Chapter 96: The Town Comes Down

By the third day, demolition had spread across Althoff like controlled destruction.

Old sheds leaned, groaned, and collapsed beneath ropes pulled by teams of workers.

Abandoned houses were stripped from roof to foundation instead of simply smashed apart. Carpenters removed sound beams, doors, shutters, floorboards, and roof frames before demolition crews touched the remaining structure.

Iron hinges and nails disappeared into sorting baskets. Usable bricks were stacked. Foundation stones were pried from the earth, scrubbed clean, and loaded onto carts for reuse.

Anything rotten went into separate piles for fuel or disposal. Raymond walked through the work zones with Lily beside him and watched a house become raw materials within hours. Nothing was wasted if someone could find another purpose for it.

Even the old town, apparently, was helping pay for the new one.

The roads suffered next. Narrow lanes that had twisted through Althoff for generations were ripped open where they collided with the Master Plan. Men swung picks into compacted earth while teams with shovels cleared old gravel and broken stone.

Survey stakes multiplied so quickly that Lily joked the city was growing wooden grass. Beyond the old settlement, ropes marked future avenues across empty ground, and shallow test trenches revealed soil conditions beneath planned streets.

Inside the demolition zones, deeper channels began appearing where drainage lines would eventually run. Some were wide enough for a grown man to stand inside without his shoulders reaching ground level.

Children gathered behind barriers to watch workers vanish into trenches and reappear covered in mud. Wagons moved constantly, carrying salvaged stone in one direction, timber in another, debris toward disposal sites, and tools wherever foremen shouted that they had run short.

From a distance, the destruction looked astonishingly fast. Every evening another patch of cramped buildings had disappeared, another future road had been opened, another line of stakes had pushed farther into the surrounding land.

Raymond enjoyed the sight until Mara found him near the future commercial district carrying a bundle of papers thick enough to ruin his mood.

She did not bother with greetings. "Demolition is ahead of schedule."

Raymond glanced toward a shed collapsing under coordinated pulls from two rope teams. "That sounds suspiciously like good news."

"It is." Mara handed him the papers.

"Construction isn’t." Raymond stared at the first page, then the second, then slowly looked back at her. "Are these estimates for the entire city?"

"No. First major construction phase."

His smile disappeared.

Stone requirements alone were enormous. Foundations, drains, road beds, public buildings, retaining structures, warehouses, and later defensive works would consume quantities that made the salvaged piles beside the old town look decorative.

Timber was worse. Houses needed frames, floors, roofs, doors, scaffolding, supports, carts, temporary structures, workshops, bridges, and countless smaller components.

Then came lime for mortar and plaster, clay for bricks and tiles, iron for fittings and tools, nails by the thousands, standardized beams, roofing materials, replacement picks and shovels, wagons, harnesses, draft animals, ropes, and food for the laborers who would spend months moving all of it.

Raymond reached the final page and rubbed his forehead. "I think this document just mugged me."

Mara almost smiled. "The city is larger than the town, my Lord." "I had noticed."

Lucan joined them and explained that the numbers were still conservative because Public Works had deliberately excluded later districts and most of the outer wall.

The first residential expansion alone would require an uninterrupted supply of processed timber. Roads could advance while quarries expanded, and earthworks required more labor than specialized material, but buildings could not rise from enthusiasm.

Raymond looked around the construction zone differently now. Hundreds of workers seemed impressive until he imagined keeping each crew supplied every morning.

A mason without stone was simply a man holding a hammer. A carpenter without beams was unemployed. A wagon without an ox was expensive furniture.

Building a city was not one project. It was thousands of dependencies stacked on top of one another, and one missing resource could leave hundreds of people standing idle.

Raymond handed the estimates back. "What runs out first?"

Mara paused. Lucan looked toward her, then back at Raymond. "My Lord?"

"Forget everything we need eventually. If we continue at the planned pace tomorrow, what runs out first?"

That changed the conversation immediately. Mara unfolded a production report and traced several figures with her finger. Stone supply would become painful, but Kael had already identified promising quarry sites and crews were being organized.

Clay was available locally.

