Several months later.
Uzel Forest, once lush, abundant, and brimming with life, had become nothing but a flat expanse of earth.
Its wooded hills had been burned, its mounds leveled, and its debris cleared away. Birds, beasts, and magic monsters had vanished without a trace, leaving only the desolation of cleared land.
Yet as nature's vitality receded, another kind of prosperity rapidly took its place.
Humans had occupied what should have been a wild, untamed landscape. Rather than practicing slash-and-burn agriculture or reclaiming farmland, they were developing it in a special way.
The recruited native residents worked across this stretch of level ground.
They were paving the surface using a method similar to masonry.
Each worker held a palm-sized restriction patch, applied mortar with a tool, and attached it to a stone slab on a workbench.
Then these stone slabs, roughly a foot across or larger, were set into the ground according to their numbers.
The purpose of the earlier surveying and marking now became apparent: it provided the data for this stage of the work.
With precise calculations already completed in advance, the workers needed only to check the corresponding numbers to easily locate where each slab belonged, ensuring the quality of construction.
Recruitment had been underway for quite some time, and the workers on-site gradually grew skilled and efficient. With work proceeding simultaneously at every camp and construction site, progress accelerated at a visibly increasing pace.
Thus, every construction site like this bustled with activity and prosperity.
At that moment, at construction site number 15 in the great array's Third Quadrant Zone.
A native worker paused his work and looked into the distance.
Before him lay a vast, entirely open plain.
The forest that had once stood there seemed to be reflected in his eyes, but a moment