Chapter 506: Where will we put all this power?

There were mistakes in the blueprints. And when it came to fixing them, the engineer bees were met with more human obstinacy.

Bees used a very different school of thought in both study and in building. How should things be done? Why should they be done so?

Humans accepted the authority of bees in all decisions, but this didn’t prevent them from going against bees’ wishes unintentionally.

I found out that Researchina instructed her subordinates working with Workharder’s people to ensure that the future dams were built in a way that would make it easier to convert them into power plants. However, the very concept was beyond the understanding of human architects.

By their designs, a dam should be as monolithic as possible, and while this was more dependable in the long run, it would make building power plants on dams more complicated later.

And this was just one example. This went down even to the details like what base should be used to mix cement for building!

To prevent this, I ordered my girls to keep a close watch on every suggestion the humans made. On their every thought! All errors brought to their lack of knowledge or miscommunication had to be taken out before they could sprout and bloom.

But this was time-consuming and took effort from bees who could’ve spent them elsewhere. Even more…

‘Now the architects are unhappy, Father,’ Whisper reported. ‘They don’t like the amount of guidance we give them! This is ungratefulness even I rarely see.’

By this time, two more weeks had passed, and the dams’ foundations were approaching their completion. I thought that things were doing as well as they could until now, but clearly, I was being too hopeful again.

‘What do you mean, Whisper?’ I asked.

‘They have thoughts full of complaints. They don’t like being told what to do so often… But can’t realise that it’s their fault for doing things wrongly in the first place! Father, should I order my Agents to put some holy fear into them, or promise them a reward? I feel like either will just make things worse. Those aren’t humans with good personalities!’

I winced upon hearing what Whisper said.

Although I understood her point, in this case, I was actually feeling bad for the architects!

All it took was imagining how “fun” it’d be to work alongside someone who corrected your every other step. Even those steps which you have only started to make.

A nightmare of any group project!

This was effective in preventing mistakes, but it was no wonder that these people were getting stressed. I was sure that no matter how much gratitude they felt for guidance (if any), the sheer annoyance would eventually overtake it fully.

Neither a carrot nor a stick would do more than mitigate the symptoms for a short while.

‘Promise them a higher reward. You know what each of them wants the most,’ I told Whisper. ‘And perhaps, lay off the watch a little bit. Keep watching, but don’t interrupt their incorrect thoughts before they become actions.’

These people didn’t deserve punishment. Perhaps I was just in a good mood today.

Several days later, Whisper reported that the humans stopped expressing as much unhappiness and even began to work with slightly more effort than usual. Which, in the opinion of most bees, was a rare show of competence from humans.

This compensated for the time the architects lost on thinking about ideas which the bees will eventually turn down. Overall, the work sped up a little, and nobody was thinking about having a mental breakdown anymore.

After this, the construction of dams continued without more incidents that required my attention. In another month, a dozen smaller dams have been completed and merged with the existing ice wall.

The larger dams took more time. By this point, some of them still had only unfinished foundations. If not for the ice dams still holding on, thanks to the gardeners, the flow of water would’ve washed away these foundations long ago.

Over these weeks, the flood water had partially gone away into the soil or evaporated, and the water level behind the wall diminished. However, the water was still far from disappearing, and I expected that it would take several more months for it all to go away.

This was further slowed down by the continuation of a careful advance of the anti-tree army.

To make sure that they don’t cause another flood, they moved to altitudes high enough to be frozen permanently. Cutting ice-hole trees there made very little difference.

Yet again, I was getting reports about more ice-hole trees being cut, and yet again, they made me happy!

In five more months, the last dam has been completed. The architects were sent back to their homes a while longer, after Researchina and Workharder both assured me that the humans had no more useful advice left in them and were just slowing everything down.

These dams were colossal walls of stone and concrete. They were built with pieces that even mechas had difficulty lifting. Instead, special living stone cranes had to be constructed to move them, and these cranes were so giant that only humans and mechas could operate them!

Those tasks would’ve stopped human builders for months, but bees just worked together and finished them within weeks.

Now the crude ice dams were replaced with neat stone ones, and my project was ready for part two! By now, Researchina had long ago made blueprints and even a prototype of a river-based power plant…

However, harder than the power plants was promising to be their logistics. How would bees build thousands of kilometres of cables to spread this electricity all over the Bee Empire? What would we even use so much electricity for?

The river-based power plants promised to be several hundred times more powerful than any coal power plant built by us so far!

Meanwhile, our most energy-consuming technologies were measly radars.

“Well, clearly you should invent something even cooler, Researchina,” I said. “And I have just the idea for you.”