Chapter 21: Chapter 21

Kai wasn’t the only one excited about having tools. They could help all of the hives current jobs and even open up new job directions. For some reason though, Ember was the most enthusiastic and immediately went on about all the possible things she could do with needles.

Needleless to say there were enough volunteers who would gladly do the work of cleaning bones. It was also the first time that Kai was glad about being the queen, because she thought it was quite disgusting to be working with the still bloody bones, left behind by the drones.

She handed the project over to Erika and let her daughters figure out the rest. Kai wouldn’t be much of a help anyway except for maybe creating some sharp stone blades for knives. She had a vague idea of how to do it, but had never done it herself so it would still take her some time to figure out the trick.

Kai ended the meeting that had been more of an announcement and watched the others dispant. Tiffany took a few girls with her to build a new room for Artemis and Erika went towards the eating spot of the drones while being pestered by Ember.

It all looked like the most normal thing and put a smile on Kai’s face. The chance of getting to eat meat this evening might have played a small role in her happiness too.

She wouldn’t let herself laze around all day though, the meat had to be earned and would taste that much better if she looked at it like the prize of the day.

Kai turned to Anna. “Do you mind if we do a little bit of training?”

Anna looked at her sternly. “You mean for the rest of the day, don’t you?”

Kai put her hands together and smiled weakly. “Maybe?”

Her daughter sighed and inclined her head. “As long as you take regular breaks, my lady.”

That was enough for Kai and she got up. She stretched and let out a satisfied sigh. Meanwhile Anna dusted off the fur of Kai’s large tail who rolled her eyes at the action. It would get dirty during the training again anyway.

They walked around the left hive-root to the experimentation area and Anna began to gather a few silk pillars that had been built for training purposes.

Kai went over to a grassy spot near the root and sat down in a seiza position. She wanted to work on her mana manipulation first and needed to fully concentrate for this.

To start things Kai began to gather all her mana in her left hand. From there she slowly moved it towards her right foot, then to her left food and then to her right hand. To complete the circle she moved her mana to her head and then back to her left hand. She left her tail out for the first circle, because she didn’t want to accidentally lay an egg and she had no trust in her starting control.

Kai repeated the mana circle and slowly increased her speed. Once it only took her about 5 seconds she added another spot to her mana circle at the base of her tail. To make sure she had to move her mana around more than before her tail base came after her head.

The goal of this training was to increase the speed at which she could move her mana as well as her general control over it. If she had the basic system skill it would take her around 10 seconds to move her mana in a circle through her whole body, but sadly she did not have that luxury. It would still take her longer than her daughters anyway, because of the size of her tail.

There was a benefit to doing this without the system though. The system seemed to try to equalize things for different species to make things more fair. The way it did that was by simply not showing some of the resources from creatures that had more than others on the status screen.

Kai for example had noticed that she had about 80% more mana than the system was showing her on her status screen and the same was with her mana regeneration. If she had to guess, she would say the system was only showing her the information about her humanoid body and omitted the info of her tail.

Why it worked that way Kai didn’t know. Maybe it was to give non-sapient creatures an edge, because they couldn’t comprehend the system's messages?

She put that thought aside and concentrated on her training again, slowly adding more gathering spots to her mana circulation.

After around an hour Anna came over to her and made sure Kai took a break. The queen had managed to get her mana to circulate through her body in 16 seconds in that time. She relaxed and ate some of the fruits that Anna had kindly brought with her.

The second training was less of a true training and more Kai trying to find out the best stances to absorb force from different directions. 

To do that Kai and Anna went a few meters away from the root to an area that Anna had covered with some of the silk that had been laying around. Then Kai took different stances and Anna shoved her as hard as possible from all directions.

Kai wanted to create a fighting style for the Antanoid and to start she wanted to have some footwork as foundation. She couldn’t just use the things she had learned when she had still been human, because her center of weight was different now. 

Hopefully Brian would then improve things and work out something for the other Antanoid off of her example. Their center of weight was again somewhere else than hers as their tails were a lot smaller, so things had to be a bit adapted for them.

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An hour later they took a break again before they increased the difficulty for Kai and Anna. Now her goal was to take small impacts and avoid larger ones by moving as little as possible. 

Anna’s goal on the other hand was to ‘attack’ Kai with varying strength and to push her over. She couldn’t just go full force all the time or Kai would have an easy time once she had the trick figured out.

They did this for the next few hours and Kai fell more often than she would like to admit, but at least she wasn’t a complete pushover anymore at the end.

Anna stopped moving and looked at the position of the sun. “It’s time to stop my lady. We should wash ourselves again before dinner.”

That was a proposition Kai was only too glad to take up upon. The last part of the training had been quite demanding after some time and her fur was all sweaty and likely also smelly.

The two of them made their second trip to the river and took a second bath. After that they returned to the hive.

A new room was already standing and Erika’s room was adorned with different bones that had been secured there to dry. The floor of the hive was now completely covered by silk and at the very edge Tiffany was tending to a small fire with a stick in her hand. She was fully clad in a silk toga.

Kai walked over to her with Anna, but kept her distance to the fire and eyed it with worry. She didn’t want to risk her fur catching fire because of a wayward spark. “Tiffany, isn’t it dangerous to do that this close to the silk?”

Tiffany looked up and smiled at Kai. “Hi mom! Don’t worry about the silk. We tested out if it was flammable before and the silk just kind of melted. It doesn’t look nice and the smell is weird, but a fire wouldn’t be able to spread.” Now the silk toga made sense, Kai wasn’t the only one with a fear of burning to death.

That the silk wasn’t really flammable was good news for Kai. She had worried since the beginning that fire would be a serious concern and they had to switch to something like stone or wood buildings in the future. That would have been kind of sad as the silk buildings pretty much belonged to the Antanoid society and culture already, even if there wasn’t much of that yet.

Kai smiled back. “Hey Tiffy. How are you doing with the fire and roasting?”

Tiffany scratched her head awkwardly. “Well, it honestly took me a while until I managed to properly roast something and I had been about to doubt you.”

Oh no, how dare she! Kai rolled her eyes.

She smiled brightly again. “But when I roasted one of the pieces only till the brown stage the taste was heavenly!”

Kai sighed. Ohh Tiffany, just how much meat did you burn to charcoal? 

Tiffany turned around and continued to play with the fire. 

Anna looked judgingly at Tiffany. “Please tell me there is something left for our queen.”

Tiffany nodded and pointed at the storage room with her stick. “Yes, there is a lot still left. You don’t have to worry about it.”

Anna eyed the still burning stick. “Then why are you wasting more wood for fire?”

Tiffany held the stick back into the fire and pointed at a few stones that were stacked nearby with her free hand. “I am trying to heat up stones and use them to roast the meat instead.”

That surprised Kai. “That’s pretty smart of you.”

She took Anna’s hand and began to drag her towards the storage room before she could say anything. “Allright Tiffy, we are going to get some of that heavenly taste you spoke about.”

Tiffany waved after them. “Thanks mom! Have fun!”

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