Back in town a few days later, Kelly was finishing her first experimental rig for testing the golden spiral. The pattern is common enough in nature and even after the end of the world she still had sufficient access to a knowledge base that allowed her to study the concept. Of course, it helped that the subject was so basic in nature. The two libraries in the old towns weren’t exactly college level, but they had more than enough material for this.

As for her rig? It was a simple enough set up. After messing around with the preservation enchantment, the boxes from the dungeon had, the town easily mixed in the knowledge with their spellcraft. Though it mostly came down to the fact that circles are really good for containment as there are no weak points for the power to pressure.

Once that is realized and you learn some of the basic magic runes, you can easily set up a magic circle. Runes and marks on the inside affect the outside and the opposite is true as well. After all, what good is a shield if the runes controlling it are on the outside where the enemy can get to them?

Of course, there are more advanced concepts out there that use other shapes to help concentrate effects and double or greater circles. Because sometimes you want to defend against the outside while doing something on the inside. Though this is a shallow overview, it was enough for Kelly to create a wooden testing rig.

The base is crafted from a single slab of stone, about three meters a side, and specially processed by a stone mage to be completely uniform. There is a classic magic circle of containment so if things blow up, it stays inside. On top of the stone, are four wooden risers that are used to suspend a square sheet of wood about a quarter of a meter off the stone. That wood and, to an extent, the risers, are meant to be replaceable.

Partly because of that chance of explosions and partly because Kelly plans to have multiple tests carved ahead of time that can be swapped out as needed. In theory, a stone tile would likely be better as you could make it more uniform, but even with magic, wood is easier to carve and shape.

Now she has everything set up and ready to go, so she places the first wood tile into place. Of course, the tile looks a little silly as it is two meters to a side and yet the carving in it half a meter at best, but Kelly wanted to start small. The containment circle was exactly well understood at this point, so better to be safe than sorry.

With the tile in place, Kelly inserts a small blob of Mana into the circle and connects it to the outer end point of the plain golden spiral carved into the wood. If you did this with a normal circle, you would get a light show as the circle lit up in a color corresponding to the type of power and quantity. This is actually the source of the next step up to the basic light spell where you use a hollow sphere instead of a blob of power.

However, when the power was placed in the spiral, it pulsed down the length of carving and basically flash banged Kelly as the containment circle wasn’t handling light in any way. A weakness she would have to remedy later. For now, though, she sets about repeating the experiment.

First with four other identical replacement tiles and then cycling through all five until the carvings had all degraded into uselessness as it wasn’t like Kelly was using masterwork wooden tiles. This process kept her busy for three entire days, though mostly because of the time she spent between tests to examine the tiles.

At least that is what Doyle assumes as he bowed out when the first day started into the second without signs of stopping. Even after that test was done, he decided against watching for now as it looked like Kelly was up for more of the same. He knew this was important work that needed to be done if people from his planet weren’t going to be complete barbarians when they finally got out into the rest of the universe. That, however, didn’t change the fact that watching it was boring when you weren’t involved.

Instead, he turned to his own experiments. More specifically, Doyle’s attempts at improving his ants. Since he had last actively paid attention to them, it had been a large number of cycles. Each new cycle created numerous nests from which he would choose the queens most capable of specializing their brood, only to start all over again.

At some point relatively early, the prey insect pattern had leveled up a good bit only for an ant pattern to split off. An interesting side effect of this split was that the prey insect pattern had dropped down in level. Not quite to where it started, but level five was a good bit lower than the 27 the ant pattern had managed to reach.

That 27 is shocking in its own rights. Very few of his patterns were at that level and the ones that were, tended to have been gained at that level. To have taken the prey insect pattern from something like level 3 all the way to splitting off ants as their own thing and getting that to level 27 is impressive. Doyle of course had his suspicions on why it worked.

Top of the list is of course the fact that he had figured out an important metric for the queens to focus on. More than enough stories contained the idea of advancing because of a deeper understanding of some concept so it would make sense. Even if there wasn’t some sort of mysticism about it, being able to focus on something important would help either way.

Though speaking of that concept, it had started to get very hard to differentiate between the queens. That likely being the reason why leveling the pattern had slowed down. At first, it was easy to pick out the queens that expressed their versatility better. Now an average drone was near perfectly average. The difference is not coming from them being slightly better or worse at one thing or another, but rather their overall ability with everything rising and falling in lock step.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Even that, however, tended to be more related to the individual drone, something about their potential, than it was the queens. So, with the leveling slowed and the drones coming out all the same, Jason felt that now was a good time to finally deal with the ant queen path thing. Something that felt so long ago he had to bring it up again just to check that he wasn’t misremembering anything.

