As the morning light spread throughout the forest, the girls started waking up.  As they began taking the various bugs out of the webs for breakfast, Jelin convinced them to also start tacking down the webs.  The smallest few bugs were given to the still recovering bee and the next smallest portion was eaten by Jelin while the rest were split evenly among the other girls.  The skeleton rat required no food.

All of the pulled down webs were stuffed into the cocoon shell and then the bee hive that the queen bee was still resting in was put inside, creating a well cushioned and shock absorbent container.  They then loaded the cocoon container on Scar's back with some help and used a little extra webbing to make sure it stayed there.  One more quick look over the area showed that most of their traces had been cleaned up and Jelin put his [Intuition] to use to point them in a direction further in the forest where he hoped water would be.

As they traveled he decided to try and take care of a few things.  The first was to start working on his strength and stamina while maybe trying to gain some new skills by prancing around, climbing trees, and generally acting like a hyperactive child.  The other thing he wanted to do was start educating everyone, except maybe the rat since it was probably too stupid to learn anything.  Several of them were skeptical at first that learning stuff would be of much help.  He started with some simple math, then flowed from that to simple measures of distance such as centimeters, meters, and kilometers.

<So, basically what we want to find is either a long stretch of water that's at least half a meter deep and half a meter across or a big patch of water that's at least half a meter deep and twenty meters from one end to the other.  See?  Knowing numbers and distances can help you understand better what to look for.  The more things you learn, the more things you can do.  Knowledge can even help make you stronger.>

He then moved on to explain seconds, minutes, hours, and days.  He wasn't actually sure if days in this world had the same amount of hours as his old world so he only explained days by the general concepts of sun positioning and light.  Since they had all come from the dungeon he even went on to explain as many differences as he could think of between day and night.  It actually took the whole day to explain it all because sometimes he had to demonstrate things a few times over, sometimes he was out exhausted from running around and needed a break, sometimes he had to try and explain things in several different ways to clear up confusion, and once they all had to take a break to kill an attacking family of what seemed to be boars which led into an immediate lunchtime.

They unfortunately didn't find a good place with water by the time night fell but they were all fully fed for the first time.  Jelin finally decided to stop for the night and asked them to only put up the bare minimum of webbing to act as an early warning system and maybe catch a light breakfast.  They all helped pull the cocoon off of Scar's back and after all the webs were set up they basically dogpiled Jelin to snuggle in for the night.  Being snuggled by five half-bug women somehow ended up being more comfortable than he thought it would be.  He wasn't even entirely sure how they all managed to get as close as they did and trying to figure it out by looking at the entangled arms, legs, and whatever else just seemed like and exercise in futility.  He gave one last check at the cocoon within arms reach and fell asleep.

They all woke up at about the same time the next morning and had a very light breakfast of whatever the webs had caught.  This time they just left the webs as they prepared to move on once again.  After only about two hours of travel, while he was about halfway up a tree, Jelin heard the faint sounds of moving water.  He quickly jumped back down excitedly started heading in that direction even quicker.

What he found was closer to a creek or stream than a river and was smaller than he would have preferred being at about the minimum size he had mentioned to the girls the day before, maybe even a little more shallow than that.  However it was flowing at a good rate which told him that there was little chance of it running dry.  The immediate area near it wasn't great for trying to set up residence but all they had to do was check around for a bit now.  That they had encountered boars already also provided hope and proof that food wouldn't be too scarce.

Still feeling excited, he asked the girls to spread out and start looking for potentially good places for them to start making their new home.  The feeling of happiness and excitement seemed to filter into the link and make the girls feel a little giddy as well.  He checked each place the girls thought might be good as meticulously as he could.  He intended wherever they finally chose to be as permanent of a home as possible, after all.  He looked at all nearby trees, the state of the ground, the distance from the water source, the amount of open space versus the closeness of the trees, and anything else he could think of.  After he had narrowed it down to what he though were the three best candidates he decided to let the girls take a vote on their preference.

The final decision was a place a little further downstream and about thirty meters away from the stream.  The trees were growing in such a way that they could easily wall them off into decent sized room-like partitions and there was a nice little clearing that was just big enough that they could likely do something like gardening some day right next to it.  Jelin honestly thought that there could barely be any place that would ever prove to be better.  There was even a queen bee approved spot where they could put up her hive.

He quickly found a good patch of dirt and began using it to draw, albeit badly, to help explain some of his ideas about how to set up their new home.  Before he went too far into explaining all of his ideas, though, he decided that the should work on marking out their newly claimed territory.  Claw and Conk acted like his personal guards while he walked around and used sticks stabbed into the ground to mark where the arachnae should try to place their webs that act like a mix of fencing and bug catchers.

Once he was done with that and the arachnae were working on closing off their territory, he took the two manteae to collect large sticks and small logs.  Night once again came, this time seemingly too quick, and Jelin looked around at their accomplishments of the day.  He could see quite a few webs out a ways starting to mark off enough area to fit a small village in.  At the edge of the clearing near where they were planning to create their pseudo house was a stack of wood to be used for later building.  The main worry was that he hoped he wasn't stressing the arachnae's bodies too much with all the webbing but they assured him it was fine when he asked.

He realized that it was likely going to take several days to really get everything done so he decided to call it a night.  As they all started to snuggle up to him again he managed to keep an arm free.  Once he thought they were all settled enough he pat each one on the head while sending feelings of satisfaction through the link. 

<You've all done very well.  I'm both happy and proud of all of you.>

He meant it, too.  Now that he actually had some time to think about his situation he realized that he was quite happy with his current circumstance.  He now had a home, a family, and a chance to relax.  There was still a lot of work to do but he was sure he could eke out a stable lifestyle before too long for all of them.  He snuggled a little more into them and enjoyed their warmth as he drifted off to sleep while dreaming of their potential futures.