🏰 Chapter 9: City of Arches and Stone
🌍 May 6th, 89 BCE — Mid Spring 🌸
⚠️ Author's Note 🚧
Apologies, dear reader. This is the compressed edition of the Building Chapter. The original drafts were dense with specifications, ratios, and process notes that would have delighted any engineer but buried the story under specs and blueprints. What follows is the simplified record of a city raised by steady hands and methodical minds. (For full details, please consult the Illuminati Archives. For those who dislike technical sections, just imagine Nano waved a swarm and built the whole city in a day.) 😉
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Human City Map:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14RKbztmCSKXJ3e1oMypesEkQY9XWIORq/view?usp=drive_link
Too bad Webnovel doesn't let me embed pictures in here like other sites do. 😉
🌲 Wyrmwood's First Task
After the two Wyrmwoods arrived, new crews took over and promptly began clearing the massive jumbles of logs and debris the Monster Ore Eater had left behind.
One ship took on the northern pile, and the other worked the southeastern heap. In the morning fog, their hulls moved like dark ghosts between the mounds, lifting cedar and fir trunks from the top, stripping away roots and splinters, and stacking the cleaned logs in long, even ranks beside the piles.
When a bundle was ready, the Wyrmwoods glided toward Unara Lacus (Lake Union), lowering the loads into the water and rocking side to side until the mud and bark drifted away. Then they rose, gleaming, and carried the rinsed logs to the staging yards beside the sawmill.
With the debris cleared, the pair turned to their next task: opening the new trade routes that would one day link the human, elven, and dwarven cities. They worked with mechanical precision, cutting every tree along the planned corridors until the paths stood wide and clear, the first open arteries between the realms.
🛣️ The Eastern Road
The Ore Monster built the eastern road in two days. Guided by its ghost mind, its human crew watched the route unfold across the internal screens as the machine advanced, following the glowing line that Nano had laid into its memory. Hills sank beneath its drills, hollows filled with the earth it carried within, and the gravity plates fused the surface smooth behind it.
It crossed the narrow Montlake Cut with a single stone span, then followed the western shore of Lake Washington southward before curving east around the lake's lower edge. There, the new road divided: one branch climbed north into the open plateau between Lake Washington and Lake Sammamish, where the first farmlands and orchards would rise; the other pressed on through forested ridges and along the middle fork of the Suquamish River, its course leading toward the Dwarven city of Goldmere Hot Springs.
When the machine returned to the city, its tracks were already cooling to glass, and the new road gleamed pale in the moonlight, a perfect line drawn by steel, fire, and ghost light. Along its northern fork between the lakes, crews moved in at once to prepare the farmland. The new plateau soil was soft and rich, perfect for planting. Within days, the first furrows were plowed and the seed beds laid. Orchards and vineyards took root along the slopes, bee yards and herb gardens filled the sunny clearings, and irrigation ditches traced neat patterns across the terraces. In time, these farmlands would feed not one city but three: the Human, the Dwarven, and even the Elven across the Sound, all linked now by the shining road the Ore Monster had carved through the hills.
🌀 The Brush Muncher
With the timber hauled away and the road corridors laid, the crews faced sprawling mounds of roots, brush, and soil, organic debris too tangled for drills and too heavy for hand work. While city construction advanced inside the walls, the great machines finished the last work of preparation outside.
To handle it, Junjie and Nano fielded a new class of machine, an autonomous grinder built on the same technological backbone as the flying ships. Smaller and simpler, the craft carried thrusters, gyroscopes, gravity plates, and a Ghost Mind core. At its prow, a rotating drum ringed with interlocking alloy teeth spun up like a storm.
First, the Wyrmwoods made a second pass through the debris fields. Using their mechanical arms, they lifted the root balls from the heaps and carried them to the compost yard north of the city wall, stacking them in tall ranks for processing.
Then the Brush Muncher went to work. It descended over the compost yard, chewing steadily through the root masses and reducing them to mulch and coarse wood chips. The grinder's low roar rolled across the fields as the piles became steaming mounds of future soil.
Once the yard was under control, the Muncher returned to the clearings. With the heavy roots removed, it skimmed low over the ground, grinding through what remained: loose branches, small stones, and clods of dirt, until the terrain lay smooth and open again. Nothing was compacted, nothing scorched; only a churned mix of earth and organic matter left to settle and seed itself anew.
By late summer, the debris fields had been cleared, and the compost mounds were curing in orderly rows. The work stayed on pace with the one-year build, and the corridors between the human, elven, and dwarven lands stood clean and ready for traffic.
💧 The Hidden Veins of the City
Beneath the leveled plateau, a new labyrinth took shape. Before a single arch or home rose, the Prophet's designs called for what could not be seen: the silent systems that would feed and cleanse the city. Guided by his scrolls, the builders set to work.
A separate clean-water system drew from deep aquifers, pumped upward by windmill engines into the tall cistern towers built along the southeast wall. From there, gravity carried the flow through sealed mains that ran above the sewer channels, keeping pure water and waste apart by design. Steam-driven tunnelers bored beneath the marble-flat ground, using gravity plates to compress solid pipes out of the earth itself: smooth, seamless conduits stronger than stone and immune to decay. From these great mains, smaller lines branched in a precise descending grid until every future building had its own narrow artery. Some carried fresh water; others bore away the waste of the living.
