Benton was working on the sect grounds when he received a pop up notifying him that Kang Lin requested an attempt to improve her Lightning Shield. He smiled. She, unlike Yang Xiu, didn't attempt to try his patience by selecting one of the trials he'd forbidden.
After granting his permission, he returned to his labor. Though he'd previously done preliminary work on the sect grounds by placing a lot of the main buildings and housing, that didn't make the area exactly move-in ready. There was no running water or sanitary system or roads. In order to actually get his sect members living out there, he needed to check all those items off his To Do list, which was why he planned to dedicate the whole night to the task.
Of course, he could use the villagers as a labor force instead of doing it himself, but they would take weeks or even months just to quarry stone, crush it, transport it to the sect grounds, and place it on the streets. And that was just one step in the process.
First, they'd have to dig out a foundation for the streets. Then, they'd need a layer of sand, followed by a layer of gravel. Finally, the top layer would be paving stones.
Of course, that was much fancier than anything in the village, where they mostly used dirt with some gravel to shore up muddy spots. But the sect grounds should be fancy. It wouldn't do to skimp on the infrastructure. If for no other reason, Benton didn't want people to trapse mud into his nice buildings.
Anyway, his point was that trying to get mortals to do the work would take way, way too long.
He did have a second labor force available, one consisting of over two hundred fifty members. And those laborers were stronger and had much better stamina than any mortal. That group, however, had much more important things to be doing than basic construction, namely growing stronger and earning him Sect Points.
Which meant that the workload fell to him. So work he did.
The good thing about techniques, especially when learned to Mastery, was that they were highly flexible. Just because he'd purchased one specifically to dig foundations did not mean that he couldn't use it to dig other stuff. It came in really handy in quickly excavating streets about a foot deep and fifteen feet wide.
He ran the main boulevard from his planned location for the front gate, between his pavilions, past the cafeteria, and to the residential area. There, he laid it out between the rows of houses. Finally, he went back to the Central Business District and forked it off to the arena.
Perfect.
The next few hours were spent flying to a nearby river in order to gather sand and rocks. He shuddered to think how difficult that part would have been without his spatial ring.
Once he had those two layers placed, he just needed something to use as paving stone. The rock itself wasn't an issue as there were literally mountains of the stuff nearby. He did, however, have to figure out how to slice off thin chunks to serve as the top of his roads.
The easiest thing, obviously, would have been to purchase a new technique using Earth qi to separate rock slabs exactly the size and thickness he needed. Unfortunately, his cheating ways were on hold since he'd promised himself to only spend more points in an emergency, and he could come up with no spin that justified simplifying his workload of adding pavers on top of his streets as an emergency. Worst case, he could just leave the gravel as the upper layer until he had more time or points to spend.
On the other hand, he really did want the task done done, and done done meant pavers. With all the power at his command, there had to be something he could do.
Hmm.
Well, his Gravity burst was good for manipulating things. He could use that to move slabs around however he wanted to, so that was a start.
He needed something to slice the rock, though. Lightning seemed grossly unsuited for the task, as did increasing temperature. Even if he were able to melt the rock into some kind of lava, he'd have to mold it back into shape, and volcanic rock just wasn't what he pictured for his streets.
There was his main attack technique. Void was really good at creating … voids. The problem was that he could only deliver it via metal, and it came out as a sphere. But did it have to?
The first part, yes. When he'd created the technique, he'd very specifically made it contingent on having something metal deliver the qi to the target.
The second part, though… Not necessarily. The technique layered two types of qi, one variable and the other Void, on metal. The shape the expended qi took depended on... He had no idea.
"System, can I make the shape of qi coming from my technique any shape I want? And if so, will that cost me a modification using points?"
"Host may modify the shape of qi expelled by a mastered technique using willpower and concentration. No Sect Point expenditure is required."
Perfect. That answer was exactly the one he'd both wanted and, frankly, had expected to receive. The response was completely logical, considering everything he knew about qi manipulation. Using qi externally required a technique, but once a cultivator mastered one, it could generally be modified to a reasonable extent to fit the needs of a moment. Otherwise, normal cultivators would be way too limited in their abilities, considering how long it took to learn techniques.
Benton Quickstepped a short distance into the forest and found a downed tree to practice on. He tossed one of his metal spheres at the dead wood, charging his attack technique with a single unit of Void qi, and, at the moment of impact, tried to shape it into a thin circle about the diameter of the tree.
It didn't work. Nor did the next. Or the next. In fact, it took him almost a dozen tries and two more downed trunks before anything other than a sphere of Void erupted from the point of impact. He was really glad none of his disciples were watching him because about fifty attempts were required before he felt proficient with the modified technique.
