CHAPTER 504: TWO TURBINES WITH ONE RIVER

I had an idea about what to do with all this water and all the dams that kept it on the other side of the wall. However, before it could even be seriously considered, a lot of other things had to be done.

First of all—counting our losses.

Despite all our efforts, some water poured over the dams and went into the rivers downstream, causing several floods. However, they were all minor, and the people were warned about their possibility.

Several human villages and some fields were flooded, but no people were harmed, and the damage was a tiny fraction of what they could’ve been.

A few hundred bees also got injured by water splashes or ice chips when fixing dams and walls, but all of them were pulled from danger and received appropriate medical attention.

In short—we really got out easy.

But this was just the first part.

With the main mass of snow on the lower parts of the mountains already melted, the Bee Empire didn’t have to worry about the repeat of the flood. Not on this scale, at least. However, the wall that kept us safe wasn’t as secure as I’d like.

A week passed in rushed work as the Bee Empire dealt with the aftermath of this catastrophic event.

Although more water poured down from the mountains during this week, its amount was tiny compared to the first flood. The speed of this water was lower, too, and the dirty dark mass of it was settling down more and more every day.

It was going to look blue soon enough, I knew it.

Unlike the ice wall, which was stuck as it was. During this week, it was reinforced with more ice-hole trees and other measures.

There were measures made to keep the trees alive. Surprise-surprise, but even those evolved trees needed air, ground and a minimum of sunlight. After being entombed in their own ice fully, they slowly died.

And with a tree dead, the ice around it would slowly melt, which was unacceptable.

To prevent this, I ordered extra trees planted around the inner ice layer, so they could keep it frozen. No matter how large a piece of ice was, if trees were bent to grow all around it, no warmth would reach it, and it would stay cold forever.

These border trees had much clearer ice surrounding them, and mechas drilled holes in it so they could breathe.

This was hard (and by "hard" I meant "near impossible") to execute with dams, though. And water that constantly poured through them was making the ice in the dams melt faster.

For a week, we kept the dams together with anchor trees grown from the river banks. We could probably hold it for many more weeks. Throw more trees into the water. But it wasn’t a sustainable solution, and the entire Council knew it.

"There is no choice, girls," I said. "We must build ACTUAL dams."

"I can’t even imagine how much soil this will take," Ambrosia said, frowning. "This is necessary, but how long will it take?"

"This sounds like another project we really must rush!" Workharder looked at me with excited eyes. "Don’t worry, Father, Mother-Queen—as long as the workers don’t have to touch ice-hole trees, we can just send as many of them as we need to finish the task on time!"

I smiled.

"Ah, the approach that never fails! But this will require a lot of study and research, too." I looked at my Science Adviser. "Researchina, this will require your best engineers. But besides that... Let me just share a thought with you."

She blinked and tilted her head.

"My mind is open to your telepathy, Father. You don’t need my permission."

"Ahem. I spoke figuratively, Researchina..." I cleared my throat awkwardly. "Anyway, you know how in ordinary power plants, the power is usually generated by steam or wind spinning a turbine?"

Researchina nodded, while others just watched curiously.

"Water can spin a turbine, too. Like water that is constantly flowing through all the temporary dams we’ve built. So what if, in addition to dams themselves, we also built power plants? There’d be enough of them to fuel the entire Bee Empire! Even when the main mass of water goes away, the main rivers will stay and will keep providing power!"

Researchina sucked in a breath and nodded.

"Amazing, Father. By equations of mass and kinetic energy, the sheer amount of power that goes through these rivers every day... It’s a pity that we can’t store the power of the flood itself." She paused. "And that we don’t have these power plants, actually. This is a project that will require some time to flesh out, even though its main principle is simple. Also, it will require a lot of cables to send the power over the Empire."

"Electric power is good, but we have to build dams quickly, don’t we?" Workharder spoke up. "Father, dams are already hard to build. This would make it even harder!"

"The power plants can be built on top of existing dams," I replied. "Dams first, power plants second."

Researchina nodded, writing something in her notes.

"I will ensure that my best Researchers will help your best Builders, Workharder, to make these dams. Sister Whisper, I also want to consult human builders. They have some experience in building dams on rivers as large as those, don’t they?"

’Yes, sister Researchina,’ Whisper’s astral projection replied. ’Father, I want to call upon human Tamsha for this. His own mind might help Researchina, too.’

I scratched my nose. If my memory wasn’t failing me—and my memory was literally perfect—then Tamsha was currently improving the human education system by following the example of our Academy and founding his own university.

He had friends in high places who eagerly shared resources with him. Including bees, because this university was going to spread the ideas I wanted humans to learn. The ideas of bee supremacy, of course.

This was pretty important, and I didn’t want to pull Tamsha away from this task. But he did have a background in architecture and some experience working with bees as almost-equals instead of being just a subordinate...