John picked the last trait of the Wealth category, the one that allowed members of his guild to drop items up to Epic quality, and was then greeted with a new button asking him to upgrade the Guild Hall now. Standing atop the sun deck of his yacht, he clicked on the yes button.

The effect was a rainbow-coloured shimmer laying itself on top of the edge of the Illusion Barrier, as if it was made of a giant soap bubble, which then slowly pushed outwards until coming to a halt when the radius of the circle had roughly doubled. Then the shimmer disappeared again.

“Pretty standard barrier extension phenomenon,” Magoi commented, somehow drinking tea from the cup without taking off his mask. He just… put it against the tip and threw it down there. “Nothing particularly special.”

“I don’t care, I have Lady Liberty!” John exclaimed, throwing his hands into the air. At the same time another window asked if, for the cheap, cheap price of a million dollars, he would like to readjust the centre of his barrier. It was basically a bargain. He put it right where it belonged, on top of the statue. He was still left with enough room to fit the current harbour in. ‘Oh hey, I own an actual pier now,’ he thought.

His new borders stretched from Flagpole Plaza, over a pier and the statue, to a vast amount of water. Really, about 50% of his current barrier were just water. There was a way to change that, namely in dumping massive amounts of money into the decoration system. Alternatively, he could pay the mana to have Gnome do it. The most likely thing to happen was that he did both, neither mana nor money were particularly valuable to him at the current time.

“Okay, time to try something,” John said and attempted to move the Harbour over to the pre-existing pier. While he could do it on the map, the eventual confirmation of the move got him a pop-up informing him that he couldn’t move or upgrade buildings while people were inside.

Thus they evacuated the Harbour and were then witness to the whole building, including the two vessels anchoring on it, sliding along the coastline in a reality-bending fashion. “THAT, however, is special,” Magoi remarked. “Reminds me of Gehnigm’s powers.”

“Might work similarly,” John agreed. “Speaking of people with space-controlling powers: Aclysia, can you bring Metra back to her bed?” They, of course, had to move the still unconscious berserker out of the Harbour with them. It had been almost two hours since they had dragged her out from underwater at this point. If it weren’t for Tilgun insuring him that she would be out for a few days at least, he would have been pretty worried by now. “Anyway, time to see what new things I can do inside here!”

The answer was: a lot. Tier 1 came with a multitude of new building possibilities, upgrades for the current ones, a lot more space to neatly put them down and 90 more Room Slots to cover it all. John decided to broadly organize everything into districts to make things simple and then start building from there.

The statue, the fort it stood on and the surrounding green area John declared to be the home district. Here he placed all buildings that were of relevance only to him or his guild. That covered a list of buildings.

The Guild Heart: As with its original building, the upgrade to it was free. It now provided a total of 25’000 mana (an increase of 15’000). There were slight visual changes to it, although John could have sworn it now glowed a bit brighter. Not that a lot of people got to judge that, he placed it in the fortress, far under Lady Liberty’s feet. He kind of wanted to place it up on the torch, but he had the feeling that exposing the central energy hub of his Guild Hall that broadly to the world would have been foolish.

The I.D. Gate: The upgrade to Tier 1 only cost John one more Room Slot. What it added was an extra two doors for people to create their own barriers inside of should the original one be occupied. Not the greatest of upgrades and John would need some incentives to do more than just add more doors to the thing if Gaia wanted him to upgrade it further. He placed the three doors in the marble wall on the first level of the star fort.

Housing Tower: Strictly speaking that wasn’t a real building, it was a deliberately changed design of the standard Housing building. The one to inhabit that building, Magoi, was insisting on what he wanted it to look like. Housing was different from other buildings in that it could be expanded however much one wanted, at the cost of more Room Slots of course. Tiers only added a larger variety of luxury rooms to the Housing. As John wanted this to be the permanent home of Magoi and his family, he obliged them on most requests.

The end result was a five-story high spire with a large head. It had a medieval feel to it, John fighting to make the dark red brick a colour that harmonized nicely with the grey stone around, with windows on every story and a magic powered elevator shaft running down the middle to give access to all the floors. It had everything that one needed for independent living and more. At the end, they placed two of those towers at the northern and western tip of the star fort, one for Magoi and his wife, the other for Magnus. That cost a total of 20 Room Slots, but the Magus’ family now had a place to live.

Security Station: While the Sentry Golems would patrol the whole barrier, John wanted the spawning station to be within reach. The upgrade to Tier 1 cost John four more Room Slots. A worthwhile investment as far as he was concerned, as the boorish looking steel cylinder now sustained a total of five level 30 golems. That was an increase of two golems and 5 levels. They still weren’t the best at dealing with serious threats, but they could break up basic problems. Much more interesting than that was the ability to place up to five exterior points in conquered territory where the Sentry Golems would be able to teleport to and also patrol through.

After some fidgeting, John found out that he could give access to placing rights to other people in his guild. He let Rave and Aclysia both have that right, trusting the latter to place one of those stations in the Enclave while they were asleep. That right was limited to the placing of such outpost-style buildings from things John had to place in the Guild Hall.

Cleaning Station: There was not much to say there. At Tier 1 there were more slimes and John could also place outposts of this, cleaning those barriers in addition to the Guild Hall. Another 4 Room Slots were spent.

For the moment, those were all the buildings in that district. There were more buildings in the luxury category he kind of wanted to have private access to (such as bathhouses, a sex dungeon, a massage parlour and so on), but he couldn’t justify that to himself just yet.

Instead, he turned to the second district, which was the area around the Harbour, simply called the travel district. It was located at the north-eastern coast of Liberty Island.

