Chrysalis

I'm exhausted and my mandibles are aching something fierce after all that digging, but is it time to rest?

NOPE.

Those damn pupae are teasing me with their very existence. The twenty large casings are resting against the side of a chamber, taunting me with their stillness. Within them, the hope of ant kind is taking the final steps of their gestation, turning from a grub into something more, something incredible. The ant species to end all ant species.

At least that's what I'm hoping for. If they suck I'm going to be really disappointed…

It shouldn't happen though! I reinforce my own positive mindset. They are going to be great, I've put so much effort into creating them and into making sure they'll get a solid boost to start out their new lives, surely they'll be great!

The closer this project is getting to fruition the more stressed I'm getting.

Put it behind you Anthony, put all of it behind you!

Focus on yourself for a while, treat yourself. To what should I treat myself? To skill training, of course!

Not only me, Tiny and Crinis have been roped in as well.

knowledge of the system has greatly expanded and the weightiest nugget

within my core, I was ignoring two aspects

within the monster. When one tree is watered over much, it does not grow properly, drowning instead of thriving, and the other trees wither. Only when the life giving succour is evenly distributed

me out of sheer shock and in the process lost his only remaining hand. At least now with Shattering Bite advancing I have one fourth rank combat skill. Advancing skills, fusing them and taking them to their extreme ends is what the surface races spend most of their time doing in

has come to take part in that most sacred of all system related activities,

grind like there's no

thing to grind?

thing that Beyn had enlightened me of. I'd thought I'd made use of an awesome hack

waste since I'm now able to produce those mana types now without too much stress. The problem is that having the gland doesn't give me access to what I really need to make use of it, which is the spell forms. I have the generic spell shapes that I've been using, but according to Beyn, every mana type has particular spells that make best of its attributes, the more advanced

was sure it was a particularly advanced form of mana, which means that the

level up my basic affinities, which will unlock the next rank of affinities, and so on until

water magic affinity to the third rank, the next wave of affinity skills will unlock. That is my most immediate goal. Apparently the exact types of mana that

local mages

Rush to the top!

in to grind our skills, repetitively, endlessly, mind numbingly. For me, that means forming and releasing the ice mana construct over and over again, casting water and ice spells at everything I can

skills in combat situations against monsters gives a much faster boost than just hitting the walls but being as mentally exhausted as we are, I don't want us diving into frenetic combat. Keeping to the upper tunnels and picking on some plants is as much as I'm willing to commit to at

this, we grind, and grind, and

a mortified Crinis to attempt to use her skills on me, thinking