The band of adventurers had gathered their things and headed off over the mountain along with a small pack of my ants, including the newly named Scout, with instructions to follow Rennie’s orders but to not just throw their own lives away. With the ten of them gone that leaves my number of ants including the queen at around 60-ish. This, of course, does not include the larval young. I head down to the nursery chamber where I materialize a few large slabs of fresh meat for Cardinal and her nursery workers to feed to the little grubs, this should cover the lack of Onyx’s hunting and then some while we wait for him to respawn, and hopefully his twenty four hours go by quicker than mine did. I backtrack through Cardinal's chamber and go to look at the fungi gardens. The hanging skeletal frameworks of baskets are being filled with silk and fungal substrate, and the pillar in the center seems to be completed, now the ants are building a spiral ramp climbing the column, and ending at the silk walkway, I wonder how they can get the silk to form solid structures instead of sagging and flapping about like loose fabric as it should so I use discern on one of the struts supporting the soon to be usable spiral walkway.
Petrified Silk, Common.
When Dire Ant silk is sprayed with the chemical compound used by Dire Ants to mine, a small exothermic reaction occurs as its organic polymer chains break and reconfigure into latices making a light, partially flexible, and homogeneous ceramic or stone-like material with ablative properties as well as being fire resistant and waterproof. However, the ability to acquire this material by sentient races is almost non-existent so its use is not commonly seen outside of any hives or colonies other than carved trinkets or other items adventurers carve to sell after raiding a colony. Used by Dire Ants to build support structures for inside the colony as well as roofing for external hive structures, later on after evolution External hive building ants will construct small domed structures similar in likeness to igloos to live in. These petrified silk hovels replace the majority of external hive structures after the colony has completely matured and evolved.
That could be a useful building material for me but there isn’t any good place for me to dissolve any without weakening the structure and they don’t seem to waste any of the material at all in their construction so I'll have to just wait until the supports are thick enough for me to take some without causing it to collapse. Thoroughly bored and unable to think of anything productive to do I head back up to the courtyard where I look around a bit, it looks better than the dirt and gravel hole it used to be but something is missing, it just looks… boring. Like an office park with no trees, I immediately move to fix this by carving out a couple planters spaced evenly around the bowl and then I hit a stoppage, I don't have anything to plant in my planters.
I feel out through the bond and can sense Scout with the adventurers making good time, granted they are moving at a snake's pace compared to how the ants could through the forest so I tickle Scout's thoughts a little bit and have her small squad of ants look for and retrieve any assortment of small saplings and seeds that I can grow. I have no idea if she even gets the message, given that they are a solid eight or nine miles away by now but I can do with just hoping for now I guess. I could just ask some foragers to bring me stuff from the surrounding forest but I am hoping for something a little more foreign than the trees, bushes, and brambles that are in the immediate area. Granted I doubt the plants from a few miles away would be too much different but it's worth the wait I suppose.
I dematerialize myself and send out my feelers over the entirety of the dungeon. I am much bigger than a football field and its stadium by now, at least in length, but the amount of space I am able to use is somewhat lacking, I still only have about nine rooms total, and the ants carving their way to the center of the mountain haven’t made too much more progress, the stone they have dug into appears to be much more dense than where I have been digging our home so I decide I will also begin helping with the excavation.
The monotonous feeling of carving out room after room from the ants already processed hallway gave me an odd sense of growth, almost as if I was a plant and I could see my roots and leaves sprouting as opposed to the way the ants digging felt. That was more like looking at my fingernails then in a few days I look again and they were longer, unable to actually feel the growth. digging my own spaces by myself also had a gratifying feeling compared to just noticing I was now bigger. After a few hours and the addition of a good few storage closets and one absolutely cavernous room that I, in hindsight, have no idea what I can even use for; I began to feel the all too familiar sluggish feeling of having depleted my mana reservoir and decided to retire from my excavating for the time being since I had also run into the barrier to my domain and returned to my core. I haven’t actually felt tired in the normal sense of being awake for a long time since I arrived.
Instead, it was more akin to being emotionally drained from attending a long-form staff meeting or the strain you get in your muscles after a hard ruck, not tired so much as just strained and exhausted, wanting nothing more than to flop into bed. I continued to just float there for a few hours, playing chess and scrolling to-do lists across my stone tablets, trying anything to quell the boredom.
Once I had returned to almost half mana I had exhausted everything I could think to do that wouldn’t use too much mana and my mind began to wander over the recent events I've been through, the foremost on my mind being the meeting with the… god? I think he was a god or some godly being at the very least, I racked my brain for a while, he was able to transport my consciousness and bind me into my physical form without any prior need for some ritual, not to mention intercept my consciousness from my mindspace and bring me to wherever it was we had our little conversation. This line of thinking also reminded me of the fact he wanted me to come up with a name for the “new thing” I had inadvertently created. I just let out a sigh and make myself a stone tablet, I never was an especially creative person aside from tinkering with mechanical and electrical circuits, and admittedly coming up with unorthodox solutions on the battlefield like duct taping a small rocket propelled shape charge to a drone and using it to hit enemy infantry mechs from behind.
