Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!-Chapter 64: Power plant? It all starts with the first step!

Waking up in his bed felt… weird.

By all means, the mounting exhaustion that came as a price of working as long and as hard as Theo did was now mostly gone. Grayed out or not, the perks of his manor still applied, after all!

Still, after already growing used to the twenty-hour-long timer for invasions, Theo couldn’t help but worry about every minute he spent doing nothing but resting.

A time spent sleeping was a time not spent on expanding the potential of his factory, after all!

But thanks to all of Theo’s preparations, that was no longer as big of an issue as it would have been before.

’Judging by how long I slept…’ Still in his bed, Theo crawled over to its edge so that he could get a better look through the window outside. ’Yeah, it had to be like what, eight hours of sleep?’

Only after a moment of staring outside and trying to judge the time by the angle at which the shadows formed, Theo slapped his face over his own stupidity.

’Don’t I have the timer that I could use for that?’

Shaking his head over his own failure to instinctively make the best use of the features his system provided, Theo looked over at the timer displayed in the corner of his vision instead.

[37:28:33]

"Adding up how long I’ve spent working on the factory and then at the excavation later on… Didn’t I sleep for only like what, six hours?"

Finally rising from his bed, Theo shook his head before throwing his legs over the bed’s edge, using the coldness of the floor to fill his body from his feet up with an unpleasant, sobering feeling.

’Just what I needed, huh?’ Shaking his head, Theo smiled as he rose up from the bed… only for his simple shirt to nearly tear in half simply because the dirt at its bottom made it glue to his covers.

’Right, I will need to think about getting new clothes soon, shouldn’t I?’

While his current industrial subroutine would likely struggle with this rather simple task… just like it was the case for his bedroom, while the grayed-out parts of the system now grew obsolete when compared to Theo’s current subroutine, they by no means became useless.

Still.

After waking up, there was just one thing that Theo absolutely wanted to check out.

And it wasn’t even the few assembly lines he hurriedly slapped down at his manufacturing center to get even those hard combinator items done. It wasn’t even the state of his chests that, by now, were likely all filled up. It wasn’t the throughput either, not when his chests were most likely filled up, making it impossible to see any problems with it anytime soon—not until Theo made some space in his storage unit and allowed the system to run for a while.

No.

The one thing he was interested in the most was but a temporary setup that exhausted the last of his workpoints. A small factory stuck at the far end of his manufacturing center, designed as something that could be removed as soon as its use ran dry. Yet, judging by how easy it was for Theo to obtain wood and foliage…

’I might be free to run on the first tier for my power much longer than I would do in any of the games I’ve played…’

After taking a moment to detach his collapsing, simple shirt from his covers, Theo quickly ran outside and then down the shaft.

Now that he had wasted around six hours doing nothing but sleeping, he couldn’t even bear the idea of wasting even more time! That’s why, as stupid as it could be if he happened to slip, he stuffed his face with some of the dried berry mush before washing it all down his throat with two fresh berries.

’Finally here,’ stepping down on the floor of his mining outpost never felt as rewarding… even if it wasn’t even the place Theo was in such a hurry to get to.

No. That place lay just a little bit further up. And as Theo entered it through a small passage… he couldn’t help but just stand in place, a whistle of amazement escaping his tense lips as he, for the very first time, stopped to appreciate the work he mindlessly did before.

The manufacturing center… was truly a behemoth of a cave. Just due to its size alone, Theo ended up leaving a neatly arrayed series of stone pillars, all designed with just the task of keeping the cave stable. Within each square marked out by any combination of said stone pillars, there was a vent in the middle, going just a little bit up before taking a roughly thirty-degree angle towards the middle of the cave, where all the other vents of a single line combined into one big one.

Those would then further turn towards the other axis of the cave’s center, combining into one massive ten-by-ten hole that emerged somewhere within the wooded part of the space between Theo’s two towers.

’That reminds me, I still have to build a venting tower to get all the gases up to the sky rather than down to where I might be walking around…’

In the end, however, all that cave amounted to was potential. For all the empty space that seemed to invite Theo to keep building, keep automating, keep expanding… it was fitted with just a bunch of storage unit boxes at one end and an unsophisticated setup at its other end, where twenty storage units’ worth of Theo’s gathered wood and foliage would first be turned into mixed biomass before being further converted into solid biomass fuel, the most efficient form of fuel Theo could currently produce.

And judging by all the smoke coming out from the array of constructors turning the seemingly endless supply of wood and greens into precious, precious fuel… the process continued to operate as smoothly as it could through the night, allowing the young man to reclassify his sleep from an outrageous waste of time into nothing but a smart investment.

"Now, as much as I would like to start building here already… do I really want to put down a power plant in a place where I’m already worried about ventilation?"

It was one thing for machines to produce emission gases while working. But when it came to biomass generators, machines specifically designed to burn through biomass of all kinds to use the chemical reaction of oxidization to provide electrical energy in turn…

"Yeah, there’s no way I’m going to do that…" Theo shook his head, the gears in his mind already spinning at high speed to produce a potential solution.

The first and most obvious idea was to just… build on the surface. An option that, with the use of the concrete foundations Theo could easily access now that he had a chest full of richstone burned into concrete powder, allowed him to keep the plant somewhat secure. But…

The first invasion, and it will be all over. What’s more, if luck will have it, I do have a feeling all those challengers will be attracted by the generators more than they would be by anything else.

Building the power plant underground would come with the very same troubles Theo saw when considering the idea of just slapping a small rig down in the cave he had already prepared.

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The only option that was left, however… was to combine the two and build something right on the edge between the surface and the underground, using the perks of one to combat the flaws of the other!