With the furs covered in brain ooze and hanging up to let it soak in I moved on to four new ones the soldiers had made. I also stopped the most recent soldier dropping off a body from heading back out and recruited her to help me. The quickest way to make hair easier to remove from a skin was to splash it with hot but not boiling water to thermal shock the pores open which should result in the hair coming right out when you rub it hard. It was helpful that I didn't need to care at all about getting dirt stuck to the skin side since I could just wave my hand and all the dirt would then fall off it. It didn't work perfectly but I managed to get all the fur off without ripping the skin, only the middle section that had the water splashed directly on to it was loosed so I had to make a run to the river to get more water to heat.

Doing that had gotten a load easier with improved power, since I could now carry seven fairly large hardened dirt pots full of water with my magic and an eighth one in my arms. Heh, if I found some white sand I wonder if I could shape it into six wings and scare someone into submission by claiming to be an angel. Could also get a few celestials placed in strategic positions to give myself some crazy backlighting effect to really sell it. I mean, I am on a mission from a god so I doubt they would be too annoyed with me for posing as one of their messengers. Anyway, repeated applications of scalding water to fur and continuous rubbing resulted in effectively hairless skins that were then put in the drying room which was then lit it up.

While those were drying I then had the soldier assist me with de-barking trees and then shredding the bark into chips. Once the chip pile was chest high I covered it with dirt to make sure they wouldn't blow away before I could use them all. To extract tannin from tree bark you just had to make bark tea, the problem was I had no large containers that allow for boiling, I had some small clay pots and large hardened dirt containers. The dirt containers were big enough but boiling water in them was a terrible idea, I had tried handling boiling mud before and it was weird, like it was somehow fifty percent earth, fifty percent water, and fifty percent fire, which was impossible but that is what it felt like. Point is that once the water started boiling it would start dissolving the very container it was in and I would not be able to stop it.

I needed either a massive clay pot or to make a stone one, tin could work if I had some kind of welding tools... hmmm, with how low it's melting point is I may be able to get away with heated stone skewer. Well nothing ventured, nothing gained, I am gonna try making a massive tin barrel! First up I had to head down and pick up a load more tin ore and to have the tunnelers make a huge anvil shaped rock and then compress it into much stronger normal sized anvil, the flat rock I was using to practice smithing by making nails on it was fine for nails, but a project like this needed a better tool. Heading inside I saw one member of Valerie's team was awake, she was piggybacking the sleep of the others so she could wake the rest of the team up if I needed them.

I told her not right now and she started staring off into space to wait for an order, was a little strange how they could do that, but I supposed she was also partly in a shared dream with her sisters. Moving on, I eventually reached the forward tunnel group and thought at them the shape I wanted carved out and it took them a bit to make it, it was just barely able to fit in the tunnel so they had to crawl over and under it. It took a bit of doing but eventually we had a huge anvil, for a finishing touch I had a handful of hardened sand attached to my palm and then used three layers of the utility version of 'power coat' and sanded it as smooth as possible. The final thing needed was to compress it into a normal size, but my spell couldn't wrap completely around it despite my power.

Good thing workers could use that spell too, since they were mind linked and I could broadcast my thoughts in a different direction from where I was casting we were able to sync cast. My spell was the primary wave and each of the worker's spells acted like a relay point and let my wave spread further around it. With a sudden woosh of air it crunched down to about a third of it's original size, which was still a little on the big side for an anvil, but I could work with it. The five of them could manage carrying it so I sent them up to place it next to the furnace, and while they were doing that I grabbed a different tunnel team and had them carve out some more of the tin ore and follow the first group up with it.

Following them out, once they placed the anvil in a good spot, I had them all link together and once more use compression on it, it shrunk down a bit more but was still kinda big. I sent them back down to continue digging while I figured out what I needed next, which was a bigger mold, to make a bigger tin sheet, which meant a bigger crucible, which meant a bigger furnace. Ugh, it wasn't hard to do all that, but I didn't really want to until I had enough heat resistance that I could use the furnace room. Oh well, progress marches on whether you want it to or not, and I doubted I could even get my resistances high enough without it being a class skill. I headed a bit outside the wall before ripping two globs of clay from the ground and taking it back.

