A puff of raw mana was apparently really hard to do when your Wis was low, since Wis was your ability to control magic you needed a minimum to handle it. So, sadly, the normal worker ended up incapable of doing it since she only had three wis, and I couldn't help her since three was too low to allow a boost. Valerie, with the help of my Wis boosting bracelet, was able to figure it out, so it seemed five points was as low as you could go to learn how to do it. Luckily, once she had it figured out she didn't need the boost anymore to continue being able to do it, so that was good. After she got that figured out it was hole digging time, I would work on one hole, Valerie was going to dig another, and the worker we had was assigned to keep the area around the holes clear of dug dirt.

In an amazing twist, Valerie beat me to the end, she may have been smaller, weaker, and younger than me but she had a hard wired fantastic digging form and hands designed for the task. I had her practice using the new skill on the pile of dirt the other worker made while I continued digging my own hole. I was certain if I didn't have this much Con my fingers and nails would have been torn to shreds from scraping against all the small rocks in the dirt. As is, it took about me nearly four hours total to dig ten tons of dirt out of a hole, I had no idea if that was fast or slow for that kind of job, and Valerie managed to beat me by an hour so it muddled it even further.

The moment I let out a mana burst into one last handful of dirt I got a notification which let me know I dug enough. It said exactly what I expected it to say, that I had earned the skill via special action. When I turned it on it was almost the same as 'control dirt' but was a lot weaker due to being lower leveled and lower ranking, and it had some special restrictions. I could not separate a ball of dirt from the ground, I could do a wineglass and have a thin strand of dirt connected to a large ball of the stuff. I could also hold a ball of dirt and when I tried to make it float above my hand it formed a strand of dirt as well. Since I knew how the better skill worked I could force power to flow in the right ways to power level the hell out of it, grabbing hold of the skill and forcing it to act better.

I held off on doing that right away and instead helped Valerie run through the various formations to level it, there was some difficulty handling even one thread of power for her at first, but once she got to level three the effects of skill level on handling ability took the pressure off. I started with two due to having much higher Wis and earned the third at just level five, which let me do odd things. A ball of dirt, even when connected to the ground, and a distance limit. Having multiple threads let me chain them, one ball could get three meters from the ground, a second ball could be tethered three meters from the first, and again for the third. At first I thought there was no practical use for it until I had the first ball at the edge of my control range and I maintained control of the third and second as they went even further from me.

Psychic communion with Valerie let me explain things a lot easier than with words, so we both advanced levels at a breakneck rate. Some really good news was that when I asked what she knew about it she gave me an exact description near instantly, pressing her she revealed it showed up when she asked the blue box for information. That meant workers had 'move dirt' as a class skill somewhere up the line of skills they earned, since class skills bypassed weird requirements they didn't need to learn how to release mana bursts to earn it. Implanted knowledge also eases up on Wis requirements to use it, since it gives a blueprint to follow, so even though they have such low Wis the workers would be able to use a simplified version until they gained a few levels.

We both hit the soft limit of leveling at around eight, I am sure we could keep going but it would take hours for just one when we could instead be leveling the other worker spells a bunch of times. Without adding any extra energy or trying to make it better manually, 'compress earth' seemed to take a few hundred casts to level up, considering there were still workers with it at level one that I know have used it a bunch. So I had both my students try various things to level it faster than that, had some good success when I described it as an invisible crushing hand and demonstrated how you got different results from squeezing harder with my real hands. The normal worker topped out at level five, which was great for them, and Valerie once again got to eight.

It wasn't just the soft cap but imagination that limited leveling, beyond just stats there was a spark in the enhanced children that the normal ones were missing. For instance the soldiers always wanted to be stronger, but their ways of going about it were limited, 'punch it harder' was the extent of how to become stronger they knew of. It took some work to draw it out of her, but Christina was far more clever than one point of Int should have made her which let her win an otherwise impossible five on one battle. Valerie was much the same way, she was trying things herself instead of only doing exactly what I said to do. Those levels in the spell reflected that, she and the worker were both given the exact same instructions but Valerie gained three more than her sister by tweaking things as she needed to.

