As I continued my ‘public works’ project to connect Fallcry to the Sunset Isles, I became more and more popular among the players of Fallcry, some of which seemed to even begin memorizing my schedule. A few who weren’t affiliated with Fallcry tried to offer me gifts in order to ‘raise my affinity’ and get me to teach them skills without joining the nation. However, I remained firm in my rule to only give skill quests to residents of Fallcry.

  At first, I had expected that there would be people wanting to join the country, only to reap the benefits from it and then leave. However, I eventually discovered that there was a cooldown period of two months after officially joining a new country before you could leave it, barring special circumstances such as the nation being destroyed.

  Thus, anyone who joined had to be willing to commit at least that much in order to receive these benefits. Of course, there were still considerably more benefits that could be obtained, such as the kingdom trait to reduce mana burden.

  On the fifth day of my project, I received a notification from the system, informing me that my kingdom’s population had officially surpassed the threshold to begin recruiting knights. Elated, I let Nuoda know about this immediately, as she was more familiar with the long-term residents of Fallcry.

  When Nuoda heard the news, she looked through the system to determine the wages needed to hire a standing force to defend the city. The number was, frankly, astonishing. In order to elevate a single Fallen to knighthood, which automatically bestowed them with skills and a level fitting their role, it would take one platinum piece per month. Part of this money was given directly to the Fallen as their wages, but most of it went straight into the system.

  When assigning a knight, Nuoda was given four roles that she could bestow to a Fallen. These were Infantry, Marksman, Mage, and Scout. To test the new roles, she found eight volunteers, assigning the roles evenly amongst them. Despite having the same roles, the new knights were not bestowed with the same skills.

  For the two infantry volunteers, they were given different weapon skills. One was given spear skills, and the other sword and shield. For the marksmen, although both were given bow skills, one was focused more on single target damage and the other on area attacks. Naturally, the mages were given different types of magic. However, what truly interested me were the scouts.

  Of the two scouts, one was given skills to observe a wide area and anti-stealth skills. They were your standard lookout, ready to spot an enemy from a great distance. The other one, though, was given a different skillset entirely. Their skills focused on movement, stealth, and gathering skills. They had the intermediate versions of Herbalism, Logging, Mining, and Butchery, making them ideal gatherers.

  In addition, although these knights started with intermediate skills, they could still gain skill experience as normal to improve. When we realized this, I had Nuoda create a scout unit first and foremost, as we desperately needed a reliable source of income if we were going to afford to pay for their wages in the long-term.

  To further facilitate this goal, I used the nation’s funds to purchase two more resource dungeons. The first dungeon turned out to be another butchery dungeon, a dark hunting ground where shadowy beasts preyed on one another. All of the monsters within the dungeon had the darkness attribute, so Diane was quite happy when she heard this news.

  The second dungeon was an endless cavern, platinum nodes interspersed along the walls. Every few hundred meters, a single deposit of mithril could be found. However, platinum was far more prevalent.

  Unfortunately, this platinum could not simply be smelted into currency recognized by the system. Otherwise, our money problems would have disappeared permanently just from this one dungeon. No, proper currency could only be obtained by monster drops, or selling items to the system.

  Speaking of which, Nuoda informed me of another system that I could look forward to with the next kingdom upgrade. If we upgraded Fallcry one more time, we would gain the ability to sell items directly to the system, albeit at a reduced cost. According to what Nuoda had heard from her friends, this was designed to let nations remove their excess stock that other countries didn’t want to trade, such as peculiar monster materials.

  Unfortunately, the selling price for this was only fifty percent, which was less than what we would buy those materials for in the first place from players. While not enough to outright ruin the nation’s economy, it did offer some small reprieve and encouraged trading with other nations.

  With these changes taken care of, it was back to the tunnel for me. Day after day, my routine remained unchanged. Eight hours extending the tunnel, then one hour working on the house, and finally walk around town and help the players seeking advice.

  On the sixth day, my Adrenaline Surge skill evolved into Barbarian’s Fury-X, a grandmaster skill that increased its buff the more damage I took in combat. Unfortunately, despite it being labeled with ‘-X’, it was at its evolution limit, since I had obtained it in its intermediate form. Still, I was quite pleased with the skill.

  On the seventh day, as I was just a few kilometers from opening the cliff wall near the Sunset Isles, three more skills evolved. One was, as expected, Instant Fortifications. This skill evolved into Walking Fortress, expanding the scope of its construction power by an order of magnitude. In addition, it removed the size limit for structures that I could place in my inventory. Instead, the restriction was that the structure must have been created in a single casting of the skill.

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  The second skill to evolve, one that I hadn’t realized was so close, was Martial Intent. Now, it had become Martial King, allowing me to imbue consciousness into my ki projections. Finally, I had acquired the namesake for my ‘king template’.

