Pushing aside all the Bongers ranting that started right after I threatened to bang my head against the wall, I did my very best to hold back this urge as I stared at just the first three category names on the list.

City creation, house blueprint creation, factory creation and many others listed below.

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I admit I was simply scared to open even a single one of them! Just the thought that all my ideas, all my work and stress caused by the challenges bound to creating village from the scratch in a way that wouldn't hinder its transformation in the city…

If my gut feeling was right, it was all fucking pointless!

Taking as deep as illusionary breath, I finally resolved myself to open the first category, only for my entire phantom body to tense in rage. Just a single look at the vast list of various buildings that appeared in the new window, was enough to confirm my guess that was born when I first saw the names of those categories.

City hall, law enforcement office, multistorey housing… Suddenly, the task of creating this damned village turned from the logistical problem of providing enough manpower to gather required resources, turn them into building materials and then fucking build everything with the hands of the inhabitants of my world, into nothing else that slimcity game!

But there was something strange about those items. Taking a random house layout as an example, I could either create it by using just a few mana points, or by supplying a specific amount of concrete bags, iron plates and liquid glass. But how the heck I was supposed to get those items in the first place?

"I think it has something to do with the factory creating category. You might want to take a look at it first."

I couldn't guess whether Bonger was now scared of my previous threats or if it finally decided to help me out, but prompted by his advice, I moved my sight back to the list of categories and opened the respective window for factories.

Extractors, furnaces, crafters… Scrolling down the list of various machines, I even saw sun-powered plants, wind turbines and other sources of renewable energy, that could power up all the machines that could provide me with an actual end product!

"From what I see, you can either set up the factory that will provide you with resources required to build the city, or just build everything with mana. I don't want to force your hand, but I think sparing some mana to avoid all the mundane beginning stages could be a wise idea since all the power sources are rather pricey. And don't even get me started on how hard it would be to create a single bag of concrete in the first place!"

Once in a while, Bonger could grace me with an actually interesting input. Since that was the case, I decided to not waste any time.

Picking out the extractor, I was moved to the map showing up the entirety of the island under my mana core influence, with some green, flashing spots on it. By moving the extractor on top of those spots, I could take a look at what kind of resource would be mined from the ground.

While the iron and copper were present in the abundance all around the island, the main problem started with the only ore required to create concrete bags - pure rock. I wasn't even going to bother with what did it means, but on the entire island, there was only one place that could provide this material, greatly limiting my ability to base all the future city creation, unless I was somehow able to expand the influence of my core to other islands!

But for now, all I could do was slap the extractor on top of all those three basic ores. After adding a simple set of furnaces and crafters and powering them up with a small wind powerplant, I could finally watch how both my mana limit drastically decreased in exchange for a slow but constant production of all the resources that I would need for now.

Or at least, that's what I thought it would be before I realised that there was no way for my materials to go from one machine to the other!

Discovering the automated belts and figuring out the way to place them in a neat way that wouldn't block the future expansion of my small world backbone forced me to actually rebuild almost everything from scratch.

Realising that the power had to be connected to all the machines and extractors was yet another task I had to face before I could finally gaze on the slowly growing pile of the materials that I could use to create the most basic city structures.

Taking a look at the overall costs of this entire factory, I couldn't help but swallow the loss of over two thousand mana points from my energy pool. I could only hope that this investment would be worth it in the long run!

Keeping in mind that I had to start with some sort of housing for everyone, I moved back to the city building interface, before creating the blueprint for the very first neighbourhood. Ten houses on each side of the small road, all with a small backside garden and the basic plumbing in place, along with minimal use of electricity for the sole purpose of lightning the insides of the house.

After tinkering around with all sorts of tasks from the outlet of the sewers I finally looked at the total resource costs… Only to realise that all the numbers were highlighted in red!

Only then did I remembered about the one specifics of the tools I was using.

They basically stopped the flow of time for me!

And with that, even if my entire factory was ready to work, it had yet to start operating at all! I guess it was time to get back to the real world and start preparing the feast to kill some time!