Reincarnated To Evolve My Bee Empire-Chapter 301: Progress

The plans drawn in bee size by B666666 were given to a young but smarter than average human devotee under Agent Secret-Listen, who was named Ruthamch. Together, B666666 made the young human draw the design in the human size.

After that, a team of hired laborers promised divine favor and earthly payment by Farini, gathered to turn these drafts into reality. But although Farini tried to find someone skilled, most of these people needed careful guidance.

Especially since B666666 used the Bee Empire's principles of architecture.

"Agent Whisper, tell your human Ruthamch that he must do something with my humans, so they stop mixing up my orders! They can't even draw an even hexagon… If not for these dummies, the building would've been progressing twice as fast!" B666666 would complain to Whisper. "Even though Ruthamch was declared the leader, half the people don't listen to him. Those humans… Bees would never act so undisciplined!"

The original architect for the temple, angry that he was replaced with some nobody—the human youth who became the official author of the temple designs—refused to keep working on the project. He claimed he was too humbled and not smart enough for work like that…

But Farini didn't need Whisper to tell him that this was just a polite way to say that the architect wanted nothing to do with this temple-building anymore.

A harsher lord could've made the architect punished badly for this, but Farini was merciful. He only made the architect design outhouses for the army and the war refugees in the city. The designs were also made by bees—Physician Bees—to minimize the spread of diseases from the buildings.

This time, the architect didn't have an option to refuse.

And although the twitching of his mandibles as he went to build toilets for the soldiers amused Whisper, it meant that if B666666, Secret-Listen and Ruthamch couldn't deal with a problem on the temple building site, Farini had to interfere personally.

Despite this, every day the progress of the building could be seen with bare eyes. The temple was small by human standards—only the size of a farmer's house—but it already promised to be a beautifully made building.

First, there was a deep foundation, with the floor of the temple being a hundred meters underground; then over humans laid bricks from living mountain stone, each of them the size of several Bee Empire's forges.

The living stone was flammable and much softer on average than most other rocks. Humans called it "living", as Explanatory once explained to Whisper, because pillar mountains—living mountains—grew over time. This change was so slow that without evolution, only Queen Bees lived long enough to notice it. But small pillar mountains eventually grew larger, and large ones became dead husks and fell.

What was more important, there were a lot of pillar mountains and a lot of stuff to easily make bricks from.

These bricks formed the unfinished parts of the hexagonal walls. B666666 compared her recipe for mortar with the one humans used and begrudgingly said that humans' recipe was better so they should use it; after Explanatory studied it, the recipe went to the Hive Supremo.

The roof was going to be a solid dome—a geometrically solid shape that barely needed supports. Most humans who saw B666666's designs thought that the dome wouldn't be able to hold its weight, but Whisper approved them anyway. She trusted a Builder Bee more than some humans, and B666666 assured everybody who doubted that she calculated everything.

After a week of building, the walls reached high enough that builders had to stand on additional supports—scaffolds, they called it—to keep building.

The creation of scaffolds slowed down the building by a day, which was something B666666 lamented about.

"I apologize to Father through you, Whisper! Tell him that when you send him another report. I didn't think that humans wouldn't be able to just fly to the higher parts of the building! To imagine that they build anything that's taller than them using only these shaky living stone supports… Good thing that we have wings."

Whisper noted the delay in her next report, but decided that the reason for it was too unimportant to include and waste the telepathic chain's time on its transfer.

Instead, she had to tell Father that the High King announced a full quarantine on the capital city as one particularly nasty illness spread through the nearby settlements.

People called it "The Flaying Flu", because it made chitin flake off the bodies of the sick and show the muscle beneath in ugly rashes, making people appear as if they were flayed.

Lines of refugees, some of them showing nasty rashes of the Flaying Flu, tried to enter, only to be stopped by armed guards.

Now they created sickness-riddled camps near the capital's walls. A lot of them heard about Farini's rebellion and went to him, to places where this particular disease didn't touch yet. freeweɓnøvel.com

He wasn't sure if he should try continuing on to the High King right now, or enforce a quarantine on his army. At least bees were immune to this illness—nobody from the Physician Bees who went to investigate it got sick.

But they returned with news that it was highly fatal to humans. They also made some preliminary guesses on how exactly it spread—by liquid and moisture in the air, most likely.

Humans prayed and hoped that the new god will come to his temple after it's finished and protect them.

Whisper had asked the Oracles shadowing her if this was the danger they warned her about, but they shook their heads. Their advice on the matter was that advancing to the High King had a higher chance of success than staying in place, but Whisper needed Father to guide them.

She sent the last word of her message and prepared for a long wait until a reply reached her. If Father was busy, it might take the rest of the day.

But only he could make the final decision. To wait, to finish building the temple—or seize the moment, rush things… and leave the temple without close supervision?