  At first, I felt as if this was somewhat wasted as a grandmaster evolution perk, as I could already summon ki clones. Furthermore, the projections I ‘awakened’ in this manner weren’t able to use any of my other skills. For instance, if I created a sword, it could fly around the battlefield on its own, but would only fight with physical attacks, using my sword proficiency.

  I couldn’t even create an army of foot soldiers, because creating a moving body was extremely complicated to do under duress. If I had time to focus on all of the necessary parts, then the battle wasn’t dire enough for me to need it in the first place.

  Then, I realized the real benefit for this modifier. Unlike the ki clones, I was not splitting my awareness with my summons. Even if I created ten flying swords, and gave them each different instructions, there was no added pressure on me as the caster. Theoretically, I could summon hundreds of weapons to annihilate an army. Of course, this was only theoretically, as the skill still had its downsides.

  The major downside of the skill was that I did not receive experience for any weapon skills my conjured weapons used. There was no archery experience gained with bows, or sword experience when I summoned blades. This was likely because the summoned entities were no longer treated as a part of myself due to having their own awareness. I could only assume that this extended to being unable to gain full experience for anything that they killed. Instead, the only experience gained would be in the Martial King skill itself. It may even take away experience that my party members might have otherwise received.

  Finally, the last skill to evolve was Tremorsense-X, which had become True Sight. In reality, I wasn’t very impressed with this upgrade. Although it increased my ability to spot hidden enemies even further, its ‘grandmaster effect’ was the same ability I had from Hawkeye-X, allowing me to project my senses. Admittedly, I could project more than just my sight, but I didn’t see many reasons why I would need to project my sense of touch, taste, or smell. At most, I could see myself projecting hearing in order to listen to a distant conversation.

  Regardless, I now had four fully evolved grandmaster skills. With one more, I would be able to unlock Simulation Training. And, given that both Fire Intent-X and Water Intent-X were just one level shy of evolving, I didn’t think it would take me very long to reach that point. However, I was also not in any real rush. The only way for me to take advantage of simulated training like that was if I remained still for long periods, which I rarely did since I was often adventuring with Diane and Bella.

  Curious to test out my new Walking Fortress skill, I pushed it to its limits, finding that it could complete the entirety of the cave in a single activation. Upon confirming the choice, a five kilometer stretch of tunnel parted before me, perfectly flush with the section I had already completed.

  Now, all that was left was the creation of the bridge, which would span the gap between the cliff face and the Sunset Isles. This was no easy task, given the fact that the bridge could not be stabilized from below with pillars. The ocean beyond the cliff was simply too deep, and I would likely need to spend another week just to build this bridge.

  Instead, I used my new skill evolution to anchor the bridge on both sides. At first, the bridge collapsed under its own weight, until I succeeded in creating arching supports from below that reduced the strain on the bridge. Still, to test it out, I transformed into my crystal dragon form to walk across the bridge. Given my weight in this form, it was unlikely that it would often encounter more weight than I was subjecting it to.

  When I neared the other side of the bridge, I saw a small group waiting for me. Among them was, of course, Diane and Bella, with Charlie accompanying them. Bella waved eagerly, glad to see me again after the week of individual training. “Welcome back! Did you get the upgrade you wanted?”

  I gave a gruff chuckle, a deep, rumbling sound that echoed in my throat in this form. “It wasn’t as good as I was hoping. All it did was let me make bigger projects. No special effects to imbue into the structures.”

  Charlie smiled when he heard this. “From my understanding, such benefits come from the Architect skill path, so you may have just not reached that point yet.”

  I nodded my head, focusing on transforming back to my normal appearance, rolling my shoulders after walking on all fours for eight hours straight. “How about you two? Made good progress while I was working?”

  “To a degree,” Diane spoke in her calm, stoic ‘character’ tone. “Without your buffs, it took longer to complete the dungeon, and we even wiped when we weren’t careful. Still, we managed to reach almost level two hundred.”

  That meant that they hadn’t managed to gain that many levels while hunting the ice slimes and golems. However, I was sure that their skills would have improved a lot more when they weren’t relying on me to buff them all the time.

  I looked at Diane curiously, hesitating for a moment before asking the question on my mind. “Did the sponsor clips…” I trailed off, and Diane shook her head.

  “That part wasn’t shown,” she answered, and I let out a sigh of relief. “Lately, your clips have been focused on how you interacted with other players in Fallcry.”

  Well, that’s good. I thought inwardly, relieved that the system had kept our anonymity when it came to that undercover operation.

  “However,” she continued. “I received a report from Wisteria that the three monster players had been broken out of the League’s prison before they could interrogate them for any secret information.”

  I gave a small grunt of acknowledgement, having expected something like that. I’d been a bit too busy to check in with the League to ask about their progress with the dungeon city, but the fact that they hadn’t approached me likely meant that their research was still underway.