Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!-Chapter 39: Let’s cut them all down, I can gather them up later

[Construction of the Mining Guild (level 1): Completed!]

[Mining Camp: +75 ore per hour]

[Vein usage: 2/7]

[Mining Guild Can be Expanded!]

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"So it’s not linear, huh?" Theo took a mental note while hanging his axe down on his shoulder as he shifted his attention away from the tree and toward the notification.

While he had way too little data to judge at what rate those numbers went up, it didn’t stop him from feeling nice about the productivity of his manor rising in the slightest.

"Then again, is this mining guild an exception to the rule…" Theo squinted his eyes, "or a hidden hint?"

Prompted by his own curiosity, Theo looked back toward the notification with all his possible upgrades… before attempting to select the constructor’s office again.

Quite obviously, with all but the last few of his nails now gone, he didn’t have the proper materials to set another constructor’s office up. Yet, this wouldn’t be the first time for him to try to build something despite having none of the necessary resources for the construction.

This time, however, rather than rejecting Theo’s request, his system… simply refused to react to his desire in any way or form, pretty much in the same way it would just stay silent whenever Theo would ask questions out loud, foolishly hoping for the system to grace him with an answer.

"There really should be some sort of manual for how it all works…" Theo muttered under his breath as he gave up on the idea of doubling the constructor’s office before turning his eyes and attention back to the task at hand.

Right now, he was quite some distance away from the manor’s palisade, much deeper than the perimeter he originally attempted to cut out.

As it turned out, the stone walls project… while already one of the most costly projects Theo could partake in at the moment, really only required a fraction of the materials Theo was supposed to prepare to have it set up.

If his wooden palisade surrounded an area no bigger than an average children’s playground locked in the middle of a suburban setting, the outline of where the stone walls would be erected—a shining courtesy of Theo’s system—reached much farther away from the mansion, turning his small private possession into a compound in the full sense of the word.

"While this might be a bit too little to call it a stronghold or a walled-off city, a fortified keep, on the other hand…"

For a moment, Theo allowed his thoughts to linger on the idea and its ramifications, especially once extrapolated through the potential of development hidden behind the third tier of his manor.

Then, however, rather than allowing his thoughts to wander endlessly, Theo sighed before bringing his iron axe down from his shoulder and turning his attention straight back to his current task of cutting down the trees.

When he first came face-to-face with the enormity of the task of clearing the land for his system to erect the walls, initially… Theo thought about just giving up.

As he was currently in the middle of the forest, he had to remove a tree for pretty much every meter of the projected wall’s length. And given just how massive of a project this turned out to be…

Theo simply abandoned the idea of properly harvesting each tree he brought down, simply cutting them down, removing all of their branches with a single strike of his axe, and then moving on to the next tree.

The mindset behind this choice was simple.

If he managed to survive the incoming attack, he would likely have more than enough time to go back and harvest all those leftover logs for the precious wood they offered.

Thanks to this choice, by now, roughly twenty-five minutes into the task of clearing the trees away, Theo managed to clear out a stretch of a bit above a hundred meters. Yet, in the grand scheme of things, this distance amounted to a ninth, maybe a tenth of the area he needed to clear to open up the space for his system to construct the wall.

"At this rate…" Theo muttered, turning his eyes over to the invasion timer relentlessly ticking down regardless of how much Theo hurried up with his tasks. "At this rate, I’m really going to be cutting it close…"

With a bit less than sixteen hours left before the attack, Theo couldn’t help but feel as if his progress, while insane in its own right, was still too damn slow.

From the sixteen hours he had left, he had to cut away eight for a proper night of sleep. A time he then further padded up by two more hours, given the lack of a proper alarm to wake him up after a proper eight hours of sleep.

In this realistic scenario, he effectively only had six more hours’ worth of work, two or three of which he had no other choice but to dedicate to just the task of clearing out all those trees!

"Adding up the time I need to get the bunkers up just in case, the delay from smelting the ore from the guild and then crafting it into the nails, then the possible crafting time of the weapons and…"

Theo gulped his saliva down.

"And I’m starting to run short of the two hours I wanted in case something unexpected happens…"

Breathing out an exhausted sigh, Theo lowered his axe from his shoulder before standing up from the tree stump he took for a seat and moving over to the next tree daring to occupy the spot within the area marked by the system with a dim, white glow.

"Well, while it would suck balls if I ended up losing it all, it’s not like it would be impossible for me to get it all back at a later date," Theo muttered, allowing his mood to swing a bit…

Only to chase all those thoughts away when the mere act of swinging the iron axe and then watching how its sharp blade bit into the solid wood of the tree’s trunk reinforced his mood, replacing the defeatism with determination.

"Yeah, that’s not happening. I’m not going to retake this place simply because I won’t let anyone or anything take it away from me to begin with!" he announced out loud, only to pull his axe back before slamming it down against the tree again.

With two more swings, the tree creaked before its damaged support could hold no longer, effectively sending the decades-old plant falling down to the ground.

A few moments later, once the massive, branched log finally settled down slightly above the ground, Theo took a step away before placing the side of his axe’s blade against its trunk… and then slammed the bottom of his right palm against the axe’s handle, forcing its blade to run along the trunk as if he wanted to cut away the bark.

Just like that, as if by the touch of a magic—a system’s?—wand, all of the tree’s crown just… vanished, turning into nothing more than a bigger number attached to sticks and foliage slots within Theo’s inventory.

"Another meter done," Theo muttered as he jumped to the back, watching the log now fall properly to the ground before rolling a few steps away and finally settling down in its new resting spot. "Now," he then added as he slowly raised his eyes and locked them on the next tree in line, "only about eight to nine hundred meters to go!"