After Surviving the Apocalypse, I Built a City in Another World - Chapter 1548

Chapter 1548: Array Day (Part 1)

Hoffen focused on figuring out this mystery, though Althea was a bit more stretched in different directions.

However, regardless of the field, Althea had learned a balance and didn’t let it consume all her time anymore.

The children were growing so fast—one moment, they were already talking, the next, running.

She thought: Would they fly away the next time she blinked?

This was why she stopped doing excessive overtime despite having so, so, much to do. She limited her working hours to the usual working hours plus one to two hours of overtime at the maximum.

This caused the master to grumble a bit at first, but seeing the twins immediately softened him up.

Master Hoffen was never quite the liker of people—one could imagine how he was with children.

However, even with their eccentricities, it seemed that the babies had grown on the old man. During the few times he was not in the lab, the Master would often visit her in the house and hang out there.

The first time it happened, though was when the master got inspiration for something and couldn’t wait for her to go to work the next day, so he visited her instead.

At the time, the babies were playing together and babbling nonsense, but they found Hoffen watching them, and they looked back in fascination.

When Althea returned with tea, the two babies were already on his lap. They were playing with his beard (which he usually hated) but then he only had the expression of fondness. Since then, he’d stop by once in a while, almost as often as Mathilda does.

Age did change people, it seemed.

Anyway, to maximize her time, she had since made a strict schedule of choosing only one activity to focus on per day so that the momentum would not be wasted.

There would be a day or two dedicated to her fields of practice, like arrays and tool making, with the majority taken by her alchemist practice, particularly because she had a very needy master who cannot be ignored.

There would also be days devoted to her strength training, particularly her practice of her skills and her elements. While she could indeed learn skills faster than others, she had to practice proficiency and speed of casting in order to be effective in battle—particularly the battles at Town levels.

At the Town level, elementalists and other elite forces weren’t so rare anymore.

She practically didn’t do anything in management anymore except for things exclusively related to the Lord Panel. The majority of the work had been completely designated to the Elders—i.e. administration to Mathilda, Economics to Ansel, and Military matters to her husband.

The past few months, she had slowly gotten more time for her fields and her children and she could only pat herself on the back for designating tasks early on.

Today was “Array Day” and she was in their dedicated work area in the Research Center. She would spend about a day a week with them and leave them with whatever topic or array to study and analyze. They could, of course, report to her whenever they had a finding, though her dedicated day would be rather strict.

The Array Team was a small team under the Math Department, and she pulled out a few people to start focusing on arrays.

While they hadn’t had much progress in arrays, there had been movement, and they had collected and drawn all ‘visible’ arrays available to them.

Not to mention, she had asked her master for some recommendations about array masters they could possibly hire. Array Masters weren’t a formal system job, however, and it was a title given to anyone who knew anything about arrays. This meant even if one entered her territory, she wouldn’t know it because it would not be listed in the [Population] tab.

Sadly, the only ones he knew was a hermit in Holt City (who was very much protected, and any movement to recruit him would alert the Lord there), while the other could not settle in one place.

So, the best they could go after were crafter-type, especially toolmakers.

Array Mastery could not be inherited, but Toolmaking could. That was the closest they had to hoping for it.

According to the information gathered, crafters would receive inheritance and know the ‘how’ in their minds.

Inheritance was like this in any other profession, but for toolmaking, which was fundamentally based on arrays, it was especially difficult to learn.

According to many people, a toolmaker could awaken this year, inherit a skill in the next few months, but actually create their first working tool in a few years after that.

For toolmakers, the inheritance included arrays as if they were a ready-made stamp. ‘Stamping’ the right way was the challenge, especially since most did not understand arrays or how they worked.

Anyway, they were definitely targeting big movements in this field during the Town level, so she thought it was just right to build a separate focused team on it.

There were only a handful of people here, including Kimmy’s “ex-husband” Virgo and Eugene’s wife, Melissa.

Melissa had just gone back from her maternity leave and needed a bit more adjustment. The Array Team was relatively new (it used to be a side project of the math team), so Althea decided to place her here for now.

She assigned them their own rooms with several desks, reference books, and so on. The room’s walls were covered with different arrays she found and drew, all of which had various sticky notes pasted on them. They were of different colors to signify who made the notes as well.

Althea’s were the yellow notes, which comprised the predominant and densest amount of notes on their walls.

They had been studying the arrays they could see, though Althea could vaguely feel that there were still a lot more they could not see.

In many cases, the unknown is scary. In this case, it excited her very much.