Tommy tried to ease their fear, but his sweet soothing words were less effective than usual because what he was saying wasn’t making them feel better about what their eyes were seeing. And they were seeing pretty discouraging things.
Apparently, the large building they went to wasn’t actually their accommodation. It was the factory that they would work in for most of their lives.
When they entered the factory, they saw a large central furnace at the center of the floor. They also saw tens of forgers hammering hot, glowing pieces of metal over large anvils.
Everywhere they looked, people were working hard. There was no supervisor to ensure that people were spending their time on productive things. But everyone was still focused on working their hardest.
Their accommodation was behind the factory. Tommy took them there after they toured the first floor.
Each forger was assigned a single room. The room was larger than normal, as it contained a small kitchen at the back, but it was only slightly bigger than one of the rooms in the two-room apartment that Loki was given in his previous life.
Loki saw and curled his lips as he said to himself, "I already knew to expect something bad when I learned that the place we live is at the place we work, but I’m still surprised that they went this far. Isn’t land and space in this place dirt cheap?"
It would have been one thing for them to be given a small, cramped place to live in the fourth ring or even in the first ring. This would be understandable because things are very expensive there.
But this is the seventh ring where space is supposed to be cheap. Yet, the leader of the Rusty Bolts Society still skimped out on the small amount of money needed to give them comfortable accommodations.
At this point, there is no difference in their accommodations between those who joined a society and those who didn’t. The only difference is that, as bad as their accommodation is, it is free.
The six newbies also noticed this point. Unfortunately, it was too late to back out of the deal.
The six of them became anxious for their future, but Loki continued to be carefree. He slept well that night as if nothing was wrong. Then he woke up early the following day and went to the factory to learn how to forge.
He was very eager to learn how to forge, even though he was technically learning the technique for free and wouldn’t pay any price because he only had three months to learn it.
Other newbies like him will have one year to learn, after which they will have to start earning money for the Rusty Bolts Society. But since he doesn’t plan to work for the society for his whole lifetime, he plans to check out when he can.
He has done the calculations and came to the conclusion that he only has three months to spare before he has to reverse time and start again. So he plans to pack as much as he can into these three months of learning.
Forging wasn’t easy work by any definition of it. But it was manageable for him because his body was naturally four times stronger than the average power of a normal human body.
Plus, he had Metacs to improve his strength and a lot of internal energy to use those Metacs. So he had no problem adapting to the immense amount of work needed to learn how to forge.
While other newbies were struggling to keep up, he was so dedicated to forging that he worked 24/7 on it without resting. Both his body and mind were strong, so the immense work didn’t cause him to break down. He only needed to use the Concentration Metac to recover his mental energy once in a while.
Getting tired was a strange sensation that he never experienced since he advanced to rank 2. It was already very difficult for him to get tired at rank 1 because of the large amount of internal energy that he possessed, but even if he worked himself to the bone and somehow got tired, his 308 energy threads ensured that he would quickly recover his stamina and energy.
He didn’t understand the value of the 308 energy threads until he was using the Liquid Metal Metac, Body Lever Metac, Living Armament Metac, and other Metacs constantly for 24 hours straight without running out of internal energy.
He was able to understand that this was the case because the 308 energy threads were recovering his energy faster than he could use it. When he realized that he might have infinite energy with how fast he was recovering internal energy, he became even more encouraged to work himself to the bone.
He had asked around in his last life, so he knew that a single energy thread would increase energy recovery by 1%. He also knew that this 1% increase to someone with a large energy well would be large compared to someone with a small energy well, like Jim.
In general, people recover all of the energy in their energy well in one hour, no matter how large the energy well is. So someone with an energy well of 95 units, like Slav, will be able to recover all those 95 units in one hour, so their energy recovery rate will be 1.583 units of energy per minute.
For someone like Jim with a capacity of 27 units, his energy recovery rate will be 0.45 units per minute. So there is already a gap of 3.518 times between them. But this gap in their recovery rate will only increase once they gain energy threads.
Slav will be able to create 95 energy threads, which will grant him a 95% boost to his energy recovery rate. So at rank 2, Slav will be able to recover 3.087 units of energy per minute.