Reincarnated To Evolve My Bee Empire
Chapter 350 - 350: Growing, growing, growing

It was as successful and bloody as the first one.

Within one week since the crusading army came to the Krisha village, the fields there became fully free of pests! As well as almost every other insect and animal except for those who lived underground.

Even these weren't all spared—when the bees found burrows large enough to enter, they went inside and stung to death whatever hid within. Or just burned it together with its burrow!

Ecosystems? Biodiversity?

Forget about these words!

If every other species could be a potential enemy designed specifically against bees or humans, then we better kill them all before they become even a larger problem than they were already!

I didn't worry that the plants in the area will lack pollinators, either. The soldiers in the garrisons could carry the pollen around crops on the fields, and anything else wasn't our concern.

The seedlings were safe, and they were already budding out of the ground!

The villagers, assured that their fields will be safe from hordes of insects that were already making holes in forests all over the region, kneeled before our two fortress-hives in gratitude. They praised us and brought not just the supplies we asked for, but also coins and flowers that they would usually leave on altars.

Unlike more educated of the bee followers, the people in Krisha village actually believed we will use money as *money* instead of simply melting it—just like they believed coins buried with people will be used by them in the afterlife.

This was when I said heartfelt goodbyes to the crusaders—both those who already settled in Krisha as garrisons, and those who were about to continue their crusade—and returned to Hive Supremo.

Here, at the train stop of the First Train (which was heavily modernized with metal reinforcements and steam engine), armies of new recruits were gathering. Every day brought more and more people from the sub-hives.

And now that the first crusade was over, they were about to spread all over the Naregan Kingdom, led by Grand Commander Malevolence and several others. The practical experience Malevolence got in her first operation will make sure that the rest will run even smoother.

Each of the crusading armies was so large that if it traveled on its own, it would need an entire railroad just to get supplies. But in the Krisha village, devotees sent by Farini were already waiting for them with carts and extra food.

These carts will carry the armies all over the country, and humans will feed them. This way, I won't have to think twice about the logistics of it all!

And it worked out just as I hoped. In two more weeks, the telepathic chains in places brought news of successfully cleansed fields. Some of them were already in bad shape, but the timely appearance of the crusaders gave the sprouts hope of surviving.

Field by field, the country was slowly growing clearer—and with it, the Bee Empire was growing larger. The separate administrative regions, like The Central, The Digging Holes and The Fields, took shape on the paper schematics of the Empire.

However, as I listened to the reports, I knew already…

There were too many fields to cleanse them all quickly.

Even with the plagues and the civil war taking many lives, and even with the thousands of people living in areas so remote that even government officials had only a vague idea of their existence, the Naregan Kingdom had a population of approximately 35 million people.

That was half the amount of bees that lived in the Bee Empire, so I wasn't sure whether to consider the number to be large or small. Especially since the amount of bees was only growing every day. Just the new fortress-hives made our settlement count rise by dozens!

With the expansion of our territories we could enclose and protect more unevolved beehives and "invite over" more Drones, so there were always enough of them for the new Queens—and all of them laid eggs like there was no tomorrow.

Either way, people lived densely and had a lot of crop fields and living mountain orchards to take care of.

The Bee Empire had plenty of people to do it, but it would take them days—weeks!—to reach the farthest edges of the country.

Farini assured me that my intervention should be fast enough to let the country last until the next farming season—and the climate here was warm enough to gather two harvests a year—but I still worried and asked the Oracles to peer into the future as far as they could.

This let me warn humans about several heavy storms that would've drowned their fields if they didn't know about them early enough to cover the plants with tarps.

As a result, the reputation of bees grew even higher! With it, more temples were built to Dalmanrach as well, although I was sure that it wasn't important at this point. Still, he became a god of the Blood Brotherhood and a god to whom countless people prayed for salvation from illnesses.

Before, there were plenty of people who refused to believe in new religious teachings out of sheer stubbornness or because of their traditionalism, despite their new king saying that all bees were now officially sacred creatures and messengers of gods.

But now even the people most attached to their old faith accepted us—or were beaten into believing by their own neighbors who were afraid to anger the protectors of their fields.

It was going way better than accepting Christianity was going for Rome! Not only bees came with real magic powers and vital benefits, it was much easier for humans to accept the bees as divine guardians that served their familiar gods than a completely new religion.

And recalling the power of religions in history, I knew I couldn't miss this opportunity.

So while my girls were still killing and burning pests in his fields, I sent Farini a message.

'You must send devout and well-spoken people to other countries so they will spread the true teachings to the suffering people there!'