Whilst Kiara was busy preparing her brother, Beatrice was also quite busy, currently expanding the number of defenses littering the first floor of her home.
Although Beatrice had already created some large scale defenses a while ago, using cannons to shoot at ants was not the most cost-effective idea, and as such, she decided to increase the variety of her defenses.
...
At the moment, Beatrice could be seen standing in front of numerous stone statues, each of which had been carefully created and enchanted by the ants using their earth magic.
As a result, the stone statues in front of Beatrice were both much more resistant to damage than even normal stone, but also very flexible, much like a human.
But even though this was the case, in their current state, these one hundred unmoving and souless stone statues would prove useless in defending Beatrice.
Because of this, Beatrice had to give them life, their very own soul.
Much like she did with the ants, Beatrice very much liked to reuse human souls in her projects, thanks to their great flexibility.
On one hand, the souls had a very large capacity for intelligence and thought, but on the other hand, after some neutering and adding some safeguards, these souls could be easily manipulated placed into all kinds of different items, objects or bodies.
So easily, in fact, that Beatrice did not plan on doing it herself, instead, she planned on delegating this task to Antonia and some ants who were proficient in manipulating the soul.
Beatrice herself would only transform the souls to the necessary standard and check that the quality of the golems was as expected.
Although the Earth Ants were always extremely meticulous when doing anything, since this was related to her own safety, Beatrice still felt as though she needed to be even more certain.
But after making sure that the golems had passed her safety standards, Beatrice turned her attention onto something else, something much more important and critical.
Right now, if somebody other than Beatrice wanted to move through the underground abode, they had to know a set of secret passwords, which changed every single week.
These passwords would then allow that person to pass through the magical barrier that Beatrice had created all around the abode.
Of course, other than Beatrice, who knew every single password but did not have any need for them, nobody else had access to every single password, causing the areas they could travel to be limited.
Although this method was very easy to implement on Beatrice's side, and gave her hideout a certain level of safety in the early stages, right now, as the scale of her operation became bigger and bigger, Beatrice knew that this system was about to become outdated.
Even though there were only three people residing within the hideout, excluding the experimental subjects and the people from the farm, in the future, this number was bound to increase.
Although Beatrice was very powerful, she could not truly be certain of the loyalties of every single person, nor could she be sure that they would not be mind controlled or have their memories read.
Because of this, Beatrice had now begun working on a new system, and sought to quickly eliminate the passwords whilst her hideout was still of a relatively small scale.
Sometimes, the simplest and most obvious ideas are truly the best, and in this particular example, this was the case, with a few caveats.
The first idea that came to Beatrice's mind after she began this project was a personal permission system, which would use a person's soul to identify them.
If that particular person had permissions to go into that area, they would be allowed to go through, if they didn't, they wouldn't, and they would be silently watched by a number of ants so that their intentions could be observed.
Is someone who was registered within the system was found out, that person would be immediately apprehended.
After that, their method of entrance would be found out and hopefully destroyed or patched up.
Although this was her first idea, after some thought, and after building a miniature version, which used ants to replace people, Beatrice was satisfied with the project, and was prepared to begin implementing it.
Not too long after that, though, Beatrice soon encountered a problem, her clones, as well as clones in general.
As it turns out, if the project was built this way, Beatrice's clones would have the same permissions as Beatrice, and would be allowed to go on all nine floors.
This was of course not something that Beatrice would allow, and immediately halted the project until she found a suitable solution for this.
As Beatrice had begun the creation of this system, she had of course managed to circumvent this dilemma, surprisingly though, she did not do it on the side of the system though, she instead created a new set of rules for clones, as well as a name card for clones.
This was of course not a normal name card, rather, it was something that attached to the very soul of the clones, and could not be taken out.
As soon as Beatrice thought of this, and managed to create this name card, the rest of the things that she had to do became easy.
As such, only a few moments after checking the quality of the puppet soldiers the ants had created, Beatrice began work on the permission system.
Using the infrastructure created for the password system as a base, Beatrice was able to quickly and efficiently get the permission system up and running on the first floor in just under two days.
...
"Try going through that barrier," said Beatrice as she bent down behind a little Beatrice and pointed at a transparent barrier in front of her.
After a faint nod, the little Beatrice then quickly walked through the barrier without any sort of care, causing Beatrice to smile.
"Try going through the next barrier now," said Beatrice, causing the little Beatrice to once again confidently walk towards the barrier.
Sadly, though, Beatrice was then stopped, as the barrier she was trying to walk through suddenly solidified and stopped her.
Seeing this, Beatrice faintly smiled before waving her hand a few moments later.
"Try again," said Beatrice, causing little Beatrice, who had bumped head first into a solid wall, to grit her teeth and try again.
As soon as little Beatrice passed through the barrier without any sort of issues, the size of the smile on Beatrice's face increased.
"Changing permissions is working as intended, the system should be ready to be implemented to the other floors after a few more tests are made..." mumbled Beatrice with a smile still present on her face.