I figured I was going to need a plan before trying to liberate the town, and there was no guarantee that the people in town would be as accepting as I hoped they would be with one despot replacing another.

For now, I wasn’t going to approach the town until I was prepared, or I absolutely had to. I’m sure Tom would have an opinion on the subject since he was always quite empathetic, but I’m not risking my life or safety without options.

I got up from the table and opened a door to the Library World. Proceeding back to my 3D model of the compound, I zoomed out and started planning for future developments.

I have a source of fresh water now, and plenty of confiscated food to last me for years. I could repurpose the stocks to use for the refugees and last the people in town for months if we rationed. That should give us plenty of time to get some farming set up to provide a reliable and sustainable food source. Most people would likely want to stay in their homes and communities, but I’m sure some will want to relocate once they see or hear about the compound.

I will need to zone some housing areas and farming plots. The housing will be within the safety of the compound, and I can set up farming plots outside the walls but within the range of the turret’s protection.

I zoned out eight fields running the length of the walls, leaving space along the road to enter the compound. Each field runs roughly one thousand feet in length and three hundred feet in width. Fields of this size should provide more than enough food for the people within the compound, while allowing excess to sell to anyone that doesn’t want to join me.

I wouldn’t have to do any work to get these installed besides providing the required tools and machinery for my people to make the new fields. I would need to acquire some seeds for planting, but I’m sure some can be located in town.

Once I had that completed, I moved on to housing. I didn’t plan on housing very many people within the compound to start with, but planning for the future is much better than being underprepared. I decided to go with three apartment buildings at the rear of the compound. I would start out with four units per floor and three floors per building. This would give adequate housing for thirty-six families, or multiple groups of individuals in shared living spaces. With my creation abilities, adding floors to the buildings would be a simple process if needed in the future.

With the knowledge I now had at my disposal, it was prudent that I provided access to it for my people. Smarter people were smarter and more effective workers. The combination of knowledge the system provided would allow people to learn and use the most accurate information ever available to anyone on this planet. Hopefully, this would allow some of them to devise new and improved information on their own after absorbing the teachings and forming their own hypotheses to test. Even though I had all of this knowledge in my head, I was only one person and who knew what developments could be made with more accurate information available. This was probably the most beneficial part of allowing people into the compound and providing them the facilities to live.

In that thought, I visualized a school building close to the apartments in the right rear of the compound. Following that up, I also visualized a large library building to the north of the apartments on the left side of the compound. I would have to export the system books in order to fill it up, but this would be the most important building in the entire compound.

I didn’t want to keep storing everything in my house and have people coming in and out of it for resources, so I visualized four warehouse buildings to the north of the schoolhouse on the right of the compound. This should provide ample space to store any goods we produce or procure in the future, all while allowing easy transport without access to my house.

I planned on having products produced for export to the town, and I didn’t want to be constantly creating items for this. So, I created a large factory building across from the warehouses. The close proximity should make it a lot easier to transport resources in from the warehouses and complete products out to them.

Once I had everything mapped out on the 3D model, I added roads between all of the buildings around the compound. Roads are the arteries through which the lifeblood of civilization flows. I left the areas to the left and right of the main entrance undeveloped in the model but added roads dividing it into three sections for future development.

Now that I was finished with the model, it was time for me to get to work on actually installing these facilities. It had only taken me a short amount of time to get the water system up and running, so I still had enough energy to start working on some of the buildings.

I went to the rear of the compound and created the foundation for the three apartment buildings. I wanted to make sure my plan translated properly from the 3D model into real life, so I was going to lay the foundation and prepare connections for utilities for all of the buildings first. I moved on to the various buildings in a reverse clockwise fashion, laying the foundation for each of them until I arrived back at the apartments.

Now that I had all of my foundations in place, it seemed that everything would match up with my expectations from the model. I followed the same route laying the roads around the compound out of concrete as I had done with the walls. This probably wouldn’t hold up to the test of time like asphalt would, but it didn’t have to be extravagant in the beginning as it could be easily modified in the future.