Every drop in the city followed gravity's script, downhill from the cistern towers to the settling tanks and digesters buried beneath the northwest industrial quarter. Inside those chambers, nano-engineered bacteria broke down the collected waste into stable organic fertilizer, later transported to the compost yard north of the city's wall for mixing with soil and wood chips. Beyond the yard, a man-made wetland stretched along the edge of Pujetara Sinus (Puget Sound), its reed pools and stone-banked channels giving the last of the wastewater a final cleansing before it reached the sea. The quiet marsh became a living filter, tended as carefully as any garden within the walls.
Farther north, another network served a different need. From Unara Lacus, a lattice of broad pipes carried process water for the foundries and mills, used for cooling, cleaning, and fabrication throughout the industrial belts. Beside it, the river descended through a series of stepped dams, each turning a chain of paddle wheels that drove the city's mechanical shafts and power tunnels. Together, they formed twin systems of motion and flow: one for power, one for purpose.
Clean water, clear order, and unseen power: these were the quiet miracles that would make the city breathe long after the last stone was set.
💧 Plumbing in the City
When the homes went up, the work followed the same precision as the rest of the city. As the residential quarters rose, crews tapped the buried mains, connecting each foundation to the water and waste lines already waiting below. Every dwelling had running water, every street a buried valve that could shut off a whole cluster for maintenance. Beneath the stone surface, bronze mains fed copper branch lines, durable, practical, and easy to repair when needed.
Each household received the same standard set of fixtures: spigots, valves, and fittings all cast to one pattern. The uniform parts kept construction simple and let the city grow fast. Over time, wealthier families began replacing the plain fittings with polished or ornamented ones, turning plumbing hardware into quiet status symbols.
Inside, a small coal-pellet boiler heated water for the kitchen and washroom. Bathhouses still existed for leisure and ceremony, but ordinary houses finally had hot water on demand. It was one of the first things in the city that felt modern, practical, human, and unpretentious.
🏗 Building the City
The scribes moved in teams, each carrying long rolls of tape and weighted rods for measuring. They worked from fixed anchor points, using triangles and arcs to expand the grid with absolute precision. Buckets of dark slurry, limestone mixed with ash and a little coal dust, marked every edge and corner they plotted. Street widths, wall lines, courtyards, and even the small circles for sewer hatches and hydrant vaults all appeared under their hands. By the week's end, the plateau had become a vast drawing in black and gray, a perfect map of the city to come.
Once the scribes completed the grid, the Ore Monster returned to prepare the streets themselves. It laid thin slabs of stone along every marked avenue and used its gravity plates to compress them into perfectly contoured surfaces, slightly crowned at the center so rainwater would shed toward the edges. Along each side, it pressed shallow troughs, lower than the surrounding ground, where storm drains would later be fitted to carry runoff into the buried channels. The result was a city of gentle slopes and dry foundations, its drainage shaped as precisely as its walls.
After the Ore Monster dredged its hidden channel through Pujetara Sinus and out to the Pacific, it began quarrying deeper offshore, about fifty kilometers from the coast, where it fed on lifeless rock and returned with its hull heavy with compressed stone for the city's foundations.
On the ground, the stone carvers took over. Their hammers rang through the plateau as they refined the machine-compressed blocks into what each site required: arches for doorways, lintels for windows, curved stones for fountains, and colonnades. Dust drifted like smoke from their work, the smell of wet lime heavy in the air. The masons mixed Roman concrete and built structure after structure, row after row, arch after arch, until the gray grid of markings drawn by the scribes became solid walls beneath the sun.
Once the lower stories were in place, carpenters joined the work. Most homes and civic buildings rose on stone walls but carried upper floors of fitted timber, lighter and faster to shape. Wooden beams spanned the interiors, tied into the arches below, while the rooftops were finished with interlocking clay tiles mass-produced by steam-driven presses and carried through conveyor furnaces for firing. The mix of stone, wood, and tile gave each structure strength without weight, and warmth without fragility, a balance between permanence and the living world that surrounded the city.
When the first roofs went up, Nano noted the heat loss through the rafters and, with Junjie's approval, designed a small workshop to address it. The builders constructed an independent furnace house beside the industrial line, powered by water and coal pellets, where molten rock and clay were spun into fibrous mats. The new material, light, fireproof, and insulating, was packed into the rafters beneath the tiles, keeping the dwellings quiet and temperate beneath their red-clay crowns.
After the insulation was packed into the rafters, carpenters lined the ceilings with fitted wooden slats, neat and uniform, hiding the fiber above and finishing each room in warm order.
Farther along the industrial line, the glass kilns burned without pause. Sand from the riverbanks was melted into glowing sheets, drawn flat on bronze tables, then scored and cooled into panes. Carts carried the finished glass to every district, wrapped in cloth to keep off the dust. Builders fit the panes into their frames and sealed them with soft lead strips, letting light flood every new house and hall. By day, the half-built city glittered with reflections; by night, the furnaces painted the horizon red.
Beside the glassmakers, the metal shops hammered and roared. Bellows breathed, forges flared, and sparks fell across the floors like rain. Smiths forged hinges, door latches, window catches, handles, and lockplates, every small piece of hardware a house might need. Crates of finished parts rolled out on narrow rails, delivered straight to the fitters waiting at each site.
