Awakening from a deep slumber I instinctively stretch my nonexistent legs to begin my day. Only to be surprised by what appeared in front of me, or more specifically what appeared in the part of my conciseness that governs the sense of my domain.

What was shown was not a few corridors and rooms going down, but a massive network of tunnels and chambers creating a complex network. Even with my instinctive sense of my domain, the idea that I could become lost here seems plausible.

How long was I sleeping for?

Wandering around the new areas with my conciseness, I discovered that most of the walls were smooth, round in shape and only wide enough for 2 or 3 people to stand shoulder to shoulder.

Soon the ants who were responsible for the changes came into view, and I was surprised to find they had far evolved from what I remember modifying them. Even culture seems to have appeared in these creatures with the modified brain size, something I spent a long time to accomplish.

All the ants have different patterns from a large variety of ore and rock minerals painted or even carved into their hard exoskeletons, with some having shiny and even glowing minerals adorning themselves. These ants were usually larger and more dangerous looking. Most ants avoided these better-equipped ants like some sort of show of fear or respect, perhaps both.

I arrived at the largest room in the nest and found the queen sitting atop the lifeless bodies of various creatures most of which were no longer identifiable, devouring them, all the while laying eggs.

The eggs were quickly taken away by smaller ants as they were laid, to be taken somewhere else, probably the chambers that were filled with the young. When I moved closer to the queen to see her changes more clearly she startled, quickly looking up and around.

For a moment I thought that she must have seen me but it appears she can only sense my presence. But soon she surprised me again, she sent out waves of mana crashing out in all directions, Initially, I thought it was some kind of attack but the familiarity of the energy made it apparent that it was not an attack but a message.

The message was simple in comparison to the memory packet I received from the earth, almost primitive, all it conveyed was emotion in its rawest form, glee, happiness, awe, respect, and worship. I think I have a loyal fan of my work, her messages please me so I should reward her.

Hmm, perhaps I will give her a name, Elise it is. The moment the name was created I felt mana leave me at a rapid pace. not knowing what was going on was worrying but soon Elise started to wiggle strangely which caught my attention. Her movements were rapid and seemed to move in ways impossible for her body to move in seemingly restructuring itself.

After a gruesome few minutes, she stood up in her new body. It was larger with thorny bone plates protecting everything except the joints, the abdomen grew to nearly twice the size, probably to increase the birth rate. Most importantly of all her mana messages became significantly more complex, not mere emotions now but short bursts of speech. While her stuttering would not be able to hold much of a conversation, it can convey meaning.

We conversed for the first time, she called me Master and I referred to her as Elise. Elise was ecstatic to find out her name and thanked me profusely all the while slipping in some emotion messages of loyalty and thankfulness. I asked her about why she calls me Master and her reply was that I freed her from her captors with my wrath of fire and water, killing off enough of them for her loyal brood to take control of the colony.

After learning the reason for my domains expansion and find out a rough time frame for how long my "nap" was I proceeded to go back to my experiments with magic. During my "nap" with the expansion of the ants, I was able to receive quite a few Earthmails most of which, even after serious amounts of effort, were nothing but garbled nonsense.

For example, one of the largest pieces of information I received was a skeleton as far as I can tell and I don't know how having a perfect memory of a skeleton can help in any way. Just for shits and giggles, I decided to try making one with mana. At first, it was difficult but soon I got the hang of it and making something with mana became easy almost like I was born to do it.

While staring at the still skeleton thinking of what I could do with it a sudden urge caught my attention it feels like my other energy is vibrating and pulsing trying to connect to the skeleton's body. Almost all the urges so far have been an interesting experience so far, then I guess I'll give it a shot.

Slowly pouring the energy into the body being careful not to have an accident like with my mana tests. The skeleton moved or should I say twitched, since pouring several hundred large insects worth of energy into the skeleton it started to move. Slowly at first but after putting in more the skeleton became more nimble and after commanding it with mana messages like what the queen uses I was able to figure out that its strength increased too.

The experimenting came to an abrupt halt when the skeleton suddenly violently exploded after pouring more power in. By that point the skeleton was exhibiting superhuman levels of movements and reflexes along with its almost perfect flexibility because of lack of ligaments would make it an extremely dangerous foe.

The amount of improvement, however, seems to have a limit based on the strength of material I've tried to replace the bones of the skeleton with harder material from different magics like stone with small success and it does allow to increase the amount of energy I can put into my creation but stone seems to be a poor conductor of the power and requires a far greater amount of energy to get the same effect.

After exhausting my energy I now call life energy due to its ability to animate objects I must wait to accumulate more through the deaths of my underlings, a time-consuming task

What was that?