A Black Market LitRPG

Kyle immediately flew out of the tunnel base again once he refuelled the hornet, this time wearing his Version 0 arctech exosuit, except it turned out that he did not need it.

By the time he made it back to the battlefield, the Versian Garrison had already managed to push the Yual forces out of the city and back onto the boats. Now, the battle was locked in a stalemate, with continuous, consistent artillery fire lobbed at each other as they fought for the trenches.

Kyle could also see that the Raktor forces were building additional fortifications opposite the defenders of Ocra, entrenching themselves. This only showed that Count Leon might have given up on a blitz attack, after the failure of the midnight flank attack. If it wasn’t for Kyle’s intervention in disrupting the supply chain, Count Leon’s forces might have very well succeeded.

Reporting his observations of the state of the battle, he soon returned to Desham, taking a rest for a day while assigning one of the other ten hunters who had mineral ant partners to take the stealth hornet and fly regular observations.

The next day, Kyle began work on creating another stealth hornet. However, there was a key issue that had been plaguing him for a while. As of now, he only had twelve mineral ants total, with eight being warriors and four being venom-spitting hornets. How the hell do I get more?

He inspected the Artificial Hive Core carefully, trying to get a hint. The ‘monster’ that he had snatched it from was able to control more than a thousand of the ants, so could he eventually reach the same height?

There did not seem to be any indication for Kyle as to its upgrade path. It was at times like this when Kyle realised he was really relying too much on the System. It has grown to be an integral part of me in barely less than half a year.

Nevertheless, Kyle needed to find a way to bolster his burgeoning airforce. If he couldn’t upgrade the artificial hive core, then he should think further. Maybe I’ll build my own aircraft…

The resources required would be intense. For now, the eight warrior mineral ants were utilised by the hunters, using their airborne capabilities to herd groups of mammoth hogs into the waiting arms of ambushers, laying traps throughout the forest to fuel the food demand of Desham.

With the battle at Ocra crawling to a halt thanks to Kyle’s intervention, Kyle kept a close eye on the battle over the next few days while the factories for both weapons and potions were slowly built up from the ground.

The powerbase Kyle was fostering grew stronger every day, creating a resilient network from the ground up. The locals of Desham were more optimistic than ever, thanks to Diya’s leadership, where she was fully focused on rebuilding the town to a self-sustaining working state.

It was a far cry from her former position as a black market fixer, being far too used to having her way done without the need for paperwork. Now, every action and decision she made had a far larger impact, making her wary about each step of implementation.

Unlike her previous successors, she consulted every facet of society that would be affected by any future changes, taking into account their grievances and wants. This public consultation was taught to her by Kyle, who was slowly grooming her into a proper puppet leader. Even a puppet should have basic competency in leading a state.

Kyle did not want Diya to do so because he loved the people of Desham or that he cared for them; instead, it was to reduce potential backlash or counter-coups being launched against Diya and overthrowing all the hard work he had done. He needed Diya to build a solid reputation and amass enough goodwill, political capital and social capital to push through hard changes in the future.

The exploitation of the local economy and the local workforce was not a one-time affair but rather a long game of balancing rewards. Too fast of an improvement in the standard of living, and the people will complain when the going gets tough. Too slow of an improvement, people will begin to riot and ask for more. It was Kyle’s and Diya’s job to find that sweet spot, and Kyle had more experience than most to know how to do it.

It was for this reason that the blueprints of the temporary housing built to hold the slum dwellers were marginally better – just enough for the dwellers to notice a clear improvement, but not too much that their lifestyle was overhauled. This kept their standard of living low, and, subsequently their desire for consumer goods low.

Already the dwellers were beginning to treat the mammoth hog meat as currency, but not as something necessary for survival. Human needs and desires evolve in step with the evolution of their environment, and Kyle needed to control that environment, lest he pays the price of having to satisfy the people continuously.

Furthermore, there was nothing to exploit if the economy was in shambles either way. Kyle would have to build a proper economic base first before even thinking about trying to exploit it illegally.

With the two main factories coming online within a week in a prototype stage, jobs were created as workers were slowly trained under Feldon and Hayden. Kyle handled the training for the potion factory, which of now was still extremely barebones with no automatic conveyer belt system or anything of the sort, just a few workbenches, weighing scales, arctech stoves and flasks.

But before he could train anyone, he needed the ingredients in bulk first. Drake led the remainder of the workers in the tunnel base to plant the Poair Saplings while harvesting Poair Leaves from any trees they came across.

