When Suho asked Khalid what significance the village he was so intent on held, Khalid explained that it had been used as a refugee camp for quite a long time.
Refugees who had drifted in from all over had formed a village there, and not long ago, several soldiers belonging to the federal government had barely managed to flee to the village after being wounded in battle.
The villagers treated and cared for them, and the soldiers stayed there for a while. But when they attempted to contact their main unit in order to return, al-Shabaab intercepted the communication.
Taking the village to be an outpost for federal government forces, al-Shabaab had brought a large number of troops and attacked.
In other words, through a series of tangled circumstances, they had been unjustly made a target.
As Suho listened to the whole story, scratching his chin, he asked,
“...So, in any case, this is a place you’re familiar with?”
“That’s right. We’ve been settled here for quite some time.”
“I see. Good. Then from now on, let’s make this the capital.”
“Pardon...? The c-capital...? But the capital is already over there in Mogadishu...”
“Is Mogadishu still functioning as the capital?”
“...Not exactly, but...”
“I heard it’s only a symbolic capital. From what I’ve been told, one faction after another keeps fighting there, and whichever side wins uses it as a garrison each time. There are also many districts that have been reduced to ruins because of the frequent battles. I don’t see any need to insist on making that place the capital.”
After pondering Suho’s words, Khalid slowly nodded. He was right. There was no reason to insist on Mogadishu as the capital.
This place, Wajid, where the refugees had now formed a village, had more than enough favorable conditions.
It had an arid desert climate and low annual rainfall, but that was true of most regions in Somalia anyway, and this place had the advantage of being mostly plains.
Though it had now largely been cut off, it had once been a place where NGO activities were active, so it also had some name recognition.
However, if this place were to be made the capital, the first issue to resolve would be the poor road infrastructure. Almost all of the routes connecting it to nearby cities were unpaved.
As Khalid sank into thought, Suho asked him again,
“How many refugees are there in this town in total?”
“It isn’t an exact count, but... I believe roughly between thirty thousand and thirty-five thousand people are gathered here.”
“That’s quite a lot. It’s suitable in many ways. Then let’s start from here.”
Suho selected a wide open lot and materialized a custom-made container module house on it.
It was not made of transcendent materials like Maglite or Blacksteel, but a factory-produced mass-production building: an ordinary container house with steel plates added to the outer walls.
It did not have incredible durability, but its interior layout was solid, it was sturdy enough to stop bullets, and above all, it had the advantage of being mass-producible as ordered—a steel modular house.
Suho showed the building to Khalid and handed it over, telling him to use it however he liked, whether as a command headquarters or a presidential residence.
Khalid, wearing a dazed expression as he looked around the building, was followed by dozens of high-end androids and enhanced androids, and behind them trailed even more villagers.
* * *
“You found Khalid Abdi Nur?”
“Yes. Just as the records suggested, he was exactly the kind of person suited for national reconstruction. If he’s to lead a country, he’ll have to cultivate many more necessary qualities, but for now, his heart is upright.”
After telling Khalid to look around the residence, consider its uses, and also select people to work with him, Suho crossed the dimensional gate in an instant and met Daniel, the WFP representative, on the other side of the Earth.
Daniel’s mouth fell open, as if he had never expected things to progress this quickly.
They had already discussed various matters regarding Somalia’s recovery, but now that they had found a leader to guide the nation, all those plans were about to accelerate.
The question of how to restore a place that had completely lost the functions of a nation was not a simple one.
Extremely poor countries could not rise again through mere financial aid or food aid alone; a foundation had to be laid so they could become self-sustaining once more.
Regarding this, Daniel had prepared a “Large-Scale Support Plan for the Reconstruction of Somalia’s Economy and Society,” but in truth, it was something that required an enormous amount of time.
First, the civil war issue had to be resolved, and an initial government system established.
Sustainable agricultural technologies had to be distributed, and modern agricultural infrastructure built.
Technical education programs had to be created so residents could achieve economic independence.
Basic education systems appropriate for different age groups, as well as medical systems, had to be established.
Energy technology had to be installed locally so that, in the long term, the country could become self-sufficient in energy, gradually revitalizing the national economy.
Transparency and accountability had to be strengthened to reform the international aid system.
Through all this, the trust of the international community had to be gained, helping the country return to normal...
It was truly dizzying to imagine just how much time and how many processes would be required.
“For now, I’ve assigned Khalid the androids he needs. I’ve made it so he can draw the necessary knowledge from them whenever he needs it, and I’ve also attached combat androids for his personal protection. So, Daniel, please communicate with Khalid and help ensure the Somalia Marshall Plan proceeds well in the long term.”
“Understood. There will be a great deal to do. Then what will you be doing, Suho?”
“I’ll take care of what’s more urgent.”
Somalia’s national reconstruction would take time.
The problem was that even now, countless people were starving to death in real time.
Whatever long-term plan they began, they first had to provide emergency food and safe water, and distribute nutritional supplements.
* * *
Suho crossed into the subspace warehouse and looked for Rabi.
