Molting the Mortal Coil

The final part of Sage’s training plan fell to his Insect Horde. At least that was how he liked to think of it. When he gained ownership of his home and it stopped being a dormitory for four and his own personal residence, it was full license for him to expand his Insect Shed. What started as a small storage shed had become the size of a bedroom after a few years, and now that he owned the house it was nearly half the size of the main building and had taken over the majority of the training area in the rear yard.

Within, Sage was raising dozens of different types of insects. He had three species that he used as his main source of income, with another half-dozen he was attempting to breed into a useful commodity. The rest of the many species were the ones he’d collected during his time in the Holy Flame Sect, as well as the many cross-breeds and mutants he’d already created for experimentation. With time he started to discover the limits of the Insect Immortal Index. While the people here didn’t know what genes were, Sage’s guess was that the bloodlines which were so highly regarded among Tamers had something to do with it. For Demonic Beasts and Spirit Animals, the most highly sought after beasts were those that carried the bloodlines of powerful Demonic Beasts. Every so often the traits of an ancestor would flare up and a normal seeming Spirit Animal would grow so rapidly it evolved into a Demonic Beast. Demonic Beasts with powerful bloodlines would transform and take on traits from their Ancestor. If they then became strong enough on their own, their own descendants would be reinvigorated with a new bloodline.

Sage found something similar happening with the Spirit Insects. When using ‘Mature’ he could age them rapidly and improve their rank, and he could also forcibly upgrade their quality level. What he found was that using ‘Mature’ in this manner was essentially like drawing out the Spirit Insect’s full potential. Those who were expert Insect Tamers were few and far between, Sage never visited the Chong Clan, and he was far too weak back when he was in the Lang Clan. He never got to meet any high rank Insect Tamers, so he wasn’t sure whether there was ways to determine the bloodlines of a Spirit Insect. The other two Tamers in the Holy Flame Sect didn’t have any such method as most bloodlines were merely dormant. On the other hand, he hadn’t heard of any special detection methods for Demonic Beasts and Spirit Animals either, but Tamers merely looked for special traits, abilities, or oddities in their appearance.

His guess was that Spirit Insects were far too similar looking and bred in such large quantities that picking out specific individuals to find the exceptional ones was too much trouble. Just like how Insect Tamers were much more rare than normal Tamers, the shorter lifespans and low intelligence made them less desirable. Sage was also limited on time and energy, he couldn’t normally spend all day raising and maturing every insect that he owned. Inside the Shed he had easily thousands of them in one cage or another.

The Shed was currently divided into two main areas. The first was smaller, just a hallway lined with cages from floor to ceiling. In the cages each species, or even individuals for some of them, was separated into its own cage. The other section of the Shed, which made up the majority, was divided into a handful of large habitats. Each of the habitats was a different ecosystem, for the common places that Insects usually lived. These areas are where he placed the majority of his Spirit Insects, releasing them into the contained wilderness and letting them prey upon each other and eat the vegetation. He kept the most promising individuals of each species in the segregated cages while releasing the rest to interact with each other.

Sage had to feed the caged insects regularly, but thankfully he’d rigged up an array to distribute food when he wasn’t around. On the other hand, he only checked up on the larger habitats every now or then. The insects in the habitats were those he was essentially throwing away, the only difference was that he could check up on them and see if any of them had developed anything unique or interesting. He still held hope of learning how to identify Insect Bloodlines. The stray insects also acted as food for his other catches. The Insect Immortal Index didn’t just apply to insects after all. Worms, snakes, lizards, arachnids… all sorts of small creatures roamed about in the tiny habitats he’d created. In fact, each of the habitats was actually a giant ‘Insect Cage’ as he’d had one of the Elder Formation Masters come out to his house and help him lay arrays. Each of the habitat rooms was the size of a shed from the outside, but an acre on the inside. Sustaining an ecosystem was pretty hard with a small area, so he had also added other arrays to control temperature, humidity, and amplify the sunlight.

