Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1525  A City From Scratch

Quinlan didnʼt pause to admire the effect. The gate was still pulling at him, and there were still sixty thousand people on the other side waiting to come through.

He flew into the skies and looked at what heʼd built.

Eight thousand homes spread across the clearing in a grid of packed-earth roads and compressed walls. It looked impressive from ground level. From above, it looked hopeless.

ʼThis wonʼt work.ʼ

The math was simple. A hundred thousand people needed roughly twenty thousand housing units. At one story each, that was twenty thousand rooftops, twenty thousand footprints of forty square meters each, plus roads, plus green space, plus every public building he hadnʼt started yet. The total acreage would swallow the clearing and push deep into the surrounding forest, which defeated the point of building inside a forest in the first place.

He needed to go up.

The homes heʼd already raised were compressed earth with half-meter walls and arched roofs. The walls were strong enough. The compression was dense enough. The foundations were solid. What they lacked was a second floor. And a third.

Quinlan reached into the first row of homes along the northern road and pushed upward.

The arched roof of the nearest building flattened, thickened into a floor, and new walls climbed from its edges. A second story rose in the same style as the first, compressed earth, arched ceiling, ventilation channels, doorway onto a stone staircase that carved itself down the exterior wall as he built it.

Then a third.

The building that had been a squat, practical box was now a three-story structure with the same thick walls and warm floors on every level, connected by an external stone staircase that wound down one side.

ʼSix families per building instead of two. Triple the density, a third of the footprint.ʼ

He rolled down the street and did it again. And again. The buildings grew upward in sequence, each one stretching two additional stories in the time it took a man to draw a breath, roofs becoming floors becoming walls becoming roofs, staircases spiraling down their sides like vines.

Inside the homes people screamed.

Why were they inside? Because no one told them not to, and everyone wanted to secure a home they liked. It was basically a free for all. Quinlan allowed it, because he didnʼt want to have tens of thousands of people standing idly by in the winter forests.

Itʼd be a bigger logistical nightmare than just letting them walk around while he worked.

A woman on the ground floor of a home in the eastern block felt the ceiling above her shudder, heard the groan of earth compressing and reshaping, and grabbed her children with both arms as the entire structure vibrated beneath her feet. Her husband threw himself over the youngest. The walls held. The floor held. The ceiling stopped shaking and became, impossibly, thicker.

Footsteps above her.

She looked up. Someone was walking on her ceiling.

Across the settlement, the reaction was universal. Families in single-story homes stumbled out into the roads to find their buildings growing taller by the second, staircases appearing where blank walls had been, and the flat skyline of the settlement transforming into something that looked like a proper town.

”Heʼs building on top of us!” a man shouted from two streets over.

”Heʼs building on top of everyone!” his wife corrected, pointing at the row of three-story buildings stretching into the distance.

The craftsmanʼs wife stood in her doorway with her arms folded and watched the building across the road gain two stories in the time it took her to exhale. She looked at her own home. Still one story.

She looked at the building again. Three stories. External staircase. Openings on the upper floors waiting for windows where she could plant beautiful flowers.

”Weʼre keeping the ground floor,” her husband said from behind her, reading her expression. ”I am not carrying our belongings up two flights of stairs.”

”I didnʼt say anything.”

”You were thinking it.”

”I was thinking that in Whisperfield, only guild masters and merchants lived in buildings this tall. And they paid a fortune for the privilege.”

The craftsman paused. He looked at the three-story structure across the road, at the families already climbing the new staircases to inspect their upper-floor units, at the settlement that had just tripled its capacity in the time it took most builders to lay a single course of brick.

”Donʼt tell him that,” the craftsman said. ”Heʼll raise our taxes.”

Quinlan finished the conversion in minutes. The existing grid now housed three times the population in the same footprint, and every new building he raised from this point forward went up three stories from the start. The settlementʼs silhouette had changed from a flat military camp to a low-rise town with a skyline that sat comfortably beneath the surrounding treeline.

The forest breathed easier. So did his build plan.

He still had a city to finish, though, and the work ahead was the kind that required more than just raw power. Infrastructure. Commerce. Industry. The bones of a place people could actually live in, not just sleep in.

He reached inward and found a telepathic link. A familiar one.

The response came instantly, warm and bright and carrying the particular energy of a woman who was in the middle of twelve things at once and thriving on every single one of them.

Quinlan laughed. Out loud, standing in the middle of a half-built city with sixty thousand people still pouring through a gate behind him, he laughed.

A pause came. Her voice grew concerned as a fourth possibility materialized.

He watched a family of five climb the staircase of a freshly converted three-story building, the mother counting steps while the father carried two bags and a toddler.

The delight that flooded through the link was so bright it practically had color.

Jasmine said, and the warmth in her voice was the kind that made telepathic communication feel like being wrapped in a blanket.

The word came with absolute conviction.

Quinlan asked, and the smile beneath his helmet was genuine.

He pushed his awareness beneath the settlement and started carving while chatting with his girl about various things, boosting his mood greatly and even forgetting about the mana drain while they spoke. The channels cut through bedrock in a network that ran downhill, away from the water table, away from every well he planned to dig, terminating in a sealed decomposition chamber far enough from the settlement that the wind would never carry it back. He threaded a branch of the magma conduit system through the chamberʼs walls. Heat accelerated breakdown. Basic biology. The system would process waste continuously on gravity and heat alone.

Jasmine said, and her mental voice carried a note of genuine admiration.

Quinlan grinned and moved on.

Barracks next. The soldiers of Whisperfield were still soldiers, even if the flag they served under had changed this afternoon. Scattering them into residential blocks alongside civilians would dissolve whatever unit cohesion they had left, and soldiers without structure turned into problems faster than soldiers with it.

He only needed to look as far as Iris to confirm the theory. The woman became a criminal without needing much time to deliberate.

He carved a military district along the northern edge, close enough to the treeline to serve as a buffer if anything came out of the forest and far enough from the residential grid that the distinction was clear.

Barracks halls rose from the earth in long, low rows, thick-walled and practical, with mess halls at each end and open drill yards between. Armory vaults sank into the ground with reinforced walls and heavy stone doors.

Jasmine noted approvingly.

He looked at the center of the settlement.

The residential grid sprawled in every direction, warm and solid and functional. But it was flat. The settlement needed a center of gravity, a core that pulled people inward and gave the place purpose beyond survival.

The energy through the link shifted. Quinlan felt it immediately. The warm, affectionate lover receded, and in her place stood the Tyrant of Commerce.

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