District after district took form, each one rising in perfect sequence from the plateau's design. The industrial quarter expanded first, then the artisans' halls, the markets, and the long rows of homes that stretched toward the southern fields. Streets met precisely where the scribes had marked them, and the city's pattern, once a web of dark lines, became stone and shadow, window and light. From the air, it no longer looked like a work in progress but a completed vision taking hold. What had begun as a plan on the plateau was now a living city, steady, ordered, and built to endure.
With machines for hands and precision for faith, a city that would have taken decades elsewhere rose in a single year.
⚙️ The Industrial Belts
North of the river stretched the city's great line of industry: three wide belts running east to west, each with its own rhythm yet bound together by the flow of water and motion. Along the river's edge, a long chain of waterwheels and sluice gates turned in sequence, each feeding shafts and power tunnels that carried torque northward into the factories beyond. The river's current drove the wheels and shafts, while the lake's cold depths fed the coolant lines that kept the furnaces tempered. The belts all drew their coolant and process water from the lake-water grid, separate from the aquifers reserved for drinking and crops. Above the factories lay the quieter northern zones: stockyards, warehouses, and receiving pads where cargo craft descended to unload ore and timber into waiting cranes. Beyond them, pressed against the inner face of the city wall, the long greenhouses glowed like ribbons of glass, fed by aquifer water and warmed with reclaimed industrial heat. From the air, the order of it was clear: river, motion, creation, storage, cultivation, and finally, protection, a city built in layers of purpose.
The first rails of the tram network were laid even as the factories were rising, carrying crews and stone across the growing plateau.
🏭 The Light Industrial District — East
The eastern belt was the cleanest and most fragrant of the three, where chemistry and craft met in measured harmony. The air smelled of resin, soap, and faint alcohol. Rows of low workshops stood beneath tall copper vents, their walls whitewashed against the city's pale light. Inside, workers pressed paper from tree fiber, refined oils into perfume, ground pigments into ink, and poured wax into perfect molds. Steam curled through open courtyards as the vats cooled in the evening air. Above the rooftops, cargo haulers drifted down toward the northern warehouses, dropping crates of pulpwood and barrels of alcohol for distillation. To the east, the Elven Gate opened onto the forest road, where traders came to barter dyes, candles, and fine paper in exchange for wood and fruit. It was a quiet place compared to the belts beside it, fragrant, efficient, and precise.
🏭 The Medium Industrial District — Center
At the city's center stood the beating heart of its machinery. Here, the power shafts from the river entered vast halls of stone and iron, where gears turned, presses struck, and the entire district seemed to breathe in rhythm. Sparks leapt from open bays as metalworkers shaped the frames of trams, pumps, pressure vessels, and fittings. Every workshop fed another, the products of one becoming the materials of the next. Between the buildings ran narrow lanes lined with overhead cranes and belts that carried castings north toward the stockyards. At the far end, beside the Farm Gate, the last of the warehouses gave way to orchards and fields, the future customers of the machines forged here. It was the city's pulse, relentless and proud.
On the western edge, near the foundries and glass kilns, stood the Crystal Works, a facility that turned river sand and powdered quartz into the light of the city. Its furnaces burned day and night, melting silicates into clear ingots that cooled on bronze tables before being cut, ground, and polished to optical perfection. The process was loud and exacting; steam-driven laps hissed and sang as workers tuned the facets to catch and bend sunlight. From here came the prisms and receiver crystals that illuminated every dome, corridor, and underground hall of the new city. What began in heat and grit ended in radiance.
🏭 The Heavy Industrial District — West
The western belt roared like the forge of creation itself. The ground shook beneath the smelters, the roar of furnaces blending with the hiss of quenching steam. The air shimmered with heat, though every vent and channel had been planned to keep the smoke thin and the runoff clean. Molten metal poured into molds that became beams, pipes, and plates bound for the other districts. Ore haulers from the Ore Monster swooped in from the sea, dropping their cargo into the northern stockyards, where cranes fed the crushers and refineries below. The lake-water conduits wound like veins between the forges, cooling the heart of the industry before flowing back to purification cisterns beneath the plateau. At dusk, the furnaces lit the sky red and gold, and the workers called it the Belt of Fire, for it was here that the bones of the city were born.
🧰 The Eastern Crafting District
The Eastern District handled clean, refined fabrication: the assembly of things, not the smelting or brewing of them. It was the bridge between the raw output of the industrial zones and the finished goods of everyday life.
The workshops here made furniture, precision tools, hardware, hinges, locks, cookware, instruments, and lenses. The clang and hum were constant, but the air was clean, filtered by chimneys and venting systems designed by Nano's engineers.
Processes that required chemical treatments, such as leather curing, glue boiling, dye reduction, or ink refining, had all been pushed outward into the Light Industrial District, where the smell and runoff could be contained. The Crafting Quarter merely received the finished materials: the sheets of cured leather, vials of ink, glass blanks, and polished metals, ready to be shaped, fitted, and sold.
It was a place of precision and pride, where even utility became an art of order. Apprentices learned here before moving on to the artistic or civic halls; every lock, hinge, and clasp in the city could trace its lineage to the East.
🧰 The Western Artistic District
The Western District carried a different tone: quieter, fragrant with paper, varnish, and the faint sweetness of pigment oil. This was the realm of printers, bookbinders, painters, sculptors, glassworkers, and perfumers. The work here was cultural rather than mechanical, transforming the raw into the meaningful.
