Three months was not a short span—but neither was it much time. Certainly not enough to build a venture from nothing, without any foundation already in place.
In business, five things mattered most. Place. Resources. Money. And two others that usually came later—labor and machinery. But the first hurdles were always land, capital, and tools.
Elara had no time to purchase land, begin excavation, and wait months for uncertain discoveries. Mining, prospecting—those paths demanded patience she did not possess. Time, in this case, was a luxury she could not afford.
Nor did she have money to gamble on expensive machines that might or might not work. Worse, she lacked deep technical knowledge in those fields. Pouring funds into something she could not personally oversee or fully understand was not strategy—it was recklessness.
So Elara chose differently.
She would work with what she already had.
And what she had now was clean, abundant fresh water.
