Chapter 93: Chapter 88

Axle jabbered the entire way, almost excitedly. The conversation ranged from his plans for more Sleem farming equipment, to the items left behind by the delves that would be safe to sell. I mostly grunted as he rambled, but it was an informative conversation nonetheless.

The loose silk articles that adorned the walls in residential we were free to sell under the affiliate for full prices. Most of it would turn up as generic scrap silk in the sales logs, once Axle was done with modifying the items. Any affiliate purchasing it would almost certainly be processing it into something else, which would neatly destroy any evidence. The odds of someone recognizing anything to do with delves was extraordinarily low.

The great, black, glowing pearls were another story. Those would be recognized if sold as is, so we had two options. We could break them down into chips, which sold for a handsome amount and were common enough to slip most notice. It was unlikely to get back to the great dark elf houses, but not impossible. Axle suggested splitting up the sales over longer periods of time, to avoid suspicion.

Or we could roll them into the Sleem pit. The pearls emitted trace radiation and would not dissolve in Sleem envelopment.

I balked. “There’s an awful lot of stuff around here that’s radioactive now, is this place even safe to live in anymore?”

Axle laughed, his barking voice echoing off the walls of the Sleem farm hangar. “Of course, of course. Most forms of life in the BuyMort system are quite well evolved to exist around one another’s radiation. Besides that, Cube is drawing most of the excess radiation in the area and safely converting it. You yourself are even mildly radioactive, from being part of this version of Earth.”

“I am?” It was genuinely hard to know how serious to take Axle sometimes.

“Indeed. The last Earth absorbed by BuyMort had only advanced to the level of basic mass industrialization. Around the early eighteen hundreds, by your timeline. They had not learned to split the atom before BuyMort absorbed them, so they entered the greater system with dramatically less radiation in their bodies and planet than Nu-Earth humans,” the Knowle said. He shook his head.

“It is quite sad, really. Much of the early scientific reports show dramatically less to offer the market, in regard to natural resources and biodiversity.” He trailed off as we approached the Sleem freezer. “I wonder what else is different about your particular Earth.”

“I hear we’re aggressive,” I replied.

Axle turned and stared at his own reflection in my helmet before he burst out laughing. “The House of Shireen might agree, though I believe it a safe assumption to say that they thought themselves the aggressors in this exchange.”

“Yeah, everyone always does. Wonder when that’ll change.” I said.

Axle nodded. “Soon, I have no doubt.” He waved at the air, manipulating his BuyMort account, then he closed it and launched into more detail about the situation in residential.

The bodies were the biggest, most dangerous part of our clean-up task. We absolutely could not, under any circumstances, sell the bodies of delves on any account. That kind of sales information was a direct link to the great houses, and from what Axle told me, those would not hesitate to expend a great amount of resources upholding the concept of revenge.

Apparently it was important in dark elf culture.

On the plus side, they would be easy to get rid of, as the Sleem would happily eat any corpse we provided them, or any chunk of organic material at all. It would be an excellent way to feed our growing Sleem pool, and encourage faster breeding.

Axle went on a whole tangent about how he intended to hook our eventual sewer lines up to feed the Sleem. Short of a matter recycler, Axle assured me it was the best mortie ratio we could acquire from the fledgling village’s sewage asset.

A BuyMort ad popped up, showing me the mostly convoluted escheresque machine I’d ever seen in my life. 

It grinds them, it binds them, it makes everything exactly what you want it to be. Presenting the newest line of matter recyclers from Wahbasah Infinity, the goto place for changing water into wine (or anything else for that matter!)

A cartoon animation played before me showed atoms changing from hydrogen to helium, helium to carbon, a whole litany of changes. It looked brilliant — all except for the billion-mortie price tag dancing underneath. 

It made a perverse sense. We had to manage biological waste anyway unless individuals simply continued selling their own waste. Axle told me that was always possible, but typically a comfortable toilet allowed us to discreetly gather their waste for our own purposes, and most would happily oblige, so long as they had to contribute nothing but the waste.

I gave him the go-ahead on the pearls, the bodies, and his sewer pipe Sleem feeder idea. It would take an expensive, name brand Sleem-proof pipe end, just for safety's sake, but aside from that the cost to construct it would be quite low.

