I woke up via Christina poking me in the arm, she wanted to know if she had to wait to train with me more or if she could go kill things on her own for levels. I thought about that and decided that, yes, getting some levels alone was okay, but reminded her that she could not spar with her sisters or teach them anything until her class was raised to the next tier. She didn't like hiding strength from her sisters but understood that a class up was more important to the defense of the hive than teaching them a few battle tricks. After she left I snuggled closer to Victoria and tried to get back to sleep, but to no avail, I was awake and stuck like that. Still, I couldn't be too upset with her, asking to do something of her own volition was a display of self determination that the others didn't have.

I carefully extricated myself from her arms and checked on the egg carrying workers and their cargo. They seemed to still be growing at a normal pace but the celestials were growing faster then the rest, I guessed they would be done by the afternoon, the others would be like before and hatch just in time for dinner. After asking the workers if anything needed to be done they directed me to the back of the complex. Once there I see what is going on, the tunnels have been rejoined forming a rectangle of tunnels around the central chamber that was the current royal bedroom. A new chamber was carved out in the very back and the workers were now carving out the floor into a three worker wide double helix spiral staircase with a central support pillar reaching the ceiling.

They were eight steps down already and seemed to know exactly what they were doing, the proper way to carve downward stairs must be part of their built in architecture skill. I asked if I could assist them in any way and they told me no, but once they finished the next step they needed a new task until the celestials were shining otherwise they risked suffocation from bad air building up. I sat down and watched them slice squares of stone and form the step with scary precision, even without measuring tools the steps all looked perfectly identical. After they finished that I told them to follow me top side, I planned to do as much of the palisade as we could before they had to head back down. 

I knocked over a tree and all five of them working as one turned it into a good wall segment in record time, perhaps around ten minutes. I opened up the ditch and they just lifted the log into position, no big deal, before I packed the dirt around it and we moved on to a new tree. I alternated between dirt control for various wall building tasks and harden stone on the crystal. We stopped for breakfast after a bit, but went back to work right afterwards, it was nearly lunch when something started to happen. My hardened crystal started resisting getting more energy put into it, it wasn't full up on power but for some reason could only add more by pressurizing the magic. Which meant that only the core of the spell had preassure that was high enough to get added.

That itself was only because of my magic compressor trait from when I crushed dirt control's energy wave way back when. I kept up the spell but didn't have time to do a whole meditative state while I needed to move the ground around for the logs. I tried pushing on the magic harder as I cast and maybe a smidge more worked into it but unlike dirt control it was a lot harder to force it to do something unconventional. I stopped to sink another log into place and knocked over another tree, then tried my last idea before I just needed a bunch more levels of harden stone to break through this weird soft cap. Just like when I used compress earth to make the ball I cast harden and wedged the mana gathering part of the spell open before casting it again into itself. 

There was a slightly numb feeling as it went off but my feedback resistance was plenty good enough to stop anything horrible from happening. The double layered spell did manage sink into the crystal better than a single, I would say about half of the energy went in, but compared to only about an eighth of a single spell it was a lot. A few logs later we took a break, I grabbed a soldier coming back from a hunt for additional worker protection and led the group out to the fast growing berries. They looked completely identical to the last time, which was weird now that I thought about it since plants usually, you know, grew. I turned on magic sense to check out what the hell was going on with these things.

Looking at a bush, it had a clearly elevated level of mana compared to all the other plants nearby, not just quantity but density. I looked closely as one of the workers plucked a berry, the berries themselves actually had no mana at all which was also weird. When the worker touched it a tiny sliver of her mana was sucked into the berry before it traveled up the stem into the plant. It didn't integrate with the mana in the plant, instead it gathered in a lump of different manas in the middle and sat there in a sort of cocoon of the plant's own energy. Now that I knew what to look for I expanded my range to see if there was anything notable about any of them,  when I saw it, under the ground in the middle of the bushes was a thing.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

With how deep it was I couldn't get a clear picture of it with all the interference, but once I saw it I could see how all the bushes were connected to it through long roots that were barely visible since they had nearly the same amount of mana as the ground around it. Whatever it was, it wasn't hostile, it grew bushes that grew berries, when something touched a berry to eat it, it would take a drop of their mana as payment. But I couldn't help wondering what the bushes did when they were filled up, I told the workers to leave one bush on the edge alone, then noticed they were running out of hands for berry holding so I quickly conjured some jugs to put them in. Once most of the grove was berry free I had the workers stand a bit back with the soldier while I went over to the last bush.

