Elder Cultivator

Everyone needed more and Anton was not enough by himself to help them all. He hadn’t intended to so heavily involve himself, and now he was taking on constant responsibility that allowed him little sleep. He’d asked for assistance from the Lower Realms Alliance, but to properly prepare a ship, plus travel time, could easily take half a year. More if they wanted people with the right training for uplifting every category of life.

Anton wondered how the Twisting Spike managed everything… but as he and others reviewed their records it became blindingly obvious. They didn’t. The sect did take some matters that personally affected them into their hands, but for the most part they were more harm than good.

It was actually Anton’s fault. Not that things were bad, but that he had so many problems come to him. It was his fault for actually sincerely asking people to come to him. And when people got a true sense of who he was, they believed him.

Prioritizing things was the most difficult part. Anything that involved someone actively dying was at the top. Anton had been able to suppress one hundred percent of assaults for the weeks he’d been running things, but he couldn’t stop people from being sick and preventing every accident was difficult. He could sense heightened tensions and flared energy, but actively paying attention to every movement of every object in a large city was impossible.

Short term, this was what people needed. Anton was doing his best to coordinate people to manage things, but unfortunately they didn’t all have the right mindset. Nobody wanted to be the cultivator who carried supplies from district to district at a rapid pace. Carrying stuff was for weak people, or to be done with carts. But sometimes, the most direct routes were over the completely unnecessary dividing walls between districts. If he could just…

No, tearing down walls wouldn’t help. He almost it, but there was nowhere for the rubble to go. There wasn’t space. They needed more space and more resources for the people. That was both the fault of previous overconfident individuals… and nobody. Or the upper realms for forcing the situation.

They had rock. Anton could carve out the ultra dense material, but teaching the locals how to do it themselves was better… and took time.

They had dirt, but not enough. That problem would eventually solve itself, but potentially in a disastrous manner with a population collapse. That wasn’t acceptable. But letting it naturally accumulate was too slow, and they might run out of carbon in their contained atmosphere and… there were so many issues.

It wasn’t like Anton carried dirt with him. Or rather, he didn’t carry much dirt with him. A few hundred cubic meters wasn’t going to be enough for a city. Where was he even going to get dirt?

Or proper quality soil, rather. But they only had small amounts, and though low quality soil was the most common thing on a terrestrial planet there was only dense rock at the center of a gas giant.

Anton nearly slapped himself when he realized the actual solution. The locals couldn’t get anything, but he could. He had a whole planet’s worth. Maybe more, if the other moons were suitable.

He quickly extended his senses towards their old planet. Nobody had spoken the name, and it felt disrespectful to ask. The disassociated chunks did still have plenty of dirt sitting around. Anton could also scour the nearby area to gather more. Some was probably lost, spiraling away from the planet or dropping into its atmosphere, but he didn’t really need an entire planet’s worth. Just enough for the single habitat on Moturn.

An hour later, Anton was diving back into the gas giant, straining his energy to keep a mass of dirt together. If his stars weren’t constantly feeding into him, he would have collapsed from exhaustion long before, but he realized he was pushing himself too far.

When he reached the habitat he was reminded that there wasn’t supposed to be a way in. Which meant opening the barrier without collapsing it while maintaining his blockade in the local star and keeping his mountain of dirt from being swept away. And where was he even going to put it down?

Anton needed to take a nap. Or at least do a lot less.

He did manage to get through the barrier without collapsing it- that was the most important part- and he found the easiest thing to do with the dirt was… to set it down in the streets. All of them. It was not the best solution, but that was pretty much all of the remaining land they had.

“Citizens of Moturn,” Anton declared broadly. “As you may notice, you have some new dirt. For the next week, everyone who does not have a critical or time sensitive task should focus on soil development. I have distributed several copies of scrolls that should continue to be copied. Those of you who already know what you’re doing, teach others. If you can’t use energy yet, practice your basic exercises. There’s enough space for everyone to grow their own little plot of… mushrooms. I know, I can hear your groaning. Tough it out for another month, and we’ll get a wider variety of crops going.”

Actually, very few people were groaning or complaining. Anton didn’t do anything to people just for complaining, but those who complained when they actually had more food than any time in the last decade tended to cause other trouble, and whether Anton had to directly get involved or not it eventually came to him. Which had to stop. These people could handle their own laws. And they didn’t need a complicated bureaucracy when the basics were common sense.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

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The more Anton kept other people busy, the less he found he had to do, and that didn’t mean just handing off responsibilities. Moturn’s main problem had been that there was little productive for people to do. Cultivate, if they could. Craft useful goods, but only if they had materials. There had barely been any space, seeds, soil, water, or anything else farmers needed. Now the biggest issue was sunlight, since they didn’t have that.

