There appeared to be a person in the flower, a woman, curled up into a ball. Then they moved and there was a wave of some kind of magic released that I could see and feel wash over me. It tried to do something but it just failed entirely like I was simply missing what it was looking for. With them moving I could see it was actually just a person shaped object, each time it moved there was a pulse in the secondary root and the body sort of jolted into a new position in an extremely unnatural fashion and another magic wave broke around me. After several motions I eventually realized it must have been trying to seduce me, and the magic was linked to that, but because I was literally soul bound to Victoria it wasn't working, I kind of felt sad for how much effort it was putting into this.

"You can stop, whatever you are doing won't work on me." I told it.

There was a brief pause in it's dance, then it fell over like a puppet with it's strings cut and the secondary root powered off. A few minutes passed before it lit up again, but in a different way. It continued to lay there but its mouth did a few test motions before it spoke, "eeeeeee aaaaaa ffffffff"

It was trying, but it was also just jumping from one sound to the next, just like it's movements, instead of flowing into them. If it could understand me than maybe I could meet it halfway with this, "can you understand me? Make an 'aaaa' sound to for yes."

A pulse was sent down the root and after couple seconds a return pulse hit it and it went "aaaa".

Okay good, so it could understand but it was terrible at controlling this thing. Next question, "did you make this human shaped object because of me? 'Aaaa' for yes and 'oooo' for no." I knew it did but I wanted to see if it would admit it.

It took a bit longer than the previous question to think on it but eventually it responded with an "aaaa".

Good, now let's see if I could divine it's goal with making it, "did you want me to come into contact with this creation?"

"Aaaa"

"Would you have kept me captive if I did?"

"Ooooaaaaooooaaaa"

No and yes at the same time? "Would you have captured me temporarily?"

"Aaaa"

"Would you have attempted to mate with me?"

"Oooo"

So the person shape really was just for luring, "would you have drained me of mana during the capture period?"

"Aaaa"

Why would it admit that? "Are you being honest because with your capture plan failing you are afraid I will kill you?"

"Aaaa"

Damn, so it was cooperating now out of fear, "Did you know I was the only human here?"

It shut down when I asked it that question and took several minutes before it turned back on and responded "oooo".

So that meant I fed it so well it thought there were a bunch of humans around so it could snag one for a bit. That seemed odd, even during the short time I was in town people acted like magic was something that was a limited resource, but out here I have multiple direct evidences that it was not. Thinking about it, that discrepancy could explain the plant's behavior. Everyone says magic is limited and hard to gather, but when a plant captures someone they have a lot more magic in them than everyone said. Therefore it appeared that capturing a person gave access to a greater amount of mana that more passive methods can't gather. So with the energy root only activating when it filled up, it just assumed that the bulb was finally filled not that one person fed it all in one go.

"Okay, it's obvious you mean no harm, so I will let you live-"

"Aaaa"

"BUT, you will need to join my side and perform services as needed, in exchange you will have a guaranteed source of outside mana. This includes you being moved to more accessible location, so retract whatever you need to and bring your bulk as near to the surface as you can manage, I'll be back tomorrow to dig you out for transport, do you understand?"

"...aaaa"

Once it said that there was a slight tremor, looking through the earth I saw the main body was undulating and after a little observation I could see it was rising like I told it to, albeit very slowly. It was about noon now so it was time for lunch, heading back to base the cooking meat was basically done, giving a bit to the worker I told them to spread the word for all workers to be topside after lunch tomorrow, no idea how large the plant's bulk is so they will probably need to carry it by hand. They nodded and headed inside, I turned to the cooking soldier and asked if there were any weird things with the hunting area, like the spawn rate increasing or anything. It took a bit for her to explain it properly but it seemed that the rate was increasing slowly, like normal economic inflation.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

A sudden dip in rate would have meant that a large chunk of the ambient energy was tied up in something bigger, like an alpha boar. I then asked about her feelings, seeing if the soldiers felt anything special about me. They did not, like the workers the concept of individual familial love was lost on her, she loved the hive, Victoria, and me, not because of who or what they were but just because they were her's. I let her get back to tending the meat while I practiced my physical skills on a wall for a while to kill time. Once she finished cooking she gathered most of it up and headed inside to distribute it and like clockwork a new soldier appeared from the forest with another boar for the fire.

