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    [A Quiet Island, Day 3, Sunrise]


    It took a while for the ants to move, but with my help they were able to pack everything necessary onto leaves and then drag those with them. Luckily this colony is pretty small, only about a million individuals, so I don''t have to worry as much about space. While they were walking to the dungeon, I prepared a bit for them. At the end of the entry hall I carved a large round room with two pillars in the middle on a small raised area. There are four doors arranged like a compass’s face, and two of them are “collapsed”. I kept the Roman arch aesthetic, and left the walls of the entry hall flat and smooth so I could carve more bas-reliefs into them.


    Behind one of the collapsed hallways, I make another room that''s around the same size, leaving that one empty. That room shall be the one the ants live in. Well… start in, more like. Outside, I modify a nearby species of vine, creating my first modified plant. I make it curl around the pillars and cover the roof of the temple. The leaves are smaller and denser, with a higher amount of chlorophyll, and I make the vine itself very thick and succulent. Every foot or so I make the vine grow flowers, which grow into large, nutrient dense fruit within a day. I try to make sure it tastes good, but I won''t know until the ants taste it for me. The whole process takes an hour or two, and by the time I''m done the ants have arrived.


    I order them to drag their leaves over to the door and then to group up into a circle. I form a pillar underneath the entire patch of ants and raise them to the roof of the temple, letting them free of my control to eat as they wish. I''ve noticed that the ants are a bit smarter and more self aware than before, so I leave them to eat while I transport their leaves inside. Once I''m done with that I carve a small tunnel where the temple meets the cliff, leading into the dungeon room where I''ll have them start their new nest.


    As the ants slowly make their way down the small tunnel, I think of how to modify them. Eventually the whole colony has made its way into the room, ants covering the walls, ceiling and floor to the point where I can''t see the stone underneath. I decide to take the one I originally claimed outside, and single it out from the crowd. This ant I make into a door guard, for now. I saturate the ant’s body with mana and begin shaping it. The ant grows to the size of a large dog, the carapace thickens and the muscles strengthen. I grow a pair of lungs and extend the leg carapace to cover the ant’s joints, but it’s the final addition I’m the most proud of.


    You see, some leafcutter ants of a specific genera have an adaptation which causes them to grow a thin coating of minerals on their exoskeleton. Also, unrelated observation, I’ve noticed that the basalt making up my temple, which is mostly infused with my mana, is ever so slightly tougher than regular basalt. I noticed this when I grew the vines on top of the temple. It was a bit harder for them to take root in the temple basalt than the basalt cliff the dungeon is embedded in. Now then, I wonder how I could utilize this knowledge. If you were thinking what I was thinking, you’d think that I thought that we thought that I was very smart.


    I modified the guard ant’s carapace to be covered in tiny pores, from which I grew small filaments of obsidian I’d overcharged with mana. The obsidian’s properties changed a bit, the volcanic glass growing tougher and harder, and much less brittle than before. It also gained a bit of a purplish sheen. I also made the pores secrete a thin coating of oil that the ant could use to prevent the obsidian from catching on their body. The final additions I make are to the ant’s jaws, which I modify the bits closer to the mouth to be flat and designed to crush, and the parts further away are sharpened to a point supplemented by a modification to the obsidian hair that makes it all come out as a thin shard that hangs over the edges of the jaws.


    I add more power to the ant’s jaws, and make a few changes that are mostly just sizing and intelligence tweaks. Once I’m done, I see the excess mana left over in the ant begin to gather around one point, swirling into a small ball right next to the heart. Not sure what that means, but it’s surely important. I feel a sense of awe and gratitude flow up to me through the mana tendril I used to connect to the ant, which I return with a sense of pride and care. Didn’t know I could send emotions, but I guess that’s a thing. Your job is now to guard my temple. Do not let any intruders in without my express permission. The last thing it… wait. She needs, is a name. Hmm… I think I’ll name her Alectryon.If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.


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    [A Quiet Island, Day 3, Evening]


    Now that I’m done with Alectryon’s changes, I leave her to her duties and return my focus to the ants inside the dungeon. They’re still waiting patiently, in the exact same places as I left them. The first thing I do is add a carved out ring around the top of the room for the ants to gather in instead of covering the walls and floor. I then call forth the ant queen and ten majors, the warriors and protectors of the nest. I make the queen about the size of a small pony, adding lungs and wings, but mostly focusing on the size. Her carapace goes from a dull red-brown color to a regal deep red, her wings getting a golden sheen and a formatting of spikes jutting from her head in the shape of a crown. Her egg laying rate is decreased so I don’t have to worry about overpopulation as well. I spend a lot of mana enlarging her brain too, and I let the excess mana coalesce into another sphere like the one I saw Alectryon make.


