CHAPTER 497: SLOW DEFORESTATION

Tabletina had a ludicrous amount of fun with her new toy.

The first tests showed that the prosthetic eye worked even on things which I didn’t see.

After this, Tabletina went amok with peering at people. I heard tales about some grand projects going on... But I was too scared to ask in detail about them.

The next day, she spent half an hour talking about all the chaotic mutations she discovered among bees who were listed as "ordinary" in the population census. There were a lot of people with obscure resistances like radiation, smoke and others.

She was also learning how to use the health and stamina meter to find sick people.

Various illnesses and traumas didn’t show in a creature’s status, but noticeably ill bees wouldn’t recover health or stamina above a certain point. This method of searching for sick girls was slightly less precise than regular tests used by Physicians, but it was much faster.

In the end, I had to remind Tabletina (again) that she was the Health Adviser of the entire Bee Empire.

"For someone of your rank, giving diagnoses to people should be only done in your spare time, as a hobby and to keep your wits sharp, Tabletina. Thousands of thousands of bees need your guidance. Not that you can’t have free time or even vacations—but make sure that there’s someone to replace you during your leave, or the entire system might collapse!"

This shamed Tabletina enough that she returned to her duties. I wasn’t lying about the amount of them—not only was she responsible for refining and implementing medical technologies of the Bee Empire, now she was also responsible for finding and evaluating the health of all the bees with the cold resistance gene.

Three weeks after this conversation, several more anti-tree armies (a total of 10 million bees!) entered the mountains to speed up their deforestation.

The reinforcements were necessary. The harsh mountain winds, their thin air, the thinness of our supply chains there—this all made the deforestation go slower with every day spent advancing up the mountains.

In another month, the assorted squads cleaned approximately 1% of the total population of the ice-hole trees. This tiny number wasn’t just because my girls worked slowly, but because the ice-hole trees were spreading on the other side of the mountains.

They were also extremely prevalent in the mountains themselves. The local winds carried their seeds very far, even if there wasn’t much warmth in them to grow quickly.

Tabletina was going to have all the wood for prosthetics she might want! As soon as it was delivered to her. The anti-tree armies had no time to carry the heavy wood all the way back to the Bee Empire.

The supply convoys that brought extra food and equipment to the armies carried them to the Bee Empire on their way back. These supply convoys were the weakest part of the anti-tree armies, because they were mostly made of humans.

Humans resisted cold better than bees, but had difficulties going too far into the mountains. I knew that in the future, the speed of our advance would slow down even more than before.

Three more months of advancement later, a part of the cold-immune bees had to ferry supplies from humans to their sisters on their own backs for the sake of speed and the sake of not letting the humans freeze to death under harsh mountain winds.

But at least this front was stable.

The other parts of the Bee Empire continued to persevere and slowly stabilise. I even considered resuming the Empire’s expansion, but then held it off when another plant evolution hit our food stores.

Things like these were a bane on us each time they happened. Plants weren’t the only ones who evolved. Various dragons and other creatures (usually in the wild) sometimes evolved unpredictably, too.

Like black dragons, whom bees liked to tame. Once, tamers found evolved black dragons who were even smarter than ordinary ones.

Instead of working for food (the regular process of taming), they stole food from tamers, almost killed a few of them, and then flew away!

At least the dodo population grew without evolving into anything harmful. By now, it was gradually approaching five hundred. This number would grow exponentially, to the point where we could use dodos not only by carefully draining their blood or making them pull wagons, but also kill some for meat and leather.

I knew that Dalmanrach wouldn’t care as long as their population was high enough in the first place. To him, dodos were just a tool he used to play the Game of Evolution because those were the rules.

Tabletina’s prosthetics also helped the overall well-being of the Bee Empire. Her Physicians have a lot of schematics for them. Some were basic replacements, some were augments that used flesh samples of powerful beasts killed by our Warriors.

The series of designs she was most proud of was a full-body set of prosthetics with the basic shape of a bee, but slots for flesh that could belong to any creature. It was a universal prosthetic that anyone could customise as they wanted.

And since it was a standard design, it was easy to manufacture in bulk and ship all over the Bee Empire. Things from limbs to livers went to the bees who needed them, giving a new life to thousands of bees who were crippled in a fight or after an accident!

Many Artist Bees who took this career because of disabilities began to reconsider working as such. This went to the point where Worriesgone spoke about it on the Empire Council, almost sobbing that she was going to be left without art if this continued (but at the same time, she couldn’t just stop bees from healing!).

Her fears were unfounded. There were a lot of young bees who, after going through job orientation tests, wanted to be Artists. It all went down to the quotas on them.

But besides the ordinary augments, there were even more special ones...