When it came to supplying sufficient calories and nutrition in a small volume, nothing compared to Vitanova, the chewable tablets Suho had personally developed and supplied to the Tower-climbing admittees. However, he could not supply those tablets, produced in his alchemy laboratory, to billions of people all over the world.
No matter how much automation he incorporated into the process, it would be a mind-numbingly tedious task just to imagine.
How long would it take to churn out that much?
So what Suho requested from Rabi was TerraMill.
It was originally a grain from another galaxy called Arteria, but because the name was long and not to his liking, Suho had renamed it TerraMill.
TerraMill provided twice the calories of rice and was high in protein and essential amino acids.
In other words, it had twice the energy density of rice of the same weight.
Naturally, it did not exist on Earth. It was a grain consumed as a staple food on another habitable planet, but it was nearly impossible to cultivate in Earth’s soil environment.
In particular, it was a variety that required ether energy, rather than water or sunlight, in order to grow, so it had virtually no economic viability.
Rabi explained these points, but Suho said it did not matter.
Whatever the penalties, they were not an issue.
That was because he did not need it as seed for cultivation. He would simply receive it as grain, so whether it could be cultivated or not did not matter in the slightest.
In that case, aside from that, it had nothing but advantages.
In addition to the calorie and nutrient density mentioned earlier, it did not spoil easily, so it could be stored for five to ten years without any special measures, making it efficient for logistics management.
It also had a nutty flavor, meaning it could be preferred in most cultural spheres, and it was expected to be easy to process into rice dishes, noodles, bread, or pasta.
It was truly a dream grain.
“Okay. For that, hmm... give me one yang won’s worth.”
“One yang won’s worth?”
“Yeah. This is food, after all. I’m going to be distributing it widely, so I think I’ll be using a lot.”
“Until now, you reduced your allotments to 100 ja won at a time, but this time, it’s a large amount after quite a while. Understood. I will provide one yang won’s worth of Arteria.”
Compared to Vitanova, it was vastly inferior, a lower-grade substitute several steps below it. Still, compared to rice, it could be considered an upgrade, and the fact that it could be obtained in massive quantities was a tremendous advantage. That grain was TerraMill.
The amount of TerraMill he received for one yang won was a staggering 12 gyeong tons.
Suho had no intention of eating it himself, but for some reason, he felt reassured.
“Now I need boxes to put this in. Among the thousand-yang-won items I have, what’s sturdy, not very valuable in itself, available in sufficient quantity, and unlikely to deform?”
“Quantity is sufficient for anything, but... for something sturdy while having low intrinsic value, granite seems most appropriate. To begin with, it’s extremely cheap, and we have as much as 6 hae tons of it. It’s the material we have in the most extreme surplus.”
“Oh, right. We had a lot of granite. Then let’s use granite. Cut the granite and make it into boxes. Here, look.”
Suho drew an image of a box on a tablet.
It was about the size of two forty-foot container boxes connected side by side, with internal dimensions of 13 meters in length, 5 meters in width, and 3 meters in height.
Excluding the weight of the granite frame, it was a box that could theoretically be filled with up to around 100 tons of TerraMill.
Of course, transporting this with Earth’s means of transportation would be no ordinary problem. If restrictions were applied according to the safety standards of roads and ports, that kind of weight would be impossible, and the cargo would have to be divided into much smaller portions. But since Suho had no intention of transporting it by vehicle or ship anyway, it did not matter.
“You can cut it in this shape, right?”
“Of course. As many as you like. How many shall I cut?”
“Five million.”
“...Pardon?”
“I said cut five million. Exactly this shape and this size, five million of them, and fill each one with 100 tons of TerraMill.”
Despite the incredulous expression on Rabi’s face, her work was swift.
If she had to perform spatial work outside the subspace warehouse, it would have taken a considerable amount of time, but inside the subspace warehouse, where she could operate her spatial abilities at full power, it was a different story.
In reality, it took only a few seconds to cut and create the five million granite boxes Suho had requested, then fill each with 100 tons of TerraMill.
“Now, that means they can hold 500 million tons of TerraMill, right? This should be enough to feed roughly seven billion people for a year... No, wait, you said it’s twice as efficient as rice, so it could feed fourteen billion people for a year. Well, for now, that should do for grain.”
“Would there ever be a need for this much grain?”
“There is... On Earth, a lot of people starve to death.”
“Hmm... I had no idea it was such a poor planet.”
“Tell me about it... It’s a disgrace to our planet, but... there are complicated circumstances.”
After muttering to himself, Suho opened the tablet again and drew a hexahedron of a different size.
“This time, it’s a water tank. I’m going to make this one a little big. Cut it to 50 meters wide, 40 meters long, and 5 meters high. I’m going to fill each with ten million liters of clean glacier water.”
Once again, Rabi created five million enormous granite boxes and filled each with ten million liters of clean glacier water.
“Mm, this time I’m going to make low-grade disease treatment potions... Ah, I really need to make a lot... I’ll have to get more automatic packaging machines and just churn them out in plastic ampoules that are easy to obtain. Rabi, you help too.”
