Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1523  Kingdom Building

The other side of the gate was cold.

Quinlan stepped through and his boots hit frozen soil. The air carried the bite of deep winter. Around him stretched forest in every direction, evergreen and bare oak rising tall against a pale winter sky.

But the land directly ahead had been worked.

His people from Miri Town had been clearing this stretch for months under his standing orders. Several square kilometers of forest thinned and felled, the timber hauled back to the settlement for construction, the stumps pulled, the ground leveled.

For every tree they took, they planted seeds elsewhere in the biome. Quinlan had mandated that personally.

He had infinite life ahead of him, and he intended to spend it on a planet that still had forests.

The result was a vast patch of open land set inside the forest itself, bordered on all sides by dense treeline, with clusters of trees still standing throughout where the clearing crews had worked around particularly old growth or natural groves. Cleared, leveled, and ready.

He surveyed it.

The first families were already through the gate behind him, clustered in loose groups on the frozen ground, clutching their belongings and staring at the open land with the hollow expressions of people who had expected something and found nothing. Children pressed against their mothersʼ legs. Men scanned the treeline as if expecting an ambush. A few women had already started crying, quietly, into scarves.

They looked at the clearing. They looked at the forest. They looked at each other.

”Give me just a minute,” Quinlan chuckled.

The crying stopped.

He focused.

Good soil beneath his feet. Dense, mineral-rich, packed with clay and stone. The kind of earth that held shape when you compressed it. To the east, the sound of running water could be heard. The Katalin River, maybe two hundred meters through the treeline, its current audible even through the winter stillness.

ʼThis will do.ʼ

He could feel the gate behind him pulling at his mana like a second heartbeat. The drain sat on his reserves like a weight on his chest. Every minute the gate stayed open, the weight got heavier. His active mana regeneration kept the deficit from becoming a crisis, at least not immediately, but the strain was brutal.

Working under these conditions was going to be a challenge.

He accepted it and began.

Unlike how it was in Miri Town, where they had months to prepare for the arrival of winter, had numerous dwarves working in tandem with the other races, and only needed to build homes for a couple thousand people, this new location was not going to be constructed like that.

It simply wouldnʼt work out.

Quinlan had to improvise.

The ground shook.

It started beneath his feet and radiated outward in concentric rings, the frozen topsoil cracking and splitting as the earth beneath it responded to his will. The first structure rose from the ground like a plant growing in fast motion, walls of compressed earth pushing upward, thickening, curving into an arched roof that sealed itself shut.

A child screamed in shock. Somewhere behind him, fifty meters back where the first cluster of families had been standing on the frozen ground wondering what came next, a boy had watched the earth split open and a building climb out of it. The scream set off a chain reaction. Women gasped. Men swore. A baby started wailing because everyone around it had suddenly tensed, and babies had opinions about tension.

Quinlan didnʼt turn around. He was already raising the second house.

The crowd that had been huddled near the gate spread apart, giving him distance, watching from the edges of the clearing as structure after structure climbed from the soil. They watched the way you watched a storm, from a safe distance, with your mouth open and your opinions kept to yourself.

A house. Roughly forty square meters of interior space, walls half a meter thick, doorway facing south for maximum sunlight. The compressed earth was thick enough to stop wind, retain heat, and outlast anything the common folk of Whisperfield had lived in before.

He raised the third. Then four at once.

The rhythm found itself. Push, shape, seal. Push, shape, seal. Each ”raise” took a few seconds of focused concentration, and the results climbed from the soil with an efficiency that made the process look effortless from the outside.

It was not effortless. The gate drain sat on everything he did like the taxes he planned to throw at his new citizens after they got set up with their new lives, skimming mana from every manipulation, turning what should have been casual work into sustained effort. He ignored it.

Roads carved themselves between the structures, wide enough for multiple wagons, packed and leveled by the same compression that built the walls. He laid them in a grid, but not a boring one.

