Three months later

Three months passed in the blink of an eye and alot of changes had been made. Firstly, Darren was able to harvest his wheat and grass a total 3 times which gave him an absorbent sum of money.

[gold: 3021]

Another big change that had occurred was that all his spirit animals were now level 2. He had long since finished his quest and Darren had even unlocked more aspects of the quest line.

[Quest: Have 3 Spirit Animals reach level 2(Complete!)]

[Quest: Have 8 Spirit Animals reach level 2(Complete!)]

[Quest: Diversify your Spirit Animals and add another habitat to the Sanctuary(0/1)]

He had completed the first two parts of the quest and had gotten some pretty nice rewards to boot. 

[Congratulations! You have received a Intermediate grade Habitat Blueprint.]

[Congratulations! you have received a Territory Token]

The Intermediate grade Habitat Blueprint was pretty self explanatory. It would allow him to build Intermediate grade habitats for each of his Spirit Animals. 

Darren had first got this quest prize, he held off on accepting it until he could upgrade his engineering building.

However, soon he would make drastic changes as he had just gotten word that the building just upgraded. 

[Engineering Department Building Upgraded! New features are unlocked!]

[Congratulations! you have received one Restructuring Token.]

Darren was ecstatic and he immediately got to work using all his upgraded accumulated the last three months. First he upgraded all his animal habitats which instantly filled a large portion of the top right corner of his map. Moving along the top and around to the left side, Darren placed this entire area with residential buildings. He made sure to leave sufficient room between each house as to not cause land disputes. 

After the 50 houses or so and his habitats were all covering the top third of his circular map, Darren moved on to his Farm. Still leaving room between the residential and farm, Darren started filling the entire bottom half of his map with crops. The area covered ten times the area of his previous fields and he estimated that each month he would harvest 5000 stocks of each crop.

This would allow Darren to make more money and hopefully increase the levels of his Department Buildings faster. The engineering building just upgraded and the rewards were massive for him. He wondered what the rewards for the other buildings would be like. He knew that all of them were very close to completing their required three quests so it was not long now.

After everything was in order, Darren still had one more thing he had to do before he had to call a meeting to choose new leaders.

[Territory Token: Item capable of Instantly claiming land as part of your territory. Initial settlement size is a single square kilometer. Note: you may also use the token to upgrade your existing Territory up to level 4. After level 4 multiple tokens are required.]

Darren read the information with a smile on his face and thought about the implications. Formulating a plan of how he was going to maximize his gains, Darren opened up his Territory status and read it over.

[Territory: Wuguay Farm] 

[Contracted: Darren Jones] 

[Level: 2] 

[Soul: Infancy Stage] 

[Affinities: Earth, Water, Life] 

[Upgrade Requirements: 100 Members, Teleportation Hub Unlocked, 100 gold]

Darren was already complete with two of the three requirements to upgrade his and it would be a waste to use his token now. First he would activate Recruitment Mode again and finally get his population base above 100.

After only a couple hours, he got another notification.

[You have received 80 applications!]

Darren spent the rest of his night looking through the profiles of this group.

[Faction: Thorn Brigade]

At first he was a little skeptical since this sounded like a military unit. He was a farmer not a army commander. However, looking over the information of the group he understood.

They were originally a hunting and crafting village only a month before the integration. They were then caught in the middle of a nation wide war and were forced to provide their village as a refuge to the soldiers.

 Unfortunately when the Integration hit, their planet did not survive, but the entirety of the village was transported to the mass recruitment station with the soldiers then separated almost instantly. There were no soldiers among the group and there were even more engineer classes than fighting classes. 

Darren was quite happy with this and decided to accept them immediately.

While the system was providing sub-classes, Darren organized all of the ones that had a class into their own corner in his vision. Among the 80 there were only 7 with classes. Two were plant related and two were Animal related and the final 4 were all engineers. Unfortunately there were no bloodlines among the group.

Immediately after everything was done, Darren started the upgrade to his Territory again.

[Congratulations! You have reached Territory level 3 and have unlocked new features!]

[More land has been unlocked!]

[New Items in the shop are now Available!]

[Please choose another Spirit Animal to raise in your sanctuary:]

[Spirit Snake]

[Spirit Lizard]

[Spirit Hawk]

[Spirit Lemur]

[Spirit Cat]

[Spirit Rabbit]

Darren looked over his options but was leaning toward one from the start so he just decided to choose it.

[Spirit Lizard Chosen! Please find a spot to place a Intermediate Spirit Lizard Habitat.]

Darren then opened his map and chose a open area next to his other habitats. The next instant, there appeared a massive wooden box about two feet deep but with the base area equal to his level two turtle habitat.

The interior was filled with big leafed plants that allowed for much of the ground to be covered in shadow. 

Confirming his choice to place them in the habitat, Darren let out a sigh and inspected the habitat and then the lizards inside them.

[Intermediate Spirit Lizard Habitat]

[Level: 2]

[Attunement: Life, Earth]

The next thing he did was to inspect all of his new hatchlings. There might be bloodlines or talents after all. 

The system had given him 10 baby Spirit Lizards and luckily there was one that gave Darren pause.