But cultivators could make sunlight if they did it properly, and Anton was able to give excellent demonstrations. And then people were gainfully occupied for a few weeks, during which Anton did very little. There were fewer cases to settle because people couldn’t get up to much trouble, and previous issues had already been resolved one way or another.

So he focused on only half watching the city, just maintaining his blockades in the star because he wouldn’t be able to relax if the corruption was spreading, and recovering his mental faculties. Ř

Not everyone Anton picked was good at their jobs. However, at the end of the month everyone who Anton picked was either good, trying to get better, or looking for another way they could help. Either that, or kicked out of their positions. He wasn’t going to kill people for being lazy, but they certainly weren’t going to get sympathy from him. Given a perfect opportunity to grow and failing to seize it was something Anton couldn’t abide.

At least Draza was good at some aspects of management. Food from all districts of the city either circled around the perimeter to needy neighbors or passed through the center, depending on supply and need. By now, even with the increased movement between district from a political shake-up, they had a pretty consistent idea of need. Some people weren’t happy to not be making a ‘profit’ off of things, but Anton had a pretty simple thing to say for them.

If they wanted gold, silver, or precious metals? They could have them. Anton could go snag a mountain of gold from an asteroid somewhere. But they could either get paid in metal now, or later in natural energy. Anton thought it was fairly straightforward and easy to understand, but a few people still screwed it up.

He didn’t tell them that he was the one giving money to everyone that was coming to buy from them- either directly or indirectly. If they couldn’t figure it out, that was their own problem.

Moturn was almost a utopia… if you could call a group of desperate people scrambling for mere scraps of hope a utopia. And having an oppressive governing force controlling anything didn’t make that better. It didn’t matter that the oppressive individual was Anton, because people still couldn’t act freely. But it was better than letting things collapse into chaos, and Anton was wise enough to know he had to break away from the patterns he had set up eventually.

If he’d actually wanted to be a dictator, he could have done it long before. If Anton was actually the best option long term he might have stuck with it despite his personal distaste, but he knew that wasn’t true. He just needed to make people fit for their future tasks- in terms of knowledge, mentality, morality, and in every other way.

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Unov was a bit cold. Its people were also locked beneath deadly pressure where light couldn’t reach. Unlike Moturn, they were divided. Yet in that division, they sought cooperation.

“One airlock full of dirt, as ordered,” Anton grinned, declaring his delivery to Hadrianus.

With the ‘vents’ having physical barriers, it was ironically more difficult to bring material in. But fortunately, they needed less. Anton had to disappear occasionally, when he was focused on other things, but they didn’t need him all that often. And he could deliver messages between them instantly… but once he’d gotten them to let him inside he just gave them a pile of unbound communicators. Without a relay they could only work on-planet, but what else did they need?

Unov had big plans, and Anton liked it. He especially liked how the plans involved him only very minimally. They wanted to build underground tunnels between their various seafloor habitats. Anton surveyed the density of rock for them to help them plan their routes. He transcribed onto scrolls a special work of knowledge previously only known digitally.

‘Durff’s Guide to Mining Stubborn Stone With a Stubborn Body’ was a big hit. Some of the people of Unov really like the idea of body tempering. A few were overly eager to try themselves against the crushing pressures of the deep, but fortunately restrictions were in place that kept people from just going out whenever they wanted. Anton didn’t think it was a bad way to train, but they would probably need a decade of experience at least for it to be a feasible method.

It was probably going to take Unov many years for their first tunnels to connect, as they had to do more than just dig things out, but that was just one of their many potential improvement methods. And since they weren’t in crisis, Anton thought it was actually for the best that things would take time.

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Abder probably wasn’t going to be able to keep his status as one of Anton’s disciples secret for long. His energy would feel too much like the proper One Hundred Stars once he had a few stars of Body Tempering completed. But Anton was willing to let the kid try to keep the spotlight off of him, and he’d offered to just take him away if it came down to it. Or maybe the kid would actually have early success with advanced body tempering without much natural energy.

But for the moment, Anton found the young man splitting his time between farming- Anton’s layer of dirt had extended to the back alleys- cultivating, and helping his fellow street children. While Anton had declared that everyone was to be treated fairly in the distributions of food, they didn’t all trust him or the various adults that they felt had failed them. Likewise, not everyone was willing to seek medical treatment.

That left the one mundane healer that they had traditionally been able to trust quite busy with them. However, Anton made sure he was less busy with others and properly supplied. Some day, he would ask the man if he wanted to be in charge of a whole house of healing or something similar. The man would probably refuse, given his temperament.

But maybe if Anton could get him some suitable cultivation methods he would be able to free up some time. The only difficulty would be getting the man to devote some time up front to gain more later. But that could wait until they were another step out of the emergency zone.

They probably had too much dirt. Oh well. People could move it to underground layers once they expanded that far. The labor would be good for them. It would help grow chest hair or something.