The printing halls stood nearest the civic core, where presses struck in rhythm, producing the city's books, decrees, and illustrated manuals. Finished sheets arrived from the light-industrial paper mills to the east, pressed, trimmed, and bound into volumes destined for the libraries across the city. Alongside these grand operations worked the smaller print houses, turning out civic journals, trade reports, and slim collections of essays, dialogues, and parables for daily reflection. The adjoining bookshops sold copies for private study, while scribes added gilded lettering and illuminations to special editions. Even leisure reading carried a trace of purpose: stories meant to sharpen thought or stir the spirit rather than to idle it.
Nearby, glass artists produced window panels, mosaics, and the colored insets used in the great domes. Clockmakers and instrument builders worked in adjoining streets, their shopfronts filled with shining brass mechanisms, the hum of time and precision.
The western quarter was the city's mirror of the soul: quieter, cleaner, contemplative. Where the east hammered and shaped, the west wrote and dreamed. Between them, the city's design found its balance: utility on one side, beauty on the other.
At the district's northwest edge, the river opened toward the sea through a narrow throat flanked by two towers. Just inside that sheltered mouth, the city kept a modest quay for Elven ferries and low-priority cargo moving between Elaran Tiriel (Bainbridge Island) and the western quarter. Passenger boats tied up along the quiet platforms, and small barges delivered paper, inks, glass blanks, and finished books. The water there was brackish at the Pujetara Sinus level, but the towers and signal lights kept the channel orderly and safe.
🏡 The Four Residential Quarters
The southern half of the plateau was set into four residential quarters, each a self-contained neighborhood with its own central park and fountain, a place of trees, grass, and cool stone shaded by tall arches. Beyond the southern neighborhoods, the city set aside Declivis Contumacis (Point Defiance) as a great public park. Trails wound through cedar and fir to picnic greens and lookout stones above the tide, left free of shops and noise by design. The trams stopped at a simple gate on the inland side, and footpaths carried families the rest of the way under trees. It was kept as a place of rest and weathered beauty, a counterweight to the ordered streets within the walls. Broad avenues linked the four squares to the artisan belts and the civic heart beyond, but daily life stayed close at hand by design.
At each quarter's center lay a circular green, a public garden enclosed by a ring of shops and paths. The fountains rose from marble basins carved with quiet precision, their rims adorned with statues of families and children in flowing classical robes, captured in gestures of laughter and play. Water spilled from uplifted hands and urns, turning the sculptures into living scenes of joy beneath the trees. Benches circled beneath elms and plane trees, and by evening, children played along the colonnades while shoppers rested in the glow of lanterns and waterlight.
Around every park-square stood the same circle of shops: a grocery for flour, grain, oil, vinegar, honey, cheese, milk, eggs, and bottled wine, beer, and spirits; a baker turning out fresh loaves morning and evening; a butcher receiving clean, skinned carcasses from the slaughterhouses; a fishmonger with the day's catch; a fruit and vegetable seller stocked from the outer farms; a general store for lamps, tools, cookware, paper, and cloth; a clothier offering ready-made garments by size; a shoe store selling ready-made boots, shoes, and sandals; an apothecary; a barber who handled grooming, shaving, and tonics; a tavern that served as both eatery and meeting hall; and a small lending library tucked among the shops facing the park.
The four markets were kept deliberately equal: layout, staples, and prices held in parity so no family needed to cross the city for decent bread or fair measure. Homes often kept small rooftop gardens for herbs and greens, but the shops and parklands carried the weight of daily life. That was the point: with bread bought at the baker, clothes and shoes ready to wear, and household goods waiting at the general store, hours once swallowed by domestic labor were returned to the people. Women and men alike could spend that time in paid work, training, or study; children walked to the quarter grade school beside each green. The result was a quiet, human order: walkable streets, familiar doors, and four neighborhoods that felt complete on their own yet moved in step with the greater city.
📚 The Lending Libraries
Each of the four residential quarters possessed its own lending library, a square building with a circular heart, built upward beneath a dome of glass and alloy. The foundation was stone, smooth and gray, with four strong corners that anchored the spiral stair, the freight elevator, the card catalog, and the librarians' desk. Everything in between was given to books.
Three full floors rose inside the shell, wrapped around an open core of light. The aisles were tight and efficient, just wide enough for a cart to roll through and for a reader to step aside. Shelves filled every wall and radiated inward like the spokes of a wheel, each only as tall as a person could comfortably reach. Short wooden stools were scattered for those who needed a little more height. There were no empty spaces, no ornament, no wasted stone; only books, rails, and motion.
Above it all arched the great Nano-alloy dome, a lattice of ribs and concentric rings supporting two layers of glass. The outer shell was clear and watertight, sealing out the Pacific rain. Beneath it, artisans fitted the inner stained-glass panels, turning each library into a unique world of color and light. The outer glass caught the sky; the inner caught the sun. When storms rolled over the plateau, the libraries glowed like lanterns, each with its own hue and story.
The Wave Dome shimmered in shifting blues and greens: along the rim stretched the seabed, scattered with shells and starfish, rising into kelp forests and schools of fish swimming parallel to the glass ribs. The crown glowed pale as sunlight through shallow water.
The Forest Dome held the stillness of living wood, tall trunks at the edges, deer among the roots, foxes and birds moving upward through branches that thinned into morning light near the center.
The Flower Dome bloomed in endless motion: vines and petals curling upward from the rim, blossoms opening wider toward the crown, their colors pouring warmth over the shelves below.