[Spirit Lizard]

[Gender: Female]

[Rank: 1]

[Daos: Earth, Fire]

[Bloodline: Dragon(2%)]

Darren looked at this lizard with definite hope in his eyes and immediately named the promising baby.

[Name: Lisa]

After getting unlucky with the other hatchlings having no bloodlines, Darren looked at his screen again and smiled.

The third part of his quest was complete and he could collect his rewards.

[Congratulations! Quest Complete! Reward Received for completing a chain quest!]

[You have been awarded High quality Habitat Blueprint!]

[You have been awarded 2x Territory Token!]

Darren then grinned and mentally confirmed in his mind. 

' Again!' he thought as he activated one of his three Territory Tokens he had gotten earlier. Instantly a new set of notifications appeared.

[Congratulations! Wuguay Farm has reached level 4!]

[Wuguay Farm has unlocked Dao Attunement! Activating now. Please wait...]

Pulling up the status screen of his territory, Darren read over the information closely.

[Territory: Wuguay Farm] 

[Contracted: Darren Jones] 

[Level: 4] 

[Soul: Adolescent Stage] 

[Affinities: Earth, Water, Life] 

[Upgrade Requirements: 1000 Members, 1000 gold, 5 Peak Quality Essence Stones.]

While waiting for the attunement to start, Darren thought over how he was able to do this in the first place. 

Darren had tried to upgrade the territory using the Territory token immediately but got a notification saying that the token could be used as the essence stone required to upgrade a territory but it could not be directly absorbed and cause the territory to upgrade. He still needed to meet the other upgrade requirements as well.

'woosh'

Just then a gust of wind swept Darren out of his thoughts and a second later he felt the air around him grow heavier and he instantly regognized the feeling to be an influx of essence in the air. 

Closing his eyes, Darren tried to focus on the surroundings and he was shocked at what he saw. There was a turquoise glowing clowd of fog made of life and water essence.

The air was so thick with water and life essence that Darren could see the surrounding plants grow at a visible speed. As he was admiring the new sensations this influx of essence brought, Darren suddenly noticed another change to his territory and it was coming in fast. 

Darren found himself in the very middle of the territory and stared surprised at the massive trench that had just appeared running directly through his territory. Darren decided to follow it to the top.

It started at the north most pole of his territory which was now a solid couple miles outside the old residential outskirts area and it had a massive pipe about 2 meters in diameter sticking out from beyond his territory. What was even more strange was there was a grey rusty pump to the side that looked like the type of thing someone would use to trigger dynamite.

Darren started pumping out of curiosity and was shocked to find a flood of water come out of the pipe then slowly trickly into the mud. He didn't stop after his initial pause because he finally saw what the system was trying to do by giving him a massive tench running through his territory.

It was a river that would be crucial to developing this territory as it was water and earth attuned so having a natural water source would be suitable.

After only about 10 pumps, the handle started going automatic and kept pumping even after Darren stepped away and admired the river.

Deciding to follow the river all the way down to make sure there weren't any problems, Darren started across the grass and pulled up his status screen out of boredom.

[Name: Darren Jones]

[Cultivation: 3] 

[Class: Farmer(Founder)] 

[Daos: Life, Water] 

[Bloodline: None] 

Darren had grown quite a bit with the initial rewards for being the worlds best farmer and was only one cultivation stage away from unlocking one of his most desired features of the system that he had read about from a system purchased information packet.

It was the Skill panel. This was exactly as you would imagine with a bit of a twist. Skills are apparently practically impossible to acquire. This is because they are only given out by the system. Not only this but the system only gives out skills to Founders. This was the universal term for someone who owns a land spirit. 

Founders are very rare and are usually only found on newly integrated planets. Planet's who's spirituality is in fritz due to recent integration can have slips in their soul and some pieces end up in the system's hands. It will then distribute authority over the different fractured souls to a select few lucky class holder. There are usually only about 100 souls per world and considering there must have been millions of class holders awakened, Darren had gotten extremely lucky.

Founders were considered to be the elite of awakened society no matter where you went in the cosmos. This biggest part of a Founder's power relies on the system store. Normal class holders had access to the system but not in the same way a Founder did. 

A normal class holder is only able to peruse the items in the store related to their class which slims down the choices for useful items. Founders on the other hand have access to all the the possible items in the shop for all classes recorded by the system. Not only that they also had access to their own unique set of items only Founders could buy. One of these items was the the information packet Darren had just bought for a measly 20 gold.

Reminded of his inherent advantage, Darren pulled up the system and started searching for items to boost his power. 

[Intermediate Quality Essence Stone]

[Price: 100 gold]

[Description: A stone plucked from an Essence Vain filled to the brim with pure unattuned essence extremely useful for cultivation]

-------------

[Turtle Constitution Technique]

[Price: 500]

[Description: Created by the Black Tortoise Empire, it is a basic constitutional method the empire would give to new recruits in the army. Capable of toughening the user's body to a degree.]

Darren noted that the first item was the same item he replaced his territory token with in order to upgrade his territory. After buying the two items. Darren decided he would immediately try his new technique after he finished inspecting his budding land.