For this construct I was going to need some more time than the drying dome despite it being smaller since I needed to completely bake all the clay bricks instead of just cooking them a bit so they were hard. I also wrangled in the extra team while Valerie was still asleep, first I needed them to carve out a large stone base shape, a cylinder a meter wide and a half meter tall. After they handed that over I had them go repair and then finish the wall. Once again using utility coating I was able to use another rock and my finger nails to carve away at the stone into the bottom for the new furnace. It had a large side opening to pull the ashes out of and the top was filled with holes to allow ash to fall into it from the top, it also had air inflow holes on the sides so when I closed the hatch I could pressurize it and get it much hotter.

Also unlike the last one it had an actual floor instead of just letting the ash land on the ground, the reason for all this was because of magically hardened stone's properties. After it was hardened it became almost thermally reflective, it still absorbed some heat but a lot less than it really should have. So by building a base from such a material all the heat will bounce off the bottom and concentrate more of it upward into what I was cooking with it. On top of the stone I carved a couple waste rocks into another ring of hardened stone that was a bit smaller than the base and then placed clay around it all. I had to shrink it a bit more to make it fit right but then I removed the stones on most of the sides except the ones embedded into the hatch.

On top of that was the grate that allowed the heat and smoke to flow up while being able to hold things, this was a bit thicker than before since the crucible was a fair bit larger so it had to be able to hold more weight. It was also the only component that could, and needed to, be cooked in place due to it's size and position instead of being broken into separate bricks, cooked, and then put back. Finally on top of that was the crucible chamber, due to the larger size it would be awkward to pull it out the top so there was a third hatch on this chamber as well. With everything in place I ripped it into blocks and started cooking them, while it was doing that started infusing hardening energy into the stone parts, I had to bring it as close to crystallization as possible without actually turning it crystal.

I got a few bricks done before Valerie finally woke up, came up to find me, and said, "I'm sorry."

I was rather confused by a sudden apology so I asked, "sorry for what?"

She answered, "for pushing myself too hard even though you told me not to. While I was building I just couldn't help myself, I was just so happy to be working on a huge project that I lost myself in that feeling. After sleeping on it I think part of it is because I am the first super worker, a gut feeling that no workers like me have ever appeared before, meaning that unlike big sister Christina I don't have any hive memories to guide me."

Huh, I didn't think of that, "apology accepted, just be more careful next time, you are an important part of this family. If things go well you will probably gain a little sister enhanced worker, so try to make some memories she will be able to emulate. Now go help your team finish up the wall."

She thanked me for understanding, gave me a hug, and went to meet up with her team. She gave me a new issue to tackle, culture, the ants have a whole lot of raw survival knowledge, but anything less immediately useful didn't really exist. Victoria was basically the only person Making art, and even then it was just things she thought were neat to carve instead of anything with a concept in mind. With leather I could maybe make a few drums and drumsticks and see how they felt about music. Hehehe, just had a funny thought, maybe workers would like industrial... sadly I don't think anyone else on the planet would be capable of getting it. Moving on, the next few bricks were done cooking so I moved them over to the construct and slid in some new ones.

Some time passed and I was only a quarter done before it was getting dark out and I had to head inside for the day. Down in the home chamber I asked Victoria if there was any ant based culture, I noticed she was the only one that made art. She told me how there used to be, but after the first remembered queen things were really shaky because charisma effects suddenly made it a lot harder to find a husband so reproduction rate took a nose dive and the few hives left were more actively hunted. So they went into the civilization equivalent of starvation mode and anything that wasn't directly useful was discarded. If we got the hive big enough eventually something would happen by itself, like a worker team suddenly carving a picture into a wall because they were bored, which they wouldn't do right now because they just can't be bored.