Using transmutation, Eisen hardened his blood in the bowl a slight bit to make it as thick as possible without actually turning it solid so that it continued to expell a strong bloody scent, but wouldn't be able to move around too much during the next part of the plan.
Next, Eisen grabbed a mana crystal and a small mythril needle out of Bree's backpack and made a quick enchantment, that would expell enough wind to let the crystal, that was formed into a small bowl-shape, another small enchanted crystal and the blood itself float just a slight bit above the ground with some form of stability.
Once Eisen did that, he quickly created another small mana battery and filled it up, before placing it into the bottom of the mana crystal bowl together with the hardened blood, watching as it slowly began to float in the air.
"Perfect!" Eisen exclaimed with a soft laugh at his small and quick creation, while Bree watched with awe at Eisen being able to make something like this within such a short amount of time, although she was still kind of shaken up at watching Eisen drain his hand of blood.
"And what now?" She asked curiously, trying to ignore those thoughts. Instead of telling her what he would do with this floating-crystal, Eisen simply grabbed it and began walking closer to the Mother Hive, until he thought he was close enough to be able to attract the majority of the bees inside. Slowly, he let go of the crystal and made sure it was floating properly, then ever so slightly tilted it forward so that it would continue moving on its own. It didn't need to be fast, just be able to get far away.
The floating mana crystal then moved forward just like Eisen wanted it to. It seemed somewhat unstable, but it should get a fair distance away from the Mother Hive at the very least.
Next, they waited for the bees to react, and this happened not too long afterward. After a first bee seemed to notice the smell of blood, it turned back to the hive and its antennae began shaking, before a large swarm of even more bees of the same size came flying out, making the hive look somewhat abandoned from the outside.
Immediately, Eisen and Bree sprinted forward toward it, and Eisen began guarding Bree while she started setting up the anti-fire barrier by placing down some mana crystals as 'waypoints' so to speak, before carefully activating the spell, letting a globe of mana encase the whole hive.
"Now we only need to set it on fire." Eisen muttered to himself while concentrating some infused mana inside of his hand and turning it into complete fire, which he then fired out of his palm multiple times toward different spots on the hive.
At first, it started with small fires here and there, but soon enough, the whole structure was taken over. Some of the bees tried to flee, but since they were only physically weak worker bees, none of them managed to make it past the barrier that was set up and instead simply burned up in the flames, continuing to fuel it even more.
The hive broke down onto itself and continued burning up, Eisen and Bree retreating as far away as they could while still fueling the barrier. When the fire grew large enough to be basically impossible to put out, the soldier bees that left the hive in pursuit of the ball of blood that Eisen sent away came back just to find their home nearing ashes.
Neither in sadness nor in anger, the soldiers rushed forward right into the flames for one reason, to protect the hive's queen. That was their sole reason to even exist, and it caused the whole colony to be wiped out in one go.
"Wow, that… was actually quite sad…" Bree whispered out when she watched the Soldier Bees basically throw their life away, before the whole structure simply collapsed onto itself.
Eisen and Bree sat there in silence for a while, simply watching as this what could have become a serious threat to the area ceased to exist in less than an hour.
Once the fire disappeared for the most part, Eisen got to work with getting all of the still slightly hot residues of the hive out of the way using his mana doubles, until he found one especially surprising thing. It was the queen bee, surrounded by mountains of dead soldiers. Her body was basically completely burnt up, and it was coiling its body around a small, fist-sized sphere.
Carefully, Eisen grabbed that sphere and activated his truth-seeing eye. As the world around him turned black and white, the small circle that he expected appeared in front of the sphere, and when Eisen concentrated on it, the circle turned into a white notification page.
[Queen Bee Egg][Rank – 0][Level – 0]
"An egg, huh? I see…" Eisen muttered to himself, handing the egg over to one of the doubles standing next to him, before continuing to move parts of the hive out of the way to look for the honey crystal. This was the thing he was most interested in in the first place, so thinking about what to do with the egg came later.
Soon enough, Eisen found his target, which had grown to be much, much larger than he expected. The honey crystal of the mother hive was the size of a whole hive itself! It was about the same size of one of the larger hives that he and Bree found in the area just before finding this one.
He quickly burrowed his fingers underneath it to try and pick it up, getting the help of one of the mana doubles to do so. It wasn't that it was particularly heavy, but rather that it was too large for him to handle by himself.
After bringing the Crystal Hive out to where Bree was currently picking up the mana crystals she made the barrier with again, the Fey-Kin looked at it with large eyes. "Whoa! That's so big!"
