The weeks that followed were hard on everybody. There was nothing too complex in the tasks perford by peoples of the Bee Empire and the Naregan Kingdom, but the last months drained resources of both countries and it showed.
The numbers of food and materials shown to by the system were at all tis low. Food wasn’t too much of a concern yet, but the need to equip and send out more bees in a hurry, together with several wars back to back, hit the materials stash badly. Another thing that affected it was the rapid industrial growth I had pushed for.
It was repaid as many chas that helped us expand even faster and gather even more resources than before, but it would take ti for the investnts to pay off.
Just like it would take ti to fully purify the Bee Empire from the tal-eaters, and even more ti to purify other countries—the countries which weren’t at their best even before things went from bad to worse.
Every day I woke up with a thought that surely, *today* sothing irreparably bad must happen in one of these kingdoms. An assassination of the rightful king, an ard rebellion, another flood after all!
The predictions of Oracles said that a chance of sothing like this was always not zero.
But a week passed, then another one, and nothing like that happened.
Squads of human soldiers and bee scouts searched high and low for the evolved dragons and their eggs, then killed them rcilessly. The humans, which already knew what danger these evolved dragons were to their countries, fought without concern for their lives.
The tal-eaters were also slowly but surely exterminated. They had ti to cause several more accidents, most of them in the other kingdoms, where the reach of bees was smaller.
The largest of these accidents caused a fire in a large grain silo in Kachi-Chi’s capital city, adding even more hunger to the list of the kingdom’s problems.
After this fire, the low-class people in the capital city protested, angry that they now had even less chance to get any food.
The people burst out on the streets and began breaking whatever they could reach. This caused several more fires, and since the city was mostly built from burnable living stone, could’ve destroyed it entirely.
This was only prevented thanks to the bravery of the kingdom’s guards that stopped the enraged mob with their own bodies, as well as the fast reaction of the Agents stationed over the city. As soon as they got the first wind of the protests, they ordered the Kachi-Chi’s king to mobilize his personal guard to squash them. At the sa ti, they spread the news of fires over the city so people who weren’t protesting, including the city guard, could help stop them.
Thanks to this, the damage was much smaller than it could’ve been, but it was still another heavy blow.
But over ti, things got easier on everybody.
The chas excavated more resources and the new massive manufactures turned them into armor, weapons and other equipnt for the bee soldiers on the front lines.
The bee soldiers—hundreds of thousands of them—built new forts and spread in the fields of our allies, watching over the latest batch of crops.
At the sa ti, the evolved dragons were either killed or completely driven into the wild. At least there they could compete with other beasts, just as evolved as them, instead of humans.
The Barahi Kingdom could sleep tight—they were safe. So was Judji. And all three kingdoms not only had new food-preserving technologies taught by bees but also the hygiene and dicine teachings that I ordered to spread alongside the propaganda of bee-worship.
The tal-eaters in the Bee Empire were almost all killed, only for a new generation to catch. But this was when we discovered their beetle form—much less stealthy than the larva form, but much quicker.
After this, soldiers were sent to search and fight the tal-eating beetles specifically and stop them from laying even more eggs. As far as I hoped—you never could tell for sure—they succeeded.
Stealth was the tal-eaters primary advantage, and by losing them they lost the war with bees!
They caused several large industrial accidents and over a thousand bee deaths before that, but... many more were saved.
The future looked hopeful. All this rushed work wasn’t for nothing—the human kingdoms were recovering, but they would stay tightly under the heel of the Naregan Kingdom, which was under the heel of the Bee Empire.
There was only one kingdom that never got our help—Hatha Kingdom!
From the mont when I first had to choose whom to help because I couldn’t help them all, I have excluded them deliberately. The people of this kingdom were too zealous in their religion, which was too different from that of the Naregan Kingdom. This made conquering this place with propaganda much harder.
But while I waited for the Hatha Kingdom to grow so weak from plagues and famine for its king to surrender to Naregan Kingdom by his own will...
The Hatha Kingdom just fell apart.
Hunger caused multiple peasant revolts that ended with an entire army of hungry and sick people, led by a bandit leader, to attack the king and rob everything that stood in their way. At the sa ti, the nobles of the country fought each other for the last scraps of food and power.
By this point, probably a fourth of the total population died.
I was told tales about an incredible number of corpses—so many of them that there was no ti to bury them. Cannibalism beca more and more common among hungry people. None of the kingdoms that got my protection ever had it *this* bad.
Then the Hatha king died from a bad cough, and it was the last drop.
Within days, the entire country beca an assortnt of counties and baronies. They could be easily conquered at this point, but could they be helped at all?
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