It’s been a couple of days, or at least I think it has. I don’t really know. I haven’t been able to leave. I have spent all my time just sleeping and eating. I’m sooo bored.

  It’s worse now than before as it hurts beyond words, but the absolute worst and biggest reason is because I have my birthing shape again. And everything would be okay if it was just one of them, but every time I move I feel spikes of pain, and the little brat isn’t helping with her constant, “Queen safe. Hive. Protect. Protect queen.”

  It was cute in the beginning. The first time.

  Now it’s just annoying.

  All this has done is give me time to stare at everything that is unfinished.

  My great and beautiful beginning of a chandelier. The walls with only a thin layer of wax and no combs, no proper structure, none of the techniques I’ve learned. And now that I think about it, I don’t just want one open space with things thrown around. I want dedicated nectar for different rooms. Different purposes. Different scents.

  This space was fine before, but as I grow, I won’t fit. I already barely fit. My royal rump fills the whole hole. It wasn’t true, but the mental image was stuck in my head.

  And the reality was that we needed an even smaller hole, especially when it’s already too big to keep birds out. Making it smaller won’t stop wasps anyway.

  Those damn wasps.

  What about my amazing plan to use the undead to destroy that damn hive?

  I let my anger go when I smelled my lazy daughter flying in and out, three different times dropping off nectar and pollen.

  I looked at where she’d been. Could I really call her lazy? She never stopped. Maybe a bad listener. Or bad at following orders. But not lazy. It’s kind of cute how I have to force her to stop working when she’s exhausted. She keeps insisting on protecting the queen and making the hive.

  She does grow on you. Really, I did a good job raising her.

  But the biggest problem, no, should I call it a crisis, is that I have nothing to do.

  I couldn’t do anything except make food for future children. I had other things I needed to worry about, and no real help. Now we need all the pollen and nectar just to make bee bread for them.

  For brats that don’t even exist yet, and they are already being a pain.

  And that means I can’t do anything fun. How fair is that?

  At least before I got to gather nectar, and even as boring as it was to do, I at least got to see the world and maybe some instances of suffering horribly, but I was surrounded by flowers, forced to sit inside talking to myself.

  Wasn’t this supposed to give me more freedom? More fun? Living in luxury, sipping honey from all over the world?

  Being entertained by something.

  This sucks.

  At least my healing is faster now.

  I’m at eleven HP now.

  Okay. What to do, what to do?

  The real problem was that the more HP I got, the less I could sleep. So for the first day I couldn’t just sleep the day away, and that was stressing me out.

  I stared at the nectar and couldn’t stop. Hmm. Couldn’t I do something with that?

  We needed it for the kids, but couldn’t I try sorting it? Maybe even make bee bread from the best parts or anything. Maybe figure something out, even just to ease this boredom.

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  Even when it was pooled together in a container, some parts were glowing more than others. But I wasn’t sure how to separate it, and what the glow was. Is it like the health of the nectar? And when I’m thinking about it, why do I expect that the glowing means good? Maybe it’s the reverse. I didn’t even have to think about it to know that was wrong, especially when the nice flower glowed a lot.

  Now that I think about it, didn’t I get mana from that one? I started to get super excited and tried feeling the mana from it, but it was hard separating it from the room’s mana or even mine. Maybe I could feel it when it’s inside, and who knows, maybe I can make it better for my future brats.

  I went to the first container and tried gathering only the most glowing parts. Then I looked again. I think what I was left with was glowing with the same intensity, but the truth is I can’t be sure.

  I wasn’t even sure what I was really doing, but some of the boredom was alleviated.

  I started swirling it and forgot to turn off my Nectar Sense as I tried to feel the mana.

  Something new and amazing happened. My theory was proving totally right. As the glow moved the same way the mana did, it just had a small delay. But the truly interesting part was that I could feel different kinds of mana in it.

  And as I was swirling it, I could feel how it started to combine.

  I gained an understanding about how to use a new part, and stood there waiting for the memories. I stood there until I felt my daughter’s scent. I concentrated on her, and she danced.

  “Queen hungry?”

  I looked down, then at her, then down again. It must have looked like I was eating. Does she think I’m a glutton?

  Me eating a fifth of our supply, the part meant for the kids. Whatever.

  “No, using skill…”

  Before I could keep going, she bumped into me, preventing me from dancing.

  “Stop, hurts queen, protect queen.”

  Does she expect me to just be still? But she was right, with the extra weight and nectar, it hurt to dance.

  “Not understand. Gather more. For queen.”

  I opened the skill and got furious.

  It had just become like a bad version of Mana Awareness. It only sensed mana in nectar. What a shitty level. System, you really are an asshole.

  And no memories? What is that? I could accept it when I was sleeping and didn’t get any, but now?

  I’m like the most hard-working bee I know.

  I ignored the thoughts of Esme that popped up.

  And kept debating my issues with the system in my mind. The lazy girl went past, leaving nectar and going out again a couple of times. I could smell confusion from her, and then went back to working, leaving the scent of her confusion behind.

  I just kept trying my updated skill.

  And like I thought, it was like a combination of Mana Awareness and Nectar Sense, but unlike Mana Awareness, I didn’t feel any mana except the one in the nectar. I tried feeling it in my body, but only felt the nectar I was swirling.

  What a shitty upgrade.

  I spat out the nectar-turned-honey into a container and went to sleep.

  The days went on, with me trying and not failing, but learning how to use my new sense to do something.

  What I managed was pulling the mana into myself as I swirled it. I’d hoped it would add to me and make me stronger, but it just flowed back out of my body. Then somehow I made the nectar more impure. I couldn’t really explain it in a better way, and I made wax from it because it felt wrong to feed my kids with it.

  I didn’t try that again.

  Instead, I tried pushing the glowing mana from one part to another, but both parts became impure, gaining a glow that didn’t feel right, almost dirty.

  Then I spent some time trying to get the lazy girl to see the glow, but maybe she didn’t have the gift. Or maybe she was just slow. Who knows.

  The days went by without a hitch, if I didn’t count the times we had to hide because a bird was looking into the hive, and me and Esme were as far away as we could get behind my amazing throne. It was also a reminder to fix some kind of mechanism to prevent this from happening.

  I think I have a solution, but I’m not sure how to make it yet.

  It happened the third time my lazy girl flew in, pushing me back as far as she could. It shocked me and made me kind of impressed. She could move me like that.

  But whatever.

  As it happened, I thought about some kind of movable wall that could only be pushed one way to get in or out.

  So when something pushed on one side, it opened on the other. And when it wasn’t pushed, it went back to being closed by itself.

  Or just spinning. The spinning idea sounded more fun, so probably that.

  I thought it would help, but I don’t know how to build it.

  I can’t do everything myself. I came up with the idea, so one of you brats needs to make it.

  I was thinking and dancing instructions to my eggs as they were about to hatch, and as I did, the first larva showed her face through a crack, and I started feeling my boredom truly fade.