Herbivorous Ants and Industrious Dakka

After the Death Realm Plants were discovered by Dakka, he finds himself standing at the bottom of the "red plains", as he's come to call the large space below the Valor Hall.

With all the blood that's soaked into it over the years, along with the red crystals full of the Queen's mana, there's no better name for it.

Behind Dakka is a horde of curious Ants who are looking at him with hopeful expectation… The adoration in their eyes is so strong that it could be mistaken for blind worship.

From the Ants' point of view, their guardian is going to show them how to make food come out of the ground.

From Dakka's point of view, he's just holding a large space bag full of seeds, and he's staring at the ground thinking, 'What am I suppose to do? I don't know how to farm at all, but all these girls are looking at me as if I know what I'm doing.'

Feeling a little stressed out, yet not wanting to disappoint them, Dakka recalls some images of farms he's seen long ago.

From what he saw (back when he used to raid and pillage farms in the human world), the farmers' fields had long, shallow gouges in the earth and… Were the seeds placed on top of the mounds, or between them?

'Mind as well find out.'

The first thing Dakka does, is he uses his immense magic to pick up the large 'blood crystals', as he's come to call the red, glowing stones left behind by the Queen's mana. He then moves these crystals one by one and sets them to the side – clearing a large, open plot of land.

Once these blood crystal towers are out of the way, he turns into his dragon form, shrinks himself down a little, and starts carefully scraping one of his claws across the ground to till the land.

Seeing what the dragon is doing, most of the Ants get really excited and start to randomly dig little ditches, though all of them are digging in random directions and bumping into each other.

Dakka laughs at the chaos they're causing among themselves. Still, he he's gotten better at using his Aura, so he opens his mouth and says with words of power, "Quiet down."

All of the ants immediately stop, and they look at Dakka. Dakka then explains, "You all need to dig in the same direction. I want many neat rows of… dug land."

Dakka considered just doing it all himself, but feeling all of the little girls want to help him out, he got a warm feeling in his heart. For some reason, telling them all to bugger off just wouldn't sit right with him.

And so, Dakka instructs the Ants on what to do, while only occasionally helping to remove any obstacles they accidentally dig into.

It's a good thing that crops from the Death Realm are completely unlike ones from the living world – otherwise, with Dakka's completely novice farming skills, all of their food crops would've never survived until adulthood.

In the living world, crops need proper soil to grow in, water to drink, and sun to absorb; they even need to be protected from harsh weather.

Death Realm crops, however, passively regenerate to what they were right before they were harvested and eaten. This means that the second they're released from their seals, they'll try to regrow to their original size, regardless of even if they're in soil or not.

Of course, once the plant is finished regenerating, its body will wither and perish again if it's not taken care of… but it's not like Dakka and the Ants plan on letting the crops linger in the ground for too long…

In the end, the land is successfully tilled… though if any professional farmer would see how the fields look, he'd either faint in shock or gossip about what kind of moron did this to that field.

Most of the troughs in the field are dug far too deep, and it's all very uneven and crooked. The soil isn't even fit for growing things.

…But alas, this doesn't matter to Dakka and the Ants. Dakka thinks that it looks good enough, and the Ants naturally don't doubt for a second that they're the best at their jobs.

Now that the fields are tilled, Dakka pulls out the spatial bags he was carrying earlier, and he starts scattering seeds on the fields.

He remembers images of farms having all their crops in neat lines with some gaps between the lines. He's not sure why they do this, but he decides to just do that.

Of course, Dakka realizes that since he can only sprinkle seeds a little bit at a time, he'd take forever to actually plant the fields, no matter how strong he is. It's not like he's dexterous enough with his spells to evenly spread all the seeds out in the air and lower them into the ground all at once.

So, Dakka empties one of the space bags while not really understanding what kinds of seeds he's looking at.

The Queen has been watching this all happen from a distance, and after seeing Dakka put down the first few seeds in the ground, she orders her swarm to make an organized line and each take a handful of seeds.

She then has the first Ants who got seeds to go to the furthest side of the field, as to prevent the children from running into each other.