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As it turns out, naming shit is hard. Especially if you know next to nothing about the thing you are trying to name aside from its color and otherwise general outward appearance. glowing blue, five or six sided crystal, that violently arched with some form of energy, and floated ominously. Not a whole lot to work with. Although I suppose I could do something with that. I attempt to come up with a few names, however, I decide to throw in the towel soon after as thinking up complicated names for things isn't really something I enjoy or find myself particularly good at. After this, I resign myself to playing more chess and talking with Cardinal. Perhaps I should make a giant chess set to fill the massive empty room and find a way to make the pieces move on their own, playing a never ending battle of chess in the recesses of the mountain.
Just as I finish this thought I can feel a slight pressure emanating throughout the dungeon, telling me that my core was fully charged without having to check my statistics. I reform my avatar and stroll out into the dungeon, making sure to stop by the nursery to check on the little ones and Cardinal, however, Cardinal isn’t present so I create a few large slabs of meat which the nursery workers immediately tear into to begin processing it into fist sized chunks for the larva which chitter ravenously at the smell of fresh meat. I make my way out into the rest of the queen's chamber where I find a few workers patrolling but still no Cardinal. Working my way down into the new section of dungeon I had previously carved out I find her standing just inside the doorway of the large room I had carved out into the mountain, her antennae twitch feverishly at the air and one of them twitches my way causing her to turn around and look up to me.
“How long did it take you to dig this?” she asks in what I would almost figure as an exasperated tone.
“Maybe a few hours?” I say as I ponder the question, trying to add up the time in my head while I look out into the pitch darkness that eats the low beam from my flashlight, seemingly unending with my voice echoing ominously back at us along with the chitters of a few ants that had begun mapping out the cavern and the workers at the far end continuing to dig into the stone in their unending march. I place my hand against the wall to my left and channel my mana, with a grinding sound like scraping two large stones together in a continuous line a seed of light peeks out of the ceiling, then another, and a third and fourth as I grow several people sized lumen crystals jutting out from the domed ceiling in awkward angles as I attempt to make them look somewhat natural with crystal growths jutting around them, the whole process took about half my mana and in the end did less than I’d have hoped, The room was dimly lit, as in you could see shapes milling about but still can’t actually see anything and the rooms feeling of dread was, if anything, raised by the ominous shadows that were rummaging about across the football field sized room. Disappearing behind and crawling up or down the girthy stone pillars that are keeping the ceiling from collapsing.
“What were you going to build in here?” she asks, her voice still sounding somewhat shocked or exasperated.
“I don’t really know if I'm being honest, I just didn't feel like stopping until I had run out of mana”. Not particularly satisfied with that answer but sensing it was the truth she turned back towards the cavern, antenna vibrating through the air, she then turned and bowed her head in my direction as I stepped out from the doorway and let her pass. What I said was technically the truth because I had run very low on mana, but it wasn’t the whole truth I suppose, as I could have easily run myself out entirely and fell into my state of unconsciousness. The main reason I had stopped was due to the fact I had hit my natural barrier and had to wait for the workers to continue digging out their tunnel. As I had turned to follow Cardinal, the sound of cracking stone and a sudden rush of high pressure water mixed with the two sharp feelings at the base of my skull sent my heart pumping as I rushed into the room towards the sound.
One of the workers had, unbeknownst to any of us dug into an underwater lake or spring of sorts, and given the amount of pressure it must have been a large one with us at or close to the bottom. I immediately started sending commands to have the workers vacate the area however some were not fast enough and unfortunately were caught in the torrent, having their bodies smashed against the wall I had begun putting up spanning the center of the room, one of them being killed instantly by the impact while another managed to limp its way up and over the barrier, falling in with the line of fleeing ants. I sealed the doorway just as I saw a flash of white carapace trying to peek into the doorway after the last ant made it out. I thickened the wall leading to the corridor to prevent it from breaking if this room also filled past the granite levee I was making. The stone was forming as fast as I could make it and simultaneously hollowing out the ground below, sinking the floor down a solid thirty feet, turning the forming river into a pressurized waterfall.
Three more pins at the nape of my neck told me that more of the ants than I had thought hadn't managed to get away from the water in time and had subsequently drowned in the swirling torrent, which was filling dangerously close to the brim of the barrier I had made as more of the wall leading into the lake gave away making the flood fill even faster. I began lowering the floor even farther dropping down to almost fifty feet as a precaution while raising the levee further, my mana now beginning to dip lower than I’d have liked and I am silently cursing myself for the crystal lights.
However, as I am thinking this a searing pain shoots into my thigh and I yell as my hand instinctively reaches to it and I can feel the warm trickle fall down my leg as I begin to bleed. Sticking out of my leg is a small arrow, smaller than what the scout ants had been using when they attacked, and the shaft seems like it is made out of something other than wood, I shine my flashlight at it, the creamy ivory is somewhat unmistakable as I pull the bone arrow from my thigh and consume it, the blood starts pouring as I am hit in the shoulder and side by more of the arrows. Unable to see or hear my assailants over the sound of rushing water and my senses being dulled by pain and panic I decide to call it and my form evaporates into nothing, the water now spilling over my attempted flood control while my consciousness is projected back into my sanctum.
"I just can't catch a break can I." I think to myself as I float into the queen's chambers to brief Cardinal and her procession of workers of the bad news and our new problem guests who are as of yet unknown, and now occupying the flooding chamber.