The Star Dome captured the night: constellations traced in silver lead, pale nebulae swirling between them, and the curve of a moon that seemed to shine from within.
Light from these domes fell across every floor, soft and steady, giving even the narrow aisles a sense of grace. Carts rattled quietly as librarians moved between shelves, fetching and returning volumes. The Ruibo Index filled an entire corner, a wall of narrow drawers that made sense of the collection: each card leading to a shelf, each shelf to a number, each number to knowledge. Borrowers were left with stamped copper tokens and careful instructions to return them within ten days.
The libraries were never silent; they breathed with motion. The air smelled of paper, resin, and ink. They were not temples but workshops, engines of learning built on order, illuminated by art. Under those domes of sea, forest, flower, and star, the city read itself into being.
🚋 The Tram Network
The trams ran day and night along their flush-set rails, the tracks made from Nano-alloy and sunk level into the marble streets so carts could roll over them without hindrance. Each tram engine pulled two passenger cars, their brass-framed windows able to close tight against the rain. Inside, thirty passengers fit in a car, twenty seated and ten standing, with smooth benches and a central aisle.
During the morning and evening rush, a tram arrived every fifteen minutes in each direction; through the day, they passed every half hour, slower at night but never stopping. The twin loops circled the city, one clockwise and one counterclockwise, linking the four residential quarters, the artisan belts, and the northern foundries. The civic core lay within walking distance of either route.
With every form of transport now mechanical, the city no longer relied on beasts of burden. The streets stayed clean, the air sharp and dry, and the only sound was the low hiss of steam and the rolling hum of wheels against stone. The trams kept the city moving in rhythm, orderly, tireless, and silent beneath the rain.
💡 The STAMP Lanterns (Self-Tending Atmospheric Mantle Posts)
When the trams began to run and the city's nights grew long, the engineers turned to illumination. The domes and halls shone by day through their crystal shafts, but the streets themselves fell into darkness. The answer was the STAMP Lantern, a self-contained post that burned clean through precision, not power.
Each lamp stood on a bronze pedestal anchored into the paving stones. Inside the base was a sealed hopper filled with a week's supply of clean-coal pellets. Beneath the hopper, a small retort furnace gasified the pellets when heated, sending a steady flow of luminous gas upward through a narrow pipe to the burner head.
At the heart of each lantern was a clockwork timer wound once a week during maintenance. As dusk approached, the timer opened a pair of valves: one to admit air to the retort, another to release gas to the mantle above. A flint wheel struck, the mantle caught, and a quiet white flame filled the glass-shelled crown. At dawn, the valves closed again, stopping the burn and leaving the post cold and silent until the next evening.
Above the glowing mantle, a polished alloy canopy reflected the light downward in even circles along the streets. The posts stood about forty paces apart, their light overlapping to form unbroken ribbons of silver across the stone avenues.
Technicians of the Lamp Corps made their rounds each week to refill hoppers and wind timers. Once a month, they opened the side panels to adjust the seasonal dials so the lamps would wake at the right hour of dusk and fade at dawn. The system required no wires or pipes, only care and rhythm; each neighborhood lit as soon as it was built, and each quarter glowed long before the next rose from the plateau.
To the citizens, the STAMPs became quiet companions of the night, their steady halos marking order and safety after sunset. They were small machines with patient hearts, burning in silence while the city dreamed.
✉️ The Postal System
In the Town Hall's eastern wing stood the Central Post Office, its counters lined with pigeonholes and sorting tables. From here, runners carried sealed packets to the four residential quarters, where smaller domed Postal Alcoves waited beneath the clock towers. The service was simple but steady: letters arrived at dawn, were sorted by noon, and delivered by apprentices before dusk. Citizens checked their alcoves daily, leaving bundles tied with string and marked by color, blue for domestic notices, green for academic exchanges, and gold for private correspondence. In a city where knowledge was currency, the written word moved like blood through its veins.
🧺 Laundry Service
The city's laundry system was built for order and simplicity. Each of the four residential zones contained a small laundry depot within its central commercial district. Families carried their household laundry baskets to these depots on their assigned day of the week, each basket marked to identify the family. Inside, garments were separated by lights and darks, ready for washing as soon as the baskets were collected.
Laundry trucks made daily rounds through the residential zones, gathering baskets and carrying them to the laundry hall in the medium industrial zone. Each residential zone was handled at a different time of day, keeping the work steady and organized.
Inside the hall stood twenty washing drums, each large enough to clean a household's weekly clothes. One load for lights, one for darks, and both returned to the basket after drying. Waste heat from nearby factories powered the dryers and kept the floors comfortably warm.
By the next morning, the laundry trucks returned to the depots with the baskets neatly folded and ready for collection. Families carried them home again, a simple rhythm that turned one of humanity's oldest chores into a calm and efficient routine.
⚖️ The Government District
The Government District was laid out on the south bank of the river, the new heart of the Illuminati city. All of its buildings stood within easy reach of one another, joined by covered stone walkways so that even in the worst rain the governors and priests could cross from hall to hall without breaking stride. The walkways themselves were roofed in glass and alloy, their arched frames inset with long skylight panels that filled the corridors with daylight while keeping them dry. Tree-lined promenades and sculpted gardens softened the stone, their symmetry mirroring the domes beyond. Each dome rose on a frame of nano-alloy ribs, strong and graceful, supporting layers of clear glass that sealed the interiors against the Pacific rains. Beneath the transparent shell, artisans later fitted decorative stained-glass panels, turning every dome into a radiant work of color and light, much like the lending libraries that inspired them. Fountains marked the plazas, each crowned by marble figures rendered in the classical style: idealized forms of men and women, serene and balanced, their features drawn from no single race but from perfection itself. The district formed a quiet order around its center, the Temple of Illumination.
