Book 8, Chapter 86 (1/2)
Night Elves
The clone went silent for a while before responding, “Hmm, I have information on nine other elven races, and there are a total of 130 others that I can refer to in part. It would take three months or more to come up with a perfect optimisation.”
“Three months is fast enough. I have some requirements for the new race. Preserve the external appearance of the forest elves to within 20%, and make sure that they can acclimate to all forest environments. I also want them to have at least fifty years of life and the ability to reproduce.”
“Impossible!” the avatar said in shock, “That’s the same as building a new race. This is the job of a master of creation, I’m just a weapon that can create combat drones. Reproduction is beyond my realm.”
“Sigh… I see,” Richard frowned, his expectations crashing to the ground. The conditions of the Forest Plane were unique, and elven warriors were the best type of drone here. He had been hoping to create a version of the forest elves that didn’t depend on the trees of life for reproduction, giving him a chance to infiltrate the forest and take out the World Tree eventually, but she was right. His requests were indeed in the realm of a new race, not just a set of drones.
“Sigh… Can you at least create elites that are self-aware?” he asked with disappointment, forced to reevaluate the importance of the elves subordinate to him. Unlike the drones, they could grow in number slowly yet steadily to form his empire.
As they conversed for a little while longer, Richard was surprised by another piece of information, “You can level up?”
“Yes, Master. I was waiting for when you arrived, but you seemed to be in a rush so I just suppressed it to not bother you. Do you have any instructions?”
“Hmm… No, stay on your path,” Richard decided after a while. Since she had already chosen to focus on troop creation, he didn’t want her to abandon that now. The ninth level upgrade would boost her drones by an additional level in this scenario, allowing her elven elites to be level 15 instead of 14. Even a few dozen of these warriors would be the core of an entire tribe, while druids would become elders in smaller councils.
However, the broodmother couldn’t yet create druidic drones; she didn’t have an adequate comprehension of the laws of life, so any druid she created would only have elemental magic, not the natural magic it was supposed to. The solution was to absorb a large number of beings or objects that possessed the laws of life.
When he learnt this, Richard froze for a moment. Laws of life? What was more suitable than the trees that controlled them? He had just obtained two trees of life, and outside of the cores he didn’t really have a use for everything else on them. He would have sold it all off for money, but if feeding it to the broodmother granted a chance to create druids, that would solve the last deficiency in his army. He quickly ordered the ancient treants he controlled to change course once they entered Emerald City, taking the trees to the broodmother instead of the portal.
……
A few days later, Richard was back at Emerald City. With the impossible requests of long lives and reproduction removed, the broodmother’s clone already had a set of four prototype elites waiting for him upon his return.