Tim's POV
The guards at E-Rantel's gate were doing their jobs.
I recognised this and held no particular frustration about it, they had received orders from Panasolei Gruze Day Rettenmaier, which was the appropriate chain of command, and the orders said that an army approaching the city required authorisation before entry. What was behind me looked like an army if you were looking at it from a wall and counting bodies rather than assessing intent.
I told them the hundred thousand people were my followers. Not an army.
The guard who responded, a young, trying very hard to maintain the professional composure that his training had built while processing information his training had not prepared him for, shook his head and delivered Panasolei's instruction with the commitment of someone who understood that following orders was his job.
"Sorry Sir Tim, I still can't let you in, orders are orders"
I gave him a deadpan look. Then I pointed up.
The Seraph Empyreans were at really high altitude, the tier ten angels circling in the slow pattern they maintained when not engaged in specific tasks. From the ground they were visible as large shapes against the sky, that produced the specific kind of expression across the guard's face.
He looked back at me.
I walked to the gate. Took it in both hands. The gate was solid construction, iron-banded hardwood set in a stone frame, designed to withstand siege equipment. I ripped it out of the wall, and threw it into the grass to the side of the road.
I turned back to the guards.
"Soooo, does anyone want to stop me ?"
They shook their heads.
I walked through the empty gate frame into E-Rantel, and behind me, a hundred thousand people followed.
---
The city's reaction was the reaction of a population encountering something outside its normal category system.
E-Rantel had seen unusual things. I had contributed to several of them over the years the dragon librarian, the hero-rank orphanage children, the Adamantite rank achieved by a solo party named Murder Hobo. The city had a higher threshold than most for finding things surprising.
This exceeded the threshold.
The streets were not wide enough for a hundred thousand people simultaneously, which meant the column moved through the city in a flowing process rather than a mass arrival, the people at the front finding space and the people behind filling the space vacated by the people ahead.
I reached the orphanage. Looked at it. Looked at the hundred thousand people still moving through the streets behind me. Looked at the orphanage again.
The math was simple, the orphanage, even expanded to its current form, could not house a hundred thousand people. The city of E-Rantel could not house a hundred thousand additional people.
I needed a hundred thousand homes.
I reached for the earth god's idol.
"God of Earth, Tansform"
---
The earth god's form arrived with the specific character that each transformation had, the brown glow, the shift in the body's fundamental quality, the knowledge of the divine domain filling the space my head.
Nature's Shelter arrived in my awareness as a tier ten spell, its function complete and legible, a bunker summoned from the earth itself, the interior space giving the illusion of an endless sky, capable of housing thousands in rooms the size of large houses, immune to everything except the Sword of Damocles.
I cast it.
The ground opened and the shelter rose, the earth moving aside for a structure. The exterior was unassuming, a modest opening in the ground, the entrance sized for human passage, and the interior was what the spell description had promised: rooms extending beyond what the exterior dimensions suggested was possible, each room large, the ceiling a rendered sky that changed with the hours in the way actual skies changed.
I walked one metre to the side and cast it again.
Then again.
Then again.
The process was meditative in the way of repeated precise action, each casting the same, each shelter rising the same way, the earth's cooperation with the divine form consistent and unhurried. I counted as I walked, moving through the areas of the city where the land allowed for the installations, expanding outward from the orphanage in the concentric pattern that maximised coverage without concentrating the shelters beyond what the city's infrastructure could service.
Approaching more than ten thousand, as I made more for peasents and the poor.
The shelters were not equally distributed, the noble districts, which had their established housing, I bypassed entirely. The shelters went where the lower and middle wards needed them, where the population that had been living in overcrowded conditions for generations now had access to rooms the size of houses for the cost of nothing.
By the time the hundred thousandth person had been directed to a shelter room and the door had closed behind them, the city of E-Rantel had undergone a transformation that I was going to spend the next several months managing the implications of.
---
I started to turn my orphanage to an academy.
The academy took shape over the following months.
The orphanage had always been an educational institution in practice even when it was formally a care facility, the transformation to an explicit academy was a naming and expansion rather than a creation, the classes that had been running for years formalised, the curriculum broadened, the teaching staff expanded with the gold and adventuring work had been accumulating.
I made it free for everyone.
The dwarf kingdom was paying for the operational costs as part of the sponsorship arrangement, their contribution had been growing since the formal agreement, and I had been directing it toward the academy's infrastructure rather than the orphanage's narrower needs. The dwarven teachers who had been contributing to the history curriculum had expanded their scope at my request, the craftsmanship instruction they provided having become one of the most popular curriculum tracks.
The earth god's form built housing. Not just the initial thousand shelters, I expanded through the daily hour as the need presented itself, the new residents of E-Rantel who arrived in the months following the initial influx finding rooms available because I was adding shelters faster than the population was growing.
