Recovery

Later that day.

As she stared at the pitch black potion in front of her, Beatrice suddenly took in a deep breath before quickly gulping it down.

In but an instant, Beatrice suddenly felt a gush of dark mana flow from her stomach through the rest of her body, quickly becoming assimilated by it.

Even though she desperately wanted to look behind her, even though she knew that there was nobody there, Beatrice still closed her eyes and began refining the dark mana and making it her own.

Rather surprisingly, this process went extremely fast, as it took Beatrice just under five minutes to fully refine the entirety of the mana.

'That should be a peculiarity of this potion,' though Beatrice as she suddenly opened her eyes and looked behind her, noticing that there was nobody there.

But even so, this did not mean that the elixir did nothing, in fact, unlike normally, when she had to careful look if her mana had increased, at the moment, Beatrice was sure, it had increased by quite a bit.

'The increase is at least two to three percent,' thought Beatrice as her eyes suddenly brightened.

As she now had around sixty mana, and increase of two or three percent meant that Beatrice's mana pool increased by at least over one point of mana.

In fact, the increase was probably even greater than that, and was closer to 1.5 points of mana.

"If I continue taking one potion, I can become a Peak Mage Apprentice in just under ten days," mumbled Beatrice as her eyes brightened.

Even though her teacher had told her that this would be the case, even right now, Beatrice still couldn't help but feel slightly shocked as she thought about the value of this potion.

'Even though its raw power is lower than that of the Elixir of Darkness, the fact that you can take it repeatedly makes it much more valuable, I haven't seen anything like this,' thought Beatrice as she got up from the bed and looked at the rest of the potions, which had been placed on a desk by Beatrice.

'Since my progress will be so much faster, I can speed up some of my plans as well,' thought Beatrice as she tapped her fingers on the desk, causing the potions to slightly move.

After a few more minutes of thought, Beatrice, who was currently ignoring the voice speaking from behind her, walked out of the room.

Of course, at the same time, seeing that Beatrice had begun ignoring it, the voice had also lost quite a bit of its enthusiasm, and was much more boring compared to before.

As she couldn't understand those whispers in the back of her head meant, Beatrice had begun trying to ignore them, which meant that she didn't notice this fact.

Of course, even if Beatrice noticed this, she would be unable to do anything with this information, as she couldn't do anything to affect the voice.

...

Three days later

As she looked at the five ants standing in front of her, Antonia couldn't help but faintly frown before turning her head towards Canty, who was standing motionlessly nearby with a clearly excited look on her face.

'Were these the five smartest ants that you could find in the entire colony?' asked Antonia as she looked at Canty, causing the latter to nod.

'Other than myself of course, there isn't much of a difference in intelligence between the other ants, but after searching through the entire colony, I found these five that have faintly higher intelligence that the rest,' said Canty as she looked at the five ants.

Of course, although Canty said this, the intelligence of these five ants was really quite nothing special.

If a normal earth ant had intelligence of 1, then these guys have intelligence of 1.03, but even so, Canty had to spend a lot of effort searching for these five.

After hearing the words of the little ant, Antonia fell into thought for a few moments before taking a closer look at the five ants.

'Very well, these five should suffice, now follow me,' said Antonia, causing the five ants, as well as Canty, to follow her.

...

As she looked at Antonia, who was currently being followed by six Earth Ants, Beatrice faintly smiled.

Compared to three days ago, when Beatrice looked to be in a pretty bad shape, Beatrice looked completely different at the moment.

Right now, Beatrice had seemingly returned to her past self.

"Have you prepared the five ants?" asked Beatrice as she looked at Antonia, causing the latter to nod.

'Yes mistress, they should be quite suitable for your purpose,' said Antonia as she looked at Beatrice, who was finishing preparing the five human experimental subjects that would swap bodies with the five ants.

Hearing Antonia's words, Beatrice waved her hand, causing the five ants to suddenly begin sprinting towards her without Antonia doing anything.

In but a brief moment, the five ants had climbed onto the five tables which housed the humans and obediently sat there, waiting.

As she stared at this, Antonia couldn't help but become slightly happy.

Suddenly, though, Antonia's eyes widened as she looked around here and noticed that Canty had gone missing.

Only a fraction of a moment later, Antonia raised her eyes and saw the energetic ant, now standing on Beatrice's hand.

...

Ignoring the ant that was obediently sitting on her arm, Beatrice slowly but surely got to work.

First, Beatrice took the first human soul out of it's body whilst also doing so for the ant.

Unlike what one might expect, Beatrice did not focus most of her attention onto the human, rather most of it was on the ant.

After all, even though the humans were extremely important in this operation, it did not matter if their souls were damaged.

The only thing that mattered was that the ant souls suffered no harm, otherwise their intelligence would plummet, which would ruin Beatrice's goal of smart ants that could do her bidding.