Two days later

Soldier was a quick learner, and with my help she got the hang of killing boars easy enough. The second boar kill got her to level two and unlocked her active attack skill that enhances her arm slash, her stat gains were half a point in str and vit and dex. So that's a total of one and a half per level, rare classes got two , and very rare nets two and a half. Victoria explained to me that higher rarity classes have special requirements, ours specifically needing a high number of other queens to get. Soldier ants have the "soldier" class which has known rare and very rare upgrades to specialist and sergeant, respectively.

The requirements are pretty straightforeward but also hard to do until later, a soldier must defeat five other sister soldiers in a series of single combat battles with no active powers or weapons.It cannot be cheated by one of them throwing the fight, blue box can detect that. Meaning the only real way to make any without one being incredibly better then five others is to have a five round bracket, the winner of the tournament would have had to win five times in a row. Sergeant then needs a five round battle made of specialists which you can guess takes a bit to set up.

Would then follow that doing the same thing with sergeants would get the next one, but that info wasn't in Victoria's family memory and her mother did not have nearly enough soldiers to check. I had tried to make our soldier push her skill in a few ways to make it stronger, such as maintaining it for a long time and activating it faster, she didn't like it but I am sure I managed to make her squeeze two levels out of it. I also made sure she kept a stone knife with her just in case she ran into something that should not be touched, like a slime made of acid even though those aren't native to this area.

The cave has been expanded by a bit, Victoria has gotten two rooms deeper into the mountain with just the three workers. The first chamber that leads outside will be the guard chamber, soldiers will sleep there until we get a better arrangement with a deeper and more complex chamber setup. The second one will have workers sleeping area, will let them dig more chambers by going around the last one while still being protected by the guards. The last one that is deepest in the rock so far is my and Victoria's room, for now. It being furthest from the entrance is to keep her and the eggs safe. Speaking of eggs, the next set were "made" last night, two more soldiers and workers. 

While she has eggs percolating is the only time we can do stuff without having to think about which setup the eggs should have. If she doesn't have all her egg segments busy then they will activate if we have sex, she can only decide which eggs they will be, not if they will make eggs at all. She has four egg segments at the moment, and she will grow two more every level divisible by four, so 4 8 12 etc, her body will also grow at those levels but her abdomen will grow more then her body does. At four she will still be okay with walking around but at eight she will need to constantly hold it up to prevent it from dragging on the ground. 

At twelve she would need some workers to help her walk around, above that is when it becomes basically impossible to move properly. It is perhaps a cosmic irony that the more we love eachother the faster she will be immobilized. The thing is, she really likes doing it and I have no good reason to deny her having fun with her husband. So what I need to do is to make sure I can get some magic books on enchanting before she gets too big. Then I need to make THAT magic item that will allow her to keep her mobility. Moving on, the workers just love working, but their ability to do things on their own is terrible they keep having to ask for instuctions.

I had found a new dirt control training, since the workers were digging stone, all three of them are level two. I had one of them use compress earth on a ball of dirt while I infuse the dirt and order it to not compress. I can tell instantly that the specialized magic is a lot more powerful, it does just one thing incredibly well, While my power can do anything, it's general nature made it need more power to control it instead of just a single burst in the output. Which is fine since this is training for both of us, I can feel that 'that's illegal'  feeling like when I pulled dirt from mud. I lasted for a nearly a minute, and felt my invisble exp for it shoot up and I gained one of those invisble levels. 

I alternated between taking a break and having a different worker use the spell. After the the third level I gained we entered an equalibrium, their magic and my magic prefectly counteracting. I realized she was just casting the spell with no will behind it, I had to order her to try using the spell harder before she did so. actually trying at all gave her spell a level and my magic failed as a level two compress earth was a lot more powerful than at level one. I got the other two to level up as well, this new form of compression let them compress the rocks even harder, making them into a slightly stronger stone. 

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The next day Victoria hit level three, that instantly resulted in the rest of us gaining a level, I leveled in lockstep with her while the kids were xp capped. Is kinda annoying how I now have point nine added to every stat, but I did get confirmation that our partials are adding, dex gained plus one because point nine and point five is one point four. I didn't really notice any differences with vit and dex, but I could lift bigger rocks so str going up did result in me getting stronger, can only assume the others worked. Cha is an odd one, I didn't notice Victoria suddenly getting prettier, but she said that's because it only works like that on a relative scale, since we have the same it does nothing. 