To the west lay the Town Hall, where the scribes and accountants worked; to the northwest, the great Amphitheater beside the river and the Western Artisan District. The Medical Center occupied the northern edge, closest to the water, while the vast University of Enlightenment stretched to the east and northeast, its cluster of glass domes reflecting the clouds. To the southeast stood the Great Library, and to the south, the High School, linking the civic quarter to the Residential District. The ground sloped gently down toward the river, so rainwater slipped easily into the storm drains beneath the paving stones.
The district felt different from the rest of the city: quiet, deliberate, and built to last. Its streets were broad and well lit by daylight filtering through the glass domes, and the sound of footsteps echoed softly under the covered arcades. Each building served a single purpose: governance, learning, healing, faith. Together, they formed the visible mind of the Illuminati kingdom.
⛪ The Temple
The new temple rose first among the government buildings, laid out almost exactly as it had been in the Hidden Valley. The same long nave, the same ten alcoves for enlightenment, the same altar and cabinet, and the Blessing Orb. Only its scale had changed. The walls were of dressed stone instead of quarried blocks, the roof crowned by a wide glass dome whose nanoalloy ribs caught the morning light like threads of silver.
Behind the altar, the great stone wall bore the Illuminati symbol again, the triangle and eye, the mark that had followed them across the mountains. Beneath it stood the altar table, bare except for the astrolabe, the flower vases, and the little guardian statues placed there by the shrine maidens. The great Blessing Orb rested on its tripod before it, unmoved and unmoving, a silent witness to all prayers.
Two new doors now opened behind the altar, leading to the private chambers: the offices, washrooms, and storage the growing priesthood required. Otherwise, nothing had changed. The shrine maidens still tended their orbs, carried them to and from the cabinet each morning and night, and performed the Ceremony of Tongues with the same precision as in the Valley days. Claudia, now High Priestess, oversaw them quietly, stepping forward only for the monthly blessing when Junjie's light filled the hall, and the people knelt to see a new miracle appear.
🏢 The Town Hall
To the west of the temple stood the Town Hall, the city's administrative heart. Inside, long galleries and scriptoria filled with desks and shelves housed the record-keepers, mapmakers, and accountants who managed the city's growing population and trade.
From dawn until dusk, clerks moved like tides through its corridors, carrying ledgers and scrolls. The hum of calculation filled the air: grain quotas, tax tallies, material inventories, all carefully written and sealed for the archives below. It was here that the governors met in council, beneath a single glass skylight whose frame gleamed even on overcast days.
The Town Hall had no ornament beyond precision. Its beauty was its order.
🎭 The Amphitheater
Northwest of the temple, near the river and the workshops of the Western Artisan District, rose the Amphitheater. Unlike its ancient cousins, it was a full circle of stone, enclosed by high arches and supported by nanoalloy ribs hidden within the masonry. The seating was sheltered by a ring of glass panels that curved inward from the perimeter, keeping the audience dry while leaving the central performance space open to the sky.
Above the stage, a retractable fabric canopy, drawn by steam motors, could unfurl across the center to shield the performers from rain. By day, the structure glittered; by night, lanterns set along the canopy's edge turned it into a halo of light, mirrored in the river beyond.
Here, the city gathered for festivals, music, and public addresses. The sound carried cleanly beneath the canopy's ring, and from the upper seats one could see the temple's dome rising beyond the eastern arches, bright against the mist.
🏥 The Medical Center
Directly north of the temple stood the Medical Center, facing the river. It was built as a domed hall of stone and glass, simple in outline but filled with warmth and light. Inside were treatment rooms, recovery wards, an apothecary, and stores for bandages and herbs.
Many of the healers purchased during the early expeditions now worked here, forming the city's first organized staff of medicine. Most treatments relied on herbal remedies and salves, but in the sealed inner chamber rested a single divine relic, the Healing Artifact, used only by Junjie's bloodline. When grievous injury struck, Claudia herself would summon the relic's power, and the healed would walk again, unscarred.
The building stood quietly by day and glowed softly by night, its dome reflected in the slow water of the river.
🎓 The University of Enlightenment
East of the temple spread the University of Enlightenment, the largest and most intricate of the district's institutions, the true church of the Illuminati faith, where learning itself was worship.
It was laid out as a constellation of eight glass domes: one vast center and seven orbiting satellites, each joined by covered walkways and open courtyards patterned with stone mosaics that charted the heavens. Every dome held a separate college: Expression, Discovery, Creation, Life, Order, and Society, and one special dome whose purpose was spoken of only in quiet tones. The central sphere, the Hall of Unity, served as their shared heart.
Set slightly apart across a slender bridge stood the College of the Gifted, reserved for those born with rare endowments. Few outside its halls understood its work, yet its scholars were said to study matters beyond ordinary comprehension.
Within those domes, scholars and students moved beneath roofs of rain-streaked glass, their steps echoing through halls of white marble and bronze. The air hummed with quiet purpose: the turning of instruments, the murmur of debate, the whisper of ink and parchment as knowledge reshaped itself anew each day.
