So three months passed. I put Gabil and his B-plus dragonewts to work in the Sealed Cave, cultivating magical plants inside, like Hipokute, a flower that turned into a weak universal antidote when saturated with magicules, and a few other different types of plants.
Meanwhile, his sister, Soka, was thriving under Soei's tutelage.
Hakuro was training our army (and me). Apparently, he'd earned the title 'Sword Demon,' due to his strictness. I could see it. He was incredibly strict with me. Somehow, I felt jelly in my legs and arms after every practice, even though that was technically impossible.
And finally, pretty much everyone else (except Risa, who helped out when she felt like it, then disappeared for hours at a time, working on some 'project' that Wise One wouldn't tell me about) was helping out with our town.
As for the town itself, it was coming along beautifully.
We'd laid everything out, and figured everything out beforehand, so taking it all from paper to reality hadn't actually been as difficult as we'd figured it'd be, especially with thousands of orcs helping out.
The town was set up in quadrants, separated by two large main roads. At the very center of it all was a giant central building that covered the main administration. We had a marker district, a production district, a warehouse district, a housing district, and a gigantic townhouse that we'd once upon a time used to hold all of our workers. Now, that townhouse was a luxury inn, for guests. We had a few other districts, too, but everything important was taken care of.
Looking at the town on paper, I'd had a handful of concerns, though, each of which had been dealt with in reality.
First of all, the water situation. As I'd mentioned once before, we had pipes that ran over the city. Originally, we'd wanted to make the pipes out of magisteel, but we'd had a magicule contamination problem, so we'd ended up using a sort-of plastic resin that Wise One had created, instead.
We had eight water plants situated two in each cardinal direction of Tempest. The water would be piped from these plants, down the two main roads, and then dispersed throughout the rest of their quadrant. Then, they'd go through underground pipes and deal with as waste to be filtered through, and eventually returned to the river from whence they came.
In order to keep a quadrant of Tempest from receiving clean, running water, you'd need to destroy two separate plants. Each of these plants naturally had five separate redundancies, so you'd have to destroy twenty different pumps in order to stop water from running in Tempest.
Even if you tried to poison the river, it wouldn't really matter. Working together with Dold, Wise One was able to create a magic carving that automatically purified all incoming water. Or, rather, it created a barrier that straight-up rejected anything that didn't have the exact atomic structure of water, filtering that into waste to be purified routinely.
We also had water tanks situated throughout the city, and specialists whose entire job was to go through and ensure that the water was clean and the system was working correctly.
All in all, our water system was something never before seen in this world, according to Kaijin and the dwarves. Fully running water, real showers, sinks, working flush toilets… Thank you Romans! Without your aqueduct idea, using gravity to disperse water easily, everyone in the city would've had to manually deal with their own water situation. After all, we didn't have the technology to put a water pump in every single home. We barely had the technology to upkeep the twenty that we were currently using.
We even had four public water fountains, one in each cardinal direction, just for the decor.
It also solved another problem I'd been worrying about… directions. Since a lot of the houses looked the same, it was nice that you could just follow a pipe, and be guaranteed to eventually find your way back to a main road, if you got lost.
The next problem was bugs, but screens made out of processed spider silk solved it rather well. Another novel idea that'd never been used in this world before.
And then, another issue that I'd been really adamant about, as a former Japanese person: Baths.
While there was a personal bath in every household, I had a hot spring constructed near the center of town (as well as another, smaller one inside my own house… Bite me), with special, carefully treated water that always kept the perfect heat. The end result was an amazing hot, super luxurious hot spring with special water that actually had a number of healing properties, and felt like bliss. Naturally, it was separated by gender, and could hold around ten people at a time.
Long story short, somewhere along the way, our town had turned into a picture that it felt like was pulled right out of a handbook called 'How to: Luxury Resort City.'
And, with the magic tool that Wise One had created, which grew food from the ground within a day, if supplied with a stupidly monstrous amount of magicules, our food situation had been solved, too.
Thus, I needed to move on to other issues: Laws.
The thing about monsters is: They follow the strong. So as long as I'd actively forbidden something, nobody did it. No ifs, no ands, no buts. So laws weren't technically an urgent thing right now, but I intended to have non-monsters eventually coming through here, too. I needed written laws to enforce, and I needed them now, while I still had the time.
Luckily, the Goblin Lords were all over that. They were actually pretty good at taking whatever I spewed and turning it into a coherent law, but I needed to know what I wanted to say, first.
The biggest issue I had, in that department, was polygamy. Honestly, I wasn't totally sure what to do about it, so I asked a few people, including the Wise One, and Benimaru.
Apparently, copulation in this world wasn't as simple as it was back on Earth. Basically, there were two ways of doing it. The normal way, and the 'real' way. With the latter, the new one, you basically just smashed your magicules together with the intent. Apparently that was enough. Not surprising when I thought about it. After all, that was how normal monsters were created, too.
Either way drained magicules, though. The latter resulted in stronger children, but drained far more than the former.
Apparently, it could even affect the parents' lifespan. Nobody was stupid enough to go around doing either willy-nilly. Especially now that they were higher rank, the children would take even more energy to conceive.
Plus, there was the fact that females in this world could literally use their energy to 'reject' seed. If the woman decided that she didn't want a child, she wouldn't get pregnant unless the father was exceptionally stronger than her.
What that meant was that monsters mated out of love rather often. Humans and demi-humans didn't have that level of control over their 'outcomes,' but frankly, I was working with monsters right now.
So, I decided on this rule: "Polygamy is only allowed for those with a special license." Basically, if you could fulfill a requirement, be it strength or some other special circumstance, then you could have another wife. I put a hard limit on it, though. Five. Why? Why not? If some bastard had five wives (or husbands. Any combination was technically legal… I didn't discriminate) then, in my opinion, they didn't need any more.