Quinlan didn't pause to admire the effect. The gate was still pulling at him, and there were still sixty thousand people on the other side waiting to come through.
He flew into the skies and looked at what he'd built.
Eight thousand homes spread across the clearing in a grid of packed-earth roads and compressed walls. It looked impressive from ground level. From above, it looked hopeless.
'This won't work.'
The math was simple. A hundred thousand people needed roughly twenty thousand housing units. At one story each, that was twenty thousand rooftops, twenty thousand footprints of forty square meters each, plus roads, plus green space, plus every public building he hadn't started yet. The total acreage would swallow the clearing and push deep into the surrounding forest, which defeated the point of building inside a forest in the first place.
He needed to go up.
