Chapter 79: Water, Light, Locked Gates
Chapter 79: Water, Light, Locked Gates
I claimed the compound over the following two days, and it was the most satisfying work I have ever done.
I began with the animals.
The hound I had shot through the hindquarters was still alive behind the storage units. It tried to lift its head when I approached, but the alpha was dead and there was no intelligence behind the movement now beyond pain and fear. I killed it cleanly. Then I checked the vehicle gate and the eastern scrub for the two that had fled. Their tracks kept going. I barred the pedestrian gate behind me and accepted that they might return someday with different instincts and no master.
That made the final count exact: eleven dead hounds and the alpha. Twelve cores.
Only when the yard was secure and nothing remained capable of attacking me did the deferred combat report unfold.
[Hound Battle Experience Report.]
[Personal Kills: 8.]
[Class-Assisted Kills — Ilyana Crest: 4.]
[Outside Participants: 0.]
[Experience transferred in full.]
[Level increased.]
[Adrian Vale has reached Level 15.]
Three attribute points waited for allocation. I left them untouched until the compound was defensible. Reaching fifteen meant nothing if I died while admiring the number.
The gates came next, because a base is a perimeter or it is only a building. I got the vehicle gate chained properly and then welded—badly, with a stick set from the workshop and a battery. It would not win prizes, but it would not open quietly. The pedestrian gate got a bar and a drop-pin I could lift from inside. The washed-out corner took four hours, a barrow of rubble, and two sheets of steel plate. Afterwards I walked the entire fence twice, found two softer places, and reinforced both with posts and packed stone.
I cleared the south fence line as Ilyana had instructed. Anything that could hide a crouched animal came down: weeds, a collapsed pallet rack, three sheets of corrugated metal. From the site-office window I could now see both gates and every metre of the southern approach.
Then water. The tanks were sound and about a third full. I traced the feed before touching anything, cleared the intake screen, flushed rust out of the low drain, and freed a seized valve a few millimetres at a time. The gravity line coughed brown, then cloudy, then clear. I tested the workshop tap twice and filled every clean container I owned before trusting the system.
There was a tap in that workshop that ran.
I stood there and let it run over my hands for a minute for no reason at all.
Power took most of the second day. The standby set had forty litres in the day tank, a flat battery, one loose fuel line, and a maintenance card clipped inside the cabinet. I followed it like scripture. I cleaned the filter, tightened the line, checked the oil, and used the workshop battery bank for a jump. The first attempt gave me a click. The second turned the engine twice and died. On the third it caught, coughed black smoke through the exhaust, and settled into a steady mechanical hum.
I did not power the whole compound. Fuel was finite. I isolated everything except the workshop, site office, water pump controls, and one exterior lamp. Then I closed the breaker and the strip lights came on above the bench.
I laughed like an idiot in an empty building.
The rest was inventory. The workshop held a bench, a vice, a full wall of tools, and hundreds of consumables in labelled drawers. Two storage units still contained pipe fittings, cable, fencing wire, replacement valves, tarpaulins, and sacks of cement gone hard. In the office cupboard I found a shift kit with three tins of soup, a jar of coffee, and a packet of biscuits that were technically food.
I put every edible thing in one dry cabinet. My remaining rations went beside it, counted and dated. Meat I could preserve went onto hooks in the workshop’s ventilated rear bay. Water containers went under the office shelf. Medical supplies got their own drawer, nowhere near the tools, because finding antibiotics beneath a box of bolts during an emergency felt like the kind of mistake I would make exactly once.
I harvested the pack properly because I had finally understood that a dead monster was worth only what I took from it.
Six hound hides were usable. Two early bodies had lain hidden too long, and Ilyana’s release had ruined three more beyond anything a trader would buy. I took teeth and claws from everything. The alpha’s were the size of my thumb. I stripped tendons, separated the heavier bones, and cut away plates of the alpha’s scorched hide that had survived its own returned charge. The worst remains went into a trench beyond the eastern fence. The valuable material was cleaned, wrapped, labelled, and stacked in the second storage unit.
Somewhere within a day’s walk were people who had written four hides for one course amoxicillin and meant it. The hides, bones, teeth, claws, and alpha material were for that economy. I did not yet know the buyers, but I finally had goods worth carrying to them.
The cores were different. I kept every one.
Eleven ordinary and elite cores, plus the alpha’s, which was the size of a plum and heavier than it looked. Twelve in total. Five had been removed during attrition and wrapped separately; seven came from the final battle. I locked them in the steel cabinet beneath the workbench.
Every one would go into the S-rank cultivation art—into the circulation that hurt every morning and had produced, in a month, a grain of rice slightly larger than a grain of rice. They were not for sale, and I would not casually swallow them for a burst of power. They were training, months of it, stored in twelve hard pieces. They were the only reliable way I had found to rebuild the body I had been stuck with.
The third storage unit became trade goods. The first became supplies. The workshop remained a workshop instead of turning into the kind of pile where I knew I owned a wrench but could not find it. I marked the compound plan with water shutoffs, blind spots, escape routes, and the section of roof strong enough to serve as an observation point.
On the second night I closed the pedestrian gate, dropped the pin, and walked the compound with a lamp.
Two water tanks held clean water. Light shone through the workshop windows. The generator hummed in its concrete house. Three storage units held supplies, trade goods, and room for whatever came next. Two hundred metres by a hundred and forty of fenced ground had two entrances, and I had personally locked both.
I put my bedding in the site office because it had one main door, a second exit through the adjoining washroom, and a window overlooking the yard. I set the rifle within reach, because secure did not mean stupid, then lay down without bracing my back against a wall or keeping the knife in my hand.
Water moved quietly through the pipe behind the office. Backup power hummed beneath it. Beyond the glass, the gates stayed closed.
Mine, I thought, and fell asleep before I finished the thought.