful blue fabric, dyes, and ink.

Rather, Cassandra—who knew the products of Jacoba Town—even vouched that Alterra’s was even higher quality than Jacoba’s and could therefore be sold even higher.

As such: Purple and Blue, the rarest dyes, would soon be available in Alterra and create another booming industry from it.

As for how Jacoba—or the Cloth Cities, for that matter—would react to that, they couldn’t be quite sure. Anyway, each one of those cities was very far away from them, even farther than Bleulle City, so they might not really care for them, at least for a while.

Even if they did, Alterra would’ve been connected to so many territories by then—whether they were allied, subsidiaries, or mere business partners—that anyone would have to be careful in handling them.

This was another reason why Ansel and the others made business deals only with those with acceptable morals. Even if they were not particularly rich yet, if they had some integrity, then Ansel would consider their deals over those who had done a lot of questionable things.

It would not only be against their conscience to give more power to those bastards, but it was also in the case more enemies came their way. On that front, they’d like to minimize the potential of betrayals.

It would be great if they could ally with a City though—things would be a lot easier for them, just as the alliance with Ferrol definitely helped with their security and the ease of their growth.

It was just that… the Lords of Cities they heard about so far were all jackasses… Why couldn’t there be normal people at the top, anyway? Sigh…