The next few days were largely iterative on what I had already accomplished thus far. I created a version of the shelf fungus that was smaller, harder, and bioluminescent, which would act as a source of overnight charge for the grow lights maintaining the archived essences. I added a second room to the alchemy lab, and dug out a basement for it that went the length of both. The second room would contain the growth vats. The basement would contain the essence archive, which I already knew was going to get more and more extensive.

Growing the quantity of the flammability essence by extracting it from a few generations of cattle spiders was easy enough, and inverting it in bulk just as straightforward. Using that essence as a stain for the palisade came next, and went far quicker than actually making the palisade itself. I had a trench dug out around it as well, and filled with chitinite barbed caltrops, with clockwork retractable wooden bridge installed to cross it more easily.

Throughout that whole time, I had my guard-patrols also sketching out superior maps, blazing trails to more interesting destinations they found. I had cobblestone paths laid down throughout the manor, and even extended one down to the pond. Laying down the cobblestone was done in a slight arch, with small open rain gutters on either side. The root cellar got a clockwork sump pump, even. All the major work areas got additional drainage emplaced, in fact -- including the dens for the hunting spiders, of which I now had a grand total of thirty five. I had even found a way to keep eggs of many more in a kind of biostasis in a special growvat -- I'd found a kind of parasite in a soil sample that went into dormancy like ticks and created a tonic to store the eggs in from it. The tent for the weaving workhouse went as well, replaced by another cobblestone shed. The reason for all of this was that my deciduous survivalism was hinting to me that summer storms here could be quite prolonged and intense.

I had to admit that when I was installing the caltrops in the defensive trench I thought about letting it become a most instead, but the idea of that much stagnant water nearby had resulted in my installing a sump system for the trench instead. This would also probably keep the area inside the manor walls from getting too mired, on top of whatever rain protection being under the shade of a greatoak would provide anyhow. I had just one last piece of preparation I would need to make, however, and that was one that would require me to make longer trips than I'd ever initially anticipated.

The thing about chitinite and ossium is that they are no more conductive than their non-alchemical equivalents. Which is to say, they make great resistant material. This however was a problem for anyone who had the goal of creating lightning rods to protect his buildings. I could and did treat the roof shingling with the anti flammable stain, but that wouldn't actually prevent the concussive force of a lightning strike from doing damage. And as of right now, I could scrounge the pond and streams for rocks with a moderate copper content and smelt it, which would actually be easy enough -- but that in and of itself was actually the issue. It was too easy. I would need a metal whose melting point was high enough to not do an impression of a hot candle on a tin roof when struck and neither copper nor bronze were to to the task.

So I had to resort to doing some longer-range prospecting. By having a single homunculus handle both the garden and farm area with the help of a small cadre of hunters, and another handle all maintenance/cleaning work in the same way, and one last one to work on recording and sorting activities and techniques and information about the c samples I'd archived, I was able to free up two in order to do roving defensive patrols around the base, leaving me with another two to accompany me as I went on what would be the longest trip I'd taken since establishing the manor grounds as my home base.

The only real challenge there was that the clockwork harnesses the homunculi used to get their labor done were both too slow in general and required too-long of intermission breaks for me to tolerate. So I had to come up with a solution to the problem. It took me the better part of five days -- while all the rest of what I'd described above was completed -- to work out how to make bronze from copper and black ossium. But once I did, I had a proper metallic material to work with, and one I believed to be more potentially useful than ordinary bronze in certain ways, as it received alchemical treatments very well and that in turn allowed me to create significantly superior clock springs than I previously had access to. They were roughly twice as strong and could release their tension both more quickly and more slowly. That, and I could make actual drawn wire with it, thus replacing the clockwork harnesses' current leather straps with black-bronze cables, allowing for a more efficient transfer of power.

The end result of those five days was an upgraded version of the harnesses that had the ability to operate continuously for up to six hours at normal usage (and three at 'vigorous' speeds of a light jog) and still only required the one hour to recharge. Less if spare quartzite crystals could be swapped in. Sadly, the total efficacy of the harnesses wouldn't help me, still, as the materials I had access to just couldn't bring the necessary 'oomph' to the table. Not yet, anyhow.