As for the Greis Powder, Kyle needed to find a way to sort out the powder from crushed rocks that had been excavated from the tunnels that had been dug so far. Drake had given him a sample of the powder in a small bag.

The Keru Forest was not exactly a mountainous region, which was why the Greis Powder could only be found in small batches mixed up with other rocks, unlike the usual large deposits. He knew Greis Powder was soluble based on the potions that he had made in the past, so he threw the mixture of power into the water, filtering the denser particles that did not dissolve.

Kyle sighed, hoping the System would tell him at least how many compounds were present. Time for some fractional distillation.

He spent some time setting up a simple small setup, allowing him to boil at five different steps in a single fractioning column, using heating arctech engravings to control the temperature as best as he could. Boiling the mixture, he began to see the different solutes condensing on each layer with a different temperature.

After the experiment, he tested all of the rest, only getting dirt until he reached the fifth step of the fractioning column.

Kyle knew that he had locked the temperature range, but instead of further repeating the fractional distillation process, he moved on to recrystallisation, aiming at getting the powder out.

It was a far simpler process: he poured hot water into mixing with the crude Greis compound, stirring it and letting it cool down. Once it was cooled, the powders began to crystallise slowly over time, allowing Kyle to filter out the water and obtain a higher purity.

With the method now in place, Kyle set about manufacturing the large production machines that would be able to handle continuous production of it. He needed it to be on scale and as automated as possible to reduce operating costs, drafting up a quick design in a single day for entire process.

This would become the first job of the weapons factory, with Hayden leading the project in manufacturing. A first prototype at a smaller scale was made, with clear defects in the design and errors, but it did not faze Kyle. He never expected it to get it right the very first time, not having a cranial implant like he used to in the Galactic Era.

Optimising it, the second prototype was created at the same small scale, allowing Kyle to test the entire production process himself, dumping in rocks and watching the rocks be moved up a belt feeder powered by arctech engravings, chucking them automatically into a grinder that crushed them into powder.

The powder was then dropped into a slurry of water, which was filtered into a secondary mixture. That secondary mixture was then piped through a winding set of tubes that had heating engravings wrapped around it, vaporising it into a gaseous form before the targeted compound began to condense on a fractional column level. Kyle had kept in the other steps in the design just in case, as he did not know what other minerals he could potentially extract from the tunnel as well.

Finally, the condensed Greis compound was reintroduced into a hot water tank, which was then carted off and allowed to cool slowly, the power crystallising inside. With the tank flushed of liquid, the workers could then enter and harvest the crystals from the inside, obtaining pure Greis powder.

Kyle verified the entire process, approving the design to go for scale. Over the next five days, the new Desham steel factory burst into life as it slowly expanded its operations, with Hayden and Feldon continuously adding new machines and workbenches into the large floor area that they now had. Mistakes were made as the freshly trained workers were still uneducated, but Kyle shrugged it off, seeing it as a growing pain rather than a terrible outcome.

Soon, the new machines were ready for the potion factory. The fractional column was huge, towering close to three meters high and six meters wide for scale. The machines gurgled as churn as everything was automated, save for the potion-making and harvesting of Greis Powder.

Kyle trained the workers in a similar fashion to what he had done in the Seven Snakes, assigning the workers to specific stations and having them specialise in that role. As the first batch of Greis power and Poair Leaves harvested began to come in, the production line kicked into action, slowly churning out more than five hundred handmade potions a day. Kyle knew he could scale up indefinitely.

Right now, he could only make stamina potions, as the Yul’s Tears were completely out of reach, him not having seen it at all in the region. Still, he was sure that the stamina potions would be of great use to him and his workers.

He first had Diya distribute the stamina potions, earning her even more goodwill from the people who loved it. Most of them began to rely on it as they carried out their back-breaking work in the farms, forest and construction.

More and more dwellers who had originally been sitting on the sidelines became far more receptive to the orders of Diya, putting more control into her hands.

The performance of the hunters was also significantly improved, allowing them to have a shorter downtime between each successive hunt.

With this, Kyle began to amp up the training of his own dedicated hunting force, joining them on hunts and sparring with them back at the base whenever he was free.

“So, what’s the next step?” Feldon asked as they toured the two factories as well as the newly built temporary housing, which was simple generic houses with a basic foundation. “We can’t keep paying the workers in meat and potions.”

“I know. So let’s make some money.”