Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!

Chapter 64 Power plant? It all starts with the first step!

Waking up in his bed felt... weird.

By all means, the mounting exhaustion that came as a price of working as long and as hard as Theo did was now mostly gone. Grayed out or not, the perks of his manor still applied, after all!

Still, after already growing used to the twenty-hour-long timer for invasions, Theo couldn't help but worry about every minute he spent doing nothing but resting.

A time spent sleeping was a time not spent on expanding the potential of his factory, after all!

But thanks to all of Theo's preparations, that was no longer as big of an issue as it would have been before.

'Judging by how long I slept...' Still in his bed, Theo crawled over to its edge so that he could get a better look through the window outside. 'Yeah, it had to be like what, eight hours of sleep?'

Only after a moment of staring outside and trying to judge the time by the angle at which the shadows formed, Theo slapped his face over his own stupidity.

'Don't I have the timer that I could use for that?'

Shaking his head over his own failure to instinctively make the best use of the features his system provided, Theo looked over at the timer displayed in the corner of his vision instead.

[37:28:33]

"Adding up how long I've spent working on the factory and then at the excavation later on... Didn't I sleep for only like what, six hours?"

Finally rising from his bed, Theo shook his head before throwing his legs over the bed's edge, using the coldness of the floor to fill his body from his feet up with an unpleasant, sobering feeling.

The manufacturing center... was truly a behemoth of a cave. Just due to its size alone, Theo ended up leaving a neatly arrayed series of stone pillars, all designed with just the task of keeping the cave stable. Within each square marked out by any combination of said stone pillars, there was a vent in the middle, going just a little bit up before taking a roughly thirty-degree angle towards the middle of the cave, where all the other vents of a single line combined into one big one.

Those would then further turn towards the other axis of the cave's center, combining into one massive ten-by-ten hole that emerged somewhere within the wooded part of the space between Theo's two towers.

'That reminds me, I still have to build a venting tower to get all the gases up to the sky rather than down to where I might be walking around...'

In the end, however, all that cave amounted to was potential. For all the empty space that seemed to invite Theo to keep building, keep automating, keep expanding... it was fitted with just a bunch of storage unit boxes at one end and an unsophisticated setup at its other end, where twenty storage units' worth of Theo's gathered wood and foliage would first be turned into mixed biomass before being further converted into solid biomass fuel, the most efficient form of fuel Theo could currently produce.

And judging by all the smoke coming out from the array of constructors turning the seemingly endless supply of wood and greens into precious, precious fuel... the process continued to operate as smoothly as it could through the night, allowing the young man to reclassify his sleep from an outrageous waste of time into nothing but a smart investment.

"Now, as much as I would like to start building here already... do I really want to put down a power plant in a place where I'm already worried about ventilation?"

It was one thing for machines to produce emission gases while working. But when it came to biomass generators, machines specifically designed to burn through biomass of all kinds to use the chemical reaction of oxidization to provide electrical energy in turn...

"Yeah, there's no way I'm going to do that..." Theo shook his head, the gears in his mind already spinning at high speed to produce a potential solution.

The first and most obvious idea was to just... build on the surface. An option that, with the use of the concrete foundations Theo could easily access now that he had a chest full of richstone burned into concrete powder, allowed him to keep the plant somewhat secure. But...

The first invasion, and it will be all over. What's more, if luck will have it, I do have a feeling all those challengers will be attracted by the generators more than they would be by anything else.

Building the power plant underground would come with the very same troubles Theo saw when considering the idea of just slapping a small rig down in the cave he had already prepared.

The only option that was left, however... was to combine the two and build something right on the edge between the surface and the underground, using the perks of one to combat the flaws of the other!