Riches and Bitches: I have a gate to an isekai and leveling-up system!

The feeling of aura flowing out of my body, separating from my soul and filling the seemingly bottomless hole of the stable gate's construct…

It was overwhelming.

As much as I tried my best to tame and control this process, it happened along its natural path, regardless of my attempts to change it.

My soul literally thinned out as more and more of my energy fell down the abyss of the endlessly hungry gate.

All the faint aura of unclaimed energy gravitating around my actual aura vanished and fed into the core of the construct. And before I could even properly notice, nearly half of what I foolishly believed to be a sizeable reserve evaporated without a single trace.

'Stop!'

Gritting my teeth to the point they started to move within my jaws, I cut the supply of aura. The rebound of separating from the flow made me stumble back two steps before finally regaining stability.

[Stable Gate remaining time: 40h]

Pretty much in line with the simple math, using up half of my aura reserve allowed the gate to persist for half as long as when I used close to all of it. And while the timer was still much longer than I would prefer… It became a perfect middle point between my desire to find out more about those gates and the need for the logistics to flow uninterrupted.

As the last whiskers of my aura left my soul and fell into the gate's frame, the reality itself started to warp, stretch out, and then pull towards the geometrical center of the steel frame mounted within the gateway project's cube. Enjoy new adventures from empire

The reality twisted further and further, leading to a total distortion of space at its center that then rapidly expanded, pushing away the bottomless pit of the purple backdrop, replacing it with the sights of the insides of Makary's hangar.

"It's done," I muttered, lowering my hands to my knees as I leaned forward and took a deep breath. Then, I looked up and right at Makary's face. "It's going to last forty hours."

Sparing not a single comment, Makary turned towards the gate and swung his arm towards the men on the other side.

Thankfully, changing the gate's location didn't seem to affect people's ability to perceive it.n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

'Is it because the earth's side didn't change?' I thought, only to abolish this stupid and wrong idea when I looked at Makary again.

Since he was on this side with me, if moving the gate around could affect the list of those I've permitted to notice it, he wouldn't be able to see it to begin with.

"Good," Makary whispered under his nose. He brought his arm down and put his hand into the sleeve at the bottom of his simple, military jacket. "They are starting to move."

The gateway project, in general, was the name for the whole area around the cube, where all sorts of services would pop out in the near future. For now, though, it reflected just the cube, the only building on the otherwise empty stretch of the plain.

But moving the gate from its old location to a new one was also a task that came with other changes, and improvements implemented by the engineers once they were allowed to study the practical ins and outs of the stable gate.

This time, instead of using separate conveyors to move items up to the gate, push them over, and then let them drop on another automated cargo rail, they went a step further.

'Did they develop this on their own, or does something like this exist already?'

It was truly a bizarre structure. A shelf-like construct consisting of four layers of conveyors stacked on top of each other, each with a strange mouth at its end.

Yet, as if this wasn't enough, as soon as Makary gave out the signal, his mercs rushed to move a carbon copy of this warehouse shelf-like construction. As the last step, they brought over and mounted connectors between the front-facing mouth of the earth-side construct and the back-facing mouth of its causing on the gate's other side.

Thanks to this, in mere minutes after the gate's opening, a set of three massive cargo lines connected Makary's hangar with the world we were in, allowing for smooth and relatively seamless movement of small-to-medium-sized packages.

The vertical use of the conveyors also allowed the engineers to dedicate greater width for the road, allowing them to stretch the motorized passage just wide enough for two trucks to pass by each other with the necessary margin of distance between them.

In the end, though, there simply wasn't enough space to create a dedicated passage for people, forcing human traffic to happen occasionally, when there weren't any trucks hauling containers full of goods in and out of this brand-new world.

A marvel of improvised engineering, sticking together on good word, the engineer's faith, and copious amounts of ducktape. But also a massive mark of how both the gateway project on this side of the gate and Makary's hangar on the other were bound to evolve in the near future.

In the end, the conveyors took over merely a third of the gate's width, while the entire upper half of the space dedicated to the road simply went unused.

'If we could set conveyor belts for full-scale cargo containers, we could move them much faster than any truck could. And that means…'

I shook my head and looked over at Makary, only to catch him staring at how his men quickly turned the bare gate into a fully industrialized passage.

And before either of the two of us could have a chance to shake our thoughts off, a huge number of imperials started to approach… Along with a familiar face I should but ultimately didn't expect to see.

"Kash," I muttered long before the tomboyish woman could get close enough to hear me.

"Oh, right," Makary shook his head as he woke up from his daze as well. "I've assigned her to connect the cargo rails to the storage slash warehouse," Makary looked over at a nearby flat field.

I knew the designs.

This open space was supposed to become the biggest transit hub within the camp, dedicated solely to moving the goods in and out of the gate.

A project that we had to somehow replicate on the other end of the portal for my gate to reach its full logistic potential.

'Well, that's all but a song for the future,' I thought, shaking the thoughts of the future grandeur out of my mind as I forced myself back upon reality.

"Well, if it's her, I believe we shouldn't have any problems here," I replied just for the sake of speaking back. Then, I shook my head again before casting yet another stare at the man nearby. "With that said, aren't we supposed to go with Leon?"

I couldn't see the man anywhere within the hangar.

'Obviously,' I thought.

There was no way Makary would allow that young nouveau riche to experience something as crucial as moving the gate's location.

Even if he was bound to learn about it in the coming days, there was absolutely no purpose to reveal this card right now, when our cooperation was still merely in its infancy.

"Weren't you to go with Fay?" Makary threw me an eye, causing my own eyes to widen.

"Damn it, I nearly forgot," I admitted, startled by the prospect of disappointing my girl. "Thanks for reminding me," I thanked only to turn on my heel and direct my steps to where Fay was likely busy using whatever scraps of materials she found to turn our raw love-nest into a somewhat livable space.

I last saw her when Kash left us to our own devices back at the headquarters project. And I was there to witness Fay enter her home-keeper phase as she threw herself and happily toiled away covering the raw, prefabricated floor with some soft herbs, enchanting the empty door frame with spells that did the job of a door much better than an actual door or…

To be frank, I had no idea what else Fay was doing back at our place to be. The fact that she could put a barrier that no sound or light could penetrate and that could easily stop anyone unauthorized from crossing it…

This was my first time learning she could do something like that, even after all the time we spent with our souls literally mixing together!

And given the passion that sparked in her eyes as she happily went ahead and continued to prove just how best of a best girl she was. With all of that in mind…

A cold shudder went down my spine, causing my entire body to stiffen a little.

'With how eager she was to make that empty shell of an apartment into an actual home, she's likely really looking forward to it,' I thought before sighing an internal sigh.

'And with that in mind, how could I rob her of her chance to stuff that new house of ours with all the designer furniture she could find back on earth?'