Even with the upgraded clockwork harnesses, my homunculi were still not exactly useful in an actual fight, but good enough to make the kind of journey I had in mind feasible. Especially as they would only have to be leading teams of two hunting spiders each as they pulled load bearing wagons behind them. It was actually rather impressive just how much weight the teams could pull in those wagons without slowing my pace down at all. Between the two wagons they were able to haul about two times my weight. Three times if I was willing to swap out the hunters on pulling duty every few hours. Not that I was bringing quite that much with me out: a tent and cot, portable stove, bedroll, some basic supplies, and four days' worth of food. I could have carried that in my backpack. And of course clockwork drill hammers and black ossium spades and prybars. Part of the reason for getting away traveling that light was that I was going to mostly follow the streams as both navigational aids and water sources. Since I'd discovered there was actually copper ore in the rocks I'd been using for construction, it stood to reason that somewhere upstream, I would find indications of a seam, and generally speaking where there's a seam of copper there's other ores as well. My primary hope was that I might find zinc or tin or even silver as well as concentrated copper, but what I was really holding out hope against was finding iron ore.

I knew, however, that there would be none of the above with any appreciable amount within a day or two's travel which was why this expedition. (If push came to shove I had a couple carefully preserved dormant carrotatoes and shelfruit that I could extend my food supplies with quite a lot further than just the amount I was bringing already preserved.)

Leaving my minions with their various orders for the duration, I took my leave of my new home for my extended trip fully kitted out myself and in the company of twelve hunting spiders and two homunculi, all kitted out to their various normal standards. I pity any raccupine or bear that should stumble upon my little arachnopirate crew of misfits.

~~------------~~

Nine days. I followed that stream and the tributaries I encountered, checking for indications of more or less presence of minerals for nine friggin' days. After the third day I started padding our food stocks as planned, unwilling to give up until I had made a real effort at determining the viability of any mining efforts. We must have managed fifteen kilometers a day, though that actually consisted of more like thirty as a result of the not-infrequent doubling back and spot-checking potentially likely outcroppings. It wasn't until after nine entire days that I found something that really pushed the envelope and made me rethink the nature of the geology of the environment I was now within. About a hundred kilometers away from home, still in that interminable oak forest, I found a damned geothermal vent. It wasn't exactly hot enough to produce actual steam, and sending out scouting parties to search for other vents didn't result in any hits, but this one had a hot spring with a pond roughly the size of the pond back by the manor. This was… well, infuriating.

There were a few reasons why I felt that way when I found the heated natural water feature. Most of the heavier mineral ores tend to be found near volcanic activity, and short of an actual volcano nothing says "volcanism ongoing here!" like a geyser or hot spring. They only happen, after all, when there's a magma pocket near to the surface. This is all well and good, but there's a somewhat major issue here: where there's hot springs on the surface there's almost always pressurized water channels in the rocks below, or pockets of noxious gases. Meaning that exactly where I need to mine is also exactly where I can least afford to be doing it.

Unless, of course, I'm willing to potentially sacrifice some homunculi or other worker animals. I've already gotten the hunting spiders, and I've found other kinds of insects in this world. My mastery of biological tinkering is now to the level that I can selectively target things… hmm. I really should have been paying more attention when Sterling was instructing me how to get ants, apparently. After all -- If I can't find caves, and can't mine them out myself… I can always just grow them. Yes. Okay… time to pack up and return to base.

During my interminable trip home I begin thinking about the various things I'll need to pull this frankly insane stunt I'm planning off, and it is quite extensive. I'll need some variety of ground ant, of course, to work with. I'll need to increase their size dramatically -- though happily giant bugs seem biologically feasible in this world -- and I'll need to develop a way to direct their work for me. I'll also need some way to let them easily/readily cut through or simply shape stone but I have ideas there. I'll also need a better solution to cross-cut through the forest to navigate back to this place because hiking three hundred kilometers to travel slightly less than one hundred is an absolute fool's game. Especially if, apparently, I'm going to be needing to do it with great frequency. This is a point that’s driven home by the delays produced by the fact that I’ve nearly overloaded the two carts with potentially viable ore samples from the small initial lead tunnels I and my homunculi dug out just to prove the viability of the site for future excavation.

