Reincarnated To Evolve My Bee Empire-Chapter 399: You start solving one problem, two more pile up

As always, when the order was given, the plans were executed swiftly. Or at least, as swiftly as bees and humans could travel, especially in the current weather.

The storms have abated, but not ended fully. The roads were hard to traverse, many railroads in the Bee Empire were half-operational, and the flood in the Kachi-Chi Kingdom was still ongoing–it would take a long while for all the extra water to flow away.

Even boats had difficulties traveling in the overflowing rivers, but much less than anyone who tried to travel by road. In just a week, the first of the sea ships sent by me entered the Chi river and reached the first people in need of help. Soon after, others did the same, traveling to the most afflicted parts of the Kachi-Chi Kingdom to the endless gratitude of its king.

The Naregan vessels were coordinated astoundingly well despite the distances that separated them in this task thanks to the dozens of dragons with their bee riders that carried messages from ship to ship and to the Hive Supremo.

Yes, we had to use more dragon riders on this than normally. Way more! We were really getting short on tamed dragons.

Because of the storms, many Beehound signalers that created telepathic chains that were the fastest form of communications for the bees ended up stranded.

They already lived in almost complete isolation, with only small teams to replace each other so that they could rest and hunt. Because of storms they couldn’t even do that, and many of their dwellings were flooded. Although they were warned beforehand and nobody actually drowned, some signalers were forced to focus fully on making sure they wouldn’t die and couldn’t transfer messages.

Of course, I gave orders to send help to them and someone to build new dwellings for the signalers in safer places, but this took time, and until then, the telepathic network was spotty in some places.

Not that we had any telepaths in Kachi-Chi in the first place except for rare Agent Bees. But it still took longer than usual for messages from outside the Bee Empire’s borders (which partially overlapped with those of the Naregan Kingdom) to reach my table.

So I was very glad to hear that the beast tamers at the sea have also achieved their first successes in taming the sea dragons. They used traps with food and hawkmoth pheromones to lure them and make them complacent for a while, then ordered Naregan soldiers to place the dragons into prepared cages.

There, the tamers will spend as long as it takes conditioning, training and communicating with the dragons. Either until they start obeying, until they die from something, or until I decide this wasn’t worth it.

The dragons that weren’t caught were being gradually exterminated, just like I ordered. The dragons that were spared from other vital tasks could fly out more or less safely whenever the Oracles warned me about a chance of the Vardish fleet appearing.

This happened almost daily. But they never actually arrived, and the dragon riders always returned with all their incendiary load intact—sometimes after entering a fight with one of the large sea dragons. But they always won (or at least got away).

The humanitarian aid ships saved a lot of people in the Kachi-Chi Kingdom in a short time. It was far from the saving grace of the kingdom, but some stability was returning to it.

The army I sent now was close enough to the Judji Republic so that my ambassadors could threaten the Judji senate with destruction unless they became the Naregan vassals. I was sure that they will either give up or start a war within a week, and if they choose the latter—they will be crushed within three more weeks.

With all this, I let myself relax a little and focus more on aiding the Barahi Kingdom.

Because of how many things were on my plate, and on the plates of my Advisers, we’ve barely done anything to it. The king of Barahi was getting angry and desperate about it, but...

The Bee Empire’s and the Naregan Kingdom’s logistical capacity were stretched to their limits. We couldn’t even send specialists to them. Only a few Agents were accepting messages in the Barahi Kingdom, and we had almost no dragons left to send them, anyway.

This lack of intelligence inside the kingdom stopped even the Oracles to warn me about the threat beforehand.

I knew that some animals were about to turn on humans, but most domestic animals were already slaughtered for meat by the hungry humans in the Barahi Kingdom. The wild animals were also being hunted. By all accounts, the threat there shouldn’t have been large.

But it turned out to be!

When several links of the telepathic networks were repaired and the dragons busy on their restoration went to pick messages from the Barahi Kingdom, I was told reports about vicious and devastating attacks that have been happening there.

Entire villages were slaughtered in different parts of the country, but no bodies were found in any of them.

The few survivors that escaped death and reached other settlements told wild tales about demons that killed people to eat them down to the last bones. Although the creatures were small (compared to humans), their bite had the force of a bear trap, their feet ended with razor-sharp claws, and the wounds left by them stopped bleeding only when there was no blood left in the owner’s body.

When I read this report myself for the first time, I was just as shocked as everybody else who heard these stories! There was just a bit of absurdity to it all.

These demons didn’t just appear, they were possessing the poultry of the Barahi people. Those were some of the last animals not slaughtered for food, because they produced eggs in the long term, and humans loved eating eggs.

Now these eggs were eating them. The Barahi people were attacked by evil predatory scaly toothy chickens!

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