Lime production needed expansion, though existing kilns could cover early work if prioritized carefully. Iron was expensive and processing capacity limited, but much of the first phase required fittings rather than huge structural quantities.

Food remained manageable because winter reserves still existed and spring planting was beginning. Wagons and draft animals were tight, but Corvin could schedule them around priority routes.

"Timber," Lucan said finally. "Not trees. Timber."

Raymond nodded. Althoff possessed forests across its expanded territory. Cutting logs was not the problem. Turning those logs into consistent beams, planks, boards, joists, rafters, and other usable dimensions quickly enough was.

Existing sawyers worked manually or with small workshop equipment. They could support ordinary town construction, not simultaneous roads, warehouses, public works, and hundreds of houses.

Mara tapped the projected schedule. "If we expand crews without increasing timber processing, they’ll outrun supply within days. We can fell more trees, but that only gives us larger piles of logs."

Raymond looked toward the forest line beyond the construction fields. There it was. Not a shortage of resources. A bottleneck between resource and use.

That evening, Raymond returned to the castle with the phrase still in his head. What runs out first? It was simpler than asking how he could afford an entire city.

He did not need the System to purchase every stone, beam, nail, wagon, and sack of grain.

Althoff could produce most of those things eventually. His advantage was identifying the point where ordinary capacity strangled growth, then cutting that knot.

Once Lily finished delivering his evening meal and left to bother Marianne about some household matter, Raymond locked the study door, checked the corridor through habit, and opened the System Shop privately.

[ SYSTEM SHOP ]

[ Family Grade: Tier II ]

[ System Points: 411,000 SP ]

The familiar categories appeared. Raymond selected Industry, and the item he had deliberately refused to buy weeks earlier appeared almost immediately.

[ Tier-II Sawmill ]

[ Price: 45,000 SP ]

He read the description carefully. The purchase included a complete Tier-II processing facility package: construction specifications, specialized cutting assemblies, calibration tools, essential machinery, and installation guidance suitable for local construction using ordinary stone and timber where possible.

It was exactly what Raymond wanted. The System was not selling him planks. It was selling Althoff the ability to make planks faster for years.

Raymond selected purchase.

[ Confirm purchase of Tier-II Sawmill for 45,000 SP? ]

[ YES / NO ]

"Yes."

[ Purchase Successful. ]

[ 45,000 SP Deducted. ]

[ Remaining System Points: 366,000 SP ]

[ Tier-II Sawmill Construction Package added to System Inventory. ]

Raymond leaned back and smiled. His first System Shop purchase had not been a weapon, magical treasure, or luxurious artifact.

It was a sawmill. Somehow that felt perfectly appropriate. For Raymond, that mattered more than speed alone, because every bottleneck they removed today would keep producing value tomorrow, long after the first streets, houses, and warehouses had finally been completed.

Well after midnight, Raymond moved to an unused secured storeroom beneath the castle where no servants or guards could observe the withdrawal.

One by one, packaged components appeared under System control: compact machinery assemblies, reinforced cutting mechanisms, mana-drive parts, specialized tools, technical diagrams, and carefully labeled installation materials.

Nothing resembled a finished building that could mysteriously appear overnight. Good.

Raymond spent nearly an hour inspecting the contents before resealing the room.

By morning, Alaric received instructions that House Althoff was releasing privately acquired industrial equipment for a new timber-processing facility.

Nobody found that particularly unbelievable anymore. Raymond’s late father and old family holdings had become useful explanations for many inconvenient questions.

Mara and Lucan inspected the equipment that afternoon and immediately changed their construction schedule. A site was selected near the forestry transport route but far enough from dense housing to avoid filling residential streets with noise, sawdust, and log traffic.

Corvin redirected wagons. Public Works assigned foundation crews. Foresters began marking sustainable cutting zones while surveyors planned the hauling road. Carpenters who had spent the morning dismantling old Althoff were reassigned to something entirely different.

By sunset, Raymond stood beside a freshly excavated foundation while workers drove the first structural posts into place.

Behind them waited stacked machinery under canvas covers. Ahead, wagons loaded with logs were already arriving from the forest.

The town was still coming down.

But beside it, the first machine built for the new city was beginning to rise.