If I might be so bold as to make an audacious claim. One could never know true embarrassment until they forcefully choke down chunks of flavorless bread while being watched by an ardent fan and employee whose expression sits somewhere between satisfaction and anticipation.

“This stuff is so freaking disgusting. How do they eat this crap?”

Unprompted, visions of fruits and other delicacies flooded my brain. Oh thanks CBU, very helpful of you. I’m glad you rooted around the humans’ memories to show me just how sucky my situation is. I found at least a little relief as Beatrice offered a small bowl of meat honey, which I carefully applied to the next chunk of food. The sweetness and slightly smoky flavor definitely helped, but it was still atrocious.

While the comedy routine of my retches and Beatrice’s ‘peace offerings’ continued, I was comforted by a familiar song and dance; eating while watching the Ben Channel. If I wanted to stimulate myself even more, I now had the option of turning up the volume on the Harven & Jill Show. Of course, there were the old classics like Beck 99.9 or the timeless ‘Valkybees Try to See How Close they Can Come to Killing Their Siblings Before Bedivere Smacks the Shit Out of Them.’ Or maybe put on relaxing background noise like lofi Yelah tortured screaming radio.

Ah… Speaking of her. She’s taken to screaming and yelling for hours now, and it was really starting to bother me. Her body was currently with Grehn and Vlugh, and the three of them were doing random tasks around the hive. Honestly, I didn’t have much a place for them, considering drones were much more effective laborers. Their skillsets were mainly focused on combat, so there wasn’t much for them to practically do around the hive. Currently they were in a sort of worker limbo, jumping from building to patrolling and so on to find a suitable place.

Except for Yelah, of course. Her position was a bit unique.

She was not having a fun time, no matter what position I put her in. When she was with her friends, like she was now, all she did was scream and sob. When apart from them, her only reaction was to ooze sadness and regret.

I wanted to talk with her at some point. Letting her fester in her hatred would probably end up poorly for me, but I just didn’t want to deal with her shit at the moment. In the end, though, I thought it would be important to really get into the weeds with her. Yelah’s presence was a constant reminder of the Yiwi Operation for me, funnily enough. Not the giant metal pole I was using as a pen, not the constant back and forth arguing from the old humans, nothing. Just her. And the reason was simple.

It was because of her that the whole thing started, all the way back when her team encountered the hive.

I didn’t regret my actions. Nor did I regret the actions of my bees. Beryl, who was presently training the troops more rigorously than ever before, had learned her lesson. Of course, the responsibility fell onto me. With the bees being Linked, anything they did was something I would be directly responsible for. And that wasn’t taking into account the simple fact that I was their leader.

What could I do to properly punish her? I wasn’t in a big rush, consdiering how painful she found her current situation, but it was somerthing I’d like to get off my ever-growing plate. Hm… You know, she was pretty much perfect, if you thought about it. Long, dirty blond hair. Wiry muscles. Skin that was hard thanks to her profession, yet still soft in some way.

Of course, I’m talking about using her as Queen’s vessel. Obviously.

In some ways, it was a great idea. In doing so, we could permanently keep Yelah under wraps, and we wouldn’t need to put effort into using her as a puppet. Plus, her Ability was something we were already thinking of studying to be able to do this exact sort of thing. As for whether Queen would even want Yelah’s body, that was a question that could come later.

All of that being said, it was something I could think about in the background. For now, the priority was Egg-Laying. So I decided to just put on the Ben Channel as I munched.

They weren’t seeing anything particularly interesting, but he and the rest of his squad were doing some important work at the moment. Namely, an investigation. It had been a bit of struggle to convince Ben to tear himself away from the ever-surprising sights of human society, but there were some very concerning things happening in this forest.

I am, of course, talking about the poisoned river.

Ah, yes. Yet another reason Yiwi had to thank me on their hands and knees. The river, which I now knew to be called the Yam, was a large body of water that began in the mountains and flowed vaguely into the seas in the north. It was an important body of water, one which flowed straight through the Vultuous Forest, through the city of Yiwi, and fed the farmland that in turn fed the city. But it didn’t stop there. Because it flowed north, another important city was built up there. Maybe even a city more important than Yiwi.

Siniwan, the majestic capital of the Kingdom of Somuia.

It was a big deal. Maybe the capital didn’t get its fresh water solely from the river, like Yiwi did, but it was still a valuable source of water and transportation. It wasn’t a super gigantic river by any means, but still large enough to hold a barge or two. And it was crazy that Yiwi ended up making the river flow out of sight, yet it was large enough for boats to travel along it.

