We had another two weeks, after accepting the king's terms, to build up our base camp to the point where I could, in fact, host a handful of guests. Thankfully, by that point we were already well-prepared, all of us having the Hero class at Level 13 (Level 14, in Anzerath's case), and I'd done all the preliminary manufacturing work necessary to get a decidedly un-basic work camp set up.

Plus, since I knew we were gonna need it, I improved the amphibious van with some rear loading doors and a vastly expanded interior, because I wasn't just bringing myself and my girlfriends with me, I was also bringing, like, half of the Purpleheart Collective with me, because I did not fully understand how the Collective worked, and would need their help to replicate it properly in New Shanghelm.

Then, we sailed south, along the coastline, until we reached the harbor that was once home to Shanghelm, the biggest city in Shang.

"Alright, let's do this by the numbers," I said, as the Collective unloaded crates from the back of the van, using an unloading dock I'd just built for precisely this purpose, which was mostly just a big slab of stone that turned down into a ramp after a few feet. "Everyone knows their part, yeah?"

There was a chorus of affirmatives, and I began to make the rounds, as my spellcasting ability was, in fact, the keystone of my own part. One team wheeled a few crates back down to the shoreline, whereupon I cast a spell to unpack the crates into three long, floating pontoon docks that each anchored to a stone-and-steel hardpoint on the shoreline.

Another team had wheeled out some crates that, once assembled with magic, became more of those big prefab sheet metal warehouses. Next up was a town hall building that'd be full of offices. Then a bunch of small storefronts in a few rows, aiming at the docks. And finally, for the piece de resistance, that required a lot of spellcasting to secure a stable foundation...

A big ol' apartment tower, modeled loosely off a unique-looking one from Earth that had caught my eye, once upon a time. Marina City, sometimes called the Flower Towers and sometimes called the Corn Cobs, was built as a direct, urbanist response to the ongoing white flight to the suburbs. On top of integrating commercial and recreational facilities into the property, it also simply looked cool; each floor was a big ol' circle ringed with sixteen semicircular balconies, dividing the floor up into sixteen 'units.' A studio apartment was simply one of these units, a one-bedroom was one and a half units, and a two-bedroom was two and a half. However, as someone who enjoyed symmetry in all its forms, and who also had access to spatial expansion enchantments, I felt fairly unconstrained by the limits of geometry, and therefore every apartment got to be one unit, yet big enough to comfortably hold an entire eight-person family.

Additionally, as a believer in mixed-use zoning and walkable cities, I decided that two adjacent residential units out of every floor would be merged and repurposed as a commercial unit, for whatever businesses the occupants chose to run there, whether it be restaurants, clothing boutiques, or brothels- it didn't matter, the walls and floors were soundproofed to hell and back, so noise complaints pretty much wouldn't happen.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" I asked, looking up at the tower that my magic had assembled from prefabricated units- the bulk of my prep time was setting up an automated assembly line that could make a proper, family-sized residential unit that could slot neatly into a spatially-expanded crate, which would, in turn, get stuffed into other spatially expanded crates, and then another layer of recursive crates until it only took five (still fairly big) crates to transport this entire tower from the back of my van to its final resting place... and then, of course, come out of those crates and lock together with their neighbors like oversized lego.

"It looks kinda funky," Ash said.

"Eh, fair," I said, shrugging. "I mean, I think it looks cool, but I guess if people wanna live in buildings that look different, I'm not gonna stop them from building those."

"What, not gonna build a whole fleet of those all over town?" Legs asked. "You do seem like a 'my way or the highway' kinda gal."

"Nah, not my style," I said, shaking my head. "I'll probably build a few more, just because one of those, at sixty floors and four people per apartment, will hold about three thousand six hundred people, and uh... we're gonna have more people living here than that, but..." I shrugged. "I mean, if people want to live in an apartment that doesn't look like this, they totally can. I'm just not building it myself, and therefore someone's gonna have to pay for it. Me, I don't charge rent. Landlords are the scum of the earth, and I refuse to be one of 'em." I grinned. "I reckon that, if these public apartments are free, then hardly anyone is gonna bother building privately-owned apartments, because who the hell's gonna pay money for something they can get for free?"

