It was the morning after I started cycling mana through the string and I was tired as hell, I really shouldn't have let Victoria have her way with me before she went to sleep. I mean, it was certainly a fun challenge to stay focused on mana cycling while she distracted me, but if I had to do something like this again I'd say no. I could tell it was morning because the hive suddenly became active with workers waking up and moving about, shortly after they got into motion Victoria also woke up. With her awake I told her about my conclusion and while she didn't like the idea of skipping a night she begrudingly accepted my reasoning. A few minutes later a worker came by and delivered breakfast, and V took it upon herself to feed me since my two hands were currently occupied.

That was an annoying thing, the string had to be kept taut at all time while I cycled, luckily I found that out a few minutes into starting so I didn't burn up too much time with a mistake. Having a couple moment was nice though, I thought the whole "feeding each other" thing in romances was a little silly but now I saw how nice it was. I promised to repay her later, maybe by dinner if things worked out, but I was still worried that something crazy was going to happen that would force me to drop the string and start all over again. Not long after breakfast Valerie came in because she needed a new task, it had only been about a day and a half since I let her get to work digging a tunnel with her sisters but her improved skill, power, magic, and physiology meant she could cut stone at a mad pace.

So now she was level six and itching to do something else, I had to ask and make sure she wasn't pushing herself like last time but she actually got to level six last night and slept like she was supposed to. Since she wasn't pushing herself too hard I told her to just work on her spells outside, her moon bird trait should be active for them now so I would not be surprised if she could get more than eight levels a day for them. She then said she didn't want to do that, she wanted to do something crazy like I did all the time. I had to get more information about what she meant, but it turned out she wanted to break free of the worker archtype and become a class that was not an intrinsic part of her biology.

I had no idea how that would work, Victoria did a class check on her to see if she had anything already but all that was listed were the lower tier classes of her type, worker and laborer. They were greyed out since she was already the higher version, because downgrading was impossible, but any higher classes were completely invisible so figuring out what she needed to do to upgrade was a secret, let alone accessing a class that wasn't genetic. Only option was loading her up with as many different skills as possible, just a 'throw science at the wall until something sticks' mentality. I had her get some dirt and lay it in a thick but loose layer on the floor and then I drew the 'mana' rune used in enchantment into the dirt with my nose and then had her invert it.

Her mission was to stare at it until she was allowed to remember it and then look at her magic items and figure out where it was written on them. After that, once we were both done with our tasks, I would walk her through the basics of the actual enchanting skill, think getting to level ten would be how high the skill needed to be for the class to be available to humans. If that failed I would figure something else out, there are a lot of skills out there so something may work. I also cautioned her to not get her hopes up, she may have a worker sub-class her whole life simply because we failed to find the right skill. She agreed to my demand and said "I only want to try, always trying new things is why father is strong".

I was touched by how she saw me, but I was kinda incapable of giving her an affection pat on the head so I just thought the idea of it at her which she found funny. With that she took the runic dirt clump out of the room to go stare at it in a different one so she couldn't be distracted by my magic circulation. Speaking of, at first I didn't get why I had to do it this exact way but now as I closed in on the end I realized that it is making my mana become more agreeable to the idea of being strings. With my previous woven construct I had to constantly think about keeping the threads thin on top of all the other difficulties in maneuvering multiple lines at the same time, but once I complete this task I was sure string form would be a toggle that my mana was willing to become, resulting in much easier weaving.

About two hours passed as I watched Victoria work on her carving of a boar, she was going extremely high definition with it, currently she was carefully half cutting slivers to form wooden fur on it's back. After that a soldier came by and they played a round of chess, surprisingly the soldier was not completely stomped. It took them a while to get into the swing of things but once they managed to convince themselves that chess was a sort of combat training they actually improved a lot. It also helped that they were not in a rush so the soldier had plenty of time to think and consider her moves. She still lost eventually, if I had to pin down how it went wrong for her, it was her inability to plan several steps ahead. Oh she could plan one or two steps, like sacrifice a piece to make an opening for another, but anything longer was hard for her to grasp.

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On the other hand, the normal workers didn't play anything at all. While a soldier's brain could be hacked to accept chess and checkers as battle training, a worker does not care for battle so they just don't get it. Based on their mentality something that can be used for pretend construction would engage them, like tinker toys, sadly due to a critical lack of plastic I can't give them the gift of any kind of construction brick. We have loads of wood though so I should be able to make a handful of template pieces, show the workers how to use them, and then the workers can make more as needed. I expect either they don't like them very much or one of the chambers will end up filled with a mega construction like a castle or something.

At hour twenty-two I started getting really nervous and I am forced to take a walk around the place to calm myself down. Yes, it was awkward walking around with my hands held forward like a mummy but I was too far past tired to care. Going up a tunnel to a digging crew I am surprised to see they had made a ninety degree turn to the right, guess they decided that spot was far enough out so now they were going to connect the ends in a big square. That must have been the team Valerie joined up with because the other three had not made a turn yet, and asking about it they assured me that they would know when it was time to turn. They somehow knew exactly how far from the center they were without any measuring device, exact measurements were important in construction so it was a baked in ability.

After the timer clicked over to hour twenty-three, for a few seconds I thought the universe was going to give me a break, but then Christina came running up to me and had a report. A soldier spotted two men in the forest, they were looking down at something one of them was holding at the time so they didn't spot her. The provided memory didn't have enough detail to tell who they were since the soldier turned around and bolted back home as soon as she saw them. I sighed and mumbled, "I knew it," at the report, but I refused to just give up and start over without at least trying to handle it with my hands tied. So I made for the surface with Christina in tow, once up there I was pleased to see a bunch of soldiers already waiting.

With their new prey finding skill they didn't need to spend long stretches of time wandering around to find food so all the ones with it now go out in the morning and returned once they found something. Since one boar can feed several ants and the need to always be hunting due to 'uncertainty of hunt success' is gone they can instead hang around up top after a kill and train. After counting, there were fifteen of them up here and two in the entrance chamber as guards. I grabbed eleven of them, including Christina, and the others were left as an extra layer of defense in case a third man that was separated from the first two was around but not seen. Our marching formation had Christina in the front, me behind her, with two soldiers behind me, a bit off to the sides were two groups of four.

While everyone tried to sneak forward I was the main searcher since 'mana sense' didn't interfere with my task. It wasn't the most powerful but twenty-four levels meant it could be pushed further than visible range through the underbrush and even let me see around trees. It took about ten minutes of walking before I spotted one and then a few steps later there was the other one trailing after him. I had our whole formation shuffle sideways until there were walking directly towards me and Christina and had the other groups spread out around the flanks so they would be partially surrounded after they got close enough. Once they got close enough I had Christina and the two soldiers step into the open in front of them and start talking while I stayed behind a tree.

She opened with, "stop where you are, this is the land of queen Victoria, state your business or leave."

I could hear the confusion in the man's voice as he replied, "how can you- I mean, yes we have business here! Me and my associate came out here because we were looking for another man, a Kadi Janson."

Fuck, they know my name, but they seemed less outright hostile than the last guy, so I told Christina what to say to them, "that is not what I asked, you are looking for Kadi but what is your business with him?"

The second man spoke up then, "He helped me and I wanted to repay him somehow, we do not want to hurt him." After he talked I realized who it was and almost dropped my mana circulation from pure surprise.

I stepped out from behind the tree and saw someone I thought would have never wanted to see me again, Jeremy the magic technician from Merriat. With him was one of the guards from the bridge who was freaked out by the slaughter of surrendering ants. I only had one question for him on my mind at that moment, so I asked, "Jeremy, how the HELL did you find me?"