Lord Of The New World

“...I did it all wrong...” I muttered, as I laid on the soft grass and looked at the sky.

After a bit of thinking on my... catastrophic spending of my research points, I realized that, while I would’ve had to research everything I researched anyways, I had to get smithing, metallurgy, and geological surveying first.

Because every research on level 2 needed some level of metal usage for me to actually be able to use them.

And so did my quests, well, nearly all of them except 3.

..

Level 2 Experience: 0/200

Population: 31

Empire Stockpile +

Research +

Research Points: 0

Quests:

Main Quest - Galactic Conquest – Win The Great Game and Conquer the Galaxy! – Rewards: Heaven or Draconic reincarnation + memory wipe.

Safe And Secure – Build a wooden wall around your settlement. - Rewards: 10 Exp + 1 Research Point

A Big Village – Have a total of 100 Homunculi. – Rewards: 10 Exp + 1 Research Point

Ores O Plenty! – Discover 2 deposits of ores. – Rewards: 10 Exp + 1 Research Point

Irl Farming Sim – Make enough farmlands to feed 100 people. – Rewards: 20 Exp + 2 Research Point

Into Alchemy – Collect 3 different magical herbs and understand their effects. – Rewards: 10 Exp + 1 Research Point

Nurture Over Nature – Domesticate at least 1 kind of plant and start farming it. - Rewards: 10 Exp + 1 Research Point

Whispers From The Dark – You’ve realized that there are a lot of tier 2 beings in the forest. Discover their origin. – Rewards: ???

Ores O plenty, Nurture Over Nature and... Whispers From The Dark, were all quests that could be completed without me having to use any metal on them.

Well, I am counting Nurture Over Nature but its probably going to take me a few years to complete that... unless Rae has a research or a blessing for me to research that helps with it.

So, realistically, I only could do Ores O Plenty and Whispers From The Dark right now and gain research points.

...

After a bit more of lying down, I got up and slapped my self on both cheeks for a few times.

“This is not the time to be anxious Damian! You’ve got this!” I cheered myself up, because I was scared of what Whispers From The Dark could’ve been.

Was it a dungeon? Or a Tier 2 monster that was able to cast spells?

Whatever it was, it was a bad thing for me, and my future.

Though I still clunged to the hope that it was a dungeon instead of a fully fledged Tier 2, as a dungeon would be easier to control, and easier to deal with, even though it could potentially create a lot of fully fledged Tier 2 monsters in the future, that was in the future.

And future me could deal with a few Tier 2 monsters, but current me couldn’t deal with even 1.

“Anyways, that’s enough thinking about that quest, now on to the easier one...” I muttered, and looked through my knowledge of ores, and how to find them.

I had the knowledge of how to find copper, iron, tin, gold, silver, lead, and mercury.

Basically, all of the metals of antiquity. Metals that were usable by humans before the year 0.

But there was a problem, humans had been able to discover and use the metals because they were supergenes, and appeared on the surface of the earth, on exposed rock and limestone, and were easily identifiable.

For example, malachite has a distinct green colour because of the copper in it, and hematite has a red colour to it because of the iron in it.

Problem, like I said, people were able to discover them because they were ores that were on the surface. So, when someone looked at a wall of limestone, and saw a weird patch of green or red, they were able to easily go, “Oh, copper.” or “Oh, iron.” but I could not for one simple reason, there was no exposed rock around me.

I was on a vast grassland, and though I had looked at the hills around me, I could not see any exposed stone... at least not on the ones that I had explored, and while in the distance I could see other hills, there were no mountains near me that I could go to and discover some ore from exposed rock.

So, I had 2 options, either go to the far away hills and look at them in the hopes that they had exposed rock somewhere on them, and if they did, there was a deposit of malachite or hematite. Or go into the forest and look if there was any exposed rocks or cliffs there.

I would also be looking for cassiterite, or tin ore, but I was not really confident in finding any as tin was a rare earth metal... wait, I am not on earth...

“Rae, is tin as rare on this moon as Earth?”

“Yup.”

Well, fuck me. There goes my hopes of entering the bronze age a few years earlier than normal. But not that big of a problem. After all, I was confident that I’d be able to get to empire level 3 before or around the start of fall, so I should be able to set up a few villages of sapient Homunculi ‘till next spring, or during it, and as my empire’s population grew, and more and more towns and villages appeared, someone would eventually find tin, and then we would enter the bronze age!

And yes, I knew how to make bronze thanks to metallurgy, and steel, but I still don’t know how to make charcoal, so I will probably get bronze before steel, even if I find good hematite deposits near me.

In the next week, as I entered my second month in the new world, the construction group finished the second unit of houses, and started constructing a new unit, and I summoned enough Homunculi to fill the 2 units after they were fully completed and ended up with a total of 40 homunculi and brutes, not including me of course.

