A new day, a new chance to learn something. I sat up and my legs didn't move right, I looked down and my dirt pants failed to move by themselves, the magic threads were still properly attached but they were unpowered. So that was a bust for training autonomous control, but still I had to try it. I pulled the dirt off and crumpled it into a ball, I left it attached but proceeded to ignore it to try and let my unconscious mind figure out what to do with it while I did other things. Looking around I saw there was a soldier sitting by the chess set, when asked she explained she was being taught how to play by Victoria so she was waiting for her to wake up. I decided to play a round and see how far along she was, she knew the rules and could make decent moves but she had to think it over a lot.

Victoria woke up after a few moves and joined the soldier's team, working together they managed to get me in check twice but I still scraped out a win. I gave the soldier a handshake and told her good game, making sure to instill good manners early is important. After that I left them to play eachother and told Victoria that I'd be back when she started laying those eggs so we can test out my idea to teach her dirt control. Up top I called over the workers before they got too into stacking and had them assist me in starting a palisade, I knocked over a tree and had them carve it smooth before all three of us worked together to stand it up in the ditch outside the rock wall by the entrance.

Had to make the hole a bit deeper to secure it properly but it was pretty close. We moved on to the next tree as soon as I was sure it was stable. The workers were extremely adept at slicing the trees into pillars, claws that could slice through stone were completely unimpeded by wood. We got through twelve trees before it was time for lunch, which I was pretty sure was fast as hell for three people. After lunch I knocked over twelve more trees and let the workers go at them while I dug out the ditch to the proper level for them to be secured. I then went over to the pile of dirt that couldn't go back in the hole due to the logs being in the way and balled it all up and compressed it, that was a painful idea.

I had forgotten I had a ball of dirt secured to my magic field behind me, which was the plan, but I had also forgotten that I couldn't use two magics at the same time, like dirt control and compress earth. The thread connecting me to my unconsciously controlled ball flared with power and latched on securely because it was already active and so compress earth was forced to flow around it. The massive disruption in it's energy flow caused it to go haywire and it formed blast of power, inside of me. I was sure I was gonna end up exploded, but right when the ball turned from concentrating to expanding a fair chunk of it's energy dissipated and in turned from deadly to extremely painful and it rippled through my organs.

I fell over and and my still active dirt ball caught me on the way down so I hit with a gentle thud instead of cracking my head too. I laid there for several minutes, my torso on fire with pain, and then I felt a familiar level up, magical feedback resistance. It must have dulled the blast because this was another kind of magical feedback, the kind Jeremy must have worried that forcing more energy into a spell would cause. I can now see why they take it slow if violent explosive death is a realistic concern of pushing too hard. I can't waste this chance though, because I am not going to set it up again, I turn on magic sense and push it as far as it can go so I had a searing headache to go along with my searing torso ache.

I earned three levels of feedback resistance before the torso pain faded and I dropped magic sense along with it. Still no idea what level it really was but I estimated it to be in the high teens now, along with magic sense which also gained a level during this escapade. I slowly sat up and when nothing started hurting again I sighed in relief, it was just painful instead of any real damage. Probably because it was a low level spell that went crazy, if I had it at level fifty when I did this who knows how much energy would have been in the burst. I reached out and grabbed a handhold without trying and pulled myself up, the handhold was my dirt ball that turned into little pillar with a handle on top.

This auto control had started to get a little creepy, it was moving to be what I needed when I needed it before I realized I even needed it. Still, if I could gain a duel casting ability so I could leave it on all the time without worrying I would explode again it would be great. For now I had the dirt latch on to my chest for storage before I detached the control thread and then turned to the extra ground dirt and got back to compressing it. Once it was all out of the way and the new rocks were piled on checked how the workers were doing, they had already worked through six of the trees I knocked over and I couldn't have been on the ground too long. Seems they had gotten faster as they worked, practice and all that.

