“Myriad, stop what you’re doing. I need Phixth, now.”

  “Is it so important that you had to come up here in the middle of the day?”

  “The alternative was hurting someone who annoyed me badly enough that I’d be leaving them eating through a straw until some awakening healer could come along to fix them.”

  “... Alright, if that’s what I need to do to keep you from committing any murders then I’ll be right back,” his god said, seeing the seriousness of that statement in his apostle’s voice and returning as he said less than a single minute later, with the stone god in tow.

  “Ben,” the other greeted, sounding tired. “Myriad tells me you have some sort of issue that requires my attention?”

  “I do, yes. I’m currently finishing up a quest from the adventurers’ guild, doing some construction work. The last stop is building a new residential settlement for what looks like thousands of people who fled there after losing their homes. The problem is that the city in question gave up the worst piece of land they had available to do that. They expect us to build a town in swampland.”

  “Ah, so you want me to arrange for this place to give up a better location,” Phixth nodded. “Understandable. In times like this, people need to come together, not be petty about such small things. I’ll do my best to quickly make arrangements for you.”

  “Okay, and that’s cool, but that’s also not what I’m looking for. I can work with the swamp, what I want is to make sure the city I build is its own jurisdiction, not under the control of the one putting me in the position of building there, along with enough land for it to expand if it needs to.”

  “... Dare I ask why?”

  “Because the guy who set this up pissed me off and I’m petty.”

  “... Alright, since this is to help people and you’ll be taking what sounds like a largely unused piece of land, I’ll make the arrangements with all relevant parties. I should be able to have everything set up by the night’s end.”

  “Fantastic, I knew I could count on you, Phixth! In that case, with you doing that, I’ll do my part and start getting everything I need to on my end done too. Make sure you keep an eye out for it when it’s finished because trust me, I’m going to be making something special.”

  With that conversation taking place above, down below, Ben moved, sorting out in his mind everything they’d need to do while speaking to Thera.

  “So, that could have gone better. Sorry I took the reins.”

  “It’s fine, I don’t really like the position they were putting us in either,” she shrugged, her work as a healer making the thought of trying to house anyone in such an undesirable location far from appealing, as was anyone who’d try to do such a thing. “So, what’s the plan?”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “The plan is that we’re going to be building a city so much better than this one that it’ll make that stupid asshole cry with regret at not being able to get our work here, with the first step of making sure he or anyone else helping to run this city has no claim to whatever we build already started. I’ve got the gods sorting that out, so from there, it’s just figuring out our hypothetical city’s structure, which means figuring out what the residents are going to be like as well as how we want to deal with the swamp. For now, we’ll deal with residents first, which is all me, so come on.”

  He held onto her as he lifted them both a few inches in the air, not bothering to pay attention to any of the looks they got as they zipped through the city’s streets as well as its greater perimeter, finding as many of the people who would be moving into that new location that they could while Ben examined their minds and skill sets, looking for what sort of work they were doing before they’d moved there as well as what skills they had that might be conductive to different types of employment, ordering them all in his mind to arrange a means of, in essence, building up a society with the parts he had to play with, seeing how everyone and everything would fit together into a greater whole as he determined who to put in place to govern it, along with maintain the law and other city work, on top of more simple things unrelated to government as well.

  Who there had run shops before or would be interested in that sort of work? Who could cook and might be able to fill such roles by having restaurants and food stands? Who could do the work he himself specialized in and create the things an average person might need, acting as the coming town’s smiths or woodworkers or enchanters or construction crew, and who would be happy acting as cleaners? There were hundreds of tiny jobs that worked together to build a society but he couldn’t just force people into roles they didn’t want, he had to consider their past work and their dispositions too, with all of it coming together in his mind, leaving him somewhat confident by the end.

  There might have been some people I’ve missed and if people are specifically coming here because it’s safer than most places, I’ll have to assume the population of the new city is going to be growing fairly constantly too, but for now I’d say this is good. I have a decent idea of where I can slot each person in which means the only thing left is managing where they’ll actually be living.

  “Alright,” Ben said, nodding to Thera at his side. “I’ve gotten most of what I’ve needed to here, so let’s go check out that swamp.”

  “Okay, all things considered, this could be worse.”

  While still far from being an ideal location, the very thing that had brought so many refugees to that area was currently working to their favour. With the city and other significant surrounding forces close enough, there was no real megafauna around that they needed to either be wary of or deal with, if there ever had been then it had long since been killed off, and there were no signs of demons hidden in it either. While the swampland itself may have been written off as unusable, all of the surrounding lands were patrolled enough that nothing could so easily sneak in and bunker down, especially when compared against the so many other areas in the world that were far harder to patrol like the untamed lands.

  Beyond that, in all of his reading, he hadn’t found any animals that were outright poisonous in that area either, at least not to the majority of races who’d been tested against such creatures, and while there were some toxic plants, so long as they weren’t consumed then there would be no issue.

  Really, the only problems there were the moisture and muck, both of which could cause difficulties with construction and just general living, as well as the smell of rot, yet none of that was enough to truly cause any issues. If they wanted to, between the two of them, Ben and Thera collectively had more than enough knowledge and skill to reshape the environment to their needs, even if that was just one option among many.

  Options I should think about tonight, Ben decided, seeing Thera was getting tired from the hours they’d spent surveying the swampland to make sure there were no secret horrors needing to be dealt with. From here, we can start and finish tomorrow.