Roads were made to connect people, they were like veins and arteries bringing supplies to people around the world. They were designed to be able to withstand all kinds of natural disasters as a result and they were easy to repair. But what David found in front of them was a road that just suddenly came to an end where a large lake had appeared that was so huge he couldn’t see the other side of it.

 

Several rivers had formed where it was running off the loose dirt and he could occasionally see the fins of a large creature that would break the water along with a serpentine head. The waters were dark and murky and stained a deep color of green from all of the algae in the lake. On top of the waters were green lily pads with bright red flowers that seemed to glisten in the sunlight.

 

The bear had given up after 30 minutes of driving but to be sure it was gone David kept driving until they were stopped by the sight of the lake. Everyone but Lena and David was shocked by the sight of the alien landscape that had appeared in the middle of the highway. The plants around the lake had also started to be replaced by tall dark reeds that resembled cattails in golden color and dark green grasses. 

 

“David, did we always have a lake here?” Harry asked the obvious.

 

“Yes, do you see how the road just ends here at the riverside? That is so you can swim across.” David told him sarcastically.

 

“How did you and Lena not know there was a lake here?” Harry asked.

 

“We never came this way, we hiked through the mountains to cut across so we could avoid the town,” David explained.

 

“Then why are you wanting to go there now?” Jasmin asked.

 

“We need more people, young people like us. We have a major issue in that we don’t have enough manpower.” David explained. “My dad shouldn’t be making razor wire, he should be helping me build stuff for the compound.”

 

“Are you trying to create a city or a town?” Billy asked.

 

“Yes, I am,” David told everyone seriously. “That is the best way to survive. There is strength in numbers and the more people you have the better you can protect yourselves. If we accept survivors then we will eventually have a town.”

 

David had always considered himself a realist, and if you accept people during an apocalypse then you will soon have a large population.

 

“Also, I think I might have just figured out our food problem,” David said as he stared at the lake.

 

“How?!” Harry asked with excitement.

 

“Are you familiar with aquaponics?” He asked.

 

“Isn’t that how they grow weed?” Harry asked skeptically.

 

“No, they use hydroponics which is similar,” David explained. “In aquaponics, you are taking advantage of nitrogen cycling to raise fish. They poop and pee in the water they live in which produces ammonia. You can feed this ammonia to bacteria who will break it down to nitrates that are then eaten by plants and you are left with clean water to put back into the fish tank.”

 

“What do the fish eat?” He asked.

 

“Do you see those plants growing on the water? It is called Duckweed and fish can eat it. It takes nutrients directly from the water to grow. They can outcompete algae for taking nutrients from the water, so we can use it as fish feed.” David explained. “Those aren’t cattails, it is a breed of wild rice that grows in Edea. We can also grow onions, tomatoes, and various other things to provide spices for it.”

 

“What made you think of that?” Harry asked.

 

“The fish in the waters are similar to cod, they can be raised in very little water. They even thrive in small landlocked ponds or creeks.” David explained before he held up a fishing hook. “I also sat on this fishing hook that fell out of Pandora’s tackle box and it gave me the idea.”

 

“Mine!” The cat called as she jumped up and snagged the hook from his hand and added it to the collection that was hooked into the fur of her tail. 

 

“Do we want to stop and do some fishing?” Harry asked. “The van could also do with some sorting.” 

 

The inside of it was a mess with many of the items being dislodged and various blades used for skinning had been bouncing around the cabin dangerously. Boxes of gear had fallen out of the van during their drive and some of the camping supplies had been lost. A frown crossed his face when David thought of these lost items but gear could always be replaced, unlike lives. 

 

“We are going to do some fishing and we need to go out into the waters for some of those lily pads, they are magical plants that feed off the monsters poop. If we can get those we can make some potions that are good for stamina.” David explained. “They will keep you going for 12 hours straight even if you are exhausted.”

 

“That sounds like meth! Why do we need that shit?” Harry asked in a panic.

 

“No, this is much easier to refine. It is also impossible to become addicted to them… no unless you are into really weird things.”  David lamented.

 

“Why is that?” Harry asked.

 

“The negative effect of them is that they act much like laxatives do when they start to wear off, but much more violently.” David cautioned. “Shitting your brains out is a very apt term for it.”

 

“Then why do we need that?!” Harry commented in horror as he looked at the red plants floating on the water.

