The barricade was still bleeding integrity when the [Revenue Vein] notification fired.
[SOVEREIGN REVENUE VEIN: TERRITORY BOND ESTABLISHED]
[PASSIVE ESSENCE YIELD: ACTIVE]
[INITIAL TICK RATE: 0.4 ESSENCE UNITS / MINUTE]
[NOTE: YIELD SCALES WITH TERRITORIAL CONFLICT DENSITY]
Caleb read it twice. Not because it was complicated. Because it was actually up and running.
He'd guessed the bond threshold around 60 hours. The actual number was 53 and change. Either he'd counted wrong or the system didn't work the way the tooltip said. It didn't matter to him. The only thing that mattered was it working.
The barricade took four more minutes. One of the southern struts took a large hit in the last Ashcrawler attack. Its integrity rate stood at 61%. It wasn't critical, not exactly, but 61% was the sort of percentage that turned 40% overnight.
Swing. Temper. Bind.
The strut reseated clean and the barricade integrity ticked back up to 88%.
Harlan was perched on a fractured plaza block when Caleb made another loop, flask already out. He watched without speaking, which was how he spoke best. When Caleb dropped down onto the opposite block, and pulled out his ledger, Harlan finally spoke.
"So it's running?"
"Since about forty minutes ago."
Harlan turned that over. "How much?"
"Point four per minute for now. That's the minimum rate." Caleb had already began forming rough numbers in his head, his fingers tracing through the overlay without looking.
"If conflict density scales it the way the tooltip says we can be looking at two to four times that within two weeks, once the zone finishes adjusting to the new structure count."
Harlan didn't ask what conflict density meant. He'd been in the Hollows for six years. He knew.
"And the relay?" Harlan said.
That was the other thing.
[85 DAYS]
The schematic for the relay had been in Caleb's queue for four days. He hadn't had the parts until this morning. A patrol of Ruinwardens had pushed into the northeast corridor and he'd forced them out with an area strike and a frontal assault, and the most heavily damaging unit on their retreat had been good for fragments.
The components the schematics called for circuit-grade conductor wire and two stabilized bone-iron plates. Caleb had taken it as chance then. Now, standing in front of the build site with the components queued and the schematic loaded, he wasn't so sure.
The Hollows didn't feel like a zone that dropped exactly what you needed by accident.
He set that aside too.
The build on the relay itself was not difficult, but extremely unforgiving. The conductor wire had to be threaded through the bone-iron framework prior to binding, in a spiral or the entire unit would be noisy. Caleb had done it using copper-grade wire, which was extremely forgiving. Bone0iron doesn't flex; it breaks. If you make the wrong spiral, you're working with scrap.
He had one set of bone-iron plates. He checked the spiral twice before binding. Held his breath on the third pass.
Swing. Temper. Bind.
[STRUCTURE COMPLETE: ESSENCE RELAY (TIER 1)]
[FUNCTION: AMPLIFIES PASSIVE YIELD WITHIN 40M RADIUS]
[CURRENT BONUS: +0.2 ESSENCE UNITS / MINUTE TO LINKED STRUCTURES]
[RANGE: PLAZA CORE]
The Revenue Vein ticked upward immediately. 0.4 became 0.6. Caleb watched the number grow, but he did not allow himself to feel it, which was its own kind of feeling.
He logged it instead. The relay worked. That was enough.
relay. tier 1 complete. yield bump confirmed. wire spiral matters, not just contact points. the tooltip doesn't say that. file as undocumented mechanic.
Harlan dropped down at his side. Caleb had been patrolling the perimeter or whatever it was that Harlan was calling perimeter rounds. Caleb had learned not to follow Harlan too closely during the lulls in the quiet moments. Harlan had a process and his processes were generally good to go.
"I see a patrol coming on a run," Harlan said. "Ruinwardens. Same three that went through yesterday, judging by their timing. They're coming in from the northeast, hugging the perimeter as a sort of loop."
"How consistent?"
"Consistent enough." Harlan took a drink. "You could set a schedule."
Caleb glanced at the relay and then toward the northeast passage. The Ruinwarden chassis had given him the conductor wire. Now a patrol that was moving on a loop was a passive stream of material, not just another threat. But the concern that it would be a trap that would set something off once it was repeated too often still weighed on him. Would the Hollows learn to react to repetition the way it learned to react to building construction?