Eisen chuckled in response and nodded his head with a smile. "Yeah, it really is. And the hive's capsules are even larger than I expected as well."
"Mhm, and I know why! Erm, there should be an opening there somewhere, right? Inside there should be a smaller crystal as well." Bree explained, and surprised, Eisen looked around the crystal structure until he found that one of the hexagonal capsules was opened to the inside.
Eisen stuck his hand in and felt around, until he noticed two different crystal structures. With a frown, Eisen pulled out both of them and looked at them closely.
Once more, he activated his truth-seeing eye and inspected the items in his hands. First, he looked at the small crystal that looked like a regular honey-crystal, albeit slightly lighter in color.
[Honey Crystal][Rank – 1]
"Wait, Honey Crystals have ranks too?" Eisen asked surprised. It kind of made sense the more he thought about it, but it was a surprise nonetheless.
"Mhm~! That's what happens when hives grow this large, the regular honey crystal will start to grow its own, higher-rank one! Usually, that would have allowed a sub-hive to form, with even stronger bees, but it seems like that didn't happen yet. Lucky us~!" Bree explained excitedly, squatting down to inspect the large structure that Eisen just pulled this small crystal out of.
However, there was something weird that came out together with it. A small, incredibly heavy crystal that was pitch-black all the way through. Eisen was sure that it weighed about twenty kilos on its own, despite only being the size of his index finger. After gulping nervously, Eisen inspected this abnormal crystal next.
[Compressed Crystalized Mana][Rank – 7]
"H-Huh? Bree, what's crystalized mana?" Eisen asked with his eyes opened wide in surprise. This was the highest rank he has seen of anything so far! So what was it doing in this beehive, next to a rank 1 honey crystal?
Bree tilted her head and looked over Eisen's shoulder, and the moment that she saw the crystal, she immediately hit it out of Eisen's hand. "Wh-what are you doing with that?! That's some of the most wicked mana I've ever seen!"
"It was inside of the crystal hive. You mentioned that a hive needs a large amount of mana to grow, so could this be the source of it?"
"Yes… it most certainly is. And it's even rank 7… We need to get rid of this somehow!" The Fey-kin held her hands to her head in a panic, trying to think of what to do next. But before she could completely freak out, Eisen tried calming her down.
"It's okay, don't worry. We can manage something like this, right? Just tell me what this is and what I need to do, alright?"
Bree nodded slowly and closed her eyes to get her composure back, before starting to explain. "That's compressed, crystalized mana. Crystalized mana is just mana that has been turned into a semi-permanently solid form. And it's extremely light as well, which means that this crystal contains a lot of mana, and it has been compressed to an extent that I haven't seen before… "
"And what did you mean when you said that it's wicked mana?"
"Ah… Mana has a color to it as well. It's usually white for most people, but if it's a completely corrupted or evil creature, it can turn black. And this is just complete darkness… meaning that the creature this comes from is immensely evil, you can be sure of that. This kind of thing doesn't appear out of nowhere, and it's incredibly hard to produce, so I doubt someone just dropped it… I think someone was trying to purposefully create a giant hive like the one I told you about before. Someone was probably trying to wipe out the area around here… We can be happy that we found this so early."
Eisen frowned strongly in response to this. If they hadn't found this just now, would that have meant that this would have continued growing? But for what purpose?
"This might have become a field dungeon, even…" Bree muttered out, just happy that such a crisis could be averted.
"Huh? Field Dungeon? Is it like a field boss?" Eisen asked confused, and Bree nodded with surprise in her eyes. "Uh… yeah, it is. Oh, I guess nobody explained to you what a field dungeon is, sorry. You see, field dungeons are basically mock-dungeons that naturally began forming, and usually take up a large area. They're different from regular dungeons, since they don't have dungeon cores to control everything that's going on, but instead it's more like every monster that's part of a field dungeon changes it a little bit, I guess? The Goblin Town we were at before was also a field dungeon."
"I see. It's good that we could make sure not another one of those appeared here in the area." Eisen chuckled lowly, thinking that he kind of managed to figure out the reason why this appeared here after all. Jyuuk explained to him that Dungeons are something that many players would just love to explore. And if this hive continued growing at the pace that it was now, it might have ended up the perfect size to host a large group of different players to fight against it. At the very least, that was probably the player-perspective on why this was here.
Eisen just couldn't figure out who, or rather what, wanted to create this from amongst the creatures in this world.
There had to be something going on, right? Something that was slowly expanding in the background of this world that would have to be explored by the many players that would undoubtedly start playing this game not too long from now.
Even Eisen was quite curious about that.
