Turned out that last night was the last bit needed to get Victoria to level six, meaning I was also level six, as well as all the kids who were sitting at the exp cap. Victoria herself was only given the new power of being able to make a princess of her own, but she had no reason to go for that right now. The workers gained the inverse of their first spell, 'expand earth', if used on a rock it caused it to grow and turn into something like pumice, but it was also really weak so poking it was enough for it to collapse into a pile of dusty sand. Using it on dirt and stuff was really weird, it basically shredded the particles into a larger quantity of finer grains but somehow it still counted as the base material instead of becoming dust.

Soldiers gained a great boost to their hunting ability, 'find prey' it let a soldier target something, kill it, then use the skill again to find another of the same thing. Meaning once a soldier killed an animal they could then run through the forest pinging the skill to find another one instead of taking time to track one down. From the description and how it didn't sense anything while they were by the entrance it appeared that range and number of stored targets was based on the level of the skill. Christina was able to get it to level two shortly after she got it because it used physical energy to activate and she could use the basic power leveling technique of forcing more energy into it to make it stronger.

The awake celestial didn't level up, she was not at the exp cap like her sisters so we needed to wait to see what she could unlock, but I had her accompany me to the surface so I could test out what I got. My new spell was 'holy light' and the description was basically worthless, 'unleash a burst of holy light' could mean anything, did a burst mean it caused damage or was it healing? I grabbed the celestial so they could try and figure out what it did, they didn't have light manipulation or sense but they had light spells already which was more than me. I had her stand behind me while I faced a tree just outside the ring of the fort, I said the words of the spell and felt a bizarre hiccup in my chest, before a fat load of nothing happened.

I tried several more times but each one caused the same hiccup sensation but nothing more, there must have been something I was doing wrong. Well, a major issue could be that I didn't have that light conversion organ like a celestial so maybe I needed to gather light energy another way somehow since I couldn't make my own. First thing I tried was taking off my shirt and having her cling to my back with her glowing abdomen touching it before casting the spell again. That cast ended up being almost painful, there was a powerful energy inhale in my chest that managed to suck in what must have been a wisp of light energy but after a second it inverted and the worst hiccup ever went through me as the wisp was expelled from my hand.

From my practice with other spells I could tell that the inhale was not supposed to be used to gather energy, it was the spell trying to gather energy before launching, like how 'harden earth' worked. I needed to gather an excess of energy before casting, but to gather energy I needed some way to hold on to it. It was a good thing I had an energy eater on payroll, the alraune's mana mesh that was made inside it's plants looked like they would work perfectly, but first I had to see if they could handle light energy. Entering the artificial grove I saw that the puppet was active and it appeared to be practicing movement, most of the body was perfectly still but one arm was slowly and repeatedly moving up and down in a much more natural manner than the last time it moved.

I called out to it, "hello there!"

It moved it's arm back to resting position and turned the head slowly towards me before saying, "hellllllllllloooooooo thhhhhhhhereeeeee." It was sticking to the sound of each syllable but it was basically understandable.

I told it, "good job so far, but I need your help with something," and then held up the celestial, " can your storage mesh handle light energy?"

It stared for several seconds before telling me to touch the 'glow part' to one of it's three remaining berry bushes, which I did. Turning on mana sense to watch what happened I saw that the power line connecting it to the bush was already activated. Touching the celestial's butt to a berry it did not absorb any light, instead it sucked in a drop of mana from around the light organ. I told her to try and force her mana out of the way so there was a straight path from berry to organ. After a minute of her concentrating she asked to try again, so I touched her to another berry and there was a moment of nothing happening as the berry applied suction but it passed and it appeared to have grabbed in a drop of light energy.

I said appeared to because I still couldn't sense light energy directly but the energy ball in the storage mesh gained a weird empty spot, meaning there was something I could not see in it. Then the plant did something odd, the energy root turned off and on almost a hundred times before turning off completely and the puppet started talking again. It was able to hold it but it had no way to use it, once the bush was full and it absorbed the content of that mesh it would just dump the light energy into the air. When I asked if it could teach me how to make a mesh it said it could not because it was a group effort to make a mesh and it did not know how to adapt it to one person.

