The Bee Dungeon

Shortly after her First Daughter had returned fully evolved…and taught her many new things…the First of the Eighth found herself staring at the honey cell before her. A drone and a communer from the First of the Fifth's hive stared with her and then began dancing.

"Honey got twisted at step fourteen. First of the Eighth stepped to left?"

The First of the Eighth's antennae flicked.

"…yes. How knew?"

The communer danced about rapidly.

"Queen mother tried same thing, found out makes honey explode! Feels weird but have to stop and go backwards!"

The First of the Eighth buzzed her wings briefly upon learning that the First of the Fifth had already beaten her to this exact attempt…but did her best to push that reaction aside. It was…strange accepting the First of the Fifth's help like this. Strange trying to act as if the First of the Fifth was not attempting to monopolize the King's favor.

But the memories her First Daughter had shown her could not be denied. The First of the Eighth subsequently went and danced with the other Apiary spawner queens, the ones who had suffered under the First of the Fifth's machinations for much of their lives. The Second of the Sixth admitted that she, too, had a tough time believing that the First of the Fifth was truly giving her all to the hive of hives…but that she ultimately came to believe the First of the Fifth had changed. That she could now be trusted to care for all hives, and not just her own.

The Second of the Sixth was the other Apiary queen to have already evolved, and the queen who had received access to the medicinal flowers at the same time the First of the Eighth got access to the poisonous ones, so her dance managed to convince the maddening queen to give it a try. So, here she was, letting the First of the Fifth's bees watch her attempts to make a new kind of honey. Now…she would find out if the First of the Fifth would truly help her in her attempt to ascend…or if she would take the opportunity to either steal or sabotage the First of the Eighth's work.

So, she did as the communer and drone suggested. She moved to a new cell of honey and began the dance once more. At the step they mentioned, the step where the honey exploded last time, she stopped and reversed her dance.

To her surprise, the honey did not explode or else lose all its mana. The twisting mana flipped over…and suddenly its shape became far more clear. The communer and drone happily spun about.

"Like that, like that! Now tell honey to go up!"

The First of the Eighth danced in a daze as she followed the steps the First of the Fifth's bees told her…and the mana not only did not explode, but grew increasingly clear and stable with each step. She finished the dance…and found the mana had formed into a orderly and stable structure.

"Amazing, incredible! Just like queen mother!"

She…had done it. She had created swirled honey, just like that. The First of the Fifth's hive had not only not sabotaged her…they had directly taught her their queen mother's secrets.

The First of the Fifth's change…was real.

The First of the Eighth slowly turned to face the two bees and forced herself to dance.

"…thanks. First of the Fifth's hive…helped. A lot."

The two bees happily buzzed and vibrated at her thanks. Her First Daughter danced a celebration as well, dancing something about her joining the hive of hives in truth. The First of the Eighth turned her attention to the honey, not wanting to think about how she had taken even longer to understand the hive of hives than the First of the Fifth did…

Her thoughts were torn away as she evaluated the honey and her antennae began to twitch about. Her First Daughter stopped her dance and focused on her.

"Queen mother? Something wrong? Honey ok?"

The First of the Eighth danced the negative.

"No, honey is best ever made. But…something…missing."

This was indeed swirled honey, more powerful than anything the First of the Eighth's hive had produced before. She could tell that not only would the honey be more nutritious for her hive, but that if eaten by an invader the mana would help spread the poisonous compounds within and increase their effect. It would be a stronger weapon than she had ever deployed before.

"Honey strong…but poison is same. Mana will make better but...any bee could make with nectar from poisonous flower. Think…need to change poison, somehow."

As she had danced, the poisonous compounds within the maddening honey had remained the same. They would be elevated by the new structure by the mana, but they had not fundamentally changed by the process. The First of the Eighth thus predicted…this honey would be a better maddening honey than any before, but it likely still would not match the toxic bees' honey in deadly impact. And even if she had learned that trying to compete and outdo fellow bees of the hive of hives was not the correct approach…she still wanted to complete this task and find a new way to process maddening honey. She still wanted to break through the limits of the maddening bees, to find new ways that her hive could defend the King and the hive of hives. Preferably, new ways that only they could, ways that bees who had not committed to maddening honey as they had could not replicate.

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Well, in a way, her First Daughter had already achieved that with her evolution and her new powers, but the First of the Eighth's instincts whispered to her that her own path held promise as well. That there were ways to process her honey to become something more, even more than the First of the Fifth had already achieved. She would not, could not give up until she figured out what those ways were…

She had mostly just been thinking out loud when she reported her thoughts on the honey, but the First of the Fifth's bees responded nonetheless.

"Should talk to queen mother's Third Daughter!"

The First of the Eighth was pulled out of her thoughts.

"First of the Fifth's Third Daughter? Why?"

The First of the Fifth's bees happily reported on the inner workings of their queen mother's hive.

"Working with dangerous one! Dangerous one makes new poisons, uses honey to make! Queen mother told Third Daughter to try and learn how."