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Moving on to the next spell, 'harden stone', i saw there was indeed an effect to learning spells above your level, it wasn't warped or missing bits, but they said that listening to me cast was like hearing it from far away. If I wasn't saying it to them psychically they were sure they would not have heard it at all. Since I was saying it into their minds directly they heard it well enough so we moved on to them trying to learn it. Even through it was hard to hear me say it, Valerie learned it in only fifteen attempts, even faster than 'compress earth'. She was able to notice the similarity between the two because they are both earth element spells, but the normal worker had not, even with trying to explain it to her she treated them as two totally separate things. 

Valerie got started with training it on some rocks while I kept at it with the worker, and after near eighty attempts she finally got it to work. I didn't have any sort of metaphor for how this one worked though so we had to work at pure force and power and the idea of hardness. With demonstrations and examples Valerie got to level six but the worker barely even got to three, at least she will have the early bird bonus added to it at class level four. With those done I didn't have any more class skills to teach them, so I sent the worker back down to rejoin her sisters in the tunnels. Valerie stayed with me to learn non-class skills since a few are really helpful with class skills, as in she needed to learn to sense magic and have feedback resistance, both have been super helpful in leveling spells.

Before we got started I lit up the furnace and added enough tin for both a bracelet of Wis and a ring of Int, since she could use those as well. Moving on to learning how to sense magic I taught her a similar way I had Victoria learn it, using her freeform spell's tendril as a feeler to feel the edges of another spell. I let her have my bracelet and the pure copper ring while she was trying to learn it, since every little bit helps. While we worked on it I explained the purpose of learning these skills, how they let me control spells more freely and how they prevented brain explosions from foolishness. It took nearly three hours for her to work it out, which was slower than Victoria but faster than when I learned it since Jeremy taught me the human way instead of the psychic ant way.

Once she had that skill ready I then explained how feedback resistance was earned by just being in pain from looking at to much magic. She hit that point really quickly with her low stats, but a level was a level, after she gained a few in it I had her give back the bracelet so I could make her one of her own set of stat gear. I made both of them a little funny because she was still small and I didn't have a way to make auto-resizing items yet, if that enchantment existed. She had to hold both of the items instead of wearing them, which was easier for ants than humans since they had four arms so two being taken up holding utility items was fine. Once she molted into her adult form I could remake them into proper wearables instead.

With that out of the way I told her she was free to go for the day but to keep working on her spells and skills, getting class spells to intermediate mastery before she turned into an adult may give her another bonus, like with Chistina's altered shell. Speaking of her, she came back from a hunt with the two young soldiers in tow, she must have been giving them a live demonstration. I called her over and told her about the skipped physical skills and how we could unlock them, she wasn't able to get the seeing skill but she was able to manipulate her physical energy enough that she was sure it would count for unlocking. We went back and forth, having a living target was a lot better for this since having our energies clash seemed to be the proper method instead of hitting rock with it.

We needed a break for lunch before we finally got through the huge slog of punching, since it was more about focusing energy properly rather than hitting as hard as possible I only ended up sore instead of having broken arms. Because the skills were lower tier versions of what she already had Christina was able to see their descriptions as well, it didn't have levels listed but it was still useful simply because seeing mastery bonuses was really handy for using them. Moving up to actually using hit and block was painful enough that I decided to postpone seriously training them until tomorrow when I brought a celestial up to assist us. The last thing on my to do list for today was finally finish of 'control dirt', and with range insight I gained from it's lesser version I was sure I could do it.

Infusing the most dirt I could handle with one thread I formed a pillar of it, then on top of the pillar I formed another one using a second thread. The fourth pillar poked out the top of my normal control distance and the fifth was all the way outside. Once the seventh pillar was attached, the exp started flowing in quickly, I felt it ping to ninety-nine and I could stretch the pillars out a millimeter more each. I hit the end of the line and I could feel the system thinking about if I had earned going to a hundred, after a few tense moments it finally ticked over the line and I could suddenly reach a LOT further as the expected blue notification appeared in the corner.