    The majors I modify to be the size of a large dog, like Alectryon, and they get stronger muscles and thicker carapaces that resemble plate armor. Their carapaces gain a blood red coloring, lighter in shade than the queens but still imposing. The biggest change I make is again their jaws, which I modify to be made specifically for cutting, shaped similarly to side cutters. I give them much stronger jaw muscles, and mimic the mechanism used by trap-jaw ants to let them hold their jaws open like bear traps. I make sure to make the carapace that acts as a spring to close the jaws as strong as I can without being impossible to open the jaws, and I add lungs as a given.


    I move the queen and her guards into the rooms with the pillars, and then call forward one hundred workers. I make them the size of a large cat, but only change their muscles to be stronger and more enduring, as well as modifying their jaws a bit to be tougher so they can cut through the rock of the mountain when making their new nest. Lungs again, and I make them a lighter shade of red than the guards, approaching more vibrant, brighter reds. The smallest workers are then modified, another hundred of them being called forth. These ones are a lot smaller than the other ants, and I only ever saw them inside the nest doing chores, so I make them the size of a large kitten, and a pale pink color. No changes other than that though. And lungs. Again. Because I don’t want to take the chance that the ants might suffocate from having too big a body.


    I should probably make a first floor now so the ants have somewhere to live. I move the rest outside, setting the larger ones to guard the smaller ones, and apply the changes I made to the first batches to every single ant from the colony, and then I begin carving out the first floor.


    I carve out a large labyrinth as quickly as I can, adding in stone bricks to the walls and making the corridors 10 feet tall and ten feet across. I add a few bigger rooms where I could place loot later, and then let the ants in to colonize the hurriedly constructed labyrinth. The whole thing is massive, nearly 20 acres, and the maze is as complicated as I could make it in the time I was building it. Hopefully the ants already being familiar with winding tunnels lets them not get lost. I don’t make any rules for their new nest, other than it has to include the labyrinth as a main feature, though they can have as many side rooms as they want to keep the queen in and lay their eggs and store food and such.


    A sense of worry reaches me through my connection to the queen ant, drawing my attention, and I realize that their planned food source of fungus isn’t enough to feed their colony anymore. So I modify the fungus a bit to glow faintly and grow quicker and bigger, making sure that the form the fungus’s growths assume is an easy to harvest tube of mushroom stalk. I also add antimicrobial properties and make the fungus as nutritious as possible. Very refreshing. I leave the doors open for now, since the ants haven’t made any of their own exits yet. I leave the labyrinth saturated with mana and try to think of what I should make next.


    Oh yeah, I was gonna claim every animal on the island. And then claim the island.


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    [A Quiet Island, Day 4, Sunrise]


    Oh look, the sun’s rising again! At this point I’ve claimed every animal on the island, but I haven’t done anything with them yet. I already have my ants, and I won’t need much else until the first visitors leave and send back an exploration team. Unless I get a military vessel as the first visit. I really hope someone visits soon. The next thing I do is get to work claiming every part of the island which isn’t alive. It’s a bit difficult for some reason. It feels… wrong somehow to claim land which isn’t inside. Oh well. Instincts can be crazy sometimes, and I guess I got some new ones since I reincarnated. Explains how I know how to change animals and plants to my whims. I continue claiming parts of the island, focusing mainly on the mountain and spreading out in a circle from there.


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    [A Quiet Island, Day 5, Evening]


    It took me a while, two days I think, and I’ve managed to claim the entire island. That feeling of wrongness only increased as I claimed the land, but it went away after I made it clear that I won’t listen to it. Hmmm… Maybe enlarging my core next? I’m pretty sure I should be able to do that. I return my focus to the peak of the volcano, and try forcing a mana particle into my core without absorbing it. I’ve already noticed that I gained a quarter of an inch in diameter, presumably from the amount of mana I’ve been pushing around, but it isn’t enough. I feel a bit of resistance at first, but eventually the mana particle snaps into place and… no visible difference. But I did feel something happen, even though it was accompanied by the feeling of wrongness, and I do feel a bit emptier than I just was, even though I was just at the maximum mana I can store without feeling oversaturated. I’m gonna do it again.