Chapter 164: Goodbye Home
Benton grinned, happy that he had the core of his sect placed. The Administration Hall, the Library, the Lecture Hall, the Amphitheater, six pavilions, and a couple of auxiliary buildings had been installed near the eventual gate. A short distance away was the Contribution Points Shop and the Trials Pagoda. Farther on was the arena.
That was a great start.
With the work locations clearly established, he needed places for all his people to live and chose the large empty area opposite the arena to build the residential section. On his way there, he dropped the cafeteria, a large, single-story building that had enough kitchen space and seating capacity to handle roughly five hundred people at once. As long as everyone didn’t go for meals at exactly the same time, it should work as the main eating location until sect membership reached into the thousands. Which was why he sited it where he did, halfway between the CBD and the housing area.
Once he reached the sector he’d selected, his first placement was the Outer Sect Pavilion, an eleven-story building that contained sixty apartments easily capable of holding up to one hundred eighty sect members, more if they really wanted to stuff them inside. He planned to mainly use it for children and temporary housing for new, non-village recruits.
Dotted around the area along planned curved roads much like a suburban development back in the good old US of A, he placed twenty family homes of various sizes and configurations and thirty single dwellings favored by many cultivators belonging to various sects.
Hmm.
All told, he could easily house about three hundred members, which was good. The capacity slightly exceeded the current membership. On the negative side, he was all out of dwellings from his ring, and the Rising Tide Sect was growing rapidly. There was no way he’d be able to fit all the people in the village into the current structures on the sect grounds.
To do so, he’d need to begin either building his own houses or moving ones from the village onto the grounds. Neither of those options appealed to him, though. All the structures taken from the Righteous Rain Sect, while having various appearances, had a certain aesthetic similarity that he liked. The village houses would clash terribly, and the time required to build new ones while maintaining any kind of architectural conformity would be problematic.
It seemed like a visit to Vermillion Incomparable Rain Town was in order in the near future. Which was a good idea on multiple fronts. For one thing, he had kind of promised Fatty Ren a solution to his cultivation stagnation, and recruiting the large Town Lord might just be a way to speed up the growth of the Rising Tide Sect so that Benton could get to Nascent Soul even faster.
He would feel much better about the security situation if he were stronger than any known cultivator on the continent. Fighting against an opponent with an aura had not been easy or fun. If that opponent had been a human with scores of mastered techniques, Benton may not have won.
Adding that out-of-town trip to his mental To Do List, he moved on to his next priority—getting the sect moving in the right direction. The beast tide had been a positive in many ways. Lots of sect members had made significant improvements. Pretty much everyone had gotten at least some experience out of the deal. The sect would be flush with material wealth from all the spoils from the beasts they’d killed. And best of all, no one had gotten killed. The village hadn’t even suffered any significant damage.
The event couldn’t have gone any better.