 

“It has other uses too, like in poison. It can raise your heart rate so high that your heart won’t be able to handle it and will seize up.” David explained. “Since it is a magical effect it is also really hard to stop once it gets into your system.”

 

“Are you planning on growing it?” Harry asked.

 

“No, it isn’t that useful but in a pinch, it can be life-saving,” David explained. “Heart tremor lily is one of those things that you don’t want to use unless you have to.”

 

What he wasn’t going to mention was that while you were using it the blood flow in the body would be increased and males would suffer a painful erection the entire time it was active. In Edea, this lily had been priceless among old nobility and people had problems keeping it up. His father was also getting up there in age and he was sure that his mother would appreciate getting him a gift like this.

 

“Pandora, try and get some of those fish. I am going to get those lilies.” David said parking the van.

 

“Are you going to swim out there?!” Harry asked in shock.

 

David glanced out at the waters and saw a serpentine head that was large enough to swallow him whole, breaking the surface with a large fanged fish monster in its jaws that was the size of a motorcycle. This was followed by several fish monsters that were the size of a soda bottle that displayed sharp teeth. David took one look at it before he turned to Harry like he had some sort of mental condition.

 

“Are you crazy?! Do you think I want to die?” David asked him.

 

“Then how are you going to get them?” Harry asked.

 

“Magic,” David said plainly as he turned off the van and opened the door.

 

Walking over to the back of the van, he waited for Harry to climb out and reached in behind him to grab a tarp. He then went over to the side of the water and began to set it up, being mindful that he picked a spot where nothing could spring up and ambush him. Finally feeling confident with his spot he sat down and looked around at the various lilies that were floating on the waters,

 

He reached out his right hand and began to carefully begin trying to compress his mana into a string and began to carefully stretch it out over the waters. Once he got to 10 feet he found it hard to keep it together but continued to focus with all of his might as he got it to 15 feet and felt like he was reaching his limits. If he wanted to go further he could only do it by supplying more mana, but that was fine as he began to feed more into it.

 

The line he created became more solid as it started to easily stretch out to 30 feet before it reached a lily that was floating among some reeds. Using the tip of the thread-like finger he began trying to maneuver it through the grass. The expenditure was quite high as the tip of the thread would keep breaking off whenever he applied any pressure to it.

 

Instead of letting his frustration get the better of him, he took a few deep breaths and kept trying again. It took the Machine Lord over a hundred years to hone his control to its level and he knew that he wouldn’t be able to do it in a short amount of time. Instead, he just kept going at it until he finally nudged it towards the shore and breathed out a sigh of relief as it was within reach.

 

Reaching forward, he placed his hands under the green pad and carefully lifted it out of the water, and smelled the red flower. It was sweet and citrusy and he could feel his heart rate rising from the scent of the petals. He could tell that they had just recently bloomed from the bright color of the petals.

 

“That wasn’t so bad,” David said with a smile as he looked over and froze.

 

A few feet from him he could see Lena reaching out with a tentacle of mana like a squid and pulling one lily after another into a net that Pandora used for fishing. A bucket had already started to become filled and her range was close to 100 feet allowing her to collect them at an incredible distance. The method she was using was incredibly wasteful, with a lot of her mana breaking off but this didn’t seem to affect her.

 

Is this how free-to-play gamers feel when someone has a few hundred dollars to spend on a pay-to-win game? Comparing himself to her was like comparing coal to a diamond. When it came to mana she didn’t need to be nearly as careful and could afford to be wasteful.

 

“That wasn’t so bad. Can we move over there?” She asked and pointed further down the lakeshore.

 

Every single lily that she could reach with her mana she had scooped up and dragged back to her net. The bucket was almost half full and she hadn’t even broken a sweat. 

 

“Of course, let’s go.” He said as he stood up and offered her his hand to help her up.

 

***

A few hours later…

 

They had several buckets of supplies they had gathered, a bucket with three fish in it, a bucket filled with lily pads with red flowers, and a basket filled with various wild plants that could be domesticated. Rice, wild onions, kale, lettuce, and some beans they had found along the lake were all things that David had happily collected. The only problem was that he was forced to go back to the house so that he could begin setting up a pond for the fish he had captured. 

 

“Two of these are females and they are pregnant, they will be laying their eggs soon and I can’t afford to waste any time,” David told everyone. “I want to get back to the house as soon as we can and make an artificial pond. We can then take water from it out and use it to feed a large greenhouse system.”

