Chapter 100: The Night Everything Changed
Benton developed a routine over the next several days, beginning his morning by joining the twins on a sweep of the wood harvesting area and doing check-ins with his sect members and the villagers working on the wall. The craftspeople were actually under-utilized, creating a twenty-feet long by twenty-feet tall section every other day. They informed Benton that they could easily do five times that much, but the harvesters were not producing enough.
The woods had sat fallow long enough that there was plenty of lumber available for cutting, so Benton wasn’t sure what the holdup was. He asked Guang Yin about it. The answer was simple—age. All the harvesters were in their sixties, and having reached only the third and fourth minor realms of Qi Gathering, they weren’t much more spry than a mortal of the same age. Cutting large, supernaturally tough trees was hard work.
Benton wanted to eventually wall off a huge area, but he thought he could live with starting with only five acres. That amount wasn’t nearly large enough for all the buildings he had stored, but it was more than adequate to serve the needs of a sect consisting of only a little over a hundred members.
He did some math. To fence around the entire rectangular space he envisioned would require a bit under two thousand linear feet of wall. At twenty feet every other day, that meant it would be a minimum of two hundred days before he could move his people into their new digs.
That wasn’t good enough.
The first step was to get more manpower. After talking with Mistress Zhong, they upped the number of orphans who would learn harvesting from two to six. Four of the ones from the village were easy to slot due to them having nature aspected qi, and Benton was lucky in that one from the town was wood aspected and another earth. Wood was actually a superior to nature for the particular harvesting involved, and earth was serviceable. Benton’s intent was to switch that latter kid over to growing wood instead of cutting it after the current supply crisis was resolved.
He supplied each of the six new laborers, all at minor realm four, with his harvesting technique. Of course, it would take them a while to even reach Small Success, but just having six more young, willing, strong helpers was a big improvement.
Next, Benton couldn’t help but notice that the tools the men were using weren’t exactly new, and they only had a total of ten sets. And not every tool in every set was in good enough shape to even use. Wincing at the cost, Benton purchased a new set for every harvester for one shop point each.
Production increased dramatically. The new tools cut better and were much more ergonomic than the old ones. And the strong youngsters with outstanding stamina being there for the old men to order around relieved them of a lot of the most backbreaking work.
In the first two days of having the helpers on site, production went up by fifty percent, raising output to thirty linear feet of wall every other day. After two more days with the youngsters learning their jobs and assimilating more of what the technique was telling them to do, it went up to thirty-five.
That number would only improve as the kids gained more experience. Benton expected a big jump when they all hit Small Success.
Wan Ai and Zou Tian continued to be a great team. Five days after the first bath, Ye Zan and two of his guards hit the first minor realm of Bronze Body Cultivation, having immersed themselves three full times. That same day, Wan Ai, who achieved Small Success with the herb technique, and her new assistant, Bai Xinyi, produced enough herbs for twelve baths.