The Systemic Lands
Chapter 534: Day 4,935 (3) – Talking With Michelle

A chair had been brought up to the second deck. I had a plate with three mystery burgers on it. One thing that I loved about fighting crazy monsters, was that it kept me in shape. As long as I kept up the grind, I wouldn’t get fat. I had a rule, that while I was grinding or fighting, I could eat whatever I wanted. While back in the city I would watch out for how much I ate.

The long break from all the curse damage had been annoying but necessary. In truth I didn’t need to eat that much anymore. But it gave me joy, when so few things actually did. “Mind if I join you?” Michelle asked me and I nodded at her.

The Infinite Block formed a chair for her to sit and made a table between us. Using a level 5 monster for furniture, it made me smile since it was so stupid. This was a monster that would make people scream and run away, and here we were using it to eat. I let my plate down on the make shift table, with only two burgers left on it.

The ketchup still wasn’t right and getting pickles made was a massive headache. But things were getting there. Food research was one of the biggest avenues of research out there. Everyone and their pet monster were working on food developments. One you had a process down, you could make money exporting out said food.

I picked up a fry and munched it while I watched the explosions of the moltenlands in the distance. The food holding up was always the biggest surprise. There had been attempts to enchant food, but that didn’t work. One could not eat energy like that unless they had a meta-point.

“A point for your thoughts?” I asked Michelle.

“Just wanted to sit up here with you. We haven’t spoken in a while, and it appears we will be changing things up?” Michelle asked me. It was a good question since she was in charge of tactics while I was in charge of providing direction.

“Just a lot of grinding? No trouble?” I asked her and she shook her head.

“No trouble grinding. Its just boring,” she replied.

“We put it off for a long time, since the passive income was enough, but it just isn’t anymore. The goal now is to massively increase our stats and stockpile up resources,” I told her.

“War. Several of the soldiers mentioned it,” she said and I nodded at that. My team was different from the Imperial Government, but there was overlap with several of the members in various aspects of the government except for Michelle.

“The population crisis, which is really a job crisis, but it is the same thing. Even with Doctor Katz’s development into food production using energy to stimulate growth, it won’t offset the issue enough,” I said and picked up another fry, popping it in my mouth. The crunch just wasn’t there, and they had a bit too much salt.

“Will we be fighting?” Michelle asked.

“I might be fighting. Do you want to fight?” I asked her.

“I…I don’t think I am ready to kill other people like that,” she replied, and I nodded.

“Then you will only be used for defense, not offense, unless I come back to talk it over with you. Consider it a concession for how good you are,” I told her.

“Really? I thought I would be part of the war effort?” Michelle asked me.

“It is up to you, like I said. If there is an opponent on the level of the Divine Empress, you will have to assist. But I won’t ask you to unleash a level 7 in the middle of a city. That kind of defeats the purpose of a war if we kill everyone,” I replied.

“You want people to die.”

“Not want, but need. There is only so much income we can take in every day. Only so many zones that can be cleared of monsters. We are fast pushing up to the limits of such things. The constant arrivals have created this situation. Even with all our measures to control this issue, it is coming to a head,” I explained.

“The food with Doctor Katz, that he figured out how to grow? Or his team, that won’t help?” she asked.

“It is subsidizing people’s lives. And removing their dependency on the store by a bit. People can now get food, water, and shelter, in ways not related to the store directly. That will help relieve the pressure on them as a chokepoint. But in the end, it is just a subsidy and busy work. Unless you know how we can handle hundreds of millions of people in these tiny cities?” I asked.

“It will become increasingly more expensive to build up. Or even tunneling down. People can be packed in so tight. And there aren’t that many city jobs,” Michelle said, working out the issue that was clearly obvious.

“And you hit the nail on the head. Unlike Earth governments, we don’t wait until a week or month before a deadline and panic at the last moment. We actually plan ahead, since we don’t have to worry about an election cycle. But that means we actually have to deal with issues before they become a crisis,” I replied.

“So, war, an ongoing one?” she asked, and I nodded at this.

“Yes. Clarissa will work the details out, but the idea is to have people fight each other to death so they don’t fight internally in the Empire,” I replied. “We will only be needed if there is a super powered crazy person. After that, we are going to leave a large portion of the Systemic Lands in chaos.”

