Chapter 240: The Right Fish

The next few hours were chaotic in the city.

All the heroes finished moving the corpses into the spare room of the Hall of Heroes, then they spread out to begin harvesting whatever was ready in the greenhouses.

If you couldn’t repair gear, and you couldn’t fix the buildings, then the only thing that you could do was to make sure that everything that the city had was to make it to the ones that needed it.

That was their second goal, right after sleep.

Not that anyone was actually going to get any decent sleep. After the battle of the previous day, there was no chance at all that the Heroes were going to get any sort of decent sleep.

So, after only a few hours, everyone was awake again, and taking in the results of Kalli’s hard work.

She had been hard at work, spending points to repair the damaged buildings.

But she hadn’t spent any more than necessary, and hadn’t spent anything on upgrading the city more than she already had. With a few common grade waves, the number of points she had gotten plummeted, and she didn’t have an excess of them to be burning through them before she knew what she was going to need next.

What the city needed was already obvious.

What the trial needed was not.

The city looked decent again, and nobody asked what Kalli did with the bodies after she ran them through the processing machine.

What she got back were the contents of their backpacks, backpack included, along with a small urn of ashes to be buried or placed at a memorial. The gear that they had stored was returned in the condition that it was in when processed, ready to be resold as used gear, or passed to their next of kin.

Most of the heroes did not have next of kin.

Those who did have family had the personal effects transferred to them, along with the ashes, while the other’s supplies and ashes were saved to be placed in the memorial wall.

They might not have family left in Marimgar, but Marimgar itself could be family to them.

Kalli looked down at the list of tasks that she had to complete this afternoon, and checked off the last few items. All that was left was to ensure that the Heroes had completed the rest of the tasks.

They had done remarkably well at it, she discovered.

The heroes, and the other residents who didn’t have repair type skills, had all shut down everything else but the basic cafeterias to harvest greenhouses all over the city.

They had cleared everything that was ripe, and replanted everything that they could. It was brilliant, and the amount of food that they had gathered was so extreme that they were beginning to become concerned that they wouldn’t be able to preserve it in time.

They would send most of it below, to the Arks, as a celebratory feast to mark the end of the Third Trial.

For the three quarters of a million residents of the Arks, that would be a huge change, and it would make the change to much more bland fare afterward much less depressing than a small increase from awful meals with a heavy dose of nutrient fluid.

With the production that they have now, they should be able to nearly eliminate nutrient fluid from the daily diet of the people of Marimgar.

What would be left was a nutrient fluid base to soup, bringing up the nutrient level of their diet without using too much of the fresh crop with every meal. The diet at the cafeterias in the Arks was beginning to change, but the basics were mostly soup and heavy bread made of algae flour and spice.

The spices hid the flavour, and matched well with the soups that the kitchens could make with the random ingredients that the greenhouses sent them.

Simple fare, but they also did pancakes, noodles, and a lasagna that was quickly becoming a fan favourite, despite being eighty percent noodles made from the same algae as the nutrient paste was.

It actually wasn’t all that bad.

The worst thing about the paste was the texture, the flavour was only moderately horrible. So, once they found spices and other ingredients to go with it, the kitchen staff began working hard to make their most abundant food source into anything that would pass as edible.

And after eating it for months, the residents of the Arks were getting used to the grassy flavour of the algae.

All that was left was to wait for the fishermen to get back with their loot.

They would be out all night, eager to fish up the alien catfish that had been seen in the river, as well as anything else that they could happen to catch. The only problem with catching the tasty catfish was that they needed to find species that ate mostly plants, as their role was to help process the waste water pools in the greenhouses, which grew an abundant crop of algae and seaweeds that the city didn’t need.

What they found was that the river was actually teeming with grass carp. Or, what looked like grass carp and was dumb enough to get caught in their nets.

Which was just as good.

The labs in the Academy confirmed that they didn’t have any toxins, or unknown alien compounds, in them. Which meant that they were safe to eat, and they happily nibbled on plants, so they could be transferred to one of the greenhouses, to make sure that they were suitable for the purpose.

For immediate eating, they sent teams to the ocean, hoping to fish up something good, since the ocean monsters were so much larger than standard fish.

Even one or two of the thousand kilogram ocean fish would make for a dinner special for the entire upper city. They could put it into a dish at every place that served fish, and in the main cafeteria.