Once again, streaks of light marked the sky. This time, however, pretty much all of them came from the direction of the forest's edge, posing quite the interesting question for Theo.
'Just how far will this construction pull the materials from, I wonder?' he thought, only to squint his eyes as he realized a certain discrepancy. 'Where exactly is that stone coming from? Didn't I use most of it for the trap anyway?'
Theo's memories of the exact state of his inventory weren't all that precise. Back then, he was more interested in finishing the trap than keeping an accurate mental stock of exactly how many blocks of each kind he had between his inventory and his chests.
And yet, even if he couldn't recall the precise numbers…
"Yeah, I'm quite damn sure I've used up most of it…" he muttered, staring at the strings of light that didn't seem to care about facts or logic, bringing over the stone that he had no right to have. "That is, unless…"
Theo's eyes opened up wide as the realization came down on him.
'That is, unless it's deconstructing the trap!'
Theo took a step back, more… appalled than he was surprised or shocked at this point.
It wasn't the first time for his system to work in ways he didn't expect. And judging by how one of his achievements quite literally made it easier for him to abuse the gray area between the inner workings of the system and this world's physics…
"Well, even if that's the case, that's only good for me. Thinking about it, it would be only rational for me to go back and remove all the traces of what I did, just in case the folks from back on the other side of that damned gate decided to exile someone else," he sighed, putting his curiosity aside and shoving the topic to the back of his head, classifying it as just yet another weird convenience.
With this 'don't try to fix what's not broken' attitude aside, however, Theo still had one massive issue to process.
And it just so happened that, just like with his crafting, now that he had moved on beyond just the most basic stuff—or tier 1 manor, in the case of his current project—it came with a time delay.
Sure, the particles of wood and stone continued to surge towards the now occupied center of the building zone. This time, however, the way those strings of light behaved was quite different, with most of them all originating from the same place—the forest's edge where Theo formerly presided—only to then split up right before reaching their usual goal, with the blocks of stone floating towards the mansion itself while the blocks of wood fed into the palisade and the watchtower's see-through blueprints.
The palisade itself was more of a privacy boon than an actual protective measure, standing at a measly two and a half meters tall while pretty much pressed right into the edge of the area Theo had cleared out from the trees and bushes before.
The watchtower, on the other hand, soon appeared to stand at a respectable height of around ten, maybe fifteen meters, rising just above the tops of the nearby trees.
'It surely looks practical for someone standing watch to be able to see above the trees,' Theo thought while fully aware the tower's height… was pretty much just a redundancy.
He wasn't going to waste his time leisurely standing in that tower, nor did he have anyone to do it for him.
No, the one and only purpose for this tower was to automatically warn him of any and all potential threats approaching the place so that he wouldn't be caught off guard. That, however, made its respectable height pretty much useless and, if not for the perks that came with it, nothing more than a waste of materials.
"Judging by how quickly the blocks are filling up the projected image of how it's going to look once it's completed… it shouldn't be more than two, maybe three minutes before it's done. On the other hand…" narrating his own thoughts to himself, Theo turned his eyes back to his freshly built mansion that he had already rushed to fully renovate into the higher tier.
By now, the blueprint had completely remodeled the place. Not only did it grow nearly twice in terms of the ground area it covered, moving as far out as half the distance between the old wooden walls and the palisade itself, the building also grew by a whole new level, even if it remained as nothing more than a simple, see-through projection for now.
When it came to the system filling in the holographic projection with an actual mass of stone, however, the process progressed at a much slower rate than the tier 1 wooden manor upgrades. The progress was so damn slow, in fact, that Theo couldn't even give an accurate estimate for himself of how long it would take to finish.
"It seems I've grown quite impatient, didn't I?" he muttered to himself, helplessly admitting to his own faults. "I guess this makes it as good a time as any to look into all the other tasks I should take care of, huh?"
With the axe materializing in his hand out of thin air, Theo turned his back to the manor and stepped towards the palisade, only to quickly find a system-born beaten path leading from the projected mansion's doors all the way to what seemed like a gate within the wooden wall that now surrounded the place.
"There will be absolutely no use for this wall if there are trees all around it for the monsters to climb and then jump from," he narrated his own thoughts again while approaching the wooden gate… only for it to open all on its own as he approached, remain open when he stepped through it, and then quickly shut closed as soon as he escaped to the outside.
"Judging by how the mansion expanded during the upgrade, I should assume the same would be the case for the tier two walls, huh?" Theo muttered as he dropped the axe from his shoulder while circling the first of the many trees he had mentally marked for removal.
He then raised the axe up and to the back, already calculating the proper angles and directions he should cut at for the tree to fall away from the wall.
With the task now focused more on removing the trees rather than harvesting them for resources, Theo happily switched over to the survival mode of tree-cutting, one that was far faster and more reliable than removing them block by block while coming at the obvious cost of a much lesser yield of wood from each individual tree.
'Once I'm done cutting them down, I should go mine out some stone so that I can start the second tier of upgrades as soon as the manor finishes upgrading itself,' Theo thought, already turning his attention off as he simply went through the usual motions of cutting the tree down, clearing its branches off with a single, miraculous cut, cutting it into short logs, and then quartering each of those before rising up and pinning his eyes on the next tree in line.
'That, and I should try to look for some ore, even if I don't really have plans to mine it out yet,' he thought, daring not to risk damaging the vein that he could potentially exploit just like he could now make use of the small stream by turning it into a well to draw infinitely more water than it originally would be able to provide him with.
"And then…" with another tree falling down to the forest floor, Theo raised his foot and stepped down on its trunk, holding it in place as he raised his axe with just one hand to remove all the branches with but a single cut, "then, we will see what's next. After all," he smiled lightly, "what's the use of planning for the future when I can't even begin to imagine what it holds in store for me?"
Theo giggled, mindlessly chopping the log into blocks and then quarters, only to stuff it into his inventory and move on to the next tree.
"It's not like I could've ever predicted how far I would go in just a few days back when I first took my first step in this place," he spoke to himself while shrugging his shoulders. "And just like that, seeing how my progress only seems to accelerate as it already grows faster and faster, there's absolutely no use trying to plan too far ahead."
Theo then sighed, suddenly realizing somewhat of a downside to his rapid growth.
"After all, I have just the feeling all of this…" Theo cast a sweeping glance at his surroundings, the wooden wall, the forest's depth, and then the projection of the third story of his mansion already peeking out from behind the wall, even though the actual progress of the upgrade was likely still completing the remodeling of the ground floor.
"This system of mine just might have a whole lot more in store for me than what I'm even capable of figuring out."