Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!-Chapter 50: Ten hours is not that bad of a price

[Do you wish to continue?]

Normally, if this was a game rather than real life, Theo would hardly hesitate before pressing the yes button, even if out of sheer curiosity about what the new, evolved system would provide him with.

Right now, however, Theo wasn’t in a game. And as such, rather than letting his curiosity get the better of him…

’Wait, am I actually hesitating?’

Theo squinted his eyes, only to then lean his head back, baffled by his own approach.

"It’s not like the system fucked me over before, did it?"

While he might have many complaints about it, especially when it came to how hard it could be to understand at times, Theo continued to benefit quite a lot from his system’s guidance.

Be it the choices it suggested or even the choices it outright provided, those would all come to benefit Theo in the long run, even if he couldn’t really see much of their use the moment he got them.

"Well, if the system wanted to fuck me over, it would’ve done so long ago, wouldn’t it?" Theo shrugged his shoulders before calming himself down with a breath and then opening his eyes wide, ready to read through all the notifications that would follow.

"Yes, I wish for my system to evolve into the industrial path of the crafter," Theo said out loud, just to make sure his intention would pass through.

For a moment, nothing happened.

’A dud?’

Pretty much right as Theo thought this, a new notification finally appeared.

[System Evolution Affirmed!]

[System will now evolve: Prepare for 10:00:00 timed downtime]

[This process cannot be sped up by system perks!]

[Ensure no harm can come your way during the system evolution!]

’Hmm?’

In a way, ten hours of downtime… wasn’t that big of a deal. Or so Theo would say if not for the fact that, as if to spite the early form of trust he was forming towards his system, it was also the precise moment when he just happened to glance at the next most important notification of all.

[Next challenger is approaching!]

[Time until the second challenger arrives: 20:00:00]

[System Evolution shall begin in 10:00]

And, at the same time, both of the timers started to tick away.

[19:59:59]

[9:59]

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’Well, fuck…’

Suddenly faced with the looming threat of yet another attack, an attack that Theo would love to have the time to properly prepare for… he found himself already pressed for time twice as much as he was before the first wave of challengers.

’At the very least, I know the worth of what I have right now, don’t I?’

Even if Theo would ultimately only have half the time to prepare when compared to what he had before, he now had the advantage that humans used to go from just another animal for predators to hunt to the absolute peak of the food chain.

He had the advantage of knowledge.

And with all the stuff he already set up before…

’As long as I mine some stone out, I should have enough iron, wood, and foliage to cover up the entire perimeter of both of my walls with armed towers…’ he thought, conveniently ignoring the fact that as the numbers of those towers grew, their now decreased costs in stone…

It would ramp up pretty damn quick, reaching numbers not even ten hours spent on nothing but mining stone would suffice to pay for.

"I guess that leaves me with just one thing to do, huh?"

Already hating the idea of just wasting those ten minutes of time he had, Theo dusted off his hands against his hips before abandoning the still-hot battlefield of his own making, turning, and dashing over to the inner ring of his manor.

’If anything, there’s one part that I cannot really ignore. And if I’m going to deal with ten hours of stacked progress on iron gathering, then I better get what ore the mining guild gathered into smelting right away!’

Thankfully, the recent fight came at a cost of no major injury or exhaustion, save for how hot it was, leading to a major loss of water and thus a spike in Theo’s thirst. Yet, simply by snacking on one berry after the other while making his way down to his underground mining base, Theo managed to quickly quench his thirst, completing this objective long before he actually reached the bottom level.

’Seven minutes left,’ Theo thought after taking a quick glance at the counter, only to then turn his attention back to the task at hand.

Thankfully, what he wanted to do was a pretty straightforward process.

First, he opened up his personal inventory, only to then access the manor’s storage through it, all to then move over all the iron ore his mining guild generated to his own subspace.

Then, done with the manor’s storage, he simply closed it off before going through the rather arduous process of opening each of the dozen or so furnaces he had long since set up before refilling both their smelting and their fuel chambers with, respectively, ore and wood.

’On that point, I wonder if I could use the oil from that infinite oil sack for the fuel instead,’ Theo thought, only to then laugh at the very idea. ’The question is, how? It’s not like I could put it in more than one slot at a time, and if I even tried to pour it directly into the furnace’s mouth…’

Shaking his head, Theo took a step back, as if worried that his weird idea, now projected in his mind, could somehow affect reality and lead to one or maybe even a few of the furnaces exploding right in his face.

"The moment I stop applying game logic to those blocks, they are going to act like they should in real life. Did my fight with the Oilrat teach me nothing?"

Shaking his head over his own naïveté, Theo quickly finished the task of dividing up all the ore his mining guild gathered into twelve equal parts before distributing it all into the furnaces.

Two minutes later, he was already rushing up the main staircase, counting seconds on his timer as he fought against the heat-caused exhaustion from before in his bid to spend the next ten hours—even if they had nothing to do with actual rest—in the comforts of his bedroom.

With just two more minutes on the timer, Theo finally managed to reach his manor and then make his way to his bedroom, where he quickly tossed his dirty, stinky clothes off his body before using the cleanest part of his shirt he could find to wipe as much sweat and grime from his body before falling straight back into his bed.

’Wait, if I go to sleep like that...’ Fully aware his body was nowhere near the definition of the word clean, Theo suddenly felt a sense of doubt as he glanced over to his relatively clean and stink-free beddings.

This hesitation, though, quickly passed, as he realized the advantage he had over the same situation he was in... but one devoid of his system and the abilities that came with it.

’Worst case scenario, I will just dismantle the entire bedroom and then construct it again. That seems like much less hassle than trying to wash those plant-fiber-based covers…’ he thought as the shorter of the timers finally reached [00:00], only to cut his consciousness off and send him into the abyss of unawareness right a she felt into the covers the cleaniness of which he was so concerned about but a second before.