He did not know. He logged it as a question and decided to run the patrol once before assuming anything. Worst case, he would learn something new.
The fight was clean. Caleb took the entry point with the barricade as a fallback. The Ruinwardens were slower in the northeast corridor because the terrain was uneven, rubble from a collapsed overpass that never got cleared. They moved single file through the narrow gap. Caleb hit the lead unit at the shoulder joint and watched it redirect aggro onto the second unit. Standard AI behavior. Caleb had logged it three times now.
Thirty-eight seconds. No damage taken.
joint strike confirmed repeatable. yield scales with mob tier. forge gloves are not optional anymore.
He was not annihilating them. A Ruinwarden with full health was all but immune to everything Caleb could throw at it; but a joint hit like that fractured the exoskeleton, and each time a unit fell back it lost bits in the passage. Another couple of runs, another few passes and the fragments added up. That was the loop.
This pass yielded bone iron and a small amount of stabilized wire, less than the morning drop. Either the fragment table had variance or he'd hit an above average roll earlier. Caleb would need more passes before he could model the income curve.
He was thinking about this when the Revenue Vein ticked.
Not the baseline tick. Something larger. He pulled up the readout.
[TERRITORIAL CONFLICT EVENT REGISTERED]
[YIELD MODIFIER: +0.3 (ACTIVE DEFENSE BONUS)]
[COMBINED TICK RATE: 0.9 ESSENCE UNITS / MINUTE]
He had farmed the patrol inside his territory's conflict radius and the system had registered it as active defense. The yield modifier wasn't in the tooltip. Or in any documentation that dataminers had posted on information sites. The Hollows paid more for fighting inside your own zone than for just existing in it.
He considered this while he reran the projection model. The numbers made sense. The risk did too.
Harlan was looking across the plaza. Not questioning, only wanting to see what Caleb's expression would do.
"The farming pays a bonus," Caleb finally said.
Harlan uncapped his flask. "Well of course it does."
"You knew?"
"I suspected it." He took a drink. "Hollows rewards being present. Not just being constructed. Something built this thing and wanted someone to be in it."
It had been six years since any substantial player activity had happened within the Hollows. They had just been sitting here this whole time, running their internal tuning, waiting for someone. Whether that "someone" was Caleb or whoever was stupid enough to remain was, of course, anyone's guess.
He added it to the list.
By the time the dust filtered into the grid edge to the west, he had run the patrol twice more. A second, supplemental pass of the zone. A single solid wire bundle. The bonus Active Defense proccing each time.
In between his second and third patrol run he had looked up the schematic for the relay one last time. The range was the issue; he had observed a void on the second patrol in the northwest corner of the zone, and the solution was laughably simple, only requiring another contact to be spliced in, only a twelve-minute modification.
Swing. Temper. Bind.
[RELAY MODIFIED: RANGE EXTENDED TO 46M]
[YIELD ADJUSTMENT: +0.05 ESSENCE UNITS / MINUTE]
The yield held and then some.
He was up to 1.1 essence units per minute on the final count.
The raw real number was twenty-three gold, for the day. Not from the essence ticks. Essence was not money, it was forging material. The gold was from chassis salvage, run through Harlan's network contacts at something close to forty cents on the dollar. He would rather have had sixty, but Harlan's contacts were the only ones willing to bypass the guild tax, and he wasn't quite ready to negotiate rates. He'd figure that out later.
He logged the twenty-three gold. The patrol data. The note from the relay mechanic.
The Active Defense bonus wasn't something the system said, but it was good enough for a repeat run tomorrow.
Caleb sat in the plaza, with the relay humming a tune he could almost feel through the ferrocrete, and let the Revenue Vein tick.
Harlan stopped by once more before retiring to the day watch. He glanced at the relay. He glanced at Caleb. He didn't speak, which in and of itself was its own kind of approval.
[DAYS REMAINING: 84]
[SESSION INCOME: $23.00]
[CUMULATIVE EARNED: $70.00]
[STRUCTURE MILESTONE: ESSENCE RELAY (TIER 1) CONSTRUCTED]
[SCHEMATIC UNLOCKED: RUIN WATCHTOWER (TIER 1)]