Dakka himself didn't think of this, so he's actually a little amazed at how efficient the children are in planting the fields. At this rate, the whole planting process is only going to take 2 hours or so.

Surprisingly, Dakka sees that before the children are even done placing the seeds that some of the first crops they'd planted are already sprouting.

Should… crops be growing this fast?

Normally, crops in the Death Realm take hundreds to thousands of years to grow. However, because the souls of the dead use Death Energy to regenerate their bodies, and because the Death Aura here is unbelievably thick, the crops are already sprouting within an hour.

While the Ants and Dakka are toiling in the fields below, the Queen is watching from atop her parapet, and she smiles in satisfaction. 'If I can grow my own food this quickly, then me and my swarm will be able to eat and grow stronger a lot more!'

To her, relieving her children's hunger isn't even a factor; the only thing that matters is that she can become stronger!

All day, the Ants sit around the fields and watch the crops grow. They're all so hungry that even running around and playing is too much trouble for them.

Finally, after some of the Ants have drifted off to sleep, the few who had stayed up see many fruits start sprouting on the trees.

One of the Ants near Dakka then sees the man get up and pluck one of the fruits off and eat it.

Realizing that these are supposed to be the edible parts, the vigilant Ants get up and charge at the trees – eating as much as they can and stuffing their faces.

The Ants who were still asleep all wake up after hearing the commotion. Realizing what's going on, they all join in the chaos.

Dakka realizes then that they didn't plant enough fruit trees. Even worse, they'd planted many of the trees so close together that all grew into each other.

This isn't good.

Within a matter of minutes, the entire field is utterly picked clean. The Ants who had been slow to wake up are all left to go hungry.

Feeling mad with hunger now, these Ants charge into the new forest, turn into their Ant forms, and start tearing the trees apart and eating the wood raw.

This, of course, leaves splinters in their throats, but they really don't care.

Soon after that, the entire field of crops is completely gone – only leaving seeds behind.

"Well," Dakka says happily to all the Ants. "I guess that wasn't enough land. We'll need clear more space."

"Stupid! Why? WHY!?" the Queen shouts angrily at the wall as she throws her pillows at it.

She'd been looking forward to finding another infinite mana farm – this time, it being an actual farm.

However, after her children bit into these strange fruits for the first time, she didn't feel any mana entering her soul. What exactly is in these things!? Why can't she get any power from eating them?

What she doesn't realize is that most dead souls don't carry any vitality in their bodies; rather, they keep all their mana in their spirits instead. Even if said dead person is cloaked in a body, the Queen won't get any mana from eating them.

The only reason she's been getting mana from eating the Arkin is because Arkin aren't entirely "dead". They're neither living nor dead, but something in between.

(This is why they have Death Affinity like a dead person, yet they're able to bear children with each other like a living person. They also have to eat and sleep – a need that the dead gradually lose.)

These crops, on the other hand, belong completely to the Death Realm, which means the Queen has no way of devouring the mana stored inside their tiny little souls.

Years pass by, and everyone's lives here enters a sort of rhythm.

At the beginning of every day, Dakka wakes up beside Fina, and he spends a couple of hours with her teaching her things about magic. Then, they have "couple bonding time", right before he leaves to go to work outside the Valor Hall.

For the rest of the day, Dakka goes down, and he helps work on the farm fields as well as trying to figure out how to make the Ants' lives more comfortable.

Sure, there's more than enough room to live in the abundant spaces in the Threshold and Valor Hall, but there's no furnishings and no bedding.

So, Dakka spends a lot of time with the Ant children, and he works with them to hopefully try figuring out how to make furniture with all the excess wood from the fallen trees they keep growing.

Then, Dakka will spend a few more hours interacting with the Ants – watching them carefully to make sure they don't start hurting each other while they play.

After that, Dakka closes his day off by going back to Fina and "bonding" with her again before going to sleep.

Meanwhile, the Queen herself spends most of her time studying magic and ignoring her Ants completely. To her, nothing matters besides getting stronger.