Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!-Chapter 77: Water Extractor

Waking up, Theo didn’t waste even a second before jumping out from his simple bed.

Not because he was in a hurry. With still over twenty-one hours before the next invasion would hit, he had more than enough time to go around his day, prepare everything he wanted, and then still have enough leeway to go get another night of good sleep.

No.

Theo jumped out from his bed the moment he woke up simply because he couldn’t hold back his excitement.

"There’s a lot of work to be done for today, so I better hurry it all up!"

With the burden of immense exhaustion now gone from both his flesh and mind alike, Theo felt as if yesterday’s encounter, the strain of pushing himself more than he initially wanted to, as if all the worries of the day before… Theo felt as if all of those things suddenly lost their significance, growing smaller and smaller in the face of the energy now bristling in his hands to go get some stuff done.

’I guess I’m just an addict to watching the numbers grow, huh?’ he thought as he washed his throat down with a bite of the berry before quickly slurping several berries’ worth of the dried mush, all while already moving to his next workplace.

Today, Theo started by going to the outside but opting to stay on the surface rather than digging into the dim confines of the underground.

After all, for his plan to work… No, for him to even test whether or not his plan would work, there were still a few hoops for him to jump through.

’First, bring the ditch up to the standard.’

This task would normally require Theo to go back down to his underground factory floor to get his hands on the processed richstone. Yet, this limitation, which was the most common source of annoyance back in the game, with the convenient help of his manor system… was no more.

After all, rather than taking the trek deep downstairs, he simply opened up the respective inventory window before moving a considerable stock of concrete, iron ingots, iron plates, and iron rods into his personal inventory.

"Now, that’s the first step done," Theo muttered, quickly developing a habit of narrating his own progress, not out of any practical need to do so but simply to get a better feel of actually progressing through the motions. "Next, to line it all up."

This task would normally require quite some time, effort, and likely more manpower than Theo could afford or the use of tools he simply didn’t have.

That’s where his universal tool came in clutch, however, allowing him to simplify the task of creating a metal mesh, inserting down the iron rods for reinforcement, mixing the concrete before pouring it down the mesh, and then hoping for several hours of intense sun to have it properly dry out.

Instead, he simply selected a considerable chunk of the already existing dirt-wall of his dugout before changing the resource type from raw richstone to actual concrete and iron rods and then pressing the button to confirm the building action.

Poof!

Just like that, roughly a third of the dugout’s wall now turned from just clumped dirt held together by nothing but its innate cohesiveness into a proper concrete wall that no modern construction company would be ashamed to claim as one of their own making.

Theo then repeated this step a few more times, lining up every vertical surface of the ditch with proper concrete slabs before doing the same for the floor.

"Now, for the hard part…" Theo muttered, moving back inside his inner ring of walls before forking out a pittance worth of resources to get one of the now obsolete upgrades constructed.

[Constructing: Water Well]

[Upgrade available!]

[Do you wish to upgrade ’Water Well’ to ’Water Extractor’?]

[Warning! The costs and placement requirements may change!]

’That’s…’

For a moment, Theo hesitated.

As much as he wanted to simplify his next task of spending the next ten or so hours doing nothing but pouring bucket after bucket of water from the well and then into the ditch… By upgrading the manor-subsystem extension to his manor, he was quite likely to deprive himself of the ability to get the upgrade to begin with!

’I can recall there being a requirement for the water to be deep enough for the extractor to be placed…’ Theo thought, squinting his eyes as he hesitated while looking at the small stream that peacefully trickled through the innermost ring of his manor.

Then, Theo’s expression changed when an idea popped up in his head.

’Wait, who’s there to say this stream has to remain as it is now?’

With a solution to the problems that he had yet to even confirm the existence of already forming in his mind, Theo simply accepted the system prompt while using the excavation mode of his tool to create a huge basin straight within the flow of the small stream, only to then take a step back and watch how the water slowly trickled inside.

’It should take several minutes to fill it up, I guess…’

The progress wasn’t fast by any means. And after just standing for a few minutes doing nothing but watching how the stream continued to slowly fill the shallow pond up… Theo finally had enough.

"Who is there to say the pond has to be filled up?" he muttered to himself before summoning his building overlay again and then selecting the water extractor… Only to be faced with the very issue he already foresaw.

"I don’t have the tier-three items necessary to get it built, huh?" he thought, shaking his head before changing the designated build to a different blueprint.

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"And that’s what I got this crafting bench for!"

For the small price of just a few iron rods and a few iron plates, and while ignoring just how those few pieces could somehow turn into a machining table pulled straight from some sort of sci-fi scenario, Theo finally gained the ability to craft all the items that his current subsystem allowed.

And amidst those items were the two that he missed—reinforced plates that he simply ran out of while building his factory yesterday, and then the one item he didn’t even think about automating before—rotors.

Coming at a cost of a bunch of iron ingots and then quite a little bit more of screws, Theo only needed around a minute to craft all the rotors the water extractor required, finally reaching the stage where he could actually get that building placed.

Still, even with the necessary items, Theo didn’t dare let his hopes grow too high, not when there was still a laughably thin layer of water within his pond.

’Well, there’s no harm in trying to get it done anyway,’ he thought, making sure to craft several copper ingots into copper sheets necessary for him to then place down pipes.

And, after nothing more than a few moments of tense anxiety, Theo finally whipped out the water extractor blueprint again before bringing it over the pond he just excavated…

Only for the projection to turn green, proving that even with just the tiniest of layers of water within, this pond he made was still perfectly capable of housing the extractor!

"And now, we move on to the next step," Theo thought as he grinned, placing the extractor down in its rightful spot before quickly excavating a shallow ditch from near the extractor, through the open gate, and then all the way to where the main dugout began.

With the room for it now prepared, Theo quickly placed down the pipes, connecting them to the water extractor on one end and leaving them open at the other.

"Now, for the last step," he thought, quickly wiring the extractor to where he already brought out the electric pole connecting to the main grid… Only to then drop everything and run right back to the main ditch, where he just sat down and waited.

At first, nothing really happened, making Theo doubt whether or not this water extractor could magically produce water just like it would in the game.

Yet, as the wheels within the water extractor’s body reached the full speed of their spin, Theo heard the one sound he was on the lookout for.

The sound of the water trickling through the copper pipes!

A trickling sound that soon turned into a gush as water exploded from the open end of the pipe, quickly flooding the massive, reinforced ditch he prepared!