After having Rabi prepare a few more things for a while, Suho decided to distribute the surplus resources to each village according to its resident population.
1. The first was food.
For the time being, TerraMill, packed 100 tons at a time in granite boxes.
2. The second was clean water.
Likewise, glacier water, packed ten million liters at a time in granite tanks.
3. The third was low-grade disease treatment potions and low-grade healing potions. These were prepared for those who had not received even basic medical benefits for a long time, but since they could not be distributed at random, distribution was entrusted to the leadership.
4. The fourth was small ether generators.
These were portable ether generators capable of producing 300 kWh of electricity per hour. They were like hippos that gobbled up Etherium, but since they were mass-produced models, they had the advantage of being available for bulk purchase. If run continuously for an entire month, they were high-performance models capable of producing enough electricity for seven to eight hundred households.
In the impoverished villages of Somalia, where there were practically no home appliances to consume electricity, that amount would likely be enough for several thousand households.
5. And one “partially enhanced” android to protect the above four things.
Armed force was absolutely necessary to protect the supplies received from rebel groups or other armed factions, as well as to ensure their own safety. It was necessary for maintaining internal security, too.
Most regions of Somalia were not only poor, but incredibly dangerous.
The problem was the numbers. Super-enhanced androids, which required Suho’s touch one by one, or enhanced android Ascends could not be mass-produced in such quantities.
So he settled on purchasing high-end androids in bulk and partially enhancing them, with the power units and armor being the main areas of enhancement.
When he replaced their power sources with S-rank Etherium and reinforced their armor with Magrite, the combat power of the high-end androids rose to the level of a B-rank+ Ademity or higher.
Judging that to be satisfactory, he began producing them in large numbers.
Beside each of these “partially enhanced” androids, he attached a micro-surveillance drone the size of a fly. If an enemy appeared that even the android could not handle, it would immediately share that information, and the other androids nearby were programmed to provide combat support and annihilate the enemy.
If a report came in of an enemy that even that could not handle, Suho would be contacted immediately. He set up a system whereby he would send enhanced androids through the dimensional gate in his subspace warehouse and go to the area at once to subdue the enemy.
Having decided to install these five measures in every village across Somalia where a fair number of people were gathered, Suho updated the powered armor’s AI with a map of Somalia and data on the distribution of the population.
* * *
Kabasa refugee camp, located in the Doolow region of southwestern Somalia.
This was a place where close to forty thousand residents had gathered. Once, international relief organizations, including the UN Refugee Agency, had provided water, nutrition and sanitation facilities, emergency medical services, and essential relief supplies here, but now all of that aid had been cut off due to the intensifying civil war.
However, internally displaced people within the country, unaware of that fact due to the complete collapse of the communications network, continued to flock to Kabasa to escape drought and conflict. In the end, it had long since become a village of death, where those with nowhere else to go had settled down only to starve.
Suho appeared in this place, a dreadful neighborhood beyond description, plagued by wretched living conditions and food shortages.
“A... a robot from the sky...”
People were gathered here and there like the homeless, without even houses.
Bodies that could not be told apart as dead or alive lay sprawled everywhere, and every last one of them was so gaunt that only bones seemed to remain, making it painful to even regard them as human.
While they stared at Suho with startled eyes, he spotted a woman in one corner boiling something. Raising the visor of his helmet, he approached her.
“Ee... eek!”
Suho’s huge figure in powered armor was overwhelmingly intimidating, and the woman who had been boiling something was so startled that she collapsed onto the ground.
Suho approached and asked through the translation system.
“Please don’t be frightened. I won’t do anything to harm you. What are you boiling?”
“......Grass porridge...”
After watching Suho’s demeanor for a long while, she answered in a small voice, almost mumbling.
“Grass porridge?”
At that, the woman pointed to weeds growing sparsely here and there across the desert terrain. It seemed she meant that she picked such things and boiled them.
Suho frowned and asked again.
“You can eat something like that? It doesn’t look like it has much nutritional value...”
“...My children haven’t eaten anything for days...”
“Do you have many children?”
“I had ten children, but six died... The other four haven’t eaten anything, so they can barely breathe and are very ill.”
“Hah......”
A miserable reality.
How many villages like this were there? A sigh escaped him on its own.
Straightening from where he had crouched to speak with the woman, he stood upright, and saw thousands of eyes that had gathered at some point to watch him in silence.
Wounded, exhausted, sorrowful eyes.
Yet on one side of those faces shadowed by despair, he could also glimpse an intense yearning for life.
Suho took out one android that had finished its partial-enhancement upgrade and stood it beside him.
Since it was a high-end android indistinguishable from a human, it must have looked to the residents exactly like a clean, well-groomed person.
When another person suddenly appeared out of thin air, the startled people retreated several steps.
Slowly looking over the people whose eyes seemed ready to pop out, he turned the speaker volume of his powered armor’s helmet up to maximum and said,
“I am from Korea—”