{Ageless Queens

5/15 - You have earned +1 Destiny/Level, One ant queen of choice no longer has a max lifespan

10/15 - You have earned +1 Destiny/Level, One ant queen on each floor will be mentally joined to the previously chosen queen to form a true hivemind, Previously chosen queen receives +1 to their currently lowest mental stat for each other queen in the hivemind

15/15 - Path complete, You have earned +1 Destiny/Level, The ageless ant queen has an adjusted chance to become a roaming boss which increases with age and other queens in the hivemind}

Doyle nods, while he hadn’t remembered it one for one, the gist of it had stuck with him. One ant queen gets to be the head honcho, while others connect to it. That means first things first, make sure all his floors have a decent ant population on them. Though not just that, but also high-quality queens.

Which, after a quick check, does not seem to be a thing at the moment. Only the first two floors even have a queen or two, which have become completely real despite needing a much smaller amount of power to do so. Of course, most of that power that comes from adventurers adventuring is going to be taken up by first the dungeon and then the actual monsters. Still, the ants can’t really advance or grow on their own if they aren’t real.

Of course, the worst part from Doyle’s view, is that those few real queens are some of the ones he first placed way back at the start. He didn’t even have the actual pattern for ants until basically just now so those ants are more prey insects than ants. Still, they did manage to survive up until now.

Doyle decided to give them a chance. So, while he removed any ant nest which didn’t have a fully realized queen, those few on the first two floors got a pass. Then Doyle went and chose the cream of the crop from his last set of ant farms and used them as the designs from which he pulled to fill all ten floors with ants once again. Even floors like the third which don’t have classic environments in which ants would stay gets a few nests to see what they would do.

This led to three days of war. The delvers didn’t notice anything as most of the action happened when they weren’t around, but it was wild. After those three days and an uncounted number of experienced days because of Doyle’s innate time manipulation, things finally settle down as the remaining ant colonies finalize their territories.

Oh, and those few original colonies Doyle had left on the first and second floor? All gone. The new queens were simply capable of producing better warriors that were capable of trouncing any of the old guard.

Doyle had suspected this might be the outcome of course. When tests on the warrior drones is basically a miniature weightlifting competition, there isn’t much wiggle room. In fact, the only reason the wars lasted three days was because every one of the new nests was too even. The original queens were taken down within the first day.

Though this was interesting, what really drew Doyle’s attention was stuff like how the ants adapted to the third floor. A stone maze with basically no deep layers of dirt to dig into. That didn’t stop them from digging in. They chose to take over the largest mushrooms and among the roots of the vines.

The vine roots are easy enough to figure out. Doyle had to place some dirt to get them start and with time they formed a sort of root mat on the ceiling. Underneath which, a handful of ant colonies lived. Not that many, though.

In fact, Doyle predicts that given enough time, there will end up being only one ant nest on the ceiling. Not because they’re hyper aggressive, but rather because of how the floor works. Since the various sections of the floor get shifted once a day, eventually no matter how far apart the two nests started, they will be placed right next to each other.

Of course, a similar thing is likely to happen to the mushroom nests. Though at the moment there are only two of those, anyway. While there are more than enough resources to support more than just two ant nests, there isn’t enough living space.

See, at some point the patches of mushrooms in which the myconid sprouts would hide, a few of the mushrooms became more like mushtrees as it were. Not too many. Just one, maybe two at each pool of water. It is inside of these mushrooms where the ants decided to nest. Except, while Doyle would compare them to trees, they’re actually quite small even compared to the tenth floor mushrooms.

So, while a nest can fit, they certainly need more space to work with and so only two nests remain. Even then, that has more to do with their queens having been placed so far apart over the last couple days. All it will take is one day where their nests are even just a bit closer.

Now, Doyle could order them to play nice. There isn’t really a reason for them to fight. In fact, with a situation like the third and sixth floor where the number of nests is almost assured to dip to having only one or two hives, it could be seen as a bad thing. After all, only one of his ant queens gets to be immortal.

Maybe in the short term, this wouldn’t be a problem. After all, you can easily find ant queens around a decade old out in the wild and scientists have them living up to 30 years in a lab. However, Doyle can just imagine some point in the future where he focuses on something only to come back to floors like the third being empty of ants.

However, he wants the hives to be a bit rough and tumble. Level 27 certainly isn’t the limit, Doyle just needs to find the next quality to focus on. So instead of a general forced peace, he sets it up so that new nests are given a grace period to set up as long as they start far enough away from another nest.

This does leave him with one final question: which queen to choose to make ageless? After all, with the one benefit from the path, it will be receiving plus 3 to each mental stat.