NOVEL NEXT Chapter 7: Chapter 7: Overnight Haul
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Slowly, Alchemy began regaining consciousness as the sounds of distant birds melded with the ringing sound of the system notifications. After a certain point, her eyes shot open completely as she jumped up from the chair.
"W-when did I fall asleep?" She asked herself, feeling all over, making sure nothing of hers went missing.
As she took a second to calm down, Alchemy narrowed her eyes and observed her surroundings.
'I guess I was moving around a lot from the moment I arrived. Fatigue must have caught up to me without me realizing… No, more importantly… I'm still here.' She mused inwardly.
"So it wasn't a dream after all. Well, I suppose it's not that bad. Not like I have much to return to." She shrugged, not giving herself time to think about it too much.
Luckily, that wasn't hard for her as she saw her hands, and her torso, for that matter, covered in blood with a ripped hoodie.
It took every bit of her strength not to scream as she remembered everything that happened yesterday. It was barely half a day, yet it felt like an eternity.
{Ah! Mother! You're awake!} One of her units greeted her.
Turning around to see which it was, a small smile appeared on her face as she saw it was one of the Granitects she made before passing out. She didn't have time to see them correctly.
Like their sibling units, the Granitects were a hybrid of two different insects. It wasn't as easy to tell for this big guy, but he was a mix of a beetle and an ant.
"Awake, I am. And in need of a bath." Alchemy said as her smile quickly faded.
In addition to new clothing, as far as she could tell, there wasn't a Macey's or a Shein anywhere around.
"Where are the rest?"
{The Sylvan are still gathering more resources, and the Thorns are out scouting the perimeter. Now that you're awake, they should return any minute now!}
'They're patrolling without my orders? They really are living beings now, huh?'
"Mhm. That's good. We need to go out and g-"
Her stomach growling loudly interrupted Alchemy's words, causing her to blush lightly.
"Get food for the group…"
Even if only her workers heard her, that was still embarrassing out of principle.
'Urgh... Thinking about it now, even before I got sent to this world, I hadn't eaten anything yesterday. Did the shock suppress the need for food?'
Oddly enough, however, she didn't feel lethargic or low on energy. She was trying to think of something from the game that would cause this, but only one thing came to mind.
`Is it because of Sustenance Sharing?' Alchemy hummed inwardly before shaking her head.
'No, can't be.'
The Verminae, alongside their Telepathy and increased uptake cost, had a bunch of secret passives that nobody tells you about. Every race does, really.
Among them, the one they started with was particularly useless in the game, making it so only one unit needed to eat food for the entire faction to benefit from it.
Whatever the case was, she could experiment slowly as time went on. She wasn't about to start starving herself or her people to figure out their limits.
{Mother! We've returned!} Said the two groups of Thornskirmishers as they were returning—the newly created group alongside the Sylvan Carvers.
{Yes, Mother! We've returned! Look how many resources we've gathered for you!} Said the Sylvan Carvers.
"Hmm? How much did you- Holy CRAP," She shouted as she turned to the area where they were stashing the resources, only to see 2 massive piles of wood and stone.
The stone pile was considerably smaller thanks to them only getting stone from the many loose rocks around, but it was still a sizable sum.
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"I… So much in one night? How long did you guys go at it for?"
{All Night!}
If Alchemy's eyes could widen anymore, they would. She quickly opened the unit interface and looked at the Sylvan Carvers skill.
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'Right, this skill. In game, it just removed their Stamina bar. It was certainly a decent effect, but isn't it 10 times more broken here?!'
Continuing to look around, Alchemy only just now noticed that the once relatively small clearing they were in tripled in size.
"I think I have the best harvesting unit in the game… No, in the world, now."
The Sylvan Carvers all looked at each other before they started chirping happily.
{Thank you, Mother! Your words mean the world to us!}
"Yeah, uhm… Keep up the excellent work! One of the groups of Thorns should continue guarding them as well."
{We'll get to it!}
This was good, great even. Alchemy was being conservative with her planning since she didn't know how fast she could gather resources, but this pushed her expectations ahead by several days at least.
As long as her immediate food issues could be solved, it would be smooth sailing for a while.
Getting to it right away, she opened the building menu to look at what she should make next. Excluding the spiked barricade, her remaining options were all the passive resource generation and storage facility.
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"Holy... I can knock out the requirement for the Tribal hut... Okay, uhm... Storage Unit, Plant Farm, and Lumberyard." Alchemy hummed, selecting what she wanted to place.
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Selecting Yes, Alchemy placed the farm as close as she could to the river before trees blocked the way, the storage off to the side, and the Lumberyard beside it.
As she decided on their locations, the two Granitects began running to gather materials. When they started working on the buildings, their timers decreased slightly. It wasn't by much, only a couple of minutes on each. She'd need more workers before the speed increase becomes anything meaningful.
"Well, they'll be done by the time I return. The Mine will need to wait until tomorrow; that's fine."
It was a shame she couldn't build all of it, especially when the mine was what she was missing out on. Wood was... Particularly abundant, and the rare materials from wood weren't nearly as high a priority as the ones from the mine.