I stopped them and had us get to work sticking the six ready to go logs in the ditch, after that though I left them to work on the next six trees and I headed back into the nest. I wanted to be close at hand to maximize the amount of time Victoria had to learn magic before her hormones told her that she had to get started on the next set. In the room she and a soldier were in the middle of a match and she was carving something at the same time. Well, alternating, would work on the carving while waiting for the soldier to make a move since she took a while to think through the possibilities.

I sat down to the side between them and meditated on magic sense, I focused in on Victoria's in progress eggs and I could see they were getting very magically dense, I guessed they burned through this energy to grow faster than normal. I sat there for about two hours watching how the energy swirls about, eventually I also noticed how the energy flow to the soldier's head would go up slightly when it was her turn and she was thinking hard, not a skill by itself, more like simple flow control. Thirty-seven more minutes pass when I see the flow of energy to Victoria's eggs suddenly cut off and they wiggled, it must be time.

The soldier was sent to get some workers while I stayed with V, the eggs came out real easy this time, since her ovipositor had gotten used to squeezing them out. The last egg of the batch, the one that was special because of a stat bonus was also special as an egg, I couldn't tell what color it really was with dark vision, but it wasn't completely clear like the other three. I handed them off to the workers to watch after as soon as I got them and I had Victoria sit next to me. I pulled off my dirt plate and turned it back into a ball and held it in my hand and had her place a hand on it, and had her also grab my other hand. Finally I essentially used her as a magic staff, channeling magic through her into the orb of dirt, while she focused and tried to feel it.

If it was anyone else this would probably be a near impossible way to teach, but since our mana signatures are perfectly identical I had hope for it. Several minutes passed as her mana resisted mine but as she focused It slowly smoothed out as her energy stopped resisting and instead flowed along with the energy I was sending. Eventually her energy stopped resisting entirely and began to actively reinforce it, I let go of the orb with my hand zo it was being held up by the energy thread coming from her hand instead. Slowly I pulled back on my thread, letting her own energy take over the spell.

As soon as I released her hand a large part of the dirt orb fell to the ground and she turned to me "I felt that." Then she turned to her hand holding the ball "I'm doing it! I can do magic! How the hell did you figure out how to teach a chantless spell?"

"Well, the method only works on you, I noticed a bit ago that our mana signatures are identical, so we have 100% compatibility when it comes to moving it around. So I moved your mana for you while you tried to copy what you felt from it. It won't work on anyone else because their mana is a different consistency and wavelength so it would be like trying to stir oil with a spoon made of fire. " I explained to her. "You can keep that dirt pile, I refined it to work better with the magic, so use it to practice and I'll make more later."

"Thanks, I'll get started tomorrow morning, but right now I am starting to get that itch that only you can scratch for me" she said with a smirk.

"Okay, let's make two soldiers and two more workers then I... I leveled up." I looked up "quick get back!" I jumped back when she yelled.

Her body lit up like a Christmas tree in magic sense, just a flood of energy started flowing into her. After a bit of build up she started growing rapidly, her plates shifting and changing shape slightly but growing outward by a bit, her body taking on a much more motherly shape as well as growing taller. She stopped growing when she was slightly shorter then what her mother was at but still close enough that I would call it two meter. An interesting thing was that her abdomen didn't grow as much as we thought it would have, it was clearly big enough to fit six eggs but was smaller than her mother's.

"How do you feel? That didn't exactly look comfortable to go through" I asked her.

"It actually wasn't that bad, it felt like when you stretch after being hunched over for a while, hurts slightly but also kinda feels good. Aaaand... now my two new egg pockets have celestials growing in them, little surprised getting bigger didn't interfere with that. So, what do you think of me now?"

"You managed to prove me wrong when I thought of your old form as the most beautiful person I would ever see, by becoming the new most beautiful person I had ever seen. It should have been obvious in hindsight that only you could outdo yourself." I laid it on thick, but as she blushed up a storm I knew it was worth it.

"Okay okay, you got me, stop. You are lucky you are so handsome yourself or I would be mad, well come on now, sooner we get to sleep the sooner we can wake up and start checking out all the new powers we just got." She laid down and held her arms open, inviting me to use her chest as a bed, which I obliged.