I took it and let her head right back out after grabbing a handful from the remaining chunks left by the previous cook. With it dead and my leveled power skill I was capable of ripping a leg out of it's socket, and quartering an animal with my bare hands was strangely satisfying. I then cut the skin off by enhancing the sharpness of my fingernail before I slapped the slabs of meat on the stove. With a bit of hand waving I made a stone overhang and after scraping the inside of the skin as clean as I could manage I set it on top of the rack which was over the stovetop to make it hot and lose moisture without it actually cooking, hopefully it worked, my last attempt was a bust, being unable to make leather because I don't have salt would be annoying.

After flipping the meat over once, Valerie reemerged from the depths. From a distance she looked basically the same, but once she got closer there were some obvious differences. Her silver markings were a lot more detailed, with shapes and shades in them instead of being a flat uniform color. Her fingers were longer and more delicate looking compared to a normal worker, but due to how their claws were built they were sharper and thus actually more dangerous. Her torso, or thorax, had more plates, as in she had several chest plates instead a single plate, it was a more complex design but it should result in improved flexibility, which could be important if some spells have somatic components.

Asking about what blue box had to say about her body, she had the 'nymph trained' trait like Christina had, which explained her altered plating, but she had something more mysterious as well. 'Nascent silver enhancements', from from I could gather from the description, magically conductive material could not be magically created like normal body mass, so to finish it she needed to eat a bunch of silver which will turn her silver colored markings into real silver, at which point they will further enhance her in some way. It sounded like she would gain built in magical equipment once she ate enough silver, which gave me a crazy idea, but I shelved it for now, I needed to be able to cast gold for it be worth it.

I also couldn't help her with that at the moment due to only having a handful of silver coins, enough for one silver ring and some left over. What I could do was give her wearable versions of the tin equips she was holding on to, so I had her hand them over and I threw them in the crucible and lit the forge up. I drew a quick diagram in the dirt of the current fort ring and how I was planning to expand it with a second ring touching the first and then being linked so it becomes a flat sided oval. The center of the second ring was going to be the plant, so while I was cooking up her gear she was to get started digging out all the dirt for the expansion, the whole thing should knock out quite a bit of her skill quest.

It was near sunset when Valerie came back and I handed over her reformatted gear and we both headed inside. Once back home I described the plant to Victoria and asked if she knew what it was, I had a hunch but didn't want to assume. Ancestral ant knowledge did know about them, it was indeed an alraune, it never took a human form in her memory, but it is known to shape change to best gather stray energy from it's surroundings. Simple low energy berries were the best idea while it was collecting wisps of energy from boars and rabbits, but with the workers and me being a lot more energetic it started morphing things that would give better returns. It just overcompensated with me due to feeding it instead of only letting it skim drops of energy off the top.

I asked what form the one in her memory took, it had become a cluster of giant flowers filled with nectar, which was delicious to ants but was also capable of being processed by nurse ants into wax and a kind of ant honey for storage. They were not as efficient at it as normal sized bees but being able to do so at all was pretty cool. Nectar pools also made sense for an ant lure, they would spend several moments in contact with a flower while they drank the nectar, so the flowers would have several moments to suck energy from them. I had some ideas for specific plant archetypes I could tell it to form, for example I bet it could make cotton pods that didn't need to be cleaned to use because the pods wouldn't have seeds and the puffs would pull free easily from the shells.

I told her about my negotiation with it and how it agreed to being moved, mostly out of fear of destruction if it didn't comply, but hopefully after a while it will trust that we had no plans to blow it up. She agreed that moving it would be for the best, the remembered one was rather far away from that hive so it made it difficult for the nurse ants to get access to the nectar and thus made it even harder for them to process it into anything important. While on the topic I asked what else they could do, turned out they also had mouth mounted silk glands, which was technically a fluid that hardened on contact with air. They were also capable of storage, like a honeypot ant they could gorge themselves and store nutrients as a goo that could then be redistributed in times of low food. Soon, after a bit more discussion on what exactly we could use the plant for, we went to bed.