Chapter 288: The Hive City

Beneath the towers and guns of Marimgar, the hive city was developing in its own way.

Three quarters of a million, those rescued from certain doom by the Fleets of Kalka, and now by the warriors of Marimgar, were slowly learning to adapt to life with their new resources. There were many things that the hive city lacked, but they were not sitting idle and waiting for it to come to them.

The lights were a full spectrum bulb, simulating natural sunlight.

And that meant that they could grow crops.

Perhaps not nearly as many as on the surface, but with the speed that some of these new plants grew, that hardly mattered.

The most popular were the strawberries. The plants weren’t aggressive, and didn’t move at all, but they matured in a matter of days, and provided abundant berries.

Everyone who wanted to grow some made a point of gathering a small pot of soil when they went to the surface, to grow the plant in, and the energy levels were far higher than anything else that they would normally eat.

A single berry was a meal.

But more importantly, the berries could be dried, sliced, and carried around as snacks.

When you were working a long shift, without time to break for a proper meal, they would fill you with the energy to keep going.

Of course, many insisted that the practice was terrible for the stomach, as it only had that one tiny bit of food to digest. But as a high-energy snack between meals and during shifts? It was perfect.

Nobody in the hive city worked only four hours.

There was too much to do, even with their limited resources, and they had just lost nearly a thousand prime workers to the System. Once they had a Class, the residents would naturally want to run the dungeons, do quests, and make real money, not do menial labour.

So, someone had to pick up the jobs they were doing, and everyone was quietly trying to figure out how they had accomplished it.

Every System user was one more step towards wealth in the hive city, and the rewards that a single member of an extended family could bring back with them every day were astounding.

But that also led to a lot of pressure for those who could get System Points.

They needed them to gain skills and progress. But their families also had long lists of things that they wanted. Simple staples that were normally limited by the ration cards.

Nobody was starving, but what you could get from the warehouses depended on what had been produced and looted in the last day or two, so there were often shortages of specific things.

Which meant that the families would push for their relatives to spend the points not on getting new skills, but on getting new things for the home.

Tableware sets with fancy prints, larger pots, bags of rice, peanut butter in ten litre containers.

The robotic assistant had sold quite a few of those.

The hive city lacked a sufficient supply of eggs, or any sort of chemical leavening agent. But they had plenty of compressed yeast to make sourdough starters, and they had planted many berry bushes in the city.

Blueberries were a great source of natural yeast, and soaking them made a tart juice that was excellent for baking berry flavoured breads that hid the flavour of algae flour completely.

Because of that, two new food products were taking over the city’s street food scene.

Spicy lentil burgers, with the patty ingredients coming from the greenhouses, and heavy on the bread, since algae flour was the single most abundant food source they had. Or, blueberry buns.

Both could be eaten on the go. Both filled the stomach, and had good nutrition thanks to the algae flour that the bread was made from. But most importantly, both of them did an excellent job of using very few ingredients to make something that was fluffy and enjoyable to eat.

The best part of it was, the ration system determined that two burgers or four blueberry buns were a meal, but most would struggle to finish that much food.

Still, neither street food had managed to top the noodle shops.

Those still remained the king of hive city restaurants, with more varieties being introduced every day.

Flick was one of many who had recently gone from being a nobody to getting a full on class, thanks to his efforts in the Rat Demon Dungeon. It had only taken him four runs to go from fresh level 0 to level 1, a record that very few could match. ℯℯ𝑙.

But that was because he got lucky, and the dungeon gave him a skill as a reward for his first clear, and he just needed to meet the physical standards.

[Firebolt]

Now, he was a mage, and beginning to move up in the world.

But that didn’t change the fact that he had two scientist parents and five other siblings in the family. His parents had steady work doing odd jobs and researching plants for the botany program, but his siblings were purely greedy deadweight.

Which was why he found himself hanging out in an alley in the third quadrant, using his newfound fire magic to heat a grill for one of the burger vendors.

With him around, nobody would bother the burger cart.

Competition for the good spots was fierce, but this alley was a shortcut between the best noodle shop in town and the clothing factory, where a large portion of the quadrant worked.

If you couldn’t get a spot at the noodle shop, you could always use your ration credit to grab burgers instead. And perhaps a nice mug of Marimgar Mead, if you knew how to ask. Liquor wasn’t prohibited, but it also wasn’t on the pricing list for rations, so you had to trade for it.

And that meant whoever was brewing it had to be able to keep from getting robbed.

Something that a fire mage was very good at helping with.