The Harbour: The upgrade of the Harbour had guzzled down a total of 13 Room Slots, but now the building actually had enough space to comfortably hold the yacht in addition to Magoi’s boat and still have room remaining for future vessels. It was a rectangle shaped area that grew around the natural pier, vastly extending it, and fenced off by a metal wall with a larger version of the previous gate.

Transport Station: Due to the need of special building materials, this was postponed until a later date, but the upgrade would increase the size of the pavilion and two-person sized platforms on the side. There were also going to be an extra two outposts to be build. Nothing about anyone but Guild Members being able to use it yet, John hoped that would be an eventual thing. That would be another 4 Room Slots.

‘I really hoped there would be a way to give people easy access to this island,’ John thought. ‘Doesn’t seem like it’s happening though. Perhaps I should arrange some sort of deal with the local Fateweavers to have a ferry running from the Enclave to my Harbour? No, better, I should have Magoi arrange that deal. He will have an easier time negotiating.’

To the north-west of the island were two tree-covered green areas separated by the large central walkway that would lead normal visitors down from the Flagpole Plaza to Lady Liberty. John made those two his economic districts. He further specified them as commercial and industrial, eastern and western half respectively. The placement was important because John wanted the commercial district to be closer to the travel district. He began building on the commercial district.

Guild Bank: The building didn’t change on the outside, although John could have added more bling if he wanted to through the design menu; however, the amount of storage they had increased from 100 to 300, Guild Members could now access it anywhere in the Guild Hall and they could now have up to three different accounts on the bank. That was good, because John now didn’t run danger loaning away his lunch money, so to speak. As such, he made one of the accounts as his and Rave’s shared account, one for the loaning business and a last one for his familiars’ allowances. A total of 10 Room Slots is what this building cost him, stark increase from the previous 3.

Menagerie: He still planned to sell tickets to marvel at his ever-growing collection of cute animals. At Tier 1 there was the addition of some more biomes (tropical and desert) and the spawning of a small shared space that the animals living inside could reach through all kinds of means. Also, an increase in the maximum number of animals that were sustainable to live in there. Room Slots used went from 2 to 5.

Storefront: Much like the Housing, this was a heavily customizable building that could be changed in accordance to what was needed and how much Room Slots one was willing to pay. John created a medium sized store, big enough for people to run around inside for fifteen minutes but not a giant labyrinthian construction. The idea here was to see if he could get off being dependent on the Abyss Auction to sell his stuff.

As to what the building itself looked like, keeping in the theme, it was largely red bricks and it had those large windows typical for stores facing the street. For the fun of it, John had placed an awning at the inner corner of the L-shaped building and an extra door, in case somebody wanted to open a bakery or something. This cost him a total of 10 Room Slots.

With the remaining 24 Room Slots, he moved onto the industrial district.

Transmutation Forge: The chimney-esque thing was upgradable without cost and simply became larger, more heavily decorated and able to work on two things simultaneously. Of course, the array of creatable materials also increased but only to low-tier magical materials. Using it was barely worth it if he wanted any of them.

Mana Factory: While a very small one, basically just an arrangement of four of the kind of seats John had sat in on the cruise around a central pillar where one could put down mana batteries to charge them inside a cone shaped, sci-fi themed building, this was a pretty needed one. It supplied an extra 2500 mana to the Guild Hall by just existing, with extra options of having people charge the Guild Heart from there or go fill up mana batteries instead. If John had any mana batteries, that would have been splendid. He would need to get some to take full advantage of this.

Mine: This was a building whose existence deeply surprised John, simply because it was a pretty big affront to how reality was supposed to work. Basically put, it was an underground complex that shifted daily, had several layers and spawned ore nodes. It reminded John a lot of how mining worked in MMORPGs, which fit his abilities but was still pretty overpowered. However, the ores spawned in weren’t exactly great right now, mostly low-tier single element metals, and he would need a workforce for this, as the ores didn’t farm themselves. Also, it had the exorbitant upkeep cost of 5000 mana, double what other buildings that cost 10 Room Slots needed.

Still, he could build a whole industry on this. For the moment he just planned to give some work to people from the Enclave or others that needed it and sell the metals on the auction. As time went on (and after attracting some hopefully gifted smiths, carpenters and the like), he hoped to erect a crafting district in the northern part of Liberty Island that his barrier currently didn’t cover.

Farm: The last building he built was one that was supposed to feed them. The soil was pure cheating, as it promised John that he could grow basically anything he wanted on it, very hard to please plants notwithstanding. The Farm was a bit of an unusual building, as it didn’t have Tiers as much as several extra buildings, like certain types of greenhouses, animal shelters, and so on, that he had to unlock as time went on. The incentive there was that these extensions would spawn in what John wanted immediately.

His eyes were locked on the Turkheir Shelter that, in turn, was locked behind a ‘Tier 5 Required’. He would get there, he promised himself. It worried him though that the greyed out building model looked more like a high-security prison than a stable.

All of this left him with 4 Room Slots and only 550 mana left after projected costs. The theoretical costs did assume the Harbour and Housing used 5000 mana each though, which was unlikely to happen.

“And with that, I am done,” John said. The whole endeavour had cost him several hours; all throughout his girls had come along and given their input on where he should place what and where he should change the layout of the streets to make things more intuitive. Thankfully, the days were getting longer, a few months back it would have been dark at this hour already.

“You forgot to build a fucking house for us, dumbass,” Eliza reminded him.

“No, I actually didn’t,” John told her, waggling his fingers and quickly pulling back when she threatened to bite him. “See, I get a special building for us in the Administration category. I would rather build that than waste Room Slots on getting a house for us right now when the yacht already has everything we need.”

That made enough sense for everyone, and so they headed back to the ship. On the way, John turned to Aclysia, “After dinner, I want to talk to you about something,” he said to her. It was important enough to be discussed in words.