Due to not needing to backtrack constantly, the nine day trek to the spring wound up only taking four to get back. Had I been able to properly go cross-country it would have taken far less than that. When I finally did get back I discovered my home to be in largely the same state I had left it in. Happily, it seemed that my orders to my homunculi had been received as being for the duration, as I had intended. Still, though -- their lack of inspiration or non-procedural creativity showed itself in small ways. The farm and garden were no larger than they were when I had left -- including the oatgrass. The pantry, when I checked on it, was much fuller, and the carrotato and shelfruit were properly bagged, but the oats were just piling up loosely. The alchemical essence library had multiple samples of the same type in storage -- most of which were ones I'd almost certainly never use, let alone frequently enough to use a dozen times in a single stretch. The library had multiple days' journals that were literally identical -- because the same things had been done in them. The general house duty work had always included meals so, since I wasn't there to eat them, they just got thrown away. The dry goods warehouse at least had twenty or so amphorae of cattle oil to go along with the multiple baskets of dried and crumbled pre-rendered chitin, with fish scales in baskets adjacent to them.

The list of little signs of the homunculi's lack of overall "creative spark" were numerous beyond even all of that, but at least they didn't just stop all work while I had been away. The next few days after my return consisted of my brainstorming how to solve my little mining issue while simultaneously arranging for the cleanup of my minions' labors. It had become clear to me for example that my clockworks needed to be made superior, and that the actual bronze I was now able to make would be a scarce resource until the mine was properly established. And by established I meant something far more impressive than a single 45% hole a yard in diameter that went a hundred feet down. The primary challenge there, however, was that I simply couldn't rely on any solution I worked out to get me workable materials in anything like the timeframe I needed. Even if I relocated my home to the hot spring, by the time I was established, the rains and summer storms would have come.

So, I decided to double down on the techniques I did have access to. While setting my scouting patrols to try to find me some viable ant queen to begin the bioessence notification I'd need to actually make a go of the mining project, I also had my other minions revamp my home setup. Proper clay mortar with chitinite lacquer was put into place wherever possible on the stone walls, to make the joins more-resistant to weather. The bark shingles were in batch replaced with baked clay tiles coated with the same chitinite lacquer. And all the while, I spent my time puttering in the alchemy lab, trying to find answers to some of the questions I had about how this world I was in worked, or simply make progress with my mining ambitions.

It had, oddly enough, taken my scouting minions another week to find a viable ant colony to harvest. Well, like with the oaks and blackbirds I was going to call them ants because they seemed close enough. Some of the aspects of the biology of this world's ecosystem really didn't make any sense to me at all. I mean, ants are everywhere back on Earth. The role they play in any forested ecosystem is utterly pivotal. Yet here, they're apparently quite rare. Instead there were lots of beetles and some kind of short-lived fruitfly or gnat whose reproductive cycle occurred just about every season, causing most exposed decaying vegetation to get covered in near microscopic grubs or larvae for a couple of weeks that hectically digested it the way ants and fungi normally did back home. I'm sure I was getting the specifics wrong, here -- I largely only knew how to survive in this forest, not the biosciences behind how it all stayed together. It did explain why there were so few mushrooms though.

Regardless, as the summer heat began to grow closer and closer to its full potential I finally began to make progress in some of my experiments. For example, it turned out that there was in fact an "obedience" element to the domestication trait my hunters had been imbued with. It seemed to be the result of the mixture or mingling of the intelligence and domestication traits. More interesting, however, is that I could after culturing an entire growth vat of obedience essence, extract -- though only in vapor form -- the essence of certain commands specifically. In and of itself that wasn't very useful, but it certainly hinted at future possibilities of imbuing programmed behaviors into animals. I also had the inspiration of using the captured vapor of the command or behavior essence from the mining ants to try to allow directing their behaviors, as I recalled that ant colonies used scent marking to form complex behaviors "bottom up" from simple ones. The behavior-vapors could allow me to influence the swarm logic of the colony as I wanted.

