By the time the feast concluded, I could tell from the faces of my people, that they finally managed to relax. From being moved from the slave camp, sold to someone else they never heard about, forced to go through the forest where any of them could become a random meal for a random beast passing by, through the scary travel between the islands all the way to the disappearing people at the barrier of the influence of the magic core… There were more events for this day than most of them would experience in their entire lives!

As people started slowly laying down on the soft ground in order to catch some sleep, I finally managed to escape from the clutches of Heila and Jessie continuously fawning on me, as if they wanted to be nailed down to the ground in front of everyone. As soon as both of them turned their eyes away from me to answer to someone who hit them up, I instantly untangled myself from their arms and jumped towards the gate to the dimension.

Even if I could easily access the stronghold creation tool just by immersing myself in it even if both of them were trying to vie for my attention, I still wanted to do it from the outside. As the sun, or whatever provided light and heat for my subdimension, started to hide behind the line of the horizon, I assumed that by spending just a bit of time outside of the dimension would allow me to come back there, find Gabriel and drag him off to the higher floors of the tower, in order to get him to explain this whole saint's curse thing.

As soon as I would be done with the housing and basic infrastructure for the new city, I wanted to go visit the island immediately. Just by assigning some people to move the stuff between the reality and small world, I could make the entire process of creating the future housing way easier for me, just by limiting myself to confirming the setup after the resources would be moved inside.

Stepping outside turned out to be a bit different than I expected. Compared to just a day ago, when the eerie silence of the empty land seemed to embrace me whenever I stepped or even looked outside from the higher floors of my tower, the continuous bustling of the machinery working its screws off to produce more and more resources for me turned this once calm desert into a busy working area.

Pushing this nostalgic feeling of loss aside, I took a quick peek into the stronghold creation tool to quickly check the amount of produced goods. Just like it happened back in the earth when I was playing the game, what was supposed to be a quick adventure, five minutes in and out, turned into yet another session of remodelling, laying out the floor, reorganising the entire factory and walling it all off.

While the chaotic look of all the machinery spread out across most of the empty land inside the core's hiding abilities, turned into a cubic monstrosity. Recalling some advices from the mytubers that I used to watch to learn to play the game better, I added some occasional details, yet I had to refrain from turning this ugly block into an eye-pleasing factory since most of those decorations required the oh so limited resources!

After my motivation to work on the design ran dry, I took the stock of the remaining materials… And still ended up using more than half of them in developing the machinery required to produce higher tier items, that could be used to either upgrade the housing or create more expensive buildings. This kind of games was simply too addicting, even if they were my current reality!

As soon as I saw and confirmed that everything was working just as it should do, I returned to the reality and approached the warehousing area moved from direct proximity of the gate to the outermost hangar of my new factory. By connecting the gate to the defence system of this entire place, I didn't have to worry about the inhabitants of my small world going outside and messing up any part of the buildings or even putting their hands on my resources.

While most of the new buildings were created with the use of all the resources that were already produced, the necessary expansion of the powerplant by an additional, external module that allowed me to make use of the nearby current in order to generate enough electricity to power up my expanded factory, allowed me to save up to several hundred mana points. With only about one thousand mana points left before I would reach the current limit of the core, using up all the opportunities I had to save was obvious!

With everything settled from the side of the stronghold creation, I grabbed several bags of the concrete, before prying two of them open and dropping its previous content right on the sands of the island. While I had no idea where did those bags came from, I wasn't here to complain about a free additional resource for my use! With the new carrying utensil obtained, I packed as many iron plates and other basic items as I could inside those two bags, before grabbing everything and realistically, doing one, big jump towards the tower's gate.

As I crossed through the doors between the dimensions, I couldn't help but think about the necessity to create a shortcut that would allow me to get right from the island to the proper part of the tower. Using the small world as the transitional stage for every single time I would go from the outside world to the inner parts of my stronghold, would be insanely annoying in the long turn, especially if there ever came a need to block the freedom of leaving from the inhabitants of my private dimension!

After placing all the resources where I wanted to originally build the houses by hand, I quickly moved to the stronghold creation tool and confirmed the purchase of a single small house. Not willing to pay for everything in the bulk, even if I was already set on doing so later, I returned to the reality to tour the house.

Just like its blueprints showed, it consisted of the big kitchen combined with dining room, one large bedroom with double kingsized bed, cabinet and a wardrobe, two smaller rooms with a bed, wardrobe, desk with the chair and nightstand each and a considerably spacious restroom with a simple shower and flushable toilet!

Even if both the electricity and the running water were unavailable without the proper infrastructure in place yet, I could still get the overall opinion on this building… And to be honest, it was insane. Despite its flat, open roof that hinted at the possible expansion with the upgrades and lack of any basement, a small garden one could access from the kitchen door completely made up this lack of wasteable space.

With that said, I distributed the remaining resources in a straight line, making sure to space it out rather evenly so that the system won't have the problems in picking it up with whatever sort of sensors it was using to do so in the first place.

Once again immersing my consciousness in the tool, I lined up seventeen houses in total, before the indicator in the bottom right corner of my placing window started flashing red, indicating that I ran out of the resources to do so, and every next building would just use the mana as substitute for the lacking materials.

Not willing to part with even a single more point from my core limit, I simply accepted the seventeen houses, split into two lines of ten and eight facing against each other, while connected by a wide street made with concrete and some iron reinforcing bars.

There were only two more houses missing before the first small neighbourhood would be finished. With the plan for the entice city already in my head, I had to swallow my artistic pride and accept the fact that going with the gridlike layout of the streets and buildings was the most efficient and sensible way, especially with how I wasn't limited by most natural limiters like water access or the external highways!

Content with the hard work that I did today, I finally left what was supposed to be a construction site and turned into a surprisingly well-developed place that I doubted that any native to this would have ever imagined.

It was nigh time to wake Gabriel's up and have a serious talk with him about the saint's curse!