 

“What about food, we only have enough for a week and we lost the trailer…” Harry commented.

 

“We can make quick trips just for hunting, we will look for stragglers and butcher them on the spot,” David said. “If we use greenhouses for the aquaponics system I am imagining, we should be able to feed a community that is several hundreds of times larger than what we currently have, we can also grow food year-round. The poop waste that the fish produce in the pond will need to be collected and it can be dried into fertilizer that we can toss into regular flower beds.” 

 

“Then what are the crawdads for?” Harry asked.

 

“Pandora caught them, they will be cleaning the algae in the pond. They can also eat the small fish when they are babies, which is perfect for helping control their population. Later I want to introduce catfish to the pond which will add even more diversity and more food sources.” David said with a smile. “We also discovered something incredible.”

 

Reaching into a second bucket he brushed his fingers over a large oyster in a green and black shell that was slightly smaller than his palm. Its shell was slightly cracked as it filtered food and air out of the water in the bucket.

 

“This is an Edean species, do you know what the problem with freshwater clams and oysters is?” David asked.

 

“No, I don’t know much about them,” Harry said honestly.

 

“The freshwater species we have discovered don’t taste as good as their saltwater cousins, but these are very tasty,” David explained. “The crayfish and the oysters will help clean the water of any bacteria and the scraps of dead fish, we only need to collect the sludge off the bottom which we can dry out and use as fertilizer. I will build a machine to do this for us.”

 

He could already see the large system in his mind, he needed something sustainable that didn’t require a lot of manpower. Once the bacteria were settled in a separate tank with the duckweed then he could begin to filter everything and the system would be ready for the fish. In the meantime, he planned to move everything to a fish tank that he had in the garage from when he was a kid. 

 

“Then we just need to set up some pumps and a bit of plumbing along with some magical grow lights I will set up. Lena can create a computer program since we picked up a few laptops the last time we were out raiding.” David nodded a few times here before he continued. “Should be pretty straightforward.”

 

“Why haven’t I ever heard of these systems?” Harry asked.

 

“Traditional farming that uses chemicals is hard to beat if you have the land and resources for it. We have water, and I can produce electricity and ideal growing conditions using magic.” David explained. “Aquaponics is expensive and requires specialized knowledge which I happen to have. If we wanted to make something even more incredible then we could use vertical grow beds to allow us to stack says that the water would slowly travel down as it made its way to the biofilters.”

 

In this case, a warehouse-sized building could be used to grow all of the food necessary for an entire city. The solid fertilizer produced by the fish could then be used to grow plants like potatoes and turnips that can’t be grown in aquaponics as well as spread over a grass field to raise cattle or sheep for more efficiency. Humans' relationship with nature has long been broken, but if you can create an ecosystem then you can produce all kinds of different foods.

 

What David was imagining was an L-shaped building that surrounded a large pond that was made from concrete and plastic. Inside would be a diverse selection of different fish that could be raised in the freshwater pond and the L-shaped building would be filled with grow beds. Insulated plastic sheeting for greenhouses was already plentiful in the area with all of the farmers and his parents even having enough sheets to throw together something simple.

 

Natural lighting was overrated, with enough electricity even modern grow lights had gotten to the point where they were cheaper and produced better quality vegetables than anything that could be grown under the sun. That is because when you can break away from nature and grow food non-stop at any time then you have won over the people who are just using sunlight. The disease was almost impossible since it was a closed system and pests were easy to control indoors. 

 

Reaching over he began to stroke the small cat who was sitting on the armrest of his chair as she soaked up the sun. Her belly was swollen with the fish she had eaten and she seemed content with herself after making several successful catches. All of this came from the idea of seeing a fish hook and trying to think of a way to make the fish come to him.

 

“But what about the fish traps I stayed up all night making…” Harry asked with some hesitation in his voice.

 

This hesitant question that sounded more like complaining caused David to pause and turn towards Harry with a flat expression. “Harry, do you think that these three fish will be enough to produce the hundreds and hundreds of fish that I am imagining? Enough to feed everyone?” 

 

Initially, they would need to bring in fish to stock the ponds and start the cycle of life, then they would introduce the crayfish and oysters before finally getting some catfish. The predation happening in the pond would create rich and plentiful fertilizer when the sludge was taken and dried. If he wanted to grow things like the lilies organically, then he would need to be able to create small ecosystems to provide the habitats that they needed. 

