[Small Palisade: Completed]
[Watchtower: Completed]
[Updating the threat meter]
[Threat Level: no threats]
[Manor Threat Level: no threats]
"Oh?"
Theo finished up his swing before taking a look at the notifications appearing before his eyes.
"That surely took a while," he muttered as he turned his eyes over in the direction of the now finished defensive structure wrapping around his manor before moving his eyes over to the tower.
While the palisade was nothing more than a bunch of wooden logs with spikes at the end stuck into the ground and then arranged into a neat, tight fence, the tower… was as simple as it was actually complex.
On its own, the tower appeared to be constructed in three segments, with four legs slightly angled towards the center of their support as they rose up to the sky, only to be finished with a simple square frame that bound their tips in place. This frame then served as the support for the second tier, which, in turn, supported the third and last tier.
At the very top, instead of just an empty square, there was a small shack of around two by two in size, elevated walls to protect the observer from any potential projectiles, and finally, a thatched roof resting atop a simple wooden frame to keep the user from the rain or the sun.
'While it looks like it could topple under nothing more than a slight gust of wind… This system of mine really doesn't strike me as something that would scam me like that,' Theo thought, only for his eyes to linger on the horizontal supports between each of the tiers before tracking the straight line of a simple rope ladder hanging all the way down to the point where the palisade shielded it from his eyes.
"Well, it's not like I can test it. And while I want to take a look from above, I don't really have any plans to stay there for long," thinking out loud, Theo then quickly turned his attention back to the task at hand.
Thankfully, with just three more swings of his axe, yet another tree turned into nothing more than numbers in his inventory, allowing the young man to raise the axe up to his shoulder and breathe out with the satisfaction of a job well done.
"Now, I only need to do it one, maybe two more times, and it should be all done," Theo muttered before heaving a tired sigh and turning back.
He had spent around two hours doing nothing but cutting down trees, a task that took surprisingly long even with the blessing of his system. The blocky subroutine aside—given how a tree could have as many as up to a hundred individual blocks of wood in it—by cutting the trees in the survival manner, he still needed to properly swing his axe around four times to bring it down. Clearing it of branches would take another strike, while portioning it off into chunks could take as little as three and as many as seven further strikes, a number that would then more than double when he moved on to quartering the pieces to turn them into items he could actually put into his inventory.
All in all, it took Theo between twelve and twenty well-aimed strikes of the axe to turn a tree into a bunch of numbers in his inventory. A process that appeared easy when thought about yet still proved to take quite the heavy toll not only on his arms and body in general but also on his brain—after all, felling just one tree in the wrong way could result in Theo accidentally demolishing a solid portion of his very own palisade!
With that number and those properties in mind, taking just two or three minutes to properly remove one tree was Theo's average, allowing him to bring down just around fifty trees… from an area that he calculated to have between one to two hundred trees in total!
"I know it would be best to clear the perimeter right away and stop at nothing before I'm done…" Theo's voice hung in the air for a moment, only for the young man to then lower and finally shake his head in resignation. "But I guess I'm nearing my limit by now. I need to eat, drink, and then sleep!"
Safety wasn't the only reason why Theo was so stoked about all those potential upgrades to the manor he could enact. And while he focused on his tasks, he forgot about one extremely vital question.
A question he didn't even bother to ask, instantly assuming the system wouldn't bother to give him an answer.
"Hey, system, is it possible for me to use the manor… or rather, the mansion during the upgrade process?"
Theo waited for a few moments, even going as far as to delude himself into thinking the system had to either calculate the answer or ask some authority that ruled it… only to give up when several minutes passed with no new notification appearing before his eyes.
"I'm on my own with it, I guess…" Theo muttered before making his way back inside his small wall… only to see that by now… roughly around a meter out of the total of around ten meters of his mansion had turned into solid stone.
"There are some inner walls and floors…" the young man muttered as he looked over the "completed" part of the project and through the see-through projection at the area where the mansion expanded.
Its core, however, the wooden structure nested within the boulder stoneage, appeared to be as it was before, with the upgrade-related changes seemingly not affecting it at all!
"If that's how it is, then…"
Sensing a feeling of budding hope at the bottom of his heart, Theo quickly summoned the familiar notification from the system before scrolling through it to find the two mansion upgrades he was currently most interested in.
"So the dining hall needs me to smelt some more iron… Hell yeah!"
While the missing iron for the dining hall was certainly a letdown, Theo couldn't care less.
For right now, he could satisfy both his hunger and his thirst with just the berries. What was much more important, however, was how with just a bit of foliage, wood, and stone, he could actually add the bedroom to his mansion!
"System, you know what to do!" Shouting out with joy and anticipation, Theo willed for the construction of the bedroom.
And just like that, the streaks of light appeared once again, adding up to the already existing ones that fed into the ongoing construction of the mansion's tier upgrade.
Contrary to the slower progress of the update, however, the construction of the bedroom progressed quickly enough for Theo to see the progress before he would even need to blink his eyes!
"Come on, just a little longer," he muttered while squeezing his hands into fists with anticipation, waiting for the familiar effect to happen…
Only for a cut-out part of the mansion to suddenly squeeze itself down as it rose up half a meter into the air… before decompressing as it fell down, perfectly fitting into the place it came from with the already familiar, satisfying thump
[Bedroom: Completed]
'Finally!'
Not sparing even another second on waiting, Theo jumped over the existing part of the tier 2 upgrade to his mansion before then doing it again over one of the inner walls before reaching what used to be an entrance to his wooden home. From there, he came inside… only to be faced with nothing but a series of empty rooms and a lone staircase leading up to the mansion's second floor.
For now, however, Theo ignored the second floor and ran across the wooden corridor before finally arriving at the innermost chamber of the place, hidden all the way out to where the boulders pretty much made most of the walls, with the biggest open space between them already customized to serve as a chimney for the room's fireplace, and with all the other gaps covered with wooden planks.
Then, there was the most important part of the place, an elevated podium just slightly larger than Theo was tall and more than two and a half times his width. Atop this podium lay a cushion made from what appeared to be crushed foliage neatly packed into… some sort of material Theo didn't even want to know the source of.
All in all, this was the one luxury he never expected to actually achieve so soon into his exile, even when the first wave of excitement struck him down when he stepped into this civilization-forgotten place.
Out of all the things, it was an actual bed!