The residential blocks curved where the terrain suggested it, following the natural contour of the land rather than fighting it.

Where clusters of trees still stood, he built around them. A grove of old oaks became the center of a residential block, the homes curving around the trunks like fingers cupping a handful of earth. A line of evergreens that the clearing crews had left standing became a natural divider between the northern and eastern districts, their canopy shading the road beneath.

Different neighborhoods took different shapes as he worked.

The northern district got wider streets and larger homes, built for families with lots of children, with a stand of birch trees left intact as a commons area where children could play.

The eastern blocks near the river were smaller, tighter, designed for couples and singles.

The southern quarter got arched doorways and rounded walls because he felt like it and because variety kept the place from looking like a military camp.

He was building a city. One with more green space than any city on the continent, save for where the elves lived, because the trees were already here and he saw no reason to remove what nature had spent decades growing when he could build around it instead.

By the time he was raising the fourth street, the trickle of evacuees through the gate had thickened into a steady stream. The early arrivals who had watched him from a distance had shifted from terrified silence to the insufferable pride of people who had been present for a historic event and intended to remind everyone about it for the rest of their lives.

”There was nothing here!” a man was telling his neighbor, gesturing broadly at the rows of homes surrounding them. ”Nothing! Frozen dirt and trees! Then he just…” He thrust his hand upward. ”The ground opened and a whole house came out!”

”Youʼre exaggerating.”

”I am not exaggerating! Ask my wife! Ask anyone!”

A boy of maybe nine had cornered a girl his age whoʼd come through the gate five minutes after him, and was delivering his account with the breathless authority of an eyewitness.

”The earth cracked open and buildings just grew out of it. Like plants. I saw the first one.”

The girl looked at the rows of homes, the packed-earth roads, the trees standing between structures. She looked back at the boy.

”Youʼre lying.”

”Iʼm not! I was standing right there! My mum screamed!”

”Your mum screams at spiders.”

”This was way different!”

Newer arrivals stumbled out of the gate and found streets where mere minutes ago there had been frozen dirt, buildings rising in the distance, and trees standing between rows of homes as if theyʼd always been there. They received the early arrivalsʼ boasting with the skepticism it deserved, which only made the boasting louder.

However, the skeptics didnʼt stay skeptical for long. After all, Quinlan was still in the middle of his work.

Anyone with eyes could see that he was working his magic right before them.

The soul soldiers organized the growing flow with the efficiency of people who didnʼt need sleep, food, or bathroom breaks. They directed families to open streets, carried luggage for the elderly, held children whoʼd gotten separated from parents in the crush, and kept the area around the gate clear so the next wave could come through without trampling the previous one.

Quinlan kept building.

By the end of the hour, the residential grid covered enough ground for roughly eight thousand families. Heʼd raised every structure with the same thick-walled, arched-roof design, varying the size and shape by district but keeping the fundamentals consistent. Compressed earth. Half-meter walls. Ventilation channels carved into the architecture during construction, angled upward so warm air would rise and exit through upper vents while pulling fresh air in through lower channels at floor level. There was no magic requirement to sustain them, it was pure physics.

The craftsman who had challenged him in the square was standing in the doorway of one of the eastern block homes, running his hand along the wall with the critical eye of a man who built things for a living. His wife stood behind him with their three children, all of them bundled in every layer they owned. A pair of young oaks stood just outside their doorway, their bare winter branches framing the entrance like a natural archway.

”The walls are solid,” the craftsman admitted. He knocked on the compressed earth with his knuckles. A solid, heavy thud responded. ”Insulationʼs better than our old place. No gaps, no drafts.”

”Itʼs still a dirt house,” his wife said.

”Itʼs a compressed earth house, and the walls are thicker than anything in the merchant quarter.”

”It doesnʼt have a floor.”

The craftsman looked down. Packed earth, smooth and level. ”It has a floor.”

”A real floor. Wood. Tile...”

”Woman, weʼve been here four minutes.”