Ch 9

Another new day. I wonder how long it's been? Something like a week and a half? I can't remember.

Zerg Mana – 64,985

Holy crap on a pogostick! My mana just increased over ten times! I knew jumping from about 20 hatcheries to 101 would be huge, but sheesh! All six of my Queens are bundled up around me, with me in the center. They're awake, so I squeeze out from under them and rush off to use the bathroom. Coming back I get a drink and breakfast ala creep. It's nice only needing one to two very small meals a day. I miss having variety, but then I didn't have much variety even when I was human. Being unable to cook doesn't mean you have much in the way of variety to eat.

Speaking of mana though, it occurred to me that I should probably have more. Yesterday I got about 20000 mana with only about 40 hatcheries… but not all of them had been up and running, so a good chunk of the creep hadn't had time to absorb much light before I'd gotten my daily quota. Come to think of it, those extra hatcheries didn't have much time to absorb much mana themselves last night. That means even if I didn't build any more, the next day I'd probably get like, 80,000 or something.

Well, first things first, I need to do a bit of mental math. I could create 200 or more drones now to build hatcheries, but a hundred hatcheries would cost 40,000. Two hundred would cost 80,000 and I just don't have that much yet. Would 150 do it? That'd be 60,000, but do I have enough to build 150 drones AND 150 hatcheries? Lets see… 150 drones would be… 3750. Yup, I have enough! Sending out the command, I build 150 drones, dropping me to 61,235, and 168/290 supply.

Once they finished, I sent the order out for them to spread the creep with Hatcheries. Not even an hour later, all of them have set up, leaving me at 1,235 mana and back down to 18/290 supply again. I contemplated putting out 12 more overlords, then figured, why not, and did just that. Now I'm sitting at 18/350 supply and 35 mana. With that out of the way, it's time to go back to the chasm turned pit and do some more digging.

Catching an Overlord over there, I'm suitably impressed. The Zerglings had worked all throughout the night. While they hadn't dug any deeper, they had widened the pit a lot, to the point where the creep had started down the edges into it. I quickly ordered the Zerglings to stop doing that since I don't really want to be digging through creep that is constantly regrowing back. Still, with the pit widened like this, sunlight can easily penetrate, lowering the monster count significantly. A number of exposed tunnels were branching off everywhere from it. I wondered if this might be an entrance to a fortress, and if this might not be where we'll find the end portal? That'd be really lucky, if that's the case.

Grabbing my solid obsidian pickaxe, we went to the center and created a very large corkscrew time mineshaft, digging down further and further. We were stymied once, hitting a pocket of lava, but with clever usage of water, we ended up with even more obsidian, until at last, at midafternoon, we finally reached the adamantium.

I took a swing at it with my pickaxe. It didn't even make a dent. Not even the Queens or the Zerglings could scratch it, though we found pieces of it were fairly easy to lift up and load into the Overlord. I didn't want to risk the Overlord trying to smelt the stuff though. It'd nearly caught fire smelting the obsidian. Smelting the Adamantium might actually cause it to catch fire this time. Still, we have what we came for.

Joy watched some of the strange specs of darkness floating up from beneath the adamantium and asked, "What's this?"

I looked over, and seeing what she was referring to, I responded, "I don't know what it's called, but beneath this adamantium is something called the void. It's a pitch black pit that may as well be never ending for how deep it goes. Light doesn't penetrate it and it goes down for hundreds of miles before you finally reach the Nether. Those specs of darkness float up from that, so it might be tiny pieces of the void."

"Do yourselves a favor. Never try and find an opening to the void. I've seen this world before in an interactive recording called a game, in which you control that human I told you about, the one who can take a few blasts from a Ghast and survive? Well, you can do things in games that you can't in real life, and so one of the things you could do was break any block you wanted if you weren't playing to survive. I dug down once past the adamantium. Falling into the void is death. It's not instant, but if you fall deep enough in, you'll die. Just looking down in it though, was creepy as hell. If it was that creepy viewing it through a screen, I don't want to know how creepy it is in real life. Besides…" I continued quietly, "I strongly suspect that if HE does exist, than the void may very well be where HE lives."

As soon as I said that, there was a literal mad scramble to get onto the Overlord and away from the pit. I couldn't blame them. We'd have to get powers more akin to a diety in order to face HIM than what we have now. All was quiet as we travelled back to the main hive cluster. Since we have our adamantium now, once level two comes, we'll be able to incorporate the stuff into the Zerg. Or at least I hope we can. The stuff might even be invulnerable to the processes needed to do just that!

We stored all the stuff we'd collected from our dig in the Hatchery next to the one we sleep in. We did dump all our gravel, dirt, and stone into the Zerg Mana Pool though. Should hopefully add a nice amount of mana later. With that finished, the Queens used their Overlords to get back to their spots to continue laying down creep tumors. Thanks to all the Hatcheries though, there wasn't much call for the creep tumors anymore except for here and there. They did more spot checking than anything before finally flying to the edge of the creep and planting more creep tumors there.

As for me, I spent the rest of the day flying in my Overlord until night fall before going to bed. Before I got to sleep, I noted that the last of my 150 Hatcheries had finished, giving me a grand total of 251 Hatcheries. Things are really looking up!

-END CHAPTER-

Overmind mana – 100/100

Zerg Mana – 35/1,000,000

Zerg Supply – 18/350

Units:

1 Overmind

56 Overlords

0 Drones

11 Zerglings

6 Queens (Broodmother)

Structures:

251 Hatcheries

1 Spawning Pool