The Runic Alchemist

Chapter 770: Building Public Structures

Damian visited the room that was their editorial department before going out to continue his construction project. Souldealer had hired them on his behalf.

He had a good talk with the gathered 5-people team about what news to publish in this week’s article and what their plans and ideas for the other stories were and how they could present it to the people. For now, only 500 people had the receiver tools and only they could read the articles and everything, but Damian wanted to refine their publishing department’s work using this window.

When they finally went public with this product, he wanted the editorial team to be ready. He gave notes on how to write today’s House of Lords meeting events, and the team chipped in some ideas that reassured Damian they were indeed the right people for the job. Souldealer and Evrin had chosen wisely. Many were recalled from that assistant interview and Damian remembered their faces. But they did a good job and he was happy with it.

The way the six heads separated their workload, it gave separate departments to everyone. Einar and Sam were top military generals of the Sanctuary army. Einar was to handle the army side, while Sam was supposed to handle dungeon and any other foreign exploration.

Evrin obviously managed the internal staff and Sanctuary accounts stuff. Souldealer was a healer, and when she wasn’t helping Evrin manage the loads and loads of legal documents and minute decision-making, she usually managed a high-class clinic of her own—treating injuries and diseases that normally could not be cured or treated by his health potions.

Lucian was right now helping in the dungeon exploration and other works where Damian’s presence was required, but the heads had agreed to make her the principal of their new academy. Damian had people working on the curriculum and all that; soon he could start the academy.

That was actually included in his today’s goal. Damian wanted first of all to cover the whole of Sanctuary and all the major cities and towns with runic street lamps. Then he wanted to make a few public buildings like the general hospital kind of place, though they barely had any healers other than Souldealer. And the main structure: the academy.

The street lamps were simply a single switch operated by large, one-and-a-half-story-big Blazur-coated, palm-thick wooden pillars.

The simple bright, illuminating, slightly yellowish-white orb required no liquid mana. The spell was simple enough that all day’s natural mana absorption from the environment was enough to continuously power the spell. He had achieved it by connecting more nodes to store mana than necessary in the runic inscription—it effectively raised the quantity of mana that could be stored in the metal veins.

They should work at least a decade before showing signs of deterioration.

Damian started making the runic pillars all over the Sanctuary. He didn’t linger around to explain to people what it was though—an announcement could be made later. It took much longer than he had expected. For now, since he had limited time, Damian only covered the seven major cities of the Sanctuary with the added capital city, in total eight.

The rest he decided to do later.

Once done with that, Damian selected a good place outside the Sanctuary city, where a big open green field was and the place was slightly elevated, and decided to build the academy here. It was one kilometer far from the city wall. But at the rate Damian was building things and the people choosing to migrate to the city using the waygates—the city walls would sooner or later become obsolete. He would have to build new walls.

But to be honest, Damian liked the openness. Building walls was not very efficient for growing cities when he had runic tools that could cover the whole city in a protective dome. He would have to make some kind of border around his Sanctuary land though—with his growing progress, the spies and illegal foreign entries would indeed see growth in numbers as well. He needed people to come through gates and use their Sanctum IDs or get registered on the spot.

A wall around the whole Sanctuary? Well, the idea was not that bad. That would end all questions of foreign invasion. He had a plan for it, and with the added new metal, the project had just become more feasible. With such large metal construction, Damian could add many spells as well.

Defensive spells aside, the walls could serve many other purposes. It would also help hugely in maintaining the numbers of monsters and bandits in the forests. The more Damian thought about it, the better the idea became. At the very least, there was no harm in it. It would require a tremendous amount of Blazur alloy, but Damian could put the project for later when he had enough metal supply to do it.

Building the academy was easy enough after all the heavy creations he had done. Damian kind of tried his best to give it the old Highsword Academy shape while keeping all the rooms and halls and other facilities as modern as possible. Even installing the big projector-like receivers that had academy and library channels in it.

Air-conditioned rooms, heating system, even big washrooms, and a few of those army-headquarter-style buildings on one side that could serve as a hostel for students coming from afar. A giant wall surrounded the whole campus since it was outside the city gates. The whole campus and the main academy with side hostel buildings in the end had taken up 1.3 kilometers of rectangle shape. Damian kept the future in mind and had made it much bigger; he could add stuff later. But for now, this would do.

Lucian was with him when he built this, only for a short while though, ordering him on what to make and not and how to shape it as if he was her handyman and she was the boss. He was well compensated by her when it was all built though. Lucian was even more pumped up than he had expected her to be for the academy.

Maybe the first thing in the new academy being sex was not that good a start, but Damian decided to ignore the useless thoughts and focus on the one beside him.

Building a relatively small hospital did not take as much time. Damian inscribed the healing spell in most rooms. There were no doctors in this time, of course, but there were some other similar professionals like Herbalists, Midwives, Bone-setters, Naturalists—with some added help in gathering all of them and giving them a community to thrive in, maybe in future Damian could expect some people becoming human anatomy experts and developing modern healing techniques. He had already discussed the vision with Souldealer and she was quite eager and impressed by his admittance that not everything could be cured easily. A real healer was more than just a mage.

He could make some runic equipment for the hospital that resembled modern medical tools, though Damian had no idea how most of them worked so he probably wouldn’t be that much help. Still, he could try in his free time. Since he was building, Damian also built a giant hall-like library with bookshelves and air-conditioned rooms and halls to read. They didn’t have that big a reserve of books but with increased budget through his online shop and other revenue sources, filling it with this world’s books shouldn’t be that hard. He was already making a digital library, but having a physical one was a must in the meantime and even after.

The hospital and library he had built in empty regions inside the city walls. Those were facilities that needed to be close to the common public. At first Damian thought of making a separate research lab for scholars and other science-related fields, but building all that right now was not necessary. The academy had a lot of space, and some of that could be allocated to scholars and researchers. He could even support struggling professionals by giving them a place to live and food to eat as long as they did the research for the Sanctuary.

There were still many public structures Damian wanted to make. The city needed major restructuring with plumbing systems and things, but for now, this much was enough. Still, while returning, Damian built dozens of public toilets and washrooms for general public use.

All of the new structures he had built needed to be explained to the public. So taking that and future announcements in mind, Damian had placed big receiver pillars in all eight major cities. It had only the audio channel and the official Sanctum text announcement channel in it.

He could keep the announcement one active at all times while the audio channel read that aloud for common people a few times in a day.

The audio being heard in the mind of people was limited in range compared to speakers; only the crowd under 1–2 kilometers of the pillar would be able to hear it. Which was why he had made it big. Still, the guards and other people who could read could see the announcements all day, so the information flow would be good enough.

Damian could not wait for the day when everyone would have their own receivers and the information exchange would be at an all-time peak. He could relay complex messages to his people in a super fast and efficient way.