It turned out to be faster to go to the Mountain City and then go east to the Plains biome. West would be a shorter distance, but the road that I saw that went from the south of the city ended up going east. The plains must provide a sizeable amount of food to the city, and the road must be a trade route.

I would be able to make forty kilometers an hour on a road, which would mean I could make it to the edge of the plains in a little over three hours. And then however long after that to get to the Plains Keepers. I would be expecting The Instructor to be assembling his army on the border of the Mountain and Plains biomes, but that should take him some time.

I needed to get a population of Plains Keepers under my protection, and it seemed only fair to give them a floor of the same area as the Forest Keepers got, though it wouldn't need to be nearly as tall. And to get started on that I would want a second excavator running. The first one I made wasn't the most efficient I could have done, so I started working out the variables that I could maximise.

The range of the active part of my Matter Manipulation power hadn't changed, twenty meters was the limit I could affect, but that was with all of my output focused at the point twenty meters away. Fifteen meters was more practically the limit of my range. If I have a small portal in the center of my working area that gives me a thirty meter range I can comfortably work in, both horizontally and vertically.

One of the slow things about the first excavator is that I was moving the multiple tonnes of stone with my power, which was good at moving tonnes of material, but bad at doing it at any speed. Using gravity would speed up the process a lot, though a good chunk of time would still be needed to convert the stone of the edges of the room into my stone building material.

The new excavator I designed as being a one hundred and twenty meter loop of Arachne silk steel. The plan would be to cut out a thin band of stone at the bottom of where I wanted to excavate, insert the new excavator there, then match the cut at the top, and then finally cut away the stone around the edges between the top and bottom. The Pocket Dimension side of the portal would be suspended in the air and the whole thirty meter square of stone would fall through.

It would take me almost twelve hours to carve the new excavator if I focused exclusively on that, with it running as a background process that I would check in on it would take twice that. But it wasn't something that was time critical right now, the Forest Keepers had their initial space to work with and the Plains Keepers weren't even here yet. It would be worth doing, though, as it would cut the time to completion for the Forest Keeper floor from fourteen days to eight days. And the Plains Keeper floor, if it was ten meters tall, from eight days to six days.

With that done and working, I started making the new digital presences for the human and Forest Keeper floors. I modified the design a bit from the ones I had been making so far, adding a meter and a half tall door on the front that I could retract to allow items to be placed inside, and a slot for coins. I went through the existing eight presences I had made and updated them to the new design too. Then I spent some time just duplicating Fortress Coins. I wanted at least a thousand ready as a buffer for the next quest, just in case.

I made the new quest I wanted, but hesitated before sending it to the System. The quests that I had made so far had had small tweaks to them in the language, and it would be useful to be able to preview the quest before making it go live... I added a 'preview' field to the quest data and set it to true, then sent it to the System.

Quest Preview Description Turn in One Kilogram of raw material to a Fortress Presence (material must be the first of its type submitted to this quest) Assigned to Fortress Citizens Quest type Unique: Scavenger Hunt Reward One Fortress Coin Submit Quest Remove Quest

Calling my presences Fortress Presences was new, though I was happy with it. This would give everyone in the fortress a chance at receiving a coin. Which might make me very busy in the short term, but it would give me an excellent idea as to what the people of my fortress wanted as well. I was happy with that trade off. I made sure the two new presences were on the human and Forest Keeper floors and then focused on the Submit Quest option. The Quest Preview screen disappeared, replaced immediately with a new one.

Quest Description Turn in One Kilogram of raw material to a Fortress Presence (material must be the first of its type submitted to this quest) Reward One Fortress Coin Accept Reject

Apparently I was included as a citizen of the fortress. I accepted the quest and the screen disappeared. I focused on the quest again and the screen reappeared, along with an indication of where the nearest Fortress Presence was. For me it was the two that were sitting at the portal to the top of my fortress.