After flying to the mountains and finding an outcrop of rock, though, the technique worked beautifully. He was able to produce two and a half inch thick slabs of stone in seconds, and like he'd figured, his Gravity technique worked wonderfully to separate the cuts from the rest of the stone.
With the hard part figured out, the work went pretty fast, and shortly after nightfall, the roads were finished. And they looked pretty darn good if he did say so himself. In the future, he might create a new construction technique to make them look fancier, but he was fine with them for the moment.
He crossed that task off his mental To Do list.
Next came plumbing.
Metallurgists, especially ones who could cultivate, could do some amazing things, but industrial processes weren't all that advanced on his new planet. A blacksmith could create a pipe, but each one was a one-off, meaning they weren't cheap.
It was simpler and easier to use bamboo. When treated with an alchemical solution or a bath or something—Benton hadn't learned much about the actual process—the thin wood became strong and durable, placing somewhere between PVC and cast iron when compared to the materials used on Earth.
He didn't have access to any alchemical resources to strengthen bamboo, though, and Wan Ai had more important things to learn than how to create plumbing pipe. So Benton decided to apply a different method—formations. It was a bit time consuming as he had to sketch out an array on each piece of bamboo, but after a few tests, he discovered that it wasn't all that difficult to accomplish.
Besides formations providing a method to strengthen wood into pipes, another positive was that the buildings were all internally plumbed, meaning all he had to do was hook up to the domestic water connections going into them and the sanitary connections coming out. Though most of the village buildings didn't have such amenities, they were apparently relatively common for sects and larger cities. Even most of the structures he'd seen in Vermilion Incomparable Rain Town had them.
Though the presence of internal plumbing simplified his job, Benton still had work to do, mainly finding a source of clean water and running it to the buildings and figuring out what to do with the waste that came out. One might think that, without electricity, both those tasks would be extremely difficult.
That was where qi came in.
Dealing with the sanitary disposal was made particularly simple. On Earth, he would have had to use drains to collect all that foul material before pumping it to a waste treatment facility. Instead, he just used his excavation technique to dig a hole outside each building, ran the waste pipe into the ground, applied a common formation created for the purpose of purifying such matter, and covered the hole back up.
Easy peasy.
Water was a little more complicated than sanitary but was still somewhat more straightforward than on Earth. First, Benton needed a pump house. Well, a small structure that served to move water by using qi instead of a pump.
Screw it. He decided to still refer to it as a pump house, at least to himself.
Anyway, the main feature of the structure were two arrays. The first acted as the pump, drawing water in one side of a pipe and propelling out the other side. The second purified the water, eliminating microbes, waste materials, dirt, etc.
Deciding to become a formations expert really paid dividends for him.
Carpentry, unfortunately, wasn't one of his talents, and he wasn't going to violate his emergency use only rule for the purposes of constructing a shelter to hide and protect a couple of arrays. Instead, he threw up a temporary frame of bamboo with fabric walls. To make it look better, he'd hire villagers to construct an actual building. That job could be finished at a later date, though, as it would function just fine as it was.
Next, Benton dug a well and ran bamboo pipes from the water source to the pump house, which was actually fairly easy. The biggest issue was deciding how big to make the pipe.
Back on Earth, construction projects hadn't been the primary part of his job, but he'd been involved in reviewing enough architectural and engineering design sets that he understood the basics. He figured that, for the number of buildings he was hooking up, an eight-inch diameter main might be about right to start with?
Actually, he really had no idea what size to use.
He didn't think an eight-inch main would possibly be too big, and if it were too small, adding more capacity would be easy as he could simply create a whole new run.
Actually, if he completely screwed up and it didn't work, he could always pull it out and start over. Qi combined with his other superhuman abilities made the whole process a whole heckuva lot easier that using a backhoe to dig and lifts to place heavy cast iron pipe.
The following step was a much bigger pain in the butt—distributing the water to each of the structures. If he'd only wanted to serve the buildings in the CBD, it would have been fine, but he wanted his sect members to live high on the hog, meaning the houses needed running water as well.
All the construction drawings he'd ever seen stepped down the size of pipes based on calculations performed by engineers. He had no idea what those calculations entailed, though, so he just had to wing it, transitioning to smaller diameters when it felt right.
Ugh.
Benton foresaw a lot of trial and error in his future because there was no way he was going to magically get it right on the first try. He'd just have to accept that the distribution wouldn't be perfect right from the start as he didn't have time to mess with it. As long as an occupant could trigger a formation and have water come out of a spigot, he'd be satisfied even if the flow dried up if too many people did it at once. Making capacity match demand could wait until a later date.
As it was, trenching a path leading to every single building, sizing the mains, connecting the pipes, and covering the open channels took pretty much the entire night. When he finished, though, the sect grounds were marginally ready to have people start living there.
Benton couldn't wait to get started with the move.