There had been the question of weapons and personal shields, but I quickly resolved the issue. It would have been difficult to sell the shields, as those items were quite expensive, and generally denoted an affiliate of great wealth. Selling them could attract unwanted attention.

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Rayna’s troops had already collected most of the weapons. Axle agreed with me that they should have whatever was left stashed below ground as well.

I told Axle that BlueCleave would be using the shields, and he grimaced. “That may attract unwanted attention too. Likely much slower though. Perhaps the Sleem farm here can be up and running to provide cover for the expense by the time anyone of import notices.”

Not many small affiliates had such extravagant security measures, but a tremendous income source like what our Sleem farm could become would provide more than enough cover.

After discussing the situation at length, we decided to bundle the various silk rugs, bedding, tapestries, and clothing into storage, and sell it piecemeal, along with our own silk product in order to avoid suspicion. Axle assured me part of the protocol would be to cut the various objects down into sizes and configurations that would assure it was categorized as scrap in BuyMort.

Scrap was the best place to hide your illicit sales, if you didn’t want prying eyes on your affiliate. I trusted that Axle knew what he was talking about on that specific BuyMort detail.

The bodies would go to the Sleem, as quickly as they could be gathered. The same would happen to the giant black pearls the delves had used to get intoxicated.

Axle assured me that he could arrange a visit to Quadrum's chamber, so we could simply open the door the entity had installed there and drop everything inside.

There was a small handful of wood, silver, gold, and platinum objects the delves had left behind as well, but those would have to be dealt with piecemeal. There were even small gems in some of them. Some of the luxury goods could be sold as-is, some would have to be altered first, and some would need to be smelted down to basic components before sale could be attempted.

It was complicated, and would take time, but Axle estimated a tidy profit for the affiliate of between sixty and ninety million morties for everything the Delves had left us.

We had walked while Axle went on about his survey of the delves’ remains but stopped at the Sleem farm to finish. Once he had my consent and affiliate permissions to deal with the delves belongings, we switched tracks to the Sleem farm.

A single freezer unit could attract and freeze just under a thousand morties worth of Sleem product per hour if the pipes were totally full. Axle explained that full pipes meant Sleem were being produced faster than they were being frozen, and that it was financially safe to invest in the farm further.

And our pipes were full. There was a small device that read negative space in the piping system, and it told us our entire system was crammed full of Sleem. Axle pointed at the device and explained what we needed to do in order to turn the Sleem farm into a major source of income.

Unfortunately, in order to pay for his desired upgrades, it would cost us almost a million morties worth of brand new equipment. The more freezers we could support, the faster the farm would make us money, so those became the immediate priority. Each freezer cost roughly ten thousand morties, but the more of them we had running, the faster they would pay for themselves.

I had to transfer all of my personal morties into the affiliate account to get Axle even a handful more freezers, as I had spent almost all our morties on Dr. Miles.

It turned out I could have just waited for Quadrum to come and heal Axle, but that was crying over spilt milk as I had no way to know that was going to happen. The beholder’s motivations were arcane, and difficult to predict.

The important element about morties was what you could do with them anyway, not how many you could hoard. That much was smart shopper 101, as far as I could tell.

At the end of our enervating conversation, Axle got all the lights he had wanted, along with another ten freezers.  He assured me our power generation through Cube was more than enough to handle that much, as well as power all the homes we had already built.

I left the Knowle happily opening BuyMort boxes, while the pod that had delivered our new inventory zipped back out the way it had come. Axle mentioned installing a pod portal in the ceiling, to make it easier and faster to sell our Sleem product when it was ready.

We were also going to need to complete the elevator shaft in residential, dig it out to the surface and make the area more accessible. If people were going to be living down there, we would need to make sure they had easy access to the surface.

Rayna’s hobbs had murmured about perhaps gaining ownership over the area, before the delves had shown up. While the hobbs were excellent at living with other species, they did prefer to have their own space if possible.

Residential had room for at least three hundred people, according to the scans from my MortBlock. If the hobbs didn’t mind being neighbors with a beholder, I was happy to give Rayna and BlueCleave the area for themselves.

Before that could be taken care of, I had to go welcome our affiliate’s newest member.

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