I was going to test it myself, using a kilogram of the stone I used for building so that I didn't take away a material that other people could submit, when I got a ping for attention from my presence in the druid storyteller room. I pulled the sound and visual up. Ian, the rabbit man that I had healed, was standing in front of the presence with several bags.

"So, how does this work then." Ian said quietly, obviously talking to himself.

I guess the presence had faded into an object that was just always there in the background for it to be so casually approached even by someone who had a relationship with me. I opened the doors on the presence, folding the stone back out of the way.

"Ah, you just have to indicate that you want to use it." Ian said. "Now, one at a time, or all at once... Probably best to test it with two to see what happens, then I can do the rest one by one if it needs it done that way."

The people of the fortress would be more comfortable doing the quest if I didn't interact with them, I think, so I stayed quiet. Ian placed two bags into the large space and stepped back. I closed the doors and then got a prompt from the System.

Action Required You have received your first submissions for a quest. You need to designate an area for submitted items to be stored (the System will not store them for you).

In my Pocket Dimension I quickly created a stone tray with compartments that would hold one kilogram of most stuff and sent that to the System as my designated area. Two of the compartments filled up, both with white powder of some sort. The System sent me a ping for a new interface.

Fortress Storage Fortress Coins One thousand two hundred and thirty one Plain white flour One Kilogram Refined table salt One Kilogram

And the System would track it all for me, nice. I switched back to the presence that Ian was using and played back from where I had left. The System had materialised the coins in the presence and let them roll out of the coin slot, where they had fallen on the floor. I had intended the coin slot as a way to input coins into the presence, not as the source of them being output.

I modified the design so that there was a tray in front of the slot to catch the coins when they appeared and updated the presence Ian was using, then the others.

"Hey, it changed." Ian said.

I wrote a program that would open the doors to the presences whenever someone was waiting for them and set it running in the background. The doors of the presence obediently opened again and Ian put the rest of the stuff he had brought, including two glass bottles full of liquid, inside. Back in the Pocket Dimension six more compartments filled up, leaving my Fortress Storage showing one kilogram each of pepper, white sugar, cinnamon, cane sugar, olive oil, and water. The glass bottles appeared clean next to my designated storage area.

Six more coins rolled out of the presence, this time stacking up in the waiting tray. Ian was moving his eyes back and forth, reading a screen in front of him that I couldn't see, a smile coming over his face. The doors of the presence opened again and Ian reached in and pulled out a single bag.

"It was worth trying giving the same thing twice." Ian said. "Very clear that it had already been added."

He reached out for the stack of coins, holding all eight coins that he had earned in a short time.

"That was fun." Ian said. "I have no idea what to do with these though. And I might have been a bit hasty, that was the last of the cinnamon and white sugar. Oh well, a Chef has to experiment sometimes."

Okay, the System obviously needed a display to show what Fortress Coins could be used for. I knew I could be pushing it, but I sent a request to the System to access the Fortress Store. To my surprise it appeared immediately.

Fortress Shop Portal Travel One Fortress Coin New Portal Destination Raw Material (ten kilograms) One Fortress Coin Music One Fortress Coin

That looked good enough, though it changed the name to 'Shop' instead of 'Store', and I'm not sure how I felt about the System adding Music to the list, though music was something I was interested in doing. Now I just needed to somehow communicate opening the store to Ian. The System seemed to integrate perfectly to intent control, so I made a quick quest and assigned it to Ian. It just told him to say 'Fortress Shop' in front of a Fortress Presence, and the reward was access to the shop.

Ian frowned as the Quest screen appeared in front of him, reading for a few moments.

"Fortress Shop." Ian said, followed by a look of surprise.

The doors on the presence closed as he was reading the list.

"Raw material." Ian said. "Cinnamon. Now what do I do? Oh, it cost a coin."

He put a coin into the slot on the presence and it dematerialised, appearing back on one of the stacks of coins I had made.

Action Required Ten kilograms of cinnamon has been requested from the Fortress Shop, zero kilograms are available (One kilogram is reserved). A container is also required.