Once I had my roads and foundations in place, I ran water connections for each of the buildings from the storage tanks. Stopping outside of the buildings I created main cutoffs for each of them with a simple water meter. This would allow control over the water flow in the case of problems within the buildings while providing a measurement of the water usage for each building. Depending on the water usage, I would have to expand our water processing abilities in the future.

Once I was finished with the basic infrastructure, I got to work on creating the first floors of the apartments. This shouldn’t require much mana if I create them out of synthetic materials. I created the four separate spaces for each of them, leaving the interior walls bare to allow me to run electrical wiring and water delivery without hindrance. I decided to go with one large open living space for each, only walling off the bathroom. This would allow the residents to decide how they wanted their living space to be divided once moving in. Each was equipped with space for a kitchen, but I skipped over any cabinetry or appliances to conserve on mana, only installing closed-off water connections.

While it didn’t take much mana to create the living spaces, each floor required a lengthy period of time to come into existence with the skill. It still took me a little over six hours to finish all three apartment buildings. Now I just needed to create the solar panels for each building and install them with their wiring to each unit, but I was going to take a break and check on Tom before getting back to work.

I headed inside and went to find Tom in my room, but he was apparently in the shower as I heard the water running when I went past the bathroom. I went downstairs and grabbed some hamburger out of the large refrigerator. Going back upstairs, I remembered that I hadn’t replaced my appliances with working versions after the reset. I didn’t feel like lugging the old stove out of the house, so I just created a simple hot plate and threw the hamburger into a pan. After the hamburger browned, I drained it then threw some taco seasoning in with the meat and added a small amount of water to keep it from drying out. While I was cooking up my taco meat, Tom had come out of the bathroom, apparently a new man.

“Oooh man, something smells good out here! You make any for me yah glutton?”

I chuckled “Yea, I’ve got plenty here, but would you head downstairs and get me some cheese and some tortillas?”

“What do you mean, I thought the basement was empty?”

“Oh yea, did I forget to tell you earlier? Go ahead down there and check it out.”

Tom pounced down the stairs turning the corner and I heard him yell out from the basement. He came running back up the stairs.

“Did you create all of that?!?”

“Nah, not all of it, just the equipment. I commandeered the food from the local store. Where's the cheese and tortillas?”

He looked down at his hands sheepishly. “Oh, I kinda got excited. Let me go back and get everything.”

Tom came back shortly with everything we needed to have some basic tacos right as I was finishing up with the hamburger meat. We sat down at the table after assembling our tacos and enjoyed the meal together over some small talk. I told him what I had been working on while he was sleeping. Even after seeing the changes to the house I had accomplished within the few days since the reset, he still didn’t believe everything I told him about, so we headed out to go look at the new buildings.

He could already see the buildings looming slightly higher than my house once we got outside. He almost tripped over his own feet while thinking about how I had accomplished so much in the short amount of time he was sleeping.

We went into one of the apartments, and I shared my plans for the future with him while explaining the layout of the buildings.

“So, you’re going to help the people in town?”

“Yea Tom, I plan on it, but I’m not going to do anything until I’m ready. It’s gonna take me days before I even finish the infrastructure here. Once I’ve got that finished, I’m going to need a plan and better weapons to take down that force in town.”

“Well, I guess I can’t really be too demanding. After seeing what’s going on in town, I want to help as soon as possible. But, you’re right. We are just two people and we might have better equipment than them, but they have numbers and hostages.”

“Right, thank you for seeing it clearly, Tom. I was hoping you wouldn’t let your feeling overcome rationality and let me get prepared. Now, I’m going to go back and take a shower as well. Feel free to explore the compound and use anything you want in the house.”

I headed back towards the house, leaving Tom walking around the apartment buildings. I needed to clean up before I got to work on the electrical for the new structures.

Image of the compound that I designed earlier to go along with my view of it.