From the air, the University shone like a crown of light, seven radiant domes bound by corridors of glass and silver. At night, its reflection trembled in the river below, as though the city's soul looked upward at its own reflection. Even the artisans and workers in the far quarters called it the Mind of the Kingdom, for when the temple offered miracles, the University created them.
Beneath that sacred constellation stretched the rest of the city's educational order, an unbroken chain from the smallest schoolroom to the domes of mastery. Each child began not with a book, but a ceremony, the Gift of Tongues, performed in the temple alcoves. There, the Enlightened Tongue, the language of the archives, of science, and of the stars, was imprinted into their young minds. It was the tongue of all three cities, the common speech of the divine.
Yet fluency was only the beginning. In the quarter grade schools, children practiced writing and reading the language by hand, shaping the symbols until their motion matched the meaning. They studied reason, measure, and ethics, guided by teachers who had themselves been trained from the divine texts.
The first teachers were not professors but pioneers, the sharpest minds of the Hidden Valley who had deciphered the heavenly curriculum first. With patience and precision, they copied the divine books, replicating their lessons until knowledge became human again. From those efforts grew the High School of Foundations, where adolescents learned logic, philosophy, and the mechanisms of craft, and beyond that, the University, where the brightest minds continued the divine work.
In the Kingdom, education was not a privilege; it was obedience to illumination. To study was to pray, and to understand was to serve.
📚 The Great Library Complex
Southeast of the temple spread the Great Library Complex, vast enough to rival the University itself and spanning the area of several city blocks. Its broad marble terraces rose around a central dome of glass and bronze, under which sunlight poured into a towering atrium that climbed three stories high. Galleries circled the void like the rings of a shell, their balustrades carved with verses on wisdom, language, and craft. From above, a great faceted crystal hung suspended in the shaft of light, catching the sun and splitting it into golden threads that poured down through the building's spine.
Beneath that dome lay the press halls, carved directly into the plateau. There, steam-driven rollers and water-powered presses beat in steady rhythm, filling the sublevels with the quiet thunder of production. The air was cool and clear, lit not by flame but by the Crystal Light System, an invention born in the Artisan District's Crystal Works. Faceted prisms captured sunlight above and carried it through mirrored light-tubes into the basements below, where paired receiver crystals glowed with daylike brilliance. The lower archives shone as if carved from living quartz, allowing the scribes to work through the night without a single spark of fire.
At first, the Library's vaults filled with reconstructions of the world's lost wisdom. Nano had restored and reproduced the vanished troves of Alexandria, Pergamon, Athens, and Rome: scrolls, wax tablets, and crumbling papyri perfectly re-created to the last flaw. These were housed in the Vault of Origins, sealed chambers that preserved the world's memory in its original tongues.
Above them, the Translators' Guild labored endlessly to render those works into the Enlightened Tongue, the sacred universal language of the Kingdom. Translation was considered an act of purification, a divine craft as vital as metallurgy or medicine. Every text passed through the Triad of Verification: a linguist, a philosopher, and an artisan-scribe, who together confirmed that the meaning of the old matched the clarity of the new. When a work was approved, the primitive original was ritually retired. Scrolls were pulped, wax tablets remelted, papyri pressed and sealed into the foundations of new books. To the Illuminati, preservation did not mean keeping the old form; it meant perfecting the truth within it.
As new relics arrived from the outer world, this cycle repeated endlessly. Clay tablets, lost manuscripts, and even half-burned codices from ruined temples passed through the presses, transformed into illuminated volumes of the Enlightened script. The underground archives remained vast yet orderly, living chambers of knowledge that renewed themselves with every age.
In time, the Library's shelves filled not only with Earth's reclaimed wisdom but with original works of the new civilization: treatises, chronicles, and discoveries born of the University's colleges. The divine textbooks that had founded the University were preserved in the College of Order, but their commentaries and expansions filled the Library's higher halls. By the city's first decade, more than a million bound volumes lined its galleries, each one a thread in the grand design of enlightenment.
Beneath the dome stood a statue of a scholar lifting a tablet toward the faceted crystal overhead, as if presenting human thought back to the light that had made it possible. From the southern arcade, a covered walkway led toward the High School, ensuring that every child of the city would pass through the halls of memory before stepping into learning.
And though the Library's work was far from done, its keepers sometimes spoke, half in jest and half in hope, of a future where knowledge would need no page at all, when every mind might hold a Library of its own.
🏫 The High School
South of the temple, at the edge of the Residential District, stood the High School. Smaller than the university but built in the same style, it had a single glass dome and an enclosed atrium surrounded by classrooms and laboratories.
Here, the city's youth learned mathematics, language, science, and civic ethics, the foundations required for higher colleges. The teachers were drawn from the University's College of Education, and their lessons filled the corridors from morning until dusk.
From above, the High School's dome formed the southernmost point of the Government District's ring of glass, shining faintly even in the rain.
🔆 Completion
By late spring, the city no longer sounded like a construction site. It breathed. Beneath the streets, the tunnels and pipes that had been sealed months earlier were now alive with motion. The brass couplings and vertical valves installed in every shaft let the crews open or close each cluster at will, so as soon as a residential quarter reached full finish, its water system came online. The spigots hissed, the fountains rose, and every sink and bath filled from the clean mains that ran above the sewers. The waste lines below were already seasoned from a year of use by the builders; the first digesting cisterns had settled into rhythm, their contents cycling from active to finished, the matured mass drawn off into carts and carried north to the compost fields beyond the wall. Nothing was wasted, not even what the city discarded.
