Chrysalis

It would be utterly ridiculous if the humans were to be working harder than the ants. That is a situation that could never be borne! Never! Ants are the hardest working, most industrious species on the face of the earth.

Never tiring! Never slowing!

Now it's time to show it!

Watching the humans feverishly working as if possessed by a spirit of madness has ignited a fire within my ant soul. I refuse to be outworked!

I mean … the rest of the colony are working their guts out, as always, it's only me that takes breaks. The workers are either tending to the sudden influx of eggs, keeping them clean, keeping them the right temperature, shifting them between chambers to make sure the moisture in the air is correct, or tending to the larvae, feeding them, keeping them plump and happy. Not to mention that Vibrant has been racing about, followed by her own loyal posse of workers, at a mad dash, hauling piles and piles of surface monsters back to the nest.

According to her, the surrounding forest is starting to look a little thin of surface monsters so I recommended she take her group into the Dungeon farms and upper tunnels to beef up her helpers and provide some more Biomass rich material for the colony.

No sooner had the words left my mouth than she was off, dashing down into the Dungeon and soon enough she was back with her team, carrying large mandible loads of Biomass.

Naturally this means the Queen is getting ready to lay another clutch in the next few days. All of this Biomass has largely been funnelled towards her which means my own preparations need to step up a gear!

First!

The farms!

with the

do we need?

need to pump out Biomass and cores at a faster rate than ever before in order to kick start the growth

food and I somewhat spitefully want to keep it from the Queen in order to slow down the rate of growth, if only a

the farms are four , round chambers about twenty metres beneath the surface. In my grand expansion plan I add another eight chambers, the new ones roughly double the

to the size of the task I end up recruiting Vibrant and her gang when they return to the nest and

The bliss! Ant zen,

digging project like this produces a heck of a lot of dirt and the villagers are treated to the sight of a steady stream of workers crawling about

are up to over here but

digging is done and I've collected two levels in my excavation, enough to advance it to the third rank, expert excavation, I need to do try and increase our

nest, I don't have a convenient pool of mana charged water that I can siphon off into the nest,

like the original does. You can survive on mana produced water, for example, but it doesn't hydrate nearly as well as natures' own. This applies to anything made with mana apparently. You can make metals with some advanced classes of earth mage

does that mean? More

care of the surface side of the equation, I ask Crinis to use her tentacles to burrow holes from the end of the channel that drain into the upper four farms, then

are properly squashed flat to prevent leaking and then to create a gate mechanism at the river end and at the anthill end. The last thing we want