At least, that was the initial idea. As it turned out, as tested in eight generations of mining-ant development, that concept could work, but only in a very basic and labor-intensive way. The whole point of the thing was to develop a largely fire-and-forget solution as I would be deploying them several days away, and having to constantly extract and lay down vapors at that distance just wasn't ever going to be cost-efficient. So I'd instead wound up having to direct my energies towards a different direction. I knew that imbuing the entire species with higher order intelligence wasn't exactly a great idea, as the numbers that ant colonies normally developed meant there was just no way I could actually see them all trained into obedience even if I lived directly among them -- and the idea of allowing that kind of intelligence to go feral was one whose ecological impact was frankly disturbing -- but I eventually wound up having to give up on the direct swarm behavior manipulation and instead try to find a different route to getting what I wanted, so I finally stumbled upon the idea of caste development.

It took quite a few rather intense mana headaches to get the "caste" essence from my labrat ants, but once I had it the rest just sort of gelled. A given ant caste developed by being exposed to certain stimuli while in the pupae stage, and while normally a colony only had three or four castes I could exploit the targeted essence infusion to introduce new ones, and even influence how often they would emerge. So I did just that, introducing a "brain" caste to the experimental colonies after having increased the species' average size from a few millimeters to a few inches in order to have the minimum mass to even have a chance at this working at all. The brain caste wound up having heads that were as large as the rest of their entire body at first and couldn't really do much of anything as they could barely move, but they did show evidence of heeding my verbal and hand signal commands as intended. I wound up needing to enhance the brain caste's ability to emit controlling pheromones and introduce "directional" ones to the general command-set in order to get the brain caste any utility at all.

This began to stretch the limits of what I could accomplish just in my lab so sectioned off an as-yet unused portion of my manor's defended area for further development and after another round of domestication and size increase also invested the ants' digestive enzymes with an anti-stone essence and tested to confirm that they would, in fact, burrow into rock; and further increased their mandibles' durability by infusing it with that essence of ossium, as well as increasing their proportionate mandible strength. And not only did they do so, they did with far greater efficacy than I had anticipated. With some guidance from a training homunculus, the brain ants wound up directing the worker caste to chew out chambers and tunnels large enough for me to squeeze my way through, and even reinforce tunnels by using their digestive juices in a way I hadn't anticipated, by literally fusing loose rock together. They otherwise dug through solid stone the way regular ants could through loose soil, each individual ant able to dig quickly enough that their work was visible in its progress.

I found myself enthusiastic enough with the idea of this that I decided to start planning out a complete overhaul of my manor's infrastructure. The enzyme fusing solid stone was something I just hadn't foreseen and it could be entirely ground-breaking. I could literally use the ants to construct buildings better than concrete -- and with ossium rebar could go the extent of reinforced stone. This wouldn't let me make glass skyscrapers but I could move into the architectural design recognizable in the modern age, certainly. At the very least, I deemed the mining ant project an overall basic success. Enough of one that at the cost of a permanently allocated pair of homunculi, and a dedicated batch of twenty new-grown hunting spiders to assist them, I felt that it was time to establish my first remote colony. A mining colony of a colony of mining ants, defensive spiders, and supervisory homunculi. Despite not having a feasible means of transferring ore back and forth just yet, I could at least rely on the homunculi to comprehend the goal of "build a self-sufficient and weather-tolerant base to the same standard of the manor. It should also be usable as a backup home in case something goes wrong with the manor. Direct the mining ants as needed to facilitate construction, and storage of ore. Maintain the base for long-term use. Smelt any ores you locate as best you can using heat quartzite forges." I would have to rely on written reports and orders from there, but that wouldn't be too horrible overall.

The mining colony would be a long-term feasibility project as well as a potential source for metals for further advancement along the various tech trees. I could at least appreciate that some of the lessons-learned in preparing for it had implications for my manor as well; especially in better time-management approaches to the homunculi. I would from now on be able to simply write out on a slate the tasks I wanted accomplished on a given day and expect them to follow manuals of instructions for the parameters of those tasks without needing to endlessly repeat myself as to how things should be done.