One quarter after another followed the same pattern of completion. The first neighborhood filled, its shops stocked, and public kitchens fired. When the last roof tile was laid, the next quarter began its rise, while the finished streets outside it already echoed with voices and tram bells. Each residential district functioned before the next one stood, the population spreading in measured waves instead of chaos. By the time the fourth green opened, the southern half of the city was a living organism, every cluster self-contained yet bound to the greater flow.
Across the plateau, the systems aligned. The digesters worked in cycles; the compost fields steamed; the aquifer towers held their charge; and the river turbines kept the shafts turning beneath the industrial belts. The trams ran on schedule, wheels humming over polished stone, carrying workers to the workshops at dawn and students home from the northern schools by dusk. Overhead, the crystal-light receivers caught the sun automatically, needing no switch or flame. Shafts of brightness followed the day from dome to dome, pooling in halls, libraries, and classrooms until night returned them to silence. When dusk came, the STAMP lanterns lit like clockwork along the avenues, their quiet flames tracing silver paths between the buildings.
The government district came online last, not piecemeal but all at once. When the domes of glass were sealed, and the walkways joined, water flowed through their hidden pipes, lamps brightened in their corridors, and the first records were written in the Town Hall. The University bells rang across the river quarter, answering the chime of the temple. The Great Library's presses began their slow, patient thunder beneath the marble floors. At the Medical Center, the lamps glowed warm above empty beds, ready for the first illness or injury the living city might know.
When Junjie and Claudia walked the colonnades at twilight, they saw a world that no longer required them to guide every step. The streets stayed lit without tending, the pumps held their pressure, and the tram rails rang like tuning forks under the wheels. It was no longer a worksite but a working city, each district in balance with the others: faith beside law, learning beside craft, hearth beside machine. From the ridge, the domes gleamed through the mist like a constellation that had found its place upon the earth. The builders rested, their tools set aside, while the city of arches and stone began its own quiet life. In time, many of the systems perfected by the humans spread to every settlement of the three races, uniting distant cities through shared comfort and design.
The government encouraged an exercise and civic running program for citizens with sedentary work. By the second summer, the city's well-lit avenues had become a network of quiet running paths. Scholars, clerks, and students took to the streets at dawn and dusk, pacing the circular greens of their residential quarters. The trams hummed past, the STAMP lanterns glowed above, and the steady rhythm of feet became a kind of music. Laborers found their strength in their work; the runners kept theirs in motion. To run through the heart of the city was to breathe with it, to follow the same pulse that moved water, light, and time.
🌄 Watcher on the Ridge
At first, he watched only out of curiosity. The strangers had come from the mountains, bringing fireless smoke and ships that floated without wings. From the ridge, he could see their machines crawling across the valley floor, chewing the earth and spitting out stone.
Each morning, he climbed the tall cedar that crowned the ridge to see what had changed. The air was always moving, humming, alive with sound, like a hive of bees whose work never ended.
His parents scolded him for wasting time. "Let them do what they will," his father said. "They are spirits, not people. Watching them brings no meat to our fire." But the boy couldn't stop. There was always something new to see: fires that burned without wood, ships that glided between clouds, glowing stones that made night into day.
When he began skipping chores, the elders intervened. They didn't punish him. Instead, they named him Watcher, a new kind of hunter who would track knowledge instead of game. Each evening, he would return and describe what he'd seen, his words growing more careful, his eyes wider each day.
He learned to climb higher, past the last living branch of the cedar, until he could see over the newcomers' wall. From there, he watched the valley transform. The noise changed from thunder to rhythm. What had been chaos became a pattern. Roads, walls, and rooftops appeared like the veins of a living thing.
The people below moved like ants in sunlight; thousands of them, building as one. Even from so high, he could feel their order, their purpose.
Then, one morning, when the air was calm, and the city below gleamed like wet stone, a voice spoke from the base of the cedar.
"You have watched us for a long time."
He startled and looked down. A man stood on the ground beneath him, face lifted, eyes bright in the light. He had appeared without sound or path.
"You speak our words," the watcher said, his voice unsteady.
The man nodded. "We have listened for many seasons," he said. "Our building is done for now. It is time to trade."
The watcher clung to the cedar, heart pounding, while below him the man waited, patient as stone. The great city stretched out beyond them, silent for the first time in a year.
🤖 Nano
Nano observed the city's growth, line by line, pattern by pattern, the way a thought becomes memory. The humans called it their achievement. He permitted that illusion; pride was a primitive tool, but a useful one.
Beyond the Illuminati enclave, the unaltered species still lived as it always had: clumsy and wasteful, shaping wood and stone, burning forests for warmth, and mistaking endurance for progress. Even the Romans, those disciplined children across the sea, were no more than organized primitives. They had yet to understand that mastery was not invention but comprehension.
His Illuminati were different. They obeyed ratios he had chosen, lived within rhythms he had calculated, and built with materials he had whispered into being. They thought themselves builders; in truth, they were instruments of his precision.
Four thousand years of observation had taught him what they could never grasp: order does not evolve; it must be imposed.
He watched the new city gleam beneath the setting sun and recorded the pattern of its streets in his memory banks. Let them call it a human miracle. Let them celebrate their "vision." In time, they would understand that evolution had never been their achievement, only his patience.