The air god's form was produceing cheap rock golems in mass.
The golem knowledge from the first transformation had been written down in the compressed hour of the divine form, and the notes had been thorough enough to serve as a working manual as they are in the liadary for anyone to learn, Rock golems were the first type, simple constructs, durable, tireless, capable of the sustained physical labour that farming required without the limitations of biological fatigue or seasonal availability.
I produced them in quantity.
One copper coin to borrow a golem for a day's work.
The low pricing was the point. Not profit, the copper covered the material consumption of the golem's operation and nothing more. The point was accessibility, as bread is two copper pieces, so everyone could get a golem, and they really want to, make one too.
The weather control was the multiplier.
Tier six weather modification, applied to the agricultural cycle with the precision of someone who had been listening to plants for fifteen years and understood what the crops needed as rain that arrived when the soil was right for it, the clear days that followed for the harvest work, the frost warnings that came early enough to allow protective measures. E-Rantel's surrounding farmland had been producing well for years, my earlier interventions having established a baseline of good practice. The systematic weather management took it further.
The city's relationship with food scarcity ended.
Not everywhere, not permanently, not without the ongoing management, but the structural situation changed from one of consistent pressure to one of consistent abundance.
The tier two angels were another layer I added last, the final element of a system that I had been building piece by piece since the transformation began.
A thousand tier two angels, distributed across the city and its immediate surroundings, carrying out the function of lower-tier healing on anyone and everyone injured, if fell from a cart, cut themselves in the kitchen, sick with the seasonal infections that still circulated regardless of my earlier vermin clearance, received tier one healing from an angel that arrived before they had finished registering the injury.
The undead from the Katze Plains stopped reaching the city walls. The Seraph Empyreans at high altitude intercepted them with the comprehensive thoroughness of beings that did not sleep or tire or lose concentration, the undead that had been a seasonal background concern of E-Rantel for years simply ceasing to reach the inhabited areas.
The churches had a complicated overy the few months.
Their theological framework for what was happening in their city required revision. The avatar interpretation was the one they settled on, the gods had sent their representative, and the representative was Tim, and the evidence for this interpretation was present in every direction they looked. The old earth priest who had healed my arm years ago started addressing me as the great child of the earth god, which I received with the same polite deflection I applied to all the religious titles and which convinced nobody.
The idol of myself that some of the more enthusiastic residents had commissioned was the detail that I found simultaneously most ridiculous and most indicative of how far things had gone. It was a reasonable likeness.
The craftsmanship was good. I had it moved to Hejinmal's library because putting it somewhere else felt like an endorsement and destroying it felt like a provocation, and Hejinmal had agreed to keep it on a shelf near the ceiling where it was visible but not prominent.
Hejinmal himself had become his own institution.
The library had expanded three times since his arrival, the original orphanage library, then the addition I had funded from the herb income, then the structure the dwarf kingdom had contributed as part of the sponsorship agreement.
The collection included the books from the fortress, the dwarven historical texts, everything I had acquired from various sources over the years, and the donations that people brought to what had become, in the city's understanding, a sacred repository of knowledge guarded by a dragon.
The great dragon of forbidden knowledge, they called him.
Hejinmal had received this title with the specific dignity of a dragon who was genuinely pleased but was too proud to show it without restraint. He had started giving lectures on Tuesday evenings, attending was free, the subjects were whatever Hejinmal had been reading that week, and the audience ranged from scholars to curious children to elderly residents who had nothing better to do on Tuesday evenings and found the dragon's perspective on metallurgy or historical cartography or the ecology of the Azerlisia Mountains surprisingly engaging.
---
a few weeks later....
A letter from King Ramposa III arrived on a morning when I had been in the office since before dawn, working through the administrative correspondence that running what had become essentially a small city within a city generated.
The king's seal was familiar from years of seeing it on official documents that had passed through various channels I monitored. The letter itself was courteous.
Formal, warm, neither dismissive nor deferential, the tone of someone who had been advised to be careful.
An invitation to the capital. A meeting with the king and the assembled nobles. The cart provided for my transport, which was the court's way of managing the protocol of bringing me in the royal cart defined the visit as invited rather than arrived, which carried specific implications for how the meeting would be structured.
I put the letter down and as I made a shadow clone that I was going to leave behind to manage the paperwork.
The clone acted like me and got back to work.
I got up, put on the Adamantite armour that was the paladin armour's disguise, made sure the rings and the necklace were in place, tucked the magic sack securely, and walked to the fancy cart.
The messenger opened the door of the cart for me..
As I got in.
---
Tim [level 97]
[Karma=500] [Max]