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

”Damn, these are expensive, I can only buy Class D weapons I already have…” he mumbled, pouting in disappointment. If it were things they could buy for silver elsewhere, then he might as well save up his points.

”Well, it’s like you can’t do anything about it,” the person behind the counter said, leaning towards him. Bart’s eyebrows rose as he stared, waiting for him to elaborate.

”Well, the trades here aren’t limited to material things,” Macky said, making Bart blink. ”We also buy and sell some information.”

”Are you interested?”

”What?”

There was an extra room at the side with a built-in voice blocker where people could buy and sell information. Of course, this was still guided by a moral code and sensitive information that was not supposed to be spread around would be relatively safe.

Bart blinked at this and happily took the deal! Not only would he sell some more information he knew about the outside world (and probably some networking secrets), but he also ended up buying a few things, too!

However, because he was spending his points for the superior poison, he got his men to spend theirs on a few maps of areas they had not explored even as mercenaries. Heck, they even bought maps from places that were available in their system maps.

The maps bought from Alterra using contribution points could not compare to what they had as default! Alterra’s cartography technology was really superior. It even included a rough topography and resource points. Not to mention some flags and danger zones!

Too worth it, really too worth it!

It had to be said: Althea and Ansel could think of various ways to get people to spend their contribution points, thereby getting them to work more and more for the territory to make up for it.

Speaking of salaries, with their upgrade to Town, the salaries had also been increased accordingly, though not too much. The Elders now had a salary of 75 silver and 300 contribution points a day, which—considering the low cost of living in Alterra—made them very rich people.

Supervisory positions like Jun, Silvia, Rowan, and the like were given 40 silver and 200 contribution points a day. The Captains, which was the military equivalent of this position, would get a bit more money at 50 silver, and the same contribution points per day.

The regular workers for the territory were around 15 silver and 100 contribution points a day. Working in private companies would roughly give the same, except there were no contribution points.

The military equivalent for them, the guards, would also receive slightly higher remuneration at 20 silver per day and the same amount of contribution points.

The minimum wage jobs were now 10 silver a day in both private and public sectors, and no contribution points.

However, everyone could receive these points whenever they helped out with wars or with the mobs attacking Alterra, which was why most people tended to be excited when mobs arrived. The only exception was probably the upgrade mobs, which tended to be really scary.

Considering the new contribution point requirement for a temporary residency was 2000 (a number that would definitely increase as time went on), everyone aimed to get more and more points as soon as possible.

Fortunately, even regular workers for the territory would have no problem reaching this and more after a few months of working hard.

Hopefully, the requirements wouldn’t increase during that time period!

Anyway, everyone excitedly headed back to work, with some already planning their afterwork hunting. They needed to get more points after all!

…

Later that day, the Gaea team once again congregated for a lovely dinner, except they had a special attraction today.

The Basset Town loot, mostly from Eagle’s space.

However, Basset Town was just a Level 1 Town, like they were so there was nothing too groundbreaking.

They did get a few aether letters, voice blockers, and some of the other basic tools, which were already considered a win.

Heck, Eagle, Garan, and Ansel had already claimed a few…

They also recalled the anti-aether necklace they got by coincidence, and that was already valuable enough, especially since Oslo and the others said it was a City-level tool and was quite powerful.

Other than that, the other relatively unique tool they received was the [Life Candle], which was the tool that let Bentro know about Patte’s Death as well as the location of his death.

According to the City aborigines, it was a reusable tool. They simply had to light it with fire and add a drop of blood from the person they wanted to monitor.

It was a bit morbid to use, and they really didn’t have reason to use it, for now, so they didn’t. However, despite this, there were plenty of things they could study from this tool, especially with the hope of improving its functions.

For example, if they could find or even make a tool that would have a fire that, instead of being stable, would weaken or flicker if the person’s life force was dwindling.

This would, ideally, alert them that the person was in danger before they perished.

Obviously, what they got was the low-level version that only indicated life or death, so regardless of the situation of the target, as long as they were alive, then it would just remain as it was.

Otherwise, Bentro would’ve been privy that Patte had been dying for months before he actually perished. Patte was literally scraping the door of death for months, after all.

Althea would also like to crack the formula about how the tool could track the person’s last place of death. This would be useful for the cases where—she hoped it wouldn’t happen, but just in case—they needed to determine the place where an Alterran perished.

Better yet, if they could find a way to create a tool that’d tell them where the Alterran was in while they were just weakened and still alive.

Anyway, the study of this tool (which was a bit blind since only Althea was a toolmaker) was added to the lengthening lists of projects in the Research Center.

Sigh.

When would they get new toolmakers, anyway?