I started the day by checking my new crystal ball, I think it felt like it contained the same amount of energy as when I checked it before I went to sleep. I had no idea what could happen if I added enough hardening energy to it, or if anything would happen at all, but my gut said 'go for it', so I did. I refused to just stand around staring at it all day like yesterday, so I decided to just carry it around and add juice as I checked other things out. Because Victoria was still asleep I headed out, when I ran into a soldier and decided to ask her what level four gave her, she obtained Harden Shell like Fighter had, it was an active defense skill that made her armor plates tougher as long as she focused on it. At that time I also realized I didn't check to see what I had gotten from my level four, so 'class status'.

"Duke consort"

Gives trait "linked stats"

Gives trait "ant speech"

Gives trait "darkvision"

Gain .3 to all stats per level

Gain .7 points to cha per level

Level 2 bonus "earth magic: dirt control"

Level 4 bonus "physical skill: power coat"

Power coat? A soldier's level two skill was power strike, so this must be something similar, let's see.

"Physical skill: power coat"

Mastery: beginner

Level: 1

Coats objects in physical energy boosting it's ability

Enchancement quality for offense is based on str and level

Enhancement quality for defense is based on vit and level

Enhancement quality for utility is based on dex and level

That is just vague enough to make sense, it's also finally another skill I have that blue box will actually tell me about. I held up my arm and thought of what it looked like when my soldiers used power strike, nothing happened until I remembered I probably had to say it aloud once to activate it "power coat". Suddenly a shimmering blue field appeared on my arm, which was odd since strike was red and formed a blade extending from a soldier's arm spikes. I moved it up and down my arm easily enough, just thinking where I wanted it to be was enough to move it. When it passed over my fingernails it changed color, the part over my fingers was still blue but on the nail itself it turned red.

So it was red when enhancing the attack power of a part and blue when it was enhancing the defensive power. I brought my hand towards the tunnel wall and tapped my fingers against it, but it didn't feel quite right, I wasn't trying to attack the wall but dig into it. With that thought the red on my nails instantly turned yellow, and I could then scratch the stone on the wall slightly. Looking at the contact point I realized it paradoxically didn't emit any light in spite of the fact I could see it, in color, which was important because dark vision didn't transmit color. I stopped adding scratches to the wall and turned on magic sense, there was nothing, power coat was totally and utterly transparent to it, I was somewhat expecting that.

Power coat was a physical skill instead of a magic spell, so magic sense wouldn't detect anything, but then what is it made of, the description said physical energy, but what was that exactly? I continued outside, went to one of the nearby trees, and I proceeded to punch it, slowly increasing the strength of the blow until it was slightly painful. Then I turned on power coat, covered my fist in it and hit just as hard as before, there was a cracking sound and bits of bark broke off. Looking at my fist it had a red coat that turned blue after a second of looking at it, when I thought of punching the tree again it went back to red. So it was really context sensitive and changed to what I thought I needed, I wondered if an axe chopping a tree counted as attack or utility.

Final test before serious grinding was compatibility with magic, I couldn't use two spells at the same time, but this wasn't a spell. I attached a tiny ball of dirt to my passive control, sat down, took a deep breath, and I held out my hand before carefully trying to activate it at low power, coating only one finger. It turned on smoothly and nothing exploded, so I started ramping up the power, sucking more dirt into the ball and expanding the coat over my whole hand. Still no mental explosions, I let out a sigh of relief and dropped the dirt ball to get started on my new grind, punching a tree as hard as I could with power coat with one hand while casting harden stone on my crystal ball with the other, switching it up occasionally.

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I had gotten it to level thirteen before I had to stop due to managing to break the skin on my knuckles from excessive punching, I had also gained two levels of hardening on the side. The crystal was still eating spells and still didn't look like it was leaking any energy back into the environment, it was actually kinda getting hard to look at with magic sense due to how dense it was, even with the range set to just barely far enough to see it and all my levels of feedback resistance. I could only imagine what happened when I managed to fill it up, but it should be a big deal. A soldier came back with a boar while I was pondering and was clawing bits of meat out of it, using her strike on her claws to cut the meat more easily.