It was fair to assume any unfortunate happenings within the Yam River would have some equally unfortunate consequences for the human cities. Thankfully, Yiwi had developed a solution to such problems! Oh thank goodness they had their Rotor to keep their water nice and clean.

Wait a second…

Yup. No Rotor, no good for the Yam. Especially not with this strange toxicity flowing through it. The gunk my Lock was spitting onto the riverbank was starting to piss me off, because I needed that space for flowers, dammit! Who cares about the humans’ stomachs? Whatever the poison was, I doubted it was an accident. Someone was intentionally poisoning the river, and perhaps even masking it as ugly runoff from the rains.

But it wasn’t freaking raining right now! And I’m no expert, but does ash really make you deathly ill? Maybe. Like I said, I’m not an expert. And this is a strange world so…

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Nah. This reeks of foul play for sure. If someone was dumping toxins into this crucial source of life for Yiwi, then they could’ve killed the entire city by now. Even with their Rotor-powered filtration system, it would’ve been dangerous. And so, I once again saved their sorry posteriors with my awesome power, giving up a precious portion of my Mind in the process.

I didn’t want my Mind to be acting as a glorified water filter forever, though.

Ben still hadn’t found anything upriver. Which wasn’t all that surprising; I doubted the culprits would be close by. The advantage of poisoning a river was that nature would do all the dirty work for you. But I was curious to see what sort of dastardly ne’er-do-well would be so daring.

Unfortunately, without anything interesting to see, the Ben Channel was uncharacteristically dull. Sure there were squirrels and electric crystals and the occasional leftover rotting corpse, but I had seen it a million times before. And so had Ben. Poor little guy was distraught about how boring everything was compared to the novelty of the city.

Hm. I’m sure Ben would find something interesting. In the meantime, my stomach was feeling pretty full. Since that’s the case, I might as well get ready to actually lay eggs.

Our number one goal in terms of Egg Laying is to create queens, and to do that, we presumably need to unlock them. Since that’s the case, I need to focus on ways to level up the Ability. In the past, if I recalled correctly, I managed to level up by simply using the Ability. Except it wasn’t actually that simple. Especially when I leveled up to 3, I specifically remember the tool tip saying “Qualibee AND Quantibee.” Disregarding the silly pun, the message was clear: it wasn’t enough to just pump out base-cost Linkers or drones or whatever. No, the Ability liked it when I used a bunch of Mind or tried to play around with the capabilities of the Ability.

However, I was a bit hesitant. The Yiwi Operation taught me many things, and I’m still coming to terms with a lot of what happened. But one of the biggest things was the scary lack of knowledge we posses about our bees and everything surrounding them.

How could we have known that the Linkers would have a hard time limit? We had absolutely no time to test them, and by the time we realized something was wrong, we were so busy with the rest of the operation that there was no way to understand the warning signs. If their [Linker Stinger] description had some sort of warning, then of course I could put the blame on us. But like this? No fair, I say.

Which I why I’ve been thinking of caution and documentation moving forward. What were the capabilities and limitations of the Linkers? Of the Kin Link itself? What’s the difference between a base-cost Linker and one that was made with 1% extra Mind? 2%? More? What about a Warrior? What exactly changes when more Mind is used to create an egg?

All those questions and more, answered next time! I couldn’t help but let out a sigh as I looked out at the now-familiar sight outside my window. It wasn’t that I had no interest in discovering those answers; in fact, I was excited! But was such detailed research even feasible? It wasn’t like we could lay hundreds of eggs for each subtype with dozens of different conditions. The scale was just way out my hands.

Since that’s the case, I decided that having the other queens help with that research was the way to go. At least for some of the more burning questions.

Right now, the Linkers are the most important bees in the hive, despite their lack of apparent sentience. Using them as experimental guinea pigs was my current plan. Not only would I need tons of Linker bees for the weekly refreshes, but understanding them in more detail was crucial to avoid a repeat of what happened in Yiwi. Plus, who knew what would happen when the Linkers are made with a bit more juice?

Speaking of juice, I once again cursed my lack of knowledge as I prepared myself for some good ol’ laying. This time I grumbled about Mind as a whole. Before the whole ordeal with the humans, I thought I was starting to get a better understanding of the system this world operated under. Every living creature has a Mind, and that Mind can vary in power. The power of the Mind can manifest in the material world as psychic-like capabilities, letting pretty much anyone throw rocks around like an esper.

But there were some odd quirks to said psychic powers. Mind could be represented as a percentage, shown by the menus, which allows for fine control of its power. Individuals can allocate Mind shown through percentages, allowing them to create mostly permanent influences on the world.