I grabbed hold of a berry and as expected it automatically sucked a tiny drop of mana, but I chased it and started pouring on the juice. The plant sucked up everything I gave it, I had way more juice than the plant so the mana cocoon eventually filled up, and then it squeezed the energy down the long root to the core thing. On contact it undulated slightly as it absorbed it and then sent a different burst of energy back up the roots. The bushes took in the pulse and their mana density increased slightly, the bush I had filled up had stopped accepting any more mana because it's cocoon had collapsed when it squeezed it down the root and it was slowly weaving a new one, and I mean really slowly, I was sure watching the whole thing happen would be useful in some way, but I was busy right now.

I gathered the rest of the berries from the bush and our group headed back home, where we all ate some meat and split the berries from one of the jugs, while the other two were left for the larva to eat later. By that I meant right now, the guard soldier poked her head out to announce that the celestial eggs were hatching. I quickly told the workers to work on finishing the ditch for the log wall before I hurried down with the berry jugs. When I got there Victoria was already feeding them, I held up one container and she ate a couple handfuls from it before I handed them over to the babysitter workers so they had something they could feed their sisters. Their size was only slightly smaller than a baby worker and unlike the others they wont get much bigger. 

They would instead take time to form a much stronger magical capacity and perhaps something to help them perform their magic, like a built in focus. Another interesting thing was they were awake, so after they were full Victoria and I did our best to play with them. If they couldn't stay awake then they should at least have happy memories to dream about while they sat around glowing, soon they were all tuckered out and curled up for a nap. I headed back out to work on the wall some more, we had gotten about a quarter of the way through by now, after the new batch molt into nymph stage I will pull all workers I can to hopefully finish this by throwing more bodies at the problem, which was the ant way of doing things.

Once back outside I was surprised by the fact the workers had managed to keep working without me, guess they had gotten enough repetitions that they could connect the actions to a construction project. They sawed away at the bottom of a tree and then shifted formation to catch it as it fell, laid it down to finish preparing it and then slid it into the ditch with only light dirt packing to hold it in. I helped by packing in more dirt into their already inserted logs to make sure they were stabilized, before tweaking their cutting action so they could cut the tree down more effectively. I'll worry about the stumps after the wall was finished, but since they seemed to have everything in hand by themselves now I could get back to training dirt control seriously. 

I grabbed hold of four balls of dirt and tried again to extend a fifth control tendril, this time it engaged, but was very hard to handle, I lowered how much dirt the other four already had and that helped a little. I slowly lowered it to the ground and grabbed hold of a smidge of dirt, I felt a rush as the magic wavered intensely but I had enough feedback resistance that the wiggling didn't pull away my control. After a minute it stopped trying to snap off and I gained a level, with that handled it was time to multi task. I had the ring of five separate dirt balls spin around me while I punched a tree while wearing dirt gauntlets with power coat over them. After getting two more levels in dirt control like that I switched on magic sense as well so I was juggling three different skills at the same time.

Eventually the sun started to set so it was time for dinner, I checked in with the workers to make sure they didn't work themselves too hard on the wall and to be sure to retreat if they saw anything. The other eggs had hatched and the celestials had woken back up just in time to eat with everyone else, a reverse situation occured with them, they clearly ate more than their bodies should be able to contain, guessing most of it was being converted into energy somehow. While eating Christina came back as well and reported she got two kills and hoped we had room for seconds, and funnily enough I did. I think living here has changed me as well, I could eat more but also eat less, just my ability to store nutrients had massively increased,  we all went to sleep completely stuffed.