No sooner have the words left my scent gland, than she’s off, Dashing into the Dungeon. Quick as a snap, she’s back with her team, carrying large mandible-loads of Biomass.
Naturally, this means the queen is getting ready to lay another clutch in the next few days. All of this Biomass has largely been funnelled toward her. Guess my own preparations need to step up a gear.
First, the farms!
What’s wrong with the farms? Nothing!
What do we need? MORE FARMS!
We need to pump out Biomass and cores faster than ever before in order to kick start the growth of the hatchlings, and let me tell you, there are going to be a heck of a lot of them!
Time to clear out the existing farms and chow down. No need to waste the food, and I somewhat spitefully want to keep it from the queen in order to slow down the rate of growth, if only a little.
This nets me a quick thirty Biomass, more than I expected. The farms have been subjected to Vibrant and Crinis’ attention over the last few days and they have been thorough to say the least. Feasting done, the Excavation starts. Currently, the farms are four round chambers about twenty metres beneath the surface. In my grand expansion plan, I add another eight chambers, roughly double the size of the previous.
Due to the size of the task, I end up recruiting Vibrant and her gang when they return to the nest, and we get our face-hands stuck into the dirt.
Ah, the bliss! Ant zen, how I’ve missed you.
A huge digging project like this produces a heck of a lot of dirt, and the villagers are treated to the sight of a steady stream of workers crawling about on the anthill, dumping loads of dirt and doubling the size of our visible home on the surface.
I’m almost curious to ask what they think we’re up to, but I don’t need the attention. There’s a ton more work to do, after all.
Once the digging is done and I’ve collected two Levels in my Excavation, enough to advance it to the third rank, Expert Excavation, I need to increase our core farming speed.
Unlike at our last nest, I don’t have a convenient pool of Mana-charged water I can siphon off into the nest. In fact, the closest water supply is the river on the other side of the village.
Theoretically, I could use my Water Magic to create all the water we need. Though, according to Beyn, materials created by Mana don’t quite have the same natural properties or capacity to hold Mana quite like the original does. You can survive on Mana-produced water, but it doesn’t hydrate nearly as well as nature’s own. This apparently applies to anything made with Mana. You can make metals with some advanced classes of earth mage, but they just aren’t as good as what can be mined. So rather than settle for second best, I want a natural water source for the farms.
What does that mean? More digging!
With Tiny helping, I get straight into digging out a channel that leads from the anthill toward the river in a curved line that takes us around the southern edge of the village. Whilst we take care of the surface side of the equation, I ask Crinis to use her tentacles to burrow holes from the end of the channel that drains into the upper four farms, then create a pool in each of those farms that allows the water to drain off the top into further holes to reach the lower eight farms.
With my increasingly magnificent digging Skills and Tiny’s brute strength, we dig out a fairly sizeable channel in under a day. It takes a bit longer to make sure the banks of our channel are properly squashed flat to prevent leaking. Then we create a gate mechanism at the river end and at the anthill end. The last thing we want is to dump a river worth of water into the nest…
The thwacking I would get from the queen. Yikes.
Our work doesn’t go unnoticed in the village, and Enid comes out to ask us what the hell we’re up to. Once we communicate the thrust of the project, the farmers become immensely excited. It isn’t long before Enid approaches to ask if I can assist them with a channel system for their farms. In return, they offer to forge up some proper gates for our irrigation system, something I’m happy enough to accept.
No way I’m digging it for them until I clear my schedule, though!
The ecstatic villagers are delighted to have a chance to help out their saviour, the ‘Great Ant’. They forge day and night to get the gates in place as soon as possible. So it is that a day later, the final barrier between the river and the channel is cleared away and sweet, sweet water flows to the anthill and down into our farms where it begins to absorb the ambient Mana in the air, drawing our own homegrown, free range monsters to drink and hopefully form some cores.
Excellent.
With the major renovations to the nest completed, I can let the accelerated spawn of monsters during the wave take care of the rest and populate the farms. If we keep a steady drip of water going, we’ll have a nice harvest of cores in a few days.
We’ve reached another milestone whilst I was busy digging. At first just one, but then all of the first twenty larvae started rolling about and spinning their cocoons.
In a short amount of time, they had become pupae, the final stage.
9. Check out my Skillz
I’m exhausted and my mandibles are aching something fierce after all that digging. And is it time to rest?
NOPE.
Those damn pupae are teasing me with their very existence. The twenty large casings are resting against the side of a chamber, taunting me with their stillness. Within them, the hope of ant-kind is taking the final steps of their gestation, turning from a grub into something more. Something incredible. The ant species to end all ant species.
At least that’s what I’m hoping for. If they suck, I’m going to be really disappointed…
It shouldn’t happen, though! I reinforce my own positive mindset. They are going to be great. I’ve put so much effort into creating them and making sure they’ll get a solid boost to start out their new lives, surely they’ll be great!
The closer this project is getting to fruition, the more stressed I’m getting.
Put it behind you, Anthony. Put all of it behind you!
Focus on yourself for a while, treat yourself. To what should I treat myself? To Skill training, of course!
Not only me, Tiny and Crinis have been roped in as well.
After discussing things with Beyn and drawing on his knowledge, our knowledge of the System has greatly expanded. The weightiest nugget of wisdom to come out of that was the importance of Skills.
Whereas I had been putting too much emphasis on evolution and the energy within my core, I was ignoring two aspects of the holy trinity of monster power. Evolution! Mutation! Skills!
All things must be in balance. So it is in nature, so it is within the monster. When one tree is over watered, it does not grow properly, drowning instead of thriving, and the other trees wither. Only when the life-giving succour is evenly distributed to all three trees shall the monster truly flourish in all aspects. Mentally, physically, spiritually!
I’ve gone some way to addressing the shortcomings of my mutations, but my Skills are still lacking. When Beyn found out that none of my combat Skills was of the fourth rank, he nearly slapped me out of sheer shock, and in the process, almost lost his only remaining hand. He really needs to be more careful.
At least now with Shattering Bite advancing, I have one fourth rank combat Skill. Advancing Skills, fusing them and taking them to their extreme ends is what the surface races spend most of their time doing in the pursuit of strength.
Therefore, the time has come to take part in that most sacred of all System-related activities: grinding.