All the Dust that Falls

Chapter 284: Plumbing the Depths

The next day, after I had managed to put the city into some kind of reasonable shape, I put a temporary pause on further renovations. Handling the rest of the city was still a top priority but had shifted down on the list. We needed to track down the Lieutenant who fled.

After a quick chat with Beatrice, I started following its trail. But it was a struggle. The illusions it used to cover itself lingered long enough to obscure the trail it left. There were still motes of energy that I could follow. Still, it was incredibly tricky, even with my full attention and sensor array.

I followed its flight through the castle, but each time It made a turn or a change in direction, It took me minutes to find the next place where it had left any sort of trace. It took several hours just to track its progression through the castle as it weaved through corridors and climbed over walls, doubling back and laying false tracks behind itself. It was as if it knew we would try to follow. Well, I supposed it wasn't a particularly difficult prediction to make, but still.

I didn't have much hope of catching up now. It had taken me so long to track it down this far, for a distance that likely only took moments to traverse. There was no way I could track it further with any kind of efficiency.

Still, I tried my best. Eventually, I made it out of the palace and out of the inner wall of the castle into the city. I followed it where it must have climbed up to the top of a nearby tall building, and then its trail vanished. Just vanished. No residual traces, no nothing. It had disappeared into thin air. I searched in a huge arc just to be sure. Having categorized most of the city, I looked for every single possible landing place to see if it had jumped down. But no, nothing. There was no trace of it anywhere in the city. I even started searching through the air, hoping that some sort of energy signature would have lingered if it flew away. But nothing appeared.

I spent hours scouring the area. Still, my efforts were in vain. Perhaps it had flown out of the city somehow. But either way, it didn't matter. If it was able to get outside of the city wall, there was just no way I was going to find it in the wild.

The only reason I could track it in the palace was that everything was relatively quiet there. With the low amounts of activity, whatever traces the Lieutenant had left behind would remain relatively undisturbed. But outside, with the trees and wild animals, or even in the city with its bustling people? It was much more difficult to isolate traces if there even were any undisturbed ones. That also explained why the rooftop had been one of the few places where I could find the tracks.

As much as I was ashamed to admit it, I had let the Lieutenant getaway. I couldn't find it. But we will hopefully find it soon. So I went back and returned to my other priority task: cleaning everything.

As I worked, I noticed that people loved my city. I heard countless remarks about the walking paths and their textured black glass. My citizens also found them beautiful and enchanting. That was a relief. Even if the city people had a lot to learn about cleaning, at least they could appreciate beauty. Maybe they weren't so far gone after all. I hadn't even noticed it breaking in any spots like I had initially feared.

I worked on continually upgrading roads and smoothing everything out. My very presence and domain helped make sure that every building's foundation was shored up and ready to be improved upon further in the future if I needed to increase the weight of the buildings by improving their material, for example.

Whenever I stopped by and found an immaculate child's room in a household. I continued my habit of leaving an apple by the mantlepiece. This practice was good, and I was reasonably certain that everyone appreciated it, but it caused a few unpredictable circumstances.

One was that almost every room I came across now was spotlessly clean. It was exactly what I'd hoped, but it happened much sooner than anticipated. Evidently, these children learned quickly. The other consequence was that certain children started developing various abilities.

I had thought my apples were simply better tasting than the rest. I did recall Arthur mentioning something about it filling him with strength. Still, I assumed it was one of those famous human figures of speech. But evidently, a bit of time in my dustbin led to a little more variety in results.

Some kids were developing much faster in speed or strength, and this was making it a little difficult for the parents to control them. Especially when they decided that they wanted to run around the market at the speed of a level 30 Sprinter. It took a little bit of effort to contain them. Still, I made sure to only leave apples with less magical energy wherever possible.

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The day passed as I maintained my progress, slowly improving my city to become one I could be proud of. The people were very helpful in my efforts. More and more of them were cleaning by themselves or wearing spotlessly white clothes. In fact, my count indicated that the total population of the city was steadily increasing, and the percentage of them that were wearing clean white was also multiplying.

Maybe it had to do with all the people Zeal had yelling on corners. They pointed out the clean city and how much they were helping with doing some basic cleaning. Even if I did need to come around and finish some work for them here and there.

