Chapter 323: The Eternal Spear
It was still early in the morning of Day 186 and Earth’s doomed assimilation into the galactic community rolled on. The sun was shining, the pigs were swimming, the owls were hooting, the pelicans were soaring, and the main streets of Ghost Reef were chock full of human activity. Future challenges failed to cast a pall upon the tropical settlement and its residents.
Coop had checked in with a handful of his closest friends and was ready to get back to his hunt. As he strolled toward the heavy steel front gate, he made note of exactly how busy the settlement had become. It was one thing to hear about the changes, but it was another to experience them firsthand.
People were passing in and out of the many established service buildings, ordering, reserving, and collecting as many mana-based resources as the in-house masters could produce. Different groups called out to each other, divvying supplies among themselves, and sharing alternatives that circumvented obvious limitations in available inventory. They loaded their hauls up in teams, manually carrying them to their various underground destinations along the chasm. Rather than panicked urgency, they demonstrated the diligence of a cooperative community preparing for a well-forecasted natural disaster.
This wasn’t a unique situation either, as it had been occurring on a daily basis ever since the expansion efforts into the underground had been initiated. Only the scale had increased over time. With the results of the Underlayer Event, their endeavors had grown explosively.
The expansion efforts had gone from what was more of a side project for a small portion of the already limited resident population to something akin to a settlement event, where each individual of the increased population found ways to contribute. What had started as a simple proposal being conducted by Charlie, Jones, and Balor in the beginning was now being worked on by many, many more. It wouldn’t have been an exaggeration to say that the entirety of the population had been participating in the effort, adding their hands to personally contribute to Ghost Reef just like how the original residents had built up the fort at the top.
Coop figured it was a convenient way to demonstrate that they were all in it together. Rather than having an obvious dichotomy between the new and old, they were cooperating with each other to establish a place that they would all protect.
Thousands of residents, new and old, were working hard on what seemed like an equal number of individual construction projects. They funneled through the teleportation stations or up from the ramps with empty packs. They gathered supplies and coordinated plans from various hubs, heading back down the ramps and teleporters with tools and materials that would aid their collective vision in coming to life. The settlement was continuing to expand downward, then outward, at a pace that was escalating day by day as personnel arrived and expertise increased with the aid of mana.
It was quite the contrast when compared to the slow, deliberate growth of the original top layer of Ghost Reef. As Coop and Jones developed the courtyard of the old stone fort, they had focused on individual projects, one at a time, making sure to efficiently use the space as much as possible while establishing a cohesive series of neighborhoods. When Marcus joined in, the careful considerations had continued, setting a relatively slow pace of approval and construction. The results spoke for themselves, as they had created a template that the rest of the settlement held up as an example of what they could do. The old stone fort and its courtyard had become the model home at the start of a picture-perfect development, but on what was a city-wide scale instead of limited to an individual unit.
While each level was being designed independently, there were certain patterns being carried all the way down. The similarities were centered around the connecting teleportation hubs, landings for the physical ramps, and the initial carved apartment-like housing developments. Outside of those models, each layer was building its own characteristics that would reflect the new population as it moved in, and rather than a wheel a spoke pattern, the individual layers were broken into chambers, shaped like a four-leaf clover. The clearer division allowed for multiple styles to exist on the same level. Once they were closer to completion, Coop believed he could have spent months just exploring the different layers, but for the time being, he hadn’t visited a single one.
The expansion into the underground layers was following almost the exact same pattern of construction as the surface, at least if only looking at one single chamber at a time, with individual groups collectively focused on one project before moving on to the next. The layer governors were doing their best to follow the lead of the surface, creating mixed neighborhoods that would enrich the lives of their residents while leveraging the unique cultures they represented. There was a constant stream of them seeking council from the other leaders and architects of the settlement in the Town Hall.