Of course I was confused as hell as to what that meant and asked to clarify what it was saying by 'group effort'. It took a bit for it to describe exactly what was going on, but apparently it was a reverse hive mind, a mind hive? Whatever you call it, it was almost a hundred individuals crammed into one body, they are also all individually stupid. The first mind, that was also sort of the leader, only had two int, basically they controlled many of the body's systems like democracy mode of a collective twitch game. This many mind existence was part of how they could make the mana mesh, several of the minds control one thread each and then moved around eachother like a maypole dance.

Its class and skills were also odd, every mind had it's own blue box but the stats were divided between physical and mental, physical stats listed everything about the body which was high teens in all of those, and the mental stats were listed by individual mind. Most of them were 'collective mana weaver', a few were 'collective growth controller', and the first one was 'collective core'. This was the main reason it needs outside mana, it could only generate new minds via some sort of mana reaction between the body mana and the outside mana. It took more mana per mind to make another one, which is why their species was always desperate for more mana. It also needed to use bits of the outside mana to keep currently running minds alive, so it had to have enough excess mana that it could spend some to multiply while having enough in storage for them all to eat before the next injection.

Growing the hollow shrub and the puppet was it tripling down on collecting human mana because it suddenly found itself being flooded with the stuff and it wanted to ensure the flood would continue. I asked how it knew what a good human lure would be and it counted with "why wouldn't we know that?" I had no real response to that, sounded like more system shenanigans. Asking about levels and such, the core was level nine, it gained levels from growing the size of the collective and gained point one in the three mental stats per level, meaning it was actually at two point nine int, but since only whole numbers mattered that wasn't that big a deal, except that it would suddenly become smarter at level ten.

The rest were worse off, they gained point zero five per level meaning they had to wait until level twenty to see any improvement. I then asked about evolved classes or rare classes, and they actually had a few that were eligible for evolved class, but to change their class they needed a class shrine or equivalent. A sedentary half plant creature had no chance of finding that out in the wild, that sounded like some negative system shenanigans. On the other hand that could mean that if Victoria came up and gave it a handshake she could inject it with some class change energy. I blinked and realized I was getting really off track, I told it to just do it's best to teach me how to construct a mesh and I will worry about it being impossible or not for a single mind to handle it.

I made six threads, stacked them together, and slowly twisted them in different directions, two of them formed the ribs of the sphere and the other four were woven around it like I was making a cloth, over and under in a repeating pattern. I decided to go with a really small one, which was a good call because when I got about a third of the way through when I felt my feedback resistance turn on because the threads were getting rather long even if they didn't leave my body. At the halfway point I had to reverse the expansion of the lower half so closed in on itself in the top half, meaning I had to leave out a strand in each layer instead of adding more so it would tighten as it went up.

I actually managed to make the full sphere just fine and all the ends met up in the middle of the top, but then was the hard part, I had to pull the threads tight enough that they merged into a single layer instead of being a weave without pulling so tight I snap the threads and have to start over. The worst thing was that I couldn't ramp up pressure slowly, I had to give a solid yank to "pop" the threads into merging or else they will just unravel somewhere if you are too weak on it. I took a few deep breaths and yanked the threads with about one quarter my output and... failure, too weak for the threads so I got a few snarls in it, meaning I had to dismiss the whole thing and start over.

Looking up before doing that I saw it was almost noon, I was standing there in a trance trying to make a net for hours. Now that I was aware of my surroundings my legs suddenly felt funny from standing completely still for way too long. I couldn't stand around trying this all day, I had other chores that needed doing, I mean, they were mostly self imposed chores but I liked feeling useful, making my kids do everything didn't sit right with me. I headed back to my project from yesterday and started cooking the rest of the new furnace bricks, and while those were baking I also got to work on the second brain coating and stretching for the first hides I hung up to soak the other day. I'll try to make a mana mesh again when I didn't have something more immediately doable waiting.