[Archades Ruins]

Hecate spent almost 2 hours to reinstall all 8 Save-Crystals into the city's innermost barrier nodes.

This was considered fast as she simply replaced all the Save-Crystals from the city's old and non-functional ancient barrier formation. If she were to build the city barrier formation from scratch, it would take at least a month or more to complete. But since she was just reusing the old formation barrier, there was no need to spend much time.

Though, the process was not completely without problems.

[⁂][Blood Pecker - Lv110~] (×???)
[⁂][Mutated Blood Lycan - Lv112~] (×??)
[⁂][Mutated Fligg - Lv114~] (×??)
[⁂][Mutated Florizoa - Lv119~] (×??)
[⁂][Venom Sphere - Lv126~] (×?)

There are many variety monsters roamed through the land, and they are more active at night.

Almost the entire area was filled with poisonous purple mist that seemed to be emitted from the many flower buds that were all over the area. These flower buds also turned out to be monsters, which turned out to not be the flowers in the buds, but were sharp teeth with a hole like a mouth in the middle.

Luckily, Hecate had immunity to poison and she was flying all the time, and coincidentally, all the barrier nodes were located at the top of the towers, spread across the interconnected city walls, so she could bypass the monsters on the ground just like that.

The only problem was the countless Blood Peckers which looked like blood-red crows with a ferocious look.

Even though Hecate had wings and could fly now, she was just getting used to it and was still far from being able to do aerial combat. It would be too much for her to fight hundreds of them now, especially at night and with visibility reduced by the purple mist.

Thus, she immediately created a clone and drank a bottle of Improved Invisibility Potion, sneaking away while letting the clone distract the Blood Peckers away. Of course, because her wings were activated, this was considered activity that involves mana, thus the invisibility was imperfect and caused her body to flicker, but it was enough to allow her to complete her goal.

With the clone distracting all enemies, Hecate was able to reactivate the 7 barrier nodes easily.

However, there was another problem.

The last barrier node tower along with the surrounding city walls, have apparently collapsed and only rubble remains. It would be impossible to activate the barrier unless all of them, along with the connecting formation lines were repaired first.

Coincidentally, building things was one of Hecate's specialties.

'Fortunately, I have this amazing skill, building this makeshift structure is nothing.'

The skill Hecate refers to here was of course Mana Solidification, which allows her to solidify mana into tangible objects, such as bricks, molds, and many others. It was also the core skill that allowed Hecate to perform her Mana Metalcasting technique.

Of course, that didn't mean she could rebuild all the walls with mana bricks, as they would evaporate overtime.

Hecate accessed her storage and took out a few items from the Save-Crystal she had most recently reinstalled. With those items, she was able to build a makeshift structure to contain the last node and the missing formation lines.

First, Hecate drove several steel poles into the ground every ~200 meters along the area where the wall collapsed. Judging from the distance, 6 poles would be needed to cover the entire damaged wall.

Then, like Mana Metalcasting, she used her mana to make T shaped pillar molds with each steel pole as the core.

Rather than building a wall, what she was doing was similar to building an overpass. 

This was understandable, because the walls at this time are nothing more than decoration. It would be more important to connect the formation nodes and lines so that the barrier could be activated successfully.

After that, she threw two bags of bluish-purple powder and poured a bottle of grayish-white liquid into each pillar mold. This was similar to mixing cement to make concrete pillars, but of course what Hecate used was not cement.

When the powder, or clumps of spore seeds touch the liquid, they immediately grow and multiply at an alarming rate, almost instantly filling the mold. If not because Hecate immediately strengthened the mold, perhaps the mold would burst out.

This was actually an implementation of mycelium building construction that uses fungi as the main material.

♦♦♦

 

Players always researched many things in order to make things cheaper.

Similar to the same thing in the real world, using mycelium as building materials has the advantage of being cheap, efficient, and sustainable. Apart from that, there are many ways in the game so that their growth can be done much faster, even instantaneously, than in the real world.

But of course there are big differences between in the game and in the real world.

[ ⁎ ][Verilius Mushroom Larva](×???)

Within the mold, countless tiny purple mushrooms were squeezed and entangled with each other.

These clusters of tiny fungal larvae are of course not simply mushrooms, but monsters. They are sentient, have lots of eyes and even multiple mouths, and can move like any other creature. But of course, even though they wanted to move, they were unable to do so, as they were entangled with each other.

What happened next was very straightforward.

Because Verilius Mushroom is a parasitic monster, these larvae need a host to drain as a source of nutrition. Their first nutrient comes from Fertilizer X and nothing else can be drained inside the mold, except their own kind. And so, they began to consume each other, wriggling and merging within the mold, creating a cute, but bizarre and grotesque sight. 

