Chapter 243: Waiting On Midnight

Until midnight arrived, and the fourth trial officially started, nobody wanted to do anything too major, in case it didn’t count.

So, like Kalli, they all waited for the trial to begin, sleeping away the afternoon, with plans to do as much upgrading inside the city as they could. For most, that meant beautification, opening shops that they had been planning but hadn’t gotten to during the Third Trial, and all the other little things that make a city home.

Unlike the others, Kalli was doing mental math on what she had available for points, and how much she could expect once the trial started.

They were unlikely to get huge kill quests again, certainly nothing Epic Grade.

But they should get easy and hard level kill quests if the System was opening the world. That would mean that they were going to be subject to whatever other monsters were in the area, settling themselves into the real world the way they had in the first few trials, before the Third locked them away in a fifty kilometre bubble.

If she selected the Points Reduction for construction, it would be much cheaper to upgrade the city, and she could move the people in the Arks into real housing.

But if she got the Advanced Construction option, she would be able to improve the buildings themselves, giving everyone a better quality of life. So, there was a choice to be made, and it all came down the quantity of points that she was likely to get.

She had a lot of them right now, with the completion of the third trial, and her limited spending after the last major renovation.

She had enough that she could improve the underground with a huge number of underground hab-blocks. The residents there would have to come up to see the sun, and it would always smell like recycled air.

But it would be far better than living in the cramped Arks.

It would also be cheap, as carving out the stone was less expensive than building freestanding buildings for some reason.

Perhaps it was one of those "Easier to dig a hole than grow a tree" sort of situations?

She ran through the numbers on her trusty notepad, and realized that with the points she had, she could house everyone from the arks underground. That would also leave the wall housing open, for those who became level 0 and wanted to move to the surface after the apartments were all full.

There was actually still quite a bit of free housing on the surface.

Just giving everyone enough room that they could have their own room was a huge improvement.

That settled it.

{Advanced Construction Options} chosen.

{Congratulations Coordinator on adding Tier 2 Civilization options to the store}

Eager to see the changes, Kalli opened the store, then froze in confusion.

What Tier 2 Civilization?

All the new things looked like they were magical structures straight out of an Elven fantasy novel. In fact, she was ninety percent sure that she had read more than one spicy romance novel set in a city like the one that she could now purchase.

However, for the heroes, who could use magic even if they were the most basic of warriors, the upgrades would be immense, and the power draw on the city would drop to nearly nothing unless they were defending against attacks.

That would take a load off her mind, and as she inspected the buildings, she realized that the changes weren’t just to the appliances.

The shields that she had wished for during the insectoid attacks?

They were standard security features on the upgraded buildings.

The price wasn’t inexpensive, but she could do a few buildings first, and then slowly upgrade the rest of the city as they went. It was more important to get the underground areas finished first, in the most inexpensive way possible.

Pure luxury for the top of society would come after everyone was living well.

Or when they needed those shields.

The city of Marimgar itself now had a shield that could be activated at any time. That would really help defend against things like the volcanic storms, and future air attacks.

The purchase also granted her one unexpected benefit. The ten Uncommon Grade Building Construction Orbs could be built with the Advanced Construction methods, gaining all the benefits of her best designs at no extra cost.

She also really wanted to see what the Material Converter did, but she didn’t want to do that before midnight.

It was going to be a busy day, getting everything upgraded and built, then planning a proper funeral and the memorial wall. That was a macabre way to start the fourth trial, but it would remind everyone where they were starting from, and how far they had left to go before they could all be safe and happy again.

She would do everything but the memorial right at midnight, and then set up the funeral at dawn so that the memorial could see the first light of the twin suns rise over Marimgar as it rose around the ashes of their fallen heroes.

It just felt fitting. ℯℯ𝘭.

It didn’t feel like there was anything else that she might be missing at the moment, and the heroes hadn’t come to her with any grand plans for the moment that the clock struck midnight.

But that could be because they didn’t realize that she was napping in the Hall of Heroes instead of going back to her much neglected apartment in the dorms.

With constant battle, she had spent so much time here that she hardly even went home anymore, and the manager’s room that she used in the Hall was more lived in than her own home.

Kalli would have liked to say that would change soon, but she knew better. She was mostly just keeping the apartment in the old dorms for the sake of nostalgia.

She was needed in the Hall of Heroes all day every day, and that was where everyone went looking when something went wrong.