After Surviving the Apocalypse, I Built a City in Another World - Chapter 1189

Chapter 1189: The Iron Mountain Situation (Part 1)
Another Milestone Target Alert! Lolol

When we reach 300 legitimate reviews—whenever that will be, lol—I will post another extra 3 chapters! You can be as honest as you want. If the critique is valid, I will accept 1-star reviews.

Please don’t do one sentence reviews tho! I wanna hear more from you! *stares* You got this far! Surely, you have something to say! *Hands on hips* *narrows eyes* #NoPressure

Anyway, back to the story!

…

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The situation in Iron Mountains was slightly different from that of Limestone Valley.

It has also become a tourist attraction itself and its population had also spiked so much that Alterra had no choice but to add a few manual mid-rise buildings to handle the population.

It was quite a hassle that the custom buildings of Alterra (or even Limestone Valley’s) could not be ‘pasted’ here, but what could they do?

Fortunately, they had a mountain right next to them had some useful rocks they could use. The raw material for steel (i.e. iron) was also taken directly underneath it. They had long built the processing plants for Iron near the mines, so it wasn’t that difficult to do.

Not to mention, they had the Warehouse to transport the raw materials they didn’t have. For example, lime and quicklime, which was taken and processed directly from Limestone Valley.

Finally, there was no challenge looking for men willing to do the manual labor. For better or for worse, they had tens of thousands of population, too.

Because the technicality required in the work was minimal, there were also a lot of aborigines hired.

Rather, their average levels were higher than that of Terrans’ (at least for now) so they were actually more useful in the highly physical jobs—provided they didn’t have attitude problems, of course.

Anyway, with the construction boom came a huge need for manpower —meaning a lot more people had daily salaries—which in turn added another small spike in the economy.

It was the first time most of these people earned money from something like this—without having to go out to hunt monsters every day.

Considering many of them didn’t have professions—and there were a limited amount of other jobs for the illiterate—hunting outside had been their only source of living for a long time.

It was novel and appreciated, despite the challenges that came with it.

Hiring aborigines became one of the ways for the new administration to merge better with the local population they adopted, and so far it had worked well.

After all, if people’s lives were improved—even if they had various gripes—they would soften in time.

Word also spread and a lot of citizens from villages even a hundred kilometers from them started to immigrate, skewing the aborigine-Terran ratio even more.

This also increased Iron Mountain’s prestige even more—which was actually already half-way to a Town when Alterra took over. If Guia did not fall, it would’ve become a town in less than a decade. Alterra taking over expedited that by years.

After all, although black metal wasn’t—in reality—an extremely rare resource, it was relatively unusual in this region. There were also the very real challenges of mining it.

After all, not many territories got lucky and captured a whole slew of goblins to dig for them. In most cases—even if a territory was lucky enough to find a mine, they’d more likely die because the soil collapsed on them instead.

So, for many years, Guia Village was the sole source of black metal in these parts. Considering many long-lasting territories had weapon stores that produced Class D weapons, this meant the demand for the material was not low. In time, this added quite a bit of prestige to the village, which only increased with the injection of Alterrans and their innovations.

However, like Alterra, they also knew they couldn’t handle other towns at this time.

To cope, Iron Mountains had also increased their prices similar to Alterra’s before they upgraded to a Town. It was still affordable, but it helped control the citizenship somehow.

Interestingly, if they turned to a Town, Ferrol Town promised they’d assist if needed. This was really nice of them considering the distance between them was quite small—just over hundred kilometers—which was the average distance between villages.

When Jonathan was asked if he really wasn’t threatened, he just answered with ‘if they’re nearby, then life is good and peaceful’.

And he was right.

…

At this time, Rowan was in the Prison with some old and new prisoners. It was unfortunate they couldn’t become slaves unless they beat their territory in a war, otherwise, these people would’ve been sent to the mines to help out.

They were too strong to be let out without a slave prohibition, so they could only stay in prison while they were being interrogated.

“OUR TOWN WILL NOT STAND BY FOR THIS!” the man yelled. He was much thinner than he was months ago when he was captured, but he was no less arrogant.

Rowan looked at him with a frown. This had been a constant line from this dude. Apparently, their town had a continuous deal with Guia to provide large amounts of iron every half a year.

Their Town? A place called Valov Town.

Valov Town was, apparently, in charge of another iron mine hundreds of kilometers Northwest of Iron Valley.

They knew this because the prisoners bragged about it, thinking it would humble them—not that it worked, of course.

As for the new prisoners, they were a group sent to check what happened to the previous two, as well as to take the black metal—with huge amounts of interest considering the delays.

This was a mystery to Rowan until now. For a while, they had only met one of the two groups, which came after the first one went missing.

However, even after a few months, there was still no news of them at all.

In the end, they concluded that the group probably met some bad luck on the way to Guia back then, which was just as well.

They did not know what this misfortune was, but they were thankful for it.

Somewhere hundreds of kilometers away, a certain half-orc sneezed.

One had to note that when a half-orc sneezed, it created an explosion of saliva.

Worse, he was eating some gugu bird at the time—they were camping during a clearing mission—and it splattered all over his team.

“KYAAA!”

“HEY!!!”

“Gross! My precious bento!!” someone cried. “My wife made that!”

“DAMNIT, BAKU!”

“This was a new jacket. How unlucky!”

His feline eyes twitched and he apologized, raising his clawed hands. “I just felt someone was thanking me just now.”

His team gave him a look. “Well, it’s not us!”

Baku-the-misfortune: “…”

Ah well.