Looking at the fire pit I saw it was starting to become severely clogged with ash, so I went over to clean it by just pulling it out with dirt control. That was the plan, anyway, but when I reached in there was a freaky feeling, sensing towards it, while trying to ignore the little sun I had, I saw the feeling was where the ash changed from just ash to hot ash. The ratio of fire element in hot ashes was obviously higher than cold ashes but I should still be able to do it, maybe I just needed to try harder? I focused on the fuzzy line between the cold and hot ash and had all four threads concentrate on one spot. Slowly and steadily I managed to get a grip on a handful of burning ash and pulled it to the side, when I did so all of the ash rotated so the colder side was pointing the same direction I pulled towards.

I apparently managed to grab only part of them, but no level or even insight, just a pile of ash separated from the main bulk. I gave up on that for now, and just told the soldier working to build a new firepit while what she had was cooking. She said she understood and went back to cutting meat off the animal, while she was doing that I headed back down with a dirt ball in tow, I needed to do magic only until my hands healed. Once I was out of the sun I could see the orb was faintly glowing the color of stone, a soft gray, clearly that meant it was losing energy in the form of light but it was so slow I couldn't tell while watching, if I checked before sleeping and then when I woke up I could probably get a better estimate on the rate.

I headed for the workers first to see how their digging and hardening work was going, they had almost finished digging out the chamber and added a divot in the wall where the next tunnel would go. I called for a halt to work but to stay in sync to attempt a task, a couple seconds later they stopped and all turned around, forming a semi circle around me, they even blinked in sync while waiting for the next order. I held up the orb and told them to simultaneously hit it with harden stone, they complied readily and after a moment of chanting the five beams collided with the orb, if I rated the power level I would say each beam was a quarter as strong as what I could produce, but since there were five of them it was effectively more energy being added then I could do myself.

After a few casts I called for a stop and asked them to instead collectively ponder what the orb felt like inside, and they could get closer if they had to. They all moved in and put a hand on the orb and pondered on it for several minutes, before they all moved back and said "we cannot feel anything within the sphere". Dang, still inconclusive if they couldn't sense magic ever, or if they could if I got more of them working together in an array. I let them get back to work finishing the chamber and went to see if Victoria was awake yet, she was, and was feeding two larva at once. Seemed that her increase in breast size, and thus milk production, let her feed a larva with each alone instead of needing to switch half way.

I asked how it was going and she explained that with only four it was easy, but she could tell that when she started handling six at once she would start being sore from being overly drained. I asked if she could tell what bonus stat the special one had yet, she could not, she needed to ask them to look at their stat screen and tell her, which needed  them to molt once and gain the ability to communicate. That was annoying but understandable, I noticed a distinct lack of ability to see other people's screens. I also asked how she thought her training with dirt control was going and she thought it was going well, she was increasing how much of that churned dirt ball she could lift at once, so I dropped off the raw dirt ball and told her to feel how they were different but be careful to keep them separate.

Next I showed her how the crystal was glowing now and she asked how I learned light magic, It took me a bit to explain how it was magic leakage that took the form of light, and was gray due to it's stone alignment. Nothing in her ancestral wisdom knew anything about what I had done so she found it really interesting and contemplated adding it to the memory right now, I talked her out of it because me being me I would probably find something even more interesting that she could add. She agreed that I probably could find something amazing before the soft time limit of six years. Finally I showed her power coat and asked what the normal version of consort would have gotten, and it was a weaker version "power hit" which only had attack enhancing properties.

After about another hour of shooting the non-existent breeze with her the larva started molting, the normal ones at least, the enhanced one still had some time to go because her more powerful whatever needed more energy to grow in. One worker was sent up to get a soldier for the young one to learn from and another was sent to join her sisters on the tunnel team. The soldier arrived just in time for the new one to finish hardening and the young workers went to assist/watch the tunnelers. After thinking it over I decided that regardless of what her bonus stat was, I would personally care for the enhanced one, no matter how hard she complained I would make sure she power leveled her skills and abilities so she could rank up to specialist without needing some crazy tournament format.