If I talked to someone who had lower cha they would find my words more fasinating and be more likely to agree with what I say subconciously. Human nobles probably have classes that grant cha, letting them more easily control the masses. If so it may also explain why the hate keeps going, a king gives a speech on the evils of elves and everyone listening will just agree with his huge cha. The king teaches his kids the way of hate before they have enough cha to resist so they grew up hating, which they then spread when they grow up.  This could be what happened with francis and horace, I had ten cha and when I told them to trust the ants they rolled to resist my words. 

Indoctrination would only take being told something enough that your own low stats betray you and you take their words as gospel. This situation doesn't seem like it was on purpose, more like an oversight, the blue box made a stat weirdly powerful by linking it to political positions. At least as the number goes up the difference needs to become greater, as in someone needs a quarter less then you to have chance to work so at ten I could sway people with seven or less. Meaning that at one hundred they would need seventy-five or below, so if two kings meet they will get nowhere, both of their kingly levels of cha countering eachother.  Course that's hyperbole, I doubt they get to one hundred but with my rate i'll reach thirty by level twenty.

The level also meant hunting got smoother, but making sure soldier regularly practiced her power strike was like pulling teeth, she always complains about it being "pointless". I hope once her two sisters are ready for battle she sees how much better her strike is and becomes inspired to train them and herself. It could be part of her genetic disposition, that her lower int and wis made understanding the corralation between her practice and it getting stronger difficult. Is probably mesed up to think this, but I hope one of her sisters is smarter so they can understand the idea of secret levels.

Now that I can do things other then hunt all day I started work on real stone-age gear, I had the workers carefully cut out big rocks while digging a new tunnel so I had something to work with. First up is an axe, using a good axehead sized rock I chipped an edge into it and using a stone knife i cut a hole in a branch to wedge it into. Something odd happened as soon as it was fully wedge in, it wedge itself in slightly deeper and the wood seemed to expand to hold it more securely. I must have made an offcial stone axe, meaning I was making stone spears wrong somehow. 

I got to chopping down a tree with it, nineteen str let me deliver plenty of power into every swing, I chewed through the wood in no time. The tree I picked to chop looked like some sort of young ash, it had that three leaf tip thing they have, but I was mostly just guessing. Once down I planned on chopping it into many arm sized chunks, only did some of it today and left the rest for later. Next up I made a stone pick, the head was easy enough to make but I attached and detached it from a handle in various ways until blue box kicked in and told me I did it right by solidifying it, V shaped top with double cross binding was the trick.

Was interesting, the head and the stone of the walls of the tunnel should be the same stone but the pick was clearly stronger than the wall. Doing a simple hardness test by rubbing it on the wall resulted in the wall scraping away and no marks on the pick. Trying to figure out the method to blue box's madness is a pain in the ass, but only a small one because right now it's useful. I used it along with the workers and it was slighty faster. Considering my str that isn't too good, unless I find a substantially harder stone switching the workers to picks wont help them dig faster enough to be worth it.

The next day I pulled up the stump, when you can command the dirt itself to get out of the way of the roots it is a lot easier than it normally would be. I added the stump to the chopping block and went to town on it and the tree, the end result is huge pile of wooden bits. I get the workers to help me carry the mess to the riverbank and start building a charcoal kiln, I showed the workers the pattern the wood needs to make and they were able to pile it up into a large wooden dome easily. That was all that could be done today since the wood is still really fresh so it has too much water to bake properly. Charcoal will allow much better smoke creation for meat, having a large amount of preserved meat would be a better than needing to eat all of a kill in one day. 

I also started work on a proper smoking rack, I took the makeshift one and added longer legs, moved around the slates to get better airflow and got to work on a second tier so it could do more at once. About halfway through that, soldier came back and showed me she found some rabbits. I am the only one that can handle rabbits right now with my 'quick-dirt' magic, I MIGHT be able to make a bow, but knowing what a bow is and what it looks like does not let you make one easily, think I need the right kind of wood, and some real string.