Chapter 13

“...and so, in our greed, we consumed the stars themselves.”

In reality, however, we just installed solar panels.

Honestly, I'm sorry I dissed on them before. They have been an immense help in shortening the time needed for division. Not because they somehow generated the missing materials, but they made my energy regenerate at high speeds during the daytime.

How does that help me? Well, it helps Bobs move further away from me. Remember how it all started? How I spent quite some time in horrible darkness, just because I dug too deep? A litre of water gone and I was reduced to a broken shell. What if I could do that again, but with a safety net in place?

Remember how I said the Bobs are a part of me? I can use them as a medium for the inventory. Combine that with the length they could move alone, and the fact we now have upgraded cell membrane, I could start my experiments on suicide bombers.

First of all, I would send one of Bobs close to the bottom, as far away from me as possible; without losing our contact. Then, slowly, expand the inventory collection range.

For science, it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. Sorry, Bob-2.

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Up until cubic millimetre, it was fine. After that Bob-2 received injuries I deemed lethal. So he sacrificed for the greater good by sucking in a cubic centimetre of mass.

I got a little bit caught up in the wave that followed but sustained no real damage.

Here is the best part - There is biomass in the earth!

It's not much, I only got 5, but that's almost twice what I just lost. Not to mention all the chemical elements collected.

To be on the safe side, I kept on testing with Bob-3 (Bob-1 is my favourite, I don't want him to die. Don't tell Bob-3 that), and it seems that the maximum safe drilling distance is one-tenth of a cubic millimetre. This is still an incredibly large amount compared to before. Bob-3 does receive some amount of damage, but it can be healed in under an hour.

With the experiment over, I made them divide again and keep working on mining materials. I made some really approximate calculations and this could mean it would only take a few weeks or so, to grow by the billions.

-15 hours later-

Fuck, I forgot how boring and tedious this is. Even with the occasional interesting mishap (We lost many Bobs in the last one), I hate this.

Oh yeah, I now have an army.

Honestly, I lost the actual count, so I just started to keep the number of cycles the division has happened by now. We are close to 1000. That's 8 times of division, from 4 starting cells. I didn't join, as I rather dislike the feeling of being torn apart. Still don't know the total loses from little mining accidents, just a general feeling and it's hard to calculate based only on that.

The accident itself? Well, let's just say that I didn't think of what would happen if every cell, once we reached over a hundred, activates inventory power at the same time.

I have to suspend mining for now, as the sun has gone down and the energy strain on me is too large to handle anything more than Bob blob around me. Thankfully, the Bobs themselves work as an energy relay and increase the general range with only a small cost. As Kevin kindly put in - we’re having a sausage party here and as I kindly put in - Kevin can go eat a bag of dicks, for all I care.

Anyway, it's time to show the rest of this pond, who's the real boss around these parts.