Reincarnated To Evolve My Bee Empire
Chapter 346 - 346: The Great Crusade begins

It actually took longer than a week to finish the year-long plan, but the time spent was worth it.

Not only have I and my Advisers decided the direction of the Empire's growth, we've solved a problem that has been nagging me for some time now.

The problem was such: I wanted humans to depend on bees, so our control of them wasn't reliant only on propaganda—but humans were very independent creatures.

Yes, thanks to their telepathic connection and good education, bees, on average, could do intellectual work better than a Naregan citizen. But even then, bees needed a human to write down things if they wanted other humans to read them. And if a bee wanted to read something, a human or an entire squad of bees had to turn the page so a bee could read it.

Besides, administrative jobs weren't vital enough for humans to not even think about kicking the bees out. If anything, power-hungry humans would only be more likely to do so.

Of course, bees would take as many powerful positions as possible, but we needed something more.

And now, as the Naregan farmers prepared to sow their empty fields again, I came up with what only bees could do.

Thanks to the "Fast Evolution" rules in the Game of Evolution, insects all over the place have been evolving rapidly and breeding like mad. They didn't evolve as quickly as bacteria and viruses, but fast enough that our borders were constantly attacked by them.

In the wild, predators ate the insects with relish, and some plants evolved to protect themselves from being eaten within days. But not everywhere these two things brought the insect population down.

And now that the new farming season approached humans, their fields were going to be under attack by insects! A country-wide famine was going to threaten the kingdom by next year.

Farini, who had time to inspect the kingdom's grain silos, only agreed with me, especially after the recent famine in his own homeland. He already prepared to make larger stocks, but now I was about to bring him salvation (again).

'Within weeks, the first armies of the guardians will be ready to travel on a Great Crusade. Welcome them as your saviors. Thank *us* as your saviors. Then bring them where vermin eat your seedlings. They will kill every insect and beast that threatens your fields, one by one,' I told him.

The bees were going to be the protectors of human fields.

In this era, when pesticides weren't invented yet, the best weapon against locusts and leaf-eating caterpillars were hammers, spears and fire!

In a month, a new generation of Queens would take the place of their older sisters in the sub-hives and bring me many much more evolved granddaughters.

With an average sub-hive having a brood size of 3660 eggs with all the fertility upgrades, and 430 sub-hives in the Bee Empire by the latest count, an army of 1,5 million soldiers could be created in a month, and with the latest genes, all of them will be able to breathe fire!

Of course, this was oversimplification. To not strain the logistics and the workforce too much, especially since soldiers needed equipment and teachers, only 5 million will be realistically drafted every generation.

This was still enough for a Great Crusade, and even to leave garrisons in fields and guard us as our own territory.

Which it *would* be. I made plans of building permanent fortress-hives there. They would get most of their resources from humans, including water and sugar-rich food for making honey (which was necessary both for medicine and as a food preservative).

Even now, before the first generation of soldiers would be ready to be shipped off, our Craftsmen were hard at work making new sets of armor and weapons.

And humans were going to provide us with materials. I sent Tamsha to escort whoever was going to carry them back and forth. The man did his best trying to study bee technologies, but his education was terribly lacking in the most basic aspects sometimes.

Now Tamsha was eager to work harder than ever for the Empire. Partially because he didn't want the Naregan Kingdom to starve either, and partially because I teased him with the concepts of the future inventions bees were about to create.

But the military wasn't the only thing on the Council's agenda.

The Empire had to keep expanding, but at this point, we were stretching the limits of our logistics. Our telepathic chains were stretched thin with endless messages, and so were the administrators in Hive Supremo—including Advisers.

It was just too cumbersome to govern 430 sub-hives directly. There were too many supply chains, too many details to deal with.

Instead, I created a plan of separating the Empire into regions.

With this, the previous noble title of a Queen will be split into two: Queen and Princess. Ambrosia was an Empress, of course. Or Over-Queen, as Pollenia once called her.

Princesses will be daughters of Queens. Since the improved gene inheritance let my progeny inherit 100% of my genes no matter what, each Princess will have all the necessary genes to produce genetically perfect daughters.

The permission for Queens to rear fertile daughters will let them grow the size of their regions independently from Hive Supremo (and save me a lot of work in the future, definitely). Also, the Princesses will be more likely to obediently follow their mothers than anyone else.

And while the new generation of Queens was growing in their royal pods, the administrators and Archivists in Hive Supremo worked hard to divide the sub-hives into regions, decide on how they will be called, and who will be their ruler before an actual Queen can become experienced enough.

It was likely that the older, replaced Queens will hold these positions at least for the next few years, until even they will grow old.

All these plans proceeded with only minimal hurdles. A month passed, then a couple more weeks…

And the Great Crusade began.