Chapter 318: Barely Qualified

The application for a pressure cooker factory made it to Kalli’s desk that afternoon, and was quickly approved the moment that she saw the potential to pressure can soup and vegetables.

Faster cooking was secondary.

So, Kalli added a few things to the shipments bound for the lower city.

First, was bulk purchased canning jars. The system gave her an entire case of them, 200 for a point, so she sent twenty thousand down with the day’s shipment. With the points that they were generating with the daily work quests, it was a drop in the bucket compared to what they needed, and it was not a disposable item.

Well, some would surely be broken, but they were reusable.

Everything that they could add to the city was something that the system could count as progress, and the less that they wasted, the better that Kallie would feel about the situation.

Still, the goal hadn’t changed, she had to find a way to speed up the transition, to get even more of their people assigned classes.

But for most, that meant twenty points to buy their first skill.

Some would get one automatically once they qualified, but that was usually the ones who had life skills. Those were in short supply, and they couldn’t rely on the whole population to awaken one.

Not even one in ten were likely to.

That seemed like a good balance to Kalli. Not every person in the city needed to be a skilled tradesperson. They needed all sorts of other jobs too, and dedicated teachers, instead of just their part time teachers.

But that was a work in progress.

However, now that they had so many level zero quest completions, her System Points were starting to add up very quickly. She got a net two points for every person that completed an easy mode quest.

When there were a hundred Heroes, that wasn’t much, and she struggled to keep everyone geared.

But now, there were five hundred thousand workers, and Kalli belatedly realized that her points storage had long since overflowed. Without the system reminding her, she had just spent whatever she thought was necessary without thinking about the balance.

Now, she needed to start doing something with them.

{Increase Stats?}

The system’s message came out of nowhere, as if it was reading her thoughts.

That was definitely an option. Probably better than filling the city with random junk just to say that she had done something. There were only so many items that you needed to get for the residents before it became a hoarding situation, and all the basics were already covered.

{Use the excess to increase stats} Kalli reluctantly agreed.

Then, she would use the remaining points to start upgrading buildings.

She would be able to do a large section of the city daily if she wanted, but it wasn’t really necessary. Most of the benefits of the upgraded buildings was in the shops, so she could just do portions at a time, instead of whole districts.

{Strength Increased by 200}

{Agility Increased by 200}

{Constitution Increased by 200}

{Luck Increased by 200}

{Mana Increased by 20005}

{Total Stat cap before Ascension reached}

So, that was as physically powerful as you could get? That meant that with a six months of daily workout missions, the heroes of Marimgar would actually reach the peak of Awakened status, and simply couldn’t advance any further.

Was that what it meant by preparing them for Ascension?

It could be.

Now, she didn’t expect to get that long for everyone to grow, and she didn’t know a way to force them to gain stats faster. But they did get some with levels, and from working outside the daily missions.

But that wasn’t going to significantly shorten the time that they needed.

Most of the heroes only got 5 points per level, so even at level 15 or 20, they wouldn’t be anywhere near the cap just from advancements.

Kalli sighed, then realized that hitting the cap definitely wasn’t realistic as a way to prepare them for advancement. It might be an option, but it couldn’t be the intended method, or there would be a more obvious way to accomplish it in the time given.

Unless they were intended to fail.

Kalli let that thought pass through her mind, then discarded it. They definitely weren’t intended to fail, everyone was being given the same chances, so there was certainly a way for each species to pass the trials.

If not, they wouldn’t have been given different missions this time, or individually eliminated based on sustainability, instead of simply outcomes.

Many of the eliminated were likely thriving in an unsustainable way.

With the regular points that she had left, Kalli upgraded the lower floor workshops in the upper city to advanced technology status, startling thousands of workers who were suddenly in a brand new workspace with new tools.

"Yeah, I should probably have sent a message or something," she muttered as the forum blew up with messages.

In the Hall, Vinnie and Sanchez laughed.

They had both been here to pick up some random items, and had been listening to the Coordinator talk to herself for a while. She didn’t seem to realize that she was doing it, and the things that she came out with were highly entertaining.

"What did you do?"

"Advanced the technology in the workshop and industrial levels of most of the buildings in the upper city. Some already had it done, but I just did the rest to burn off some points that I hadn’t been spending."

Sanchez’s face went carefully blank, a sure sign that he was hiding laughter behind military discipline, but Vinnie had no such qualms.

"Well, on the bright side, they’ll be happy for the upgrade, once they learn how to use the new tools, and they figure out where everything they were working on went. Thankfully, you had already done the Tinkers and Techno Wizards spaces.

That was good news. They couldn’t have that particular group interrupted in their work, they were far too busy.

Not as bad as during the last trial, but there were still a lot of damaged items during the battle with the Giants mere days ago.