 

Monsters needed to eat a variety of different prey to sustain themselves and they didn’t like eating the same things all the time. They were incredibly picky and magical plants tended to grow right alongside them off of the mana-rich droppings they left near their dens. Raising aquatic monsters was much safer than raising land-based ones since they were almost harmless if they escaped their enclosure.

 

“Besides Harry, they are great practice. All a monster is is a really big and strong predator. Soon we are going to catch some of those eel monsters, the black ones that had rows of eyes along their backs with the sharp spines.” David said as he remembered the fish monster. “They are a delicacy and can help people below the mid-tier build up a stronger foundation by providing a purifying effect to their mana if eaten in large quantities.”

 

What he didn’t want to say was that this was the precursor to bringing in even bigger monsters. He needed a way to grow large amounts of magically fortified grasses that would attract monsters who made these grasses the foundation of their diets. Rabbits had monster variants that were incredible for this, and they could also be used to feed predatory monsters whose corpses were used to fertilize some of the better plants.

 

While the monsters would never get above the low tier, they could be used to harvest magical stones that could help the children get to the mid-tier easily. He realized that he had gotten stuck in the traditions and that farming as it had been done was too unsafe to sustain in a world where the farmers could be easily attacked. Composting the small amounts of waste they produced just wasn’t viable since they usually only brought the meat and edible parts of the monsters back to the compound.

***

Meanwhile…

 

“Honey, what should we do?” David’s mother asked as she used some binoculars from the attic to look over the wall. 

 

A few hours ago a large caravan of people had appeared and parked their various vehicles in front of the walls. There were trucks, buses, vans, and even wagons pulled by horses and close to 100 people that could be seen wearing ragged clothes. The people came in various ages with most of them being adults who were in their 20s to 30s and some of them could even be seen with small children. 

 

Armor plates and various sheets of steel and parts of other vehicles were welded over windows and rebar had been used as spikes. Several vehicles were driving on flat tires and some looked like they were running on hope and dreams. One of the busses even had a thick chain that was being used to tow a water truck. 

 

From out of a truck in the lead, the door was pushed open and a young man with skin the same color as Susie’s stepped out and revealed thick dreadlocks that had formed. He had a somber expression that could be seen behind his thick beard and a bent lead pipe could be seen hanging on his back that had duct tape wrapped around the grip. There was excitement in his eyes as he looked at the fortified concrete walls of the compound.

 

He wore a dark leather coat that was used by welders covered in burns and small holes that were burned around the corners. The clothes he had on underneath was a flame-retardant suit that was taken from a fire station and he had heavy gloves on his hands. On his feet were a heavy pair of boots that made heavy crunching noises every time he took a step.

 

“Momma! Are you in there?!” He called out with some anxiety.

 

Some tears began to come from his eyes when he thought of all the death and destruction he had seen in the last few months. Grief began to slowly surface on his face when he began to wonder if his mother had also been lost. It didn’t take long though for his fears to be quashed when a window in the house opened up and a woman of color poked her head out and began calling out to him in tears.

 

“Trey, you lived! I knew you would! Son, what happened to you?!” Susie called when she saw her beloved son looking so gruff and grave.

 

In the past, he had kept short hair and a clean-shaven face, she could still see him clearly in her mind playing trading cards with the young David. Now he even had several scars that passed across his nose and cheek that made him seem even more like a veteran of battlefields and the pipe on his back had bloodstains near the curve at the end. A sad smile crossed his face and he couldn’t help the tears that began to flow more freely from his eyes.

 

“A lot happened to me, so, so much,” Trey said sadly as anger surfaced on his face. “I should have taken David in no matter what I was told. When Amanda told me that I should leave him out in the cold, I should have known that she was a snake!”

 

The rage he had been holding began to leak out now that he knew his mother was safe, and he felt his hands clenched into fists and his teeth gritted painfully as he sneered in rage. Red sparks began to dance from his closed fists that would crackle and pop into small explosions that burned his already charred leather coat. A metallic humming noise was coming from his body that resembled what happened when a flaming candle was put in the microwave.

 

“Momma, we’re all that managed to escape… Everyone else is dead…” Trey said with some sadness mixed with rage as his knees began to shake with his grief. “We didn’t want to go to Denver, so we tried to come here…”