At this time, all Hecate had to do was simply burn the mold.

— "Fire Ball!" (distorted voice)

This action causes all the larvae to activate their defense mechanisms. Their bodies hardened and crystallized, creating hard substances to protect them from fire.

And this, was the essence of the mycelium building construction in Ascension.  

The pitiful mushroom larvae writhed in their entanglements, and pain could be seen in their eyes as their bodies darkened and hardened from the heat. Their cute little mouths seemed to emit squeals of agony, but unfortunately the sound could not be heard outside the mold.

And a few minutes later, a dark purple pillar with abstract patterns remained.

Hecate did the same thing to make 5 more pillars, and with that, the pillar section was complete.

Then, she started rebuilding the platform, with formation lines carved. The formation lines were copied from the intact part of the formation and directly printed into the mold. These things, also didn't take too much time to complete.

With all that done, she immediately reinstalled the last Save-Crystal, and then reactivate the barrier formation.

It turned out that her Spell Remote Activation had been leveled up without realizing it.

Perhaps it was because her action of using her clone as a distraction had a role in increasing the proficiency of the skill. Or maybe it was her actions in controlling the shape of the mold that influenced the level up of this skill. In any case, this was great news for Hecate.

Hecate smiled with satisfaction when she saw the notification messages.

♦♦♦

 

With the city barrier activated, Hecate can now use the City Barrier Management window.

Of course, she still couldn't do much because there were still 3 more barrier formations that were still inactive, each of which had 16, 30, and 54 nodes that had to be activated. But this could wait for later.

'Let's see... Oh, great! The repair function can be used!'

The first thing Hecate decided to check with the barrier was to see if the Territory Repair function could be used. 

This repair function was one of the functions that allows territory owners to repair damaged parts of the territory to their original state when they were registered. With this function, territory owners do not need to rebuild every time a building or infrastructure is damaged. They just need to activate the repair function and provide the resources needed for the repair.

But of course this function also requires mana to be activated, in which, taxed by the population.

'Uhh, to repair the central district requires 2m stone blocks, 100k gold alloy, 30k copper alloy...
...20k glass sheets, and 200 million MP... This is so expensive.'

Hecate was stunned by the list of resources she would have to provide to repair the entire center of the city.

But of course it was understandable, because the palace was in the central district and was automatically included in the repair list. Additionally, it seems that many of the buildings here also belonged to the nobility.

It was natural that the repair costs were expensive.

Currently, it was impossible to fulfill them all. When it comes to collecting resources, it can still be done even though it is a bit expensive. However, collecting MP up to 200m was still impossible due to the maximum limit of MP that could be collected.

'Well, I don't need those things to be repaired now... In that case, just this wall is enough.'

She then reduced the list of repairs to simply repairing the innermost of the city walls, which also revealed its name as Wall Syllus. And sure enough, the resources required were drastically reduced to just ~4k stone blocks and the MP required dropped from ~200m to ~2m.

Stone blocks can be obtained simply by reusing stone from surrounding ruins. Meanwhile, there was still nearly 80k MP that Hecate paid as a deposit when she reinstalled the 8 Save-Crystals, and the rest could be obtained by taxing the territory's population. But the problem was, the population of Hecate's territory only had one person, namely herself.

Which means, she couldn't rely on anyone but herself to power the entire barrier formation. 

"Hmph, 2 million MP is nothing!" (distorted voice)

Regarding this, Hecate simply sets the barrier formation to tax 100,000 MP per hour. Apart from that, she also disabled the barrier to reduce mana maintenance to the lowest level.

This way, the MP requirement will be met if she stays around 20 hours in the area.

Of course, taxing 100,000 MP per hour would be too much for anyone else, both Players and Natives.

Most of their average MaxMP only less or barely reaches 30k. However, for Hecate, this amount was nothing because it was still less than 30% of her MaxMP and did not even exceed her MP regeneration per hour.

Anyway, no one will complain because there is no one here besides herself who can be taxed. 

In fact, if it weren't for the limitations, she could buff herself and immediately set the tax to 600k MP per minute. Then, later she would use Elixir to fully recover her MP and donate the MP again and again, directly completing the MP requirement.

Or if the target of the mana tax was not limited to just herself and her subjects, she could just tax every creature living within the territory. If that could happen, even gathering ~200m MP to repair the entire central area wouldn't be a problem. Although, there was still the problem of the maximum limit of MP that could be collected.

But unfortunately, there are no ifs, or at least not yet.

'Well then, it's time to go back.'

With all that done, Hecate took out a Return Crystal and activated it.

It was the time to work overtime in order to complete Dalmagna's quest as quickly as possible.