Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!

Such a great majority of men would prefer to just go to sleep after doing the deed, it became a sort of joke for some.

Theo, however, even in something so insignificant, still had to be different from the others.

He wasn't deadly tired just yet, so his body, already used to constant exercise lasting up until the very limit of his endurance, simply refused to follow the natural path of post-coitus exhaustion. And with his body starved for even more action and his brain—just like that of an addict—already seeking a new source of stimulus for its reward centers, he simply followed through, pushing himself to do more.

Even if, in this particular scenario, doing more entailed sitting down on his ass, pretending not to admire Callane's curves, and just… waiting.

'Seriously, I need to get belts of a better quality, or I'm going to lose my mind waiting for the resources to just go through,' Theo thought, struggling to face this strange dissonance between the problem he would only ever encounter from behind the screen with the lingering sensation of an experience that one could only experience in reality.

"I know I was rather… forward," Callane gulped her spit as she averted her eyes, "in how I acted, but even I'm going to blush if you keep staring so much," she muttered, her face half-serious and half-amused.

"Just like you mentioned, you were quite forward," Theo chuckled, finding it somewhat easier to talk with her after the fact than it was before, as if the sense of distance between the two of them had sharply decreased ever since they… well, they'd decreased it manually to the lowest possible level. "Which only makes me wonder, what changed?"

For a moment, the two of them measured the strength of each other's stare, only for Callane to finally give up and turn her eyes away… and then turn her entire body away, as if to limit Theo's potential stares to just her ass and her shapely ass alone.

Moments after that, however, Theo's stare moved elsewhere, to where the coal-oriented belt disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel he had completed just before the whole losing-consciousness shtick. Yet, no matter how much he squinted his eyes or tried to overcome the darkness of the unlit tunnel with all sorts of overlays of his system, he couldn't see far enough to spot the moving resources.

'I really need to get those belts upgraded…' Theo thought, his expression darkening a little. 'Thankfully, as long as I remember the recipes correctly and as long as the system didn't change them…'

In theory, Theo could upgrade the belts even before reaching the level of coal. Yet, just like when he played the game, doing so cost more effort than the benefits of doing so were worth. And rather than merely doubling the capacity of the tier-one belt at both the cost of an increased price but also the added cost of a special building necessary to even go ahead and pay for unlocking the recipe…

Rather than doing all of that and wasting both the copious amount of resources necessary to do so and, even worse, the time to have it all set up and then to upgrade not only the belts but the infrastructure they serviced, he opted to aim for tier-four belts all in one go!

And now that he was about to get his hands on an infinite amount of coal quite damn soon, he would have all the resources necessary to completely skip over tier-two belts and then tier-three belts, the resources for which were but a part necessary to craft the ultimate coal-based item.

'In a way, I'm going to use all of the items normally used for the lower tiers just to craft those beams,' Theo thought, a small smile appearing on his face as he realized this small trick. 'All of them save for the iron plates normally used for tier one, that is!'

The tier-two belts could be built by using reinforced iron plates. Tier-three could be crafted with steel beams. And the reinforced steel beams? Those could be made by combining a small number of concrete bags with steel beams that, in turn, could be crafted directly out of steel ingots!

And when it came to those, all Theo needed to make them was a set of forges fed with both iron and coal ores.

When it came to the items needed for the build, they were still within the simple realm—something Theo would consider no more than a more advanced stage of an early game. The complexity of the whole build, however, was what made this part actually interesting to complete. After all, starting with how the ratios for smelting steel in the forges were already different from the ratios one could use in smelters to get either iron or copper ingots. Then, the complexity switched to something as simple as the extremely low production rates for turning steel ingots into steel beams…

Only for both complexities to be combined in the very last leg of the crafting journey, when not only were the ratios of the needed resources wildly different from any recipe used in earlier builds, but also from just how expensive the reinforced steel beams were, despite already requiring the expensive steel beams!

"What are you thinking about so hard?"

At some point, unbeknownst to Theo, Callane grew tired of just posing for him, or maybe she grew tired of the silence? Maybe it was the prolonging wait for when that damned coal would finally appear at the end of the moving belt?

Regardless of the reason behind it, Callane finally grew tired of just standing around and waiting either for Theo to speak up or for her own men to find her in the vast expanses of this factory-based, underground labyrinth.

"About all the problems I will have to solve to get to the next stage of my plans," Theo admitted openly, wasting no breath on details that Callane not only was unlikely to understand but also insights Theo was reluctant to share—even with someone that had just slept with him!