Thanks to the hunters finding more animals, which was not as great as you might think because every 3 days or so they’d bring a new tier 2 corpse, I could confidently create 2 homunculi per day without worrying too much about the food supply, but I did not want to do so because housing was a problem.

But thanks to the recent increase in the construction budged, in the shape of 3 Homunculi, the construction group was able to easily make 1.5 houses a day, so in a week they can make 10-10.5 houses, so they can complete a unit every 2 weeks!

Though I was not sure if I wanted to go over the 50 or 60 Homunculi mark until after we started agriculture with a crop that was somewhat viable to grow, we could, potentially, make enough houses for the needed 60 Homunculi for the A Big Village quest in a mere 1.5 months!

Though I should probably get metal and start constructing wooden houses instead of building more mud huts as... let me be clear, these mud huts were not surviving fall.

Not winter, fall.

So, there was a soft cap on the maximum amount of people I could have, which I thought was around 50 or 60. So, after this third unit was done in 2 weeks, the construction crew would be re-directed to either constructing a wall around the village, or mining if we found any ore in that time frame.

And just because I just talked about the number of the construction group, let me talk about the whole population. The food group had 21 people, 14 being separated into 2 hunting groups, and the rest into the gatherers. And the construction/home guard group had 19 people, 12 which were in the actual construction group, 5 were in the cooking group, and the rest 2 were in the exploration group with me, because I needed to find those ores, crops, and magical herbs.

So, I took the 2 behind me, and went towards the nearby hills with supplies enough for the 3 of us to have a comfortable time exploring around.

But sadly, even though I found exposed rock, they seemed like just rock to me with nothing of importance on them. Maybe a geologist in the future will come and find these particular rocks fascinating, but for me, they had no use... other than being grounds for a future quarry that is.

“Hmm? What is that?” I muttered as I looked at the stones a bit more, and something weird caught my eye, and after activating mana eyes—yup, there was a weird vine that was perfectly camouflaged into the rock, and it seemed to be filled with more mana than normal plants.

And then, I realized that it was a magical herb, and reach out to it—but stopped myself and turned around and went to another hill to explore them a bit more as taking that herb would do me no good.

After all, I did not have any ways to preserve or use it right now. And I did not know if it was poisonous or not either, for all I know, it could be deadly to the touch, I’d need to at least get some basic tools to understand what it was, and what it did.

As I explored the rest of the hills nearby, I found nothing of interest, and decided to continue the next day, though I didn’t find anything interesting then too.

After 2 more days, I completed exploring all the hills and mounds or whatever I could see from my village, and none of them had anything of interest on them... well, other than a few possible quarry locations and that weird magical vine I had encountered, which I wasn’t planning on forgetting anytime soon.

So, that left me with only one option, going into the forest which... lets be real here, all of us knew that this was going to happen, and I did too! So, I populated the 8 newly built houses with Brutes as they were built, and assigned all 8 to the home guard, and 6 of those went straight to the construction group, and one of the remaining 2 went to the cooking group, and the other to the exploration group under me.

So, the next day, I got my 3-man group and went to the forest after the gatherers, and started exploring around, and I occasionally activated my mana eyes to see if there were any magical herbs and such hiding around, and there were none... for the first 2 days that is.

“Wow, that’s—that’s a lot of magical herbs.” I muttered out loud as I looked at a group of ferns that, while seemingly like just normal ferns, turned out to be magical herbs of some kind.

Then I proceeded to prod them with my spear and... nothing happened. No mandragora’s appeared out of the ground and blew my ears of, and nor did the plants grew eyes and looked at me.

Getting some courage, I crouched down to the ferns, and touched them and... nothing happened then either. They were magical herbs of some kind but... they didn’t seem magical at all.

Seeing that there were quite a few of them, I wanted to bring one with me and lifted one up, except, the ground offered no resistance, and neither did I manage to pluck the fern off of the ground. What happened is, as I lifted the fern, the ground was lifted with it.

“What?” I thought aloud, and let go of the fern, and it dropped to the ground.

“So, it is not some kind of anti-gravity fern... good to know.” I muttered once more and got up and pushed the ferns aside to see what was on the ground, and whether I could inspect it with my hands or not, and to my absolute horror, the moment I moved the ferns a bit away from each other, I could see the bones of some creature.

...

“Rae, is this thing contagious?”

“Do you have an open wound?”

“No?

“Then it is not contagious.” She said.

“But don’t worry about it, as long as you are not actively dying, your immune system should be able to fight it off.” She added a few seconds later.

“And what happens if I get infected by... whatever this is as I am dying and have an open wound?” I asked.

“Well, your answer is in front of you.” She answered me calmy.

“...Noted, don’t fuck around ferns while bleeding.” I muttered, not wanting to stick around and find out if they did something else other than being one of the worse methods of death imaginable by man.