CHAPTER 507: CONTENDERS

"Cooler? Like the ice-hole trees are cool?" Worriesgone suddenly perked up with excitement. "Oh, I’m sorry to interrupt. It’s just..."

She shook her head, but her mind was brimming with loud ideas. The ideas about a pun she could make out of this if the idea was related to the ice-hole trees...

I shook my head. I didn’t even intend a pun! Now Worriesgone was derailing the Council, which already earned her a stern look from Ambrosia. Not that Worriesgone noticed it yet.

There I should’ve returned the conversation back on track—Researchina was waiting for me to elaborate!—but I couldn’t help myself.

"My idea isn’t cool at all, actually. It’s very hot," I said. "We can use electricity to smelt metals. This will allow much higher temperatures, easier control of them, and will require a shitton of power."

Worriesgone’s eyes sparkled with joy. She even clapped her hands a little! Her genuine excitement over something so silly was so adorable...

Well, it wasn’t silly to her—and to millions of my daughters. Puns were a beloved entertainment of countless bees, and anything that I came up with—including puns—instantly held ten times more value than anything else.

This pun (very lame, 3 out of 10, been done a thousand times) was going to be spread all over the empire, and countless bees will aaahh and ooooh and maybe even laugh over it.

But after smiling at Worriesgone, who was already writing it down for posterity—as if she could forget!—I turned to Researchina.

"And before you ask, I have no idea how exactly this will work out in detail. But I imagine that it will start with putting massive voltage through pieces of metal to heat them up."

Researchina nodded.

"It will be an honour and a pleasure to study this in detail and come up with a way to implement this. You’ve already shared with us a lot of things that helped us use electricity; this is all we needed."

"That’s great, dear. But do you have enough Researchers for this many projects? Besides all the maintaining work, they must come up with both the power plants, the infrastructure around them and the electric smelting..."

"I will calculate if my current number of people is enough and request more if necessary. But there should be," Researchina assured.

***

Researching and building power plants and improved smelters was going to take months in the best case.

The time normally wouldn’t have been an issue—we’ve dealt with all immediate threats in the area. Everything else—like the evolving farm plants, constant attacks on our borders—was manageable, even if it removed the percentage of resources and people we could use on expansion.

Even the ice-hole trees weren’t a threat anymore. Except, they were.

They were spreading to the other side of the mountains, and although my scouts could witness it, they (or anyone else) could do nothing to stop it.

The anti-tree armies resumed work at full speed to cut the ice-hole trees down, but it would take them months to cross the mountains. Even then, there would not be enough fighters to block the advance along the entire mountain range.

Especially because several avalanches had already fallen on the other side of the continent, spreading the ice-hole tree seeds and inviting them to advance on this untouched land.

I feared that by the time the anti-tree army cleared the mountains, they would still have an endless sea of these trees to cut. Trees that could also evolve additionally during this time.

But since I could do nothing about it, I just told my scouts to keep watching and decided that this was going to be a problem for the future Bee Empire.

For all I knew, by this point we would evolve cold resistance as a more widespread gene—the next development level wasn’t far away, and perhaps with the electric smelters we would reach it.

In the next three months, the scouts told me that the ice-hole tree advanced over the next continent as quickly as one might expect. So quickly that after a month, they left the range the scouts could reach from the Bee Empire with their astral projections!

Every grown tree released seeds into the wind, and these seeds could fly for kilometres before landing. Then they took a day or two to grow and released more seeds. It was like a plague which spread over the other half of a continent like blue mold.

In order for the scouts to see it happen from up close, they had to travel on a ship around the mountain range and send their astral projections from the shore.

A short while after this, I began doubting so much effort was necessary to spend. It was clear that the ice-hole trees were going to take over the rest of the continent, kill everything in there with their freezing aura, and become a major pain in the ass.

But on the third month, when there was only a quarter of the continent left clean from the trees, the scouts sent me a report very different from the regular "more ice-hole trees grew, everything in their range died, the ground is littered with endless piles of frozen bodies, even the living mountains froze and became brittle; only dragons and some critters from the living mountains are still alive out there".

No, instead, the report which Helping-Hands helpfully put on paper for me to read went like this:

"The ice-hole tree was found by beasts that look similar to the ’deer’ type beast. These deer ignored the cold entirely and instead ate the ice-hole trees. We’ve scouted more and found that the deer beasts are incredibly numerous in the region. They must’ve conquered it. Herds of them are moving toward the ice-hole trees."

Deer?

Were they the current winners of the evolution war on the other half of the continent? On this one, they were nothing special, like most large animals that took a while to evolve.

I wrote the scouts an order to keep watching closely. This was promising to be incredibly interesting!