I had noticed that the rhetoric they spouted was a little bit different. Beatrice had managed to get them to tone down the "wipe out all life from the planet" stuff in favor of general cleanliness, but the "removing the unclean" points didn't exactly sound too much better. At least they were mostly rallying against the demons. They did advocate keeping a fire demon in each hearth to consume trash. Still, Beatrice had to put a stop to that pretty quickly, as a few houses nearly burned down, and I was barely able to save them. But despite the few mishaps, things were well.

Our army was doing its best to maintain order as the city guard was restaffed. People who were upset with our changes were allowed to leave the city and sent off to some other place that wasn't under our control. For the most part, though, people were just generally happy. The city was clean and free of rats and bad smells.

I'd even managed to get running water to one building as a test for the rest of the city, which was a marvel. The people came to see the apparently incredible achievement from all around. The owner of the house was even charging a couple of copper for admission to come and see the running water.

Some called it a miracle, but it was just my first test subject. Tomorrow, several more houses would be fitted with plumbing. By the end of the week, I projected that most houses in the city would have running water. Now, I needed to teach them how to use toilets properly. I had seen far too many outhouses and chamber pots to bear their indignity any longer. Well, hopefully. Some of that would require some architectural changes, and that always took a little bit longer.

Perhaps I should start with the palace first, but I wanted to make sure people understood what was happening. So, I chose a prominent inn near the entrance of the city for my initial experiments. The crowds of people clamoring to see the water was starting to become a problem for road congestion. But that was okay. If I built enough of them, everyone would get used to it, and it wouldn't be special anymore.

---

Bee was having a terrible week.

The city was limping along as best it could in most aspects, but getting enough food to feed everyone was a chore, and she was barely staying ahead. A couple of houses had burned down because of rabble-rousing by the cult, and their street preaching was only encouraged by the state of the city. They were constantly running low on money and struggling to find merchants who could supply things.

Her aunt had been surprisingly helpful with the whole ordeal, but primarily because of the opportunity it presented. Her family had also made a tidy profit, and Bee wasn't sure they could repay everything, at least not quickly. Even trying to figure out a tax code had taken her forever, and while she knew her master's mind on many things, tariffs and export regulations were not one of them.

She hadn't talked to her master in a while. Occasionally, it would drop by to give her a little bit of an update on the improvements in the city, but that was it. The place really was looking nice, but running it was almost impossible.

The only reason she was able to get through as well as she was was the Warden. And Harold, surprisingly. It had taken her a while to develop a working relationship with him, but once they had found the Minister of Finance, the four of them managed to make sure everything got done just in the nick of time before there was any sort of real calamity. They were slowly working on training up some staff to handle some of the more day-to-day stuff, but at least the number of people coming to her with complaints had slowed down. It had only gotten better as the Warden had found the old Chamberlain, who helped screen out unimportant visitors or things that she didn't need to personally handle.

Lesser matters were sent off to officers of Arthur's army to handle for now, but she would need to set up a proper government for Void to take care of. She also would need to establish communication back to the castle, where the rest of her following was. Most of her trusted advisors were still back there, but she wasn't sure how many would make the trip out to help. She really needed Mary to help organize things. Still, she didn't think she could convince her and Trent to leave most of their family behind or even move their family out to the capital. Especially not when the castle was such an idyllic paradise.

She hoped to get enough breathing room to take her carpet and fly back to the castle. It would only take a day or two to make the trip, get some advice, and maybe shift some resources around. But that looked like it wouldn't happen for a few more days, at least.

She yawned, stretching high as she put down her quill. Her gaze turned to the starry sky hanging outside her bedchamber. Luckily, she only needed to sleep a few hours at her level, but even then, she was still running herself ragged. And that wasn't even considering what they would do about the Lieutenants.

At least they'd been putting up infrastructure so that she wouldn't have to do this for too much longer. At least, that's what she hoped.

As she climbed into bed and put her head on the pillow, she heard a soft rhythmic beeping underneath her bed. As Void sang her a lullaby, she felt a tired smile come to her face. Her master always managed to come back to spend a little time with her before going out to do his godly things in the night, even if they didn't talk. Bee drifted off slowly, dreading the morning and all the things she still had to get done.