The First of the Eighth held back her instinctive refusal. Indeed, if the dangerous one knew novel ways to create toxins and the First of the Fifth's Third Daughter was already studying her methods…then it made sense to see what she had done so far. The First of the Eighth clamped down on her desire to monopolize the achievement…she had already received help from the First of the Fifth's hive, after all. It would be far better to work as quickly and efficiently as possible…and that meant fully cooperating with the hive of hives.

"Ok. Can ask First of the Fifth's Third Daughter if can meet?"

"Ok!"

The First of the Eighth lightly fluttered her wings as the First of the Fifth's communer began to send dances back to her home hive. Trusting the First of the Fifth…and the whole hive of hives as a result…would take some getting used to. But…if the First of the Fifth truly would help her find new roles for maddening bees in the hive of hives, then perhaps she wasn't so bad after all.

Meanwhile, the First of the Fifth was experiencing her own reaction to the First of the Eighth's First Daughter's evolution. She had sent off the newly evolved mind-maddening queen with enthusiastic congratulations…and then stood still until now, lost in her thoughts. The First of the Eighth's First Daughter…had just evolved through honey alone.

This…changed everything. The First of the Fifth realized now that the hive of hives had started to restrict themselves in their approach to evolution, all of them trying to follow the Fourth of the Seventh's path. It was only natural, the Fourth of the Seventh's evolution had come unexpectedly. The breeze honey she used to evolve was no different than the medicinal honey the Second of the Sixth used, or the maddening honey the First of the Eighth did, so the First of the Fifth would have expected the Fourth of the Seventh to become a breeze bee. Instead, she had become something entirely different and more powerful, all on account of her deeds and with the regular attributed mana honey all other bees already had access to.

So…on account of this…the hive of hives had begun to assume that deeds were the only means by which to evolve and that honey only ever played a supportive role. Their later experiences seemed to bear this out. The Firstborn had to fight to evolve, the First of the Fifth's First Daughter spread her communer link to the entire hive of hives first, the Second of the Sixth learned to heal with her own mana. Even the First of the Fifth herself, who evolved after creating swirled honey, had believed it was the act of swirling honey and not the swirled honey itself that enabled her to evolve.

The First of the Eighth's First Daughter had just disabused her of that notion. The young queen had worked hard, of course, and it would be remiss to say she had no achievements. She, like any queen of the hive of hives, gave her all for the hive of hives and for the King, the maddening honey she helped her queen mother produce had long been a key part of the King's defenses. But…the First of the Eighth's First Daughter had done nothing beyond fulfilling the usual role of a queen, and the Firstborn had believed going beyond that was crucial for a queen's evolution. All the hive of hives had come to believe that.

But all the First of the Eighth's First Daughter had done was identify the new dancing columbine was greatly compatible with the maddening bees' honey and held new and more powerful mana than their usual poisonous herbs did. Then she had asked the First of the Fifth to swirl honey made from it…and then had used that honey to evolve herself, no further deeds required. The swirled dancing honey combined with the maddening queen's own to elevate and empower it, thus evolving the queen herself beyond her former limits. And the First of the Fifth had no doubt that the new mind-maddening queen had evolved in the same way that she had, the density of her mana within the hive link made that abundantly clear.

This was clear, firm, undeniable proof that…swirled honey could evolve queens entirely on its own! Perhaps it required nectar from a powerful flower and perhaps it required strong compatibility between the attributes of the queen and the honey and perhaps the First of the Eighth's First Daughter's strong desire to evolve with the help of the hive of hives had played a role…but one way or another it could be done! And the First of the Fifth, the queen who had so longed to create a better honey, the queen responsible for honey-based evolutions in the hive of hives, had missed it! In fact, she didn't even know if all those caveats were necessary, for the hive of hives had allocated swirled honey mainly to queens with promising deeds, and so simply hadn't attempted pure honey-based evolutions with it.

The First of the Fifth broke out of her daze and immediately began dancing at the fastest speed her body could carry her, with her antennae lighting up as her mana danced even faster. She sent out a flurry of orders throughout her hive, as well as messages to her First Daughter and the hive of hives. They had to test this! They had to create new kinds of swirled honey with new kinds of flower and have the attributed queens come and see if any resonated with them! They had to try and evolve more queens with no unusual deeds! Or maybe…could they raise new princesses who were born evolved?!

Which brought her thoughts to the drones, since the hive of hives needed them to evolve before raising new princesses. The First of the Fifth buzzed her wings. Could…the drones evolve if she gave them swirled honey, without needing to take up the Conduit and hive of the fallen's time?! Her honey was specifically good at helping workers and soldiers evolve into gardeners and communers and sprayers and lancers and all the rest…so why wouldn't it help the drones too?! And as for the workers and soldiers…could the honey help them unlock new evolutions as well?

Just how much more potential did her swirled honey possess that she had not yet unlocked? How much further could the hive of hives grow if she managed to uncover its secrets? What else was possible on the path of honey?

The First of the Fifth couldn't wait to find out…