Over the past year, I had read quite a few books on magic. To be more precise, I had copied them into my memory. Deciphering this ancient heritage could take centuries. However, a significant and most interesting part of the library was inaccessible to me. I intended to rectify this oversight.

The next month was spent plundering the library. No, I didn’t steal the crystals with the books; I merely borrowed them temporarily, leaving empty decoys in their place. During this month, no one realized what was happening, primarily because no one had read these books for several hundred years. The librarians maintained order in the library and were not eager to cause themselves problems by acquiring forbidden knowledge. I had previously placed enough Hiraishin marks in the Repository of Knowledge to sneak in unnoticed.

Finally, all the knowledge I was interested in had found its place in my skull, and I began preparing for the next phase of my plan—escape. I intended not just to escape but to establish my own colony, for which I needed to take along several female spiders. Negotiating with adult spiders seemed pointless, so I decided to snatch some eggs. But there was the issue of preserving them. From the moment the eggs were laid to their hatching, it took only two weeks. During this time, the eggs needed to be kept in specific conditions. It was highly doubtful that I could escape with such a cargo in hand, not to mention that my search for a new home could take a long time. And after hatching, the spiders would need abundant nourishment.

After considering the situation, I decided to steal the eggs a couple of days after they were laid and then seal them with fuinjutsu seals, freezing time within. To avoid losing the precious cargo during the journey, I decided to place the seals on my shell. Within a week, my clones had inscribed the necessary patterns on my abdomen. Three seals were for three eggs, and another was to contain my food base—plant seeds, mushroom spores, and scarab eggs.

Fully prepared for the journey, I waited for the queen to lay another batch of eggs and set off on my mission. Naturally, the clutches were well-guarded. The warriors were most vigilant about a small room where the eggs of future mages, including potential females, were maturing.

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My plan to infiltrate the guarded area was simple: disguise myself as a nanny worker, sneak into the room, grab three eggs, and escape using Hiraishin. However, after observing the guards, I concluded that I could not convincingly impersonate the necessary spider. They not only inspected everyone passing by but also interacted with them quite a bit. I couldn’t fake the telepathic 'voice.'

Fortunately, another method was found. The high concentration of magical energy in this room was maintained using special crystal accumulators that dissipated the energy and were replaced every two days. All I had to do was swap one of these accumulators with a crystal marked with Hiraishin. A few hours later, a worker installed it in the room, and I just had to wait for all unnecessary witnesses to leave.

The next part of the heist went off without a hitch. My clone silently appeared in the guarded room, examined the eggs, selected three that were to hatch females, and just as silently disappeared with the loot.

Finally, everything was ready for my escape. Naturally, I did not leave my humble hideout but sent a clone instead. The situation on the surface could be aptly described as an 'icy hell.' Temperatures below forty degrees, constant blizzards, and incessant snow. Over seventy years, more than two hundred meters of it had accumulated. If not for special spells regenerating oxygen, the spiders would have perished fifty years ago when all the passages to the outside were completely buried. During the first expedition, we had to dig a long tunnel to the surface, run more than two hundred kilometers, and then dig back into the snow, reaching a thin strip of frozen vegetation. Now, my clone emerged on the surface and slid south on skis.

With such a snow cover, it was hard to distinguish land from sea. I reached a small mountain range and began surveying the endless snowy plains. Well, I think it’s time to start building here, especially since the rocks protruding from the snow provided access to construction materials.

I decided not to reinvent the wheel but to create an all-terrain boat that could move equally well on snow and water. The main materials would be aluminum and titanium, which I could easily extract from granite. Fortunately, the local rocks were composed of it, not some limestone deposits. The aluminum content in granite reaches up to 15 percent, and titanium up to one percent. Given my ability to extract deuterium from seawater, obtaining the necessary metals didn’t seem challenging.