And then there were Abilities.

The more I thought Abilities, the more frustrated I became. They just made absolutely no sense. Psychich powers shouldn’t allow you to lay freaking eggs! Or make you able to swordfight with a long stinger. So what was up with Abilities?

Well, they’re still tied to Mind in some way. When I use Egg-Laying, as I was starting to do, I felt the familiar tug on my Mind, the Ability drawing power to execute its function. Egg-Laying specifically allowed me to use food and Mind to produce a living creature, which meant I didn’t have to create eggs through other, more familiar means.

But how was that even allowed? Is the life that’s born from an egg formed through Mind? So Mind isn’t just a force that exerts itself on the world. I’d thought of such things before, when thinking of B-boxes and the like, but it was still strange to think about.

Which is why the humans threw all sorts of metaphorical wrenches into things. It wasn’t something I had focused on much, considering the situation, but the humans had existed in this Mind-full world forever or whatever, so they had too know more about Mind. And they did, to some degree.

The way Yelah saw Mind was the imposition of the will. ‘Mind allows you to push against the world, forcing it to do what you want. People with a higher Mind Degree have more powerful spirits, which is why they seem more powerful.’

That all made sense to me. So then why was Yelah so weak? Well, in theory she wasn’t that weak. In fact, her Ability was insanely esoteric and powerful, speaking as someone who was used to regular physics. To her, existing in the same sort of state as Dip made total sense. To her, and to Dip, they were like one, but separate. Of course they could be together and use the other’s strengths.

Of course, it made no sense to me, but sure.

Other powerful Mind users like Jill and Harven had a slightly different perception. For Harven, he thought this when I checked: ‘Mind is power, plain and simple. There isn’t anything deep about it. Your Mind represents your power, and if you have more power, then the world naturally follows you.’

As for Jill…

‘Those who grasp things are strong with Mind. That is why the most basic usage is to push or pull and whatnot. You are grasping the world and using it. At the higher levels, this manifests in more strange forms. Those who grasp will inevitably grasp for themselves, so the Mind allows them to truly understand themselves.’

“Very philosophical and cool,” I told the both of them, giving them a thumbs up. They stopped arguing for a second to look at each other in confusion, which I ignored. As for what their ideas told me, all it showed was that each person had their own interpretation of what Mind actuially was, which wasn’t all that helpful.

As I tried looking at things from another angle, the first of many Linker eggs popped out of my mouth, which was swiftly carried away by Beverly, one of the nursery bees. I waved at her and she shyly waved back. As for Mind, I began to look more into each human’s Ability and how they were taught to use Mind.

After all, if they had a teacher, then I could just steal their lessons. Very easy.

All of them had formal training. I’m talking every single human. It wasn’t incredibly surprising, but even for people like Yelah or Oyonshe who had lonely childhoods, they had some sort of teacher that at least taught them the basics of Mind. Unfortunately, none of it was especially helpful. None of them had powerful teachers or anything, and what they were taught was mostly basic theory so that they didn’t walk around blowing shit up by accident. However, there was a particularly interesting consistency across every human and their experiences.

One Ability.

It was something I had obviously noticed and stored in the back of my mind (along with every dang scrap of information from the Link), but it wasn’t something I had thought about too often. But it did make some sort of sense. At face value, it was probably for a similar reason that most humans didn’t constantly use Mind for frivolous things like opening doors or whatever: they had very little Tappable Mind available at any given time. And the main reason for that was that every person used Locks extensively.

One could see from Yelah’s menu alone.

[Name: Yelah Welay]

[Age: 26 years]

[Profession: Mercenary]

[Status: X]

[Abilities:

* Friendly Immersion (Lv. 8)

* Humanity Factor

]

[Mind: 4th Degree]

[Tapped Mind: 0% / 40%]

[Mind Locks:

* Life (5%)

* {Knowledge} (~25%)

* {Combat} (~60%)

* {Profession} (~65%)

* Yiwi (5%)

* {Misc.} (80%)

]

If all her Locks were activated, she would be using 240% of her Mind, which was, as far as I could tell, impossible. Of course, these Locks were never activated all the time. Things like any of the various things she kept under the {Combat} section wouldn’t need to be used all the time. And since an Ability did tap Mind, she would need to keep some available to use it.

But I wasn’t satisfied with that answer. It was just too weird for every human to have exactly one Ability, so what was the deal? The tiniest freaking bee was born with multiple Abilities, so why were humans forced to deal with this limitation?

There was one outlier. One thing that was obviously out of place.

[Humanity Factor]