That had been my original intention with the Avatar and other cities. But they were just too annoying to leave alone. Now that I was stronger, my Empire more stable, and the crisis much closer, we needed a couple cities of pure anarchy.

Just push people there, if they wanted power. This would coincide with increased military spending and creating a strict permitting system up to level 3. The cost of the permits would rise, and excess people from the arrivals would be shipped out. A few would trickle back from the chaos, and they would replace the people retiring or who had died to something stupid while grinding.

We would be moving to a more heavy-handed police state while the war was ongoing. There would be a beachhead, or a single city we would control, but the rest of it would be the wild west. Or any place on Earth when Europeans poured into the area in large numbers. The Empire of Purgatory would be doing the same thing.

Except the goal wasn’t to colonize or get resources, but to force people out. The constant chaos would weaken whatever other nations were out there, and they would struggle to fight back. The hordes of grinders, we would unleash would create a blood bath wherever they were directed. If they killed the hordes, then that was fine. If the other nations tried to talk things out, we would delay and nor promise anything. If the other nations attacked us back, I would kill the strong people and let chaos settle in.

The goal was chaos, so if any one person appeared, then I would have to cut them down, if my elite soldiers couldn’t handle it. This was a war whose purpose was to kill people. I don’t think there had ever been a war fought for that purpose. Normally people were a resource and one side would give up when they ran out of people.

Here in the Systemic Lands, that thinking had been reversed. We had too many people and needed a way to remove them that wouldn’t incite a rebellion. While I knew the Divine Empress didn’t turn people into furniture for this reason and had an Evil Empire. I couldn’t help but feel that she was visionary in some ways.

Her mass executions were what kept her Empire stable, as surprising as it was. At the same time it had limited her force projection. She hadn’t sent in constant invasions into the old UCS territories, which I was grateful for. If she was better organized, then there would have been wave after human wave.

If her administration wasn’t filled by people more concerned with screaming, suffering, and all around misery, she could have used human wave tactics to put a lot of pressure on other cities and the Astrologer’s Homunculus that had been running around.

Her sheer incompetency was what saved me. It felt weird knowing I would have died if she had been with it just a bit more and not completely insane. But her insanity was where she got her combat ability from, so it was hard to say how much of tradeoff things were.

“Will summons be used?” Michelle asked.

“Summoners will be sent. But reverse engineering everything would take too long. Like the summoning sphere, for a level 7. That took years of development and isn’t simple to make. Even if the minor stuff is figured out, it isn’t a huge deal,” I replied. Even if consumption was discovered, it still wouldn’t matter.

We had a large head start and trying to figure out everything we had already figured out would take way too long. You can’t do research when you are being overrun. And even if things were discovered, then it had to be implemented on a large scale as well.

It was impossible. Clarissa was god tier or organization management. They would have to have someone with a meta-point asking for managerial powers to be as good as her in my opinion. And then you needed whatever idiot who was in charge, the Michael, to allow them to have control over the entire operation.

That level of trust wouldn’t happen easily. That was why I treasured Clarissa. We had an understanding of each other and our bottom lines. I wasn’t to meddle too much in the day to day stuff, and had to pay attention when she complained. In turn, she rarely complained or brought me into discussions unless they directly involved me, like planning for this war.

I had no doubt that her massive number of stats came from a lot of shady things happening. But it was fine. Since I got enough passive income to offset her and this grinding would put me further ahead. She might get two or three people at a combat level below me, but it wouldn’t be enough with my combat skill.

Even if I was all attack, I had come to realize offense was the best defense. If I wanted defense, I would have Michelle use a monster, or dodge. Once I got a higher Spirit stat and checked out my new skill, then I might consider dropping my two other beam skills. Maybe. A big issue was what skill I would get level 7 skill points for. There were only so many level 6 zones, which was another problem. There weren’t 60 level 6 zones out there, at least in the part of the Systemic Lands I controlled.

That was another issue I had to consider. Optimizing my skills for the next level and being able to kill the level 7 boss monsters if I was down a skill. For that to happen, I needed a lot more stats.

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