"And so, Roxy Updyke's godawful aesthetics claim another few thousand victims," Ash said.

"Smartass."

Now, in all honesty, I probably could've gotten away with just a dozen or so flower towers. That'd fit a full forty thousand people just fine, and in all honesty, New Shanghelm was not likely to be a particularly dense city anytime soon.

But, well, I hadn't just built flower tower units as prefabs. I'd also built regular-ass rectangular apartment units as prefabs, and for the Grand Palace of the Duke of Shang, I'd built something simultaneously lazy as fuck and over the top. It was lazy, in that it was simply a square ring of rectangular apartment and office units that came up twenty floors, and atop each corner was perched another sixty floors of flower tower, but it was also over the top in that this fucking thing was well over two hundred meters tall and could house twenty thousand people.

Also, at the top of each palace's flower tower, I'd slapped together a fancy-ish penthouse suite that took up the whole floor, had a glass roof for an all-over skylight, and included a swimming pool.

If I was going to have to host a self-proclaimed princess in exile in the sort of luxury she felt entitled to, then I might as well do it in the simplest way I could: stick her at the top of a fancy tower and pray she never feels the need to come down from it.

"So, question," Ash said. "If you're not gonna charge people rent, how exactly do you plan to make money?"

"Oh, that's easy," I said. "Plenty of people are gonna come here wanting to ply their trade, independent of any boss that pays 'em to work here. What I'm gonna do is sell materials to people- like what the Purpleheart Collective does with all that iron y'all make, except, y'know. Not just iron. I'll sell all kinds of shit, as long as it's something I can automate. Stuff like meat and hides, though... eh, someone's gonna wanna be a Rancher who ranches real animals like sheep and cows. Let them raise and sell their livestock. Plus, while I'm not gonna be charging rent for residential spaces, I am going to be charging rent for commercial spaces, so..." I shrugged. "And, well, if all else fails, then I don't consider a city full of people who all have plenty to eat but nothing to do to be that big of a failure. People are smart, they'll find something to do."

"As long as there's two people who aren't related and don't hate each other, there's a good chance they'll fill the time with fucking," Legs said.

"There will in fact be a lot of fucking," I said, nodding. "And I am not exactly dissatisfied with that result. If I must one day stand before the gods to answer for my actions, I would be proud to position myself as the greatest wingman in all of history."

There were some snorts from the Collective.

"Alright, I need to get some other shit sorted out," I said. "I'll get back to y'all when it's ready."

A central part of my duties as the Acting Duke of Shang was in turning The Glass Desert back into a place that people could live in. This wasn't like the arid scrublands in the eastern interior, where ashweed would help loosen up the ground and start building it into a proper soil; this was a land where the ground had been melted into glass and then allowed to cool.

So, there'd have to be a preliminary stage that broke up the ground into something that ashweed could grow in, and which could, through the accumulation of biomass, begin to become actual soil.

Hrm, I wonder, what kind of device would I make that would break up huge areas of glass into sand and gravel? It would have to be mobile, heavy, and capable of handling rough terrain.

So anyways I built a new tank and gave it a front-mounted attachment with a bunch of polycrystalline diamond grinding bits that'd pulverize the fuck out of the ground. Nel took it out for a test drive, and covered a lot of ground, which then got seeded with ashweed and a few enchanted Farmer items that'd magically force the ashweed to grow super fast, go to seed, and then compost, ready for the next batch of ashweed to start growing from seed. After enough cycles of that, it'd be ready to switch over to regular grass and clover and the like, and we'd be ready for someone to bring in a bunch of livestock.

Once our two week grace period was up, though... well, then a ship from the capital arrived.