Sage’s three current commodity insects were Alarm Crickets, Steel Silk Webspinners, and the Thorn Cloud Hornet. He also had the Moonhoney from Silverbees and the Spirit Jade Beetles. The Silverbees weren’t really a commodity on their own as it was very hard to raise them and harvest their honey. Spirit Jade Beetles were also a difficult resource as they needed special minerals and soil to raise their Azure Moss. The moss is what nourished the beetles and gave them their special properties. It had taken Sage a few years to figure out how to treat soil and provide the minerals they needed before he could breed the Spirit Jade Beetles reliably. At the same time, the special conditions weren’t cheap to maintain so their breeding rate was limited.

The Alarm Cricket was a simple alarm mechanism, just release them and then stayed within a few yards of that spot and fed on vegetation. Anyone could use them as all it took was a special scent bottle being opened to recall them back. The Steel Silk Webspinners are a variation of an uncommon insect called a ‘Webspinner’. Webspinners have long and narrow bodies like a very short caterpillar yet with a head and legs similar to an ant. They create ‘galleries’ of silken tunnels and chambers on rocks, the bark of trees and in leaf litter. Spiders made silk in dozens of different styles for whatever their current need. Sage chose the Webspinner because it spun uniform smooth silk much like a Silkworm did, but it produced far more than a Silkworm and could produce it constantly instead of only when forming a cocoon to metamorphosize.

The Steel Silk Webspinner is the result of breeding together a variety of different spiders and webspinners till the webbing that they produced was many times stronger than normal. He also bred them for specific behaviors, which he encouraged using Insect Tamer techniques. With this assistance, the Steel Silk Webspinners spent their time depositing silk onto slowly spinning posts. The loose silk slowly formed into a loose spool which was just like a Silkworm’s cocoon and could be unraveled and spun into threads. Sage used the resulting Steel Silk Thread to practice his weaving techniques and then sold the resulting steel silk cloth. He had a bolt of the cloth saved for his own use, but he hadn’t done any Tailoring work in some time. He also sold the thread and loose spools to Weavers, but that was usually done when he had no free time to do it himself.

The final insect he used for revenue was the Thorn Cloud Hornet, something he’d created by accident when mutating a very generic Spirit Insect Hornet. The strain was so simple he couldn’t even identify it as a unique species, and one he’d first found back when he fell into that ravine and lost his hand. He’d combined it with a dozen different insects while experimenting with the Insect Immortal Index for the first time. By the time the Thorn Cloud Hornet appeared, Sage had already lost track of just how many splices and mutations the Hornet had been through, so he had no idea how to replicate the combination. Nevertheless, he still bred quite a few of them and they were something he sold as essentially a grenade. The Thorn Cloud Hornet was the size of a baseball and looked like a hornet that was covered in thorn-like spines. The reason for its name was not due to its appearance, but actually because it had somehow developed the ability to launch off the majority of those spikes on its body as a weapon. Each of the spines carried a small amount of its venom, but the downside was that these spikes took days to regrow. A normal hornet could sting over and over again till it ran out of venom while the Thorn Cloud Hornet would launch off its spines rapidly and would then be left unarmed for a few days till it recovered.

Sage would package then a dozen or so at a time into a very fragile Insect Cage. When the Cultivator wanted to use it, they just had to throw it a hard surface and the cage would shatter releasing a pissed off swarm of hornets. If the Thorn Cloud Hornets were thrown into the center of a group they could cause quite some destruction as each hornet shot out a small cloud of poisonous spikes. Sage also had a special scent to attract the Thorn Cloud Hornets to be recovered, but they were usually pretty suicidal in practice. Most people would immediately attack and kill the hornets as soon as they released all their poison spines, which left very few of them alive afterwards to recover. Most people didn’t bother to buy the recovery scent bottle from him and just treated them as living grenades.

These few species were useful so far as products to sell, but they were far from adequate in regards to increasing his combat power. Without the bloodline of a powerful Spirit Insect, Sage’s plan was to instead focus on versatility. He was going to give up on trying to create one ultimate companion insect and instead create a bunch of different insects, each with a different use. Linking to a different insect took him up to an hour or two given his rank, but if he used ‘Mature’ to breed a new one he could link to an unhatched egg in a couple minutes. As long as it wasn’t an ambush he could have a new pet ready to match the situation.

Mmm, I need to figure out how to switch between them even faster. Alarm Cricket, I choose you!