Chapter 55: Chapter 53: What Survived

Regina stared down at the piece of metal. It was a long, cylindrical object, a hollow tube. And she had very little idea what to do with it now.

She resisted the urge to flick it away and instead put her chin on her hand, sighing to herself. The novels and shows she could vaguely remember always made it look so easy. But getting pretty much anything that the peoples around her couldn’t was a giant pain in the ass.

Maybe they could use something like this for a blowpipe? It was probably too big. Oh, well. She’d always known she wouldn’t be able to make something complicated, like a gun or lightbulb, that easily. If only my old self, or wherever I got these memories from, paid a little more attention to how things worked. Unfortunately, the only thing she knew about modern weapons was that they used gunpowder. Maybe. Or they had at some point in their development. And bombs and stuff relied on the chemical components that made them up, but since she didn’t know which, she couldn’t create them.

Regina shook her head to herself. “Maybe something simple like sulfuric acid,” she muttered. But she was leery of using something as potentially destructive, especially indiscriminately. Though she should be able to create some similar stuff with relatively simple molecular makeup that she knew. Actually, she could probably make quite a few poisonous substances. But nothing struck her as really practical right now.

She considered whether she could create gases, and imagined getting half a cubic meter of carbon-dioxide. There was a drain on her mana, but, of course, she had no way of knowing if that had actually been conjured. It should have dissipated right away into the surrounding air. Regina still moved a few steps away, only taking a breath once she did.

She was pretty sure that the air that used to be wherever she conjured something was simply displaced, and since it was simply air, that didn’t change much. But she had no way of really testing that, either. She wasn’t about to try and play around with high-pressure containers without at least a bit more in the way of safety measures and preparation. It wasn’t really feasible here.

Sighing, she switched tracks and focused on something else. After a long moment of intense concentration, she held a small nugget of gold. Regina lifted it up, watching the play of the sunlight across it. For some reason, creating gold was much harder, or at least more mana-intensive, than iron. It might have something to do with mass and density. Still, she wondered if this would be useful for buying things the hive needed. Though she didn’t really want other people to know she could do this. She got up and carefully hid the gold in the small stockpile she had made of various odds and ends and possible crafting materials.

After she stepped back out of the hut, she paused, a little unsure whether to continue. She was using up her mana, and she still had a large drain on its regeneration by letting so many eggs develop. Times like these, she really wished she’d chosen the mage Ability. Especially since she’d decided that she might very well only have two slots for external Infected hive members and wanted to leave the other one open. Then again, Dark had been invaluable.

She focused on the presence of the bird monster in her mind, then paused as she recognized what it was doing. The bird was following one of the groups of elves Ada had pointed out to her. She hadn’t told him to do that. But Dark seemed to have warmed up to his place here very quickly, maybe because of the steady supply of food. He was also already level 17, and would probably reach 18 very soon.

Regina pulled up his status screen with a thought.

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