Molting the Mortal Coil

Sage’s time seemed to fly by as he trained. In the past he’d always been bitterly trying to fight against fate, but now it seemed like he was changing his life. The vastly different mindset turned the dull chore into an engrossing hobby. It also helped that he was working on many different things at the same time. Training his body, techniques, crafting formations, breeding insects, and studying in the library. Along the way he also spent time with his friends, no longer feeling embarrassed by his inadequacies in comparison to their achievements. His frequent trips to the Million Skill Library also exposed him to the public more often and within a few months most of the Sect members no longer found him such an extreme and unusual sight. While ‘walking’ along with a big crowd he didn’t stand out too much from a distance, seeming to just be someone with a darker complexion than most. Without a crowd, the huge snake tail that was his legs were quite obvious. Up close it was also easy to see the scales instead of skin and the different shape of his skull, face and jaw.

As he grew accustomed to his new appearance and treatment, he was less driven to cover it up. His current plan was to head to the Seal Master’s cave and search for treasure. He didn’t plan to stop at any towns or cities along the way so he pushed back the plans to create a disguise as well as the study of the weapons and clothing he found in the Soul Taming Abode. None of the weapons were one’s he’d trained with in the past, so Sage chose not to purchase and train a whole new fighting style. When he encountered trouble the plan was to run away and return later to set an ambush. Additionally, he was still getting used to his new body. Most techniques were created for normal humans, which meant his lack of two legs changed how he could perform them. He still hadn’t even successfully been able to make use of his old fighting techniques in this new body, let alone worry about learning new ones.

Over this year of training and studying, Sage had forged a few hundred Formation Plates costing him a few thousand contribution points in materials. Half of that was covered by his usual Insect related sales which put his points at a little over ten thousand, essentially his only points remaining were those he earned from the expedition reward.

Sage entered the Insect Shed. The majority of his possessions were contained within his Storage Ring. The only things of value in his whole home were contained within this shed. He carefully prepared the feeding formations and secured the many habitats. This time he had no idea how long he’d be gone, it could take a few months or it might be a decade. As such, he cleaned out the majority of his experiments. The habitat rooms were pretty self-sufficient, arrays supported a healthy habitat and land condition to grow plants. Different insects would reproduce naturally and be preyed upon by other insects. The individual species cages on the other hand had to be more carefully managed with array formations. The formation required spirit stones as power and Sage aimed to reduce the expenditure by cutting down on the population of the individual cages. He’d already use the Spirit Jade Beetle Cage as a focus for the arrays to enhance them, but it was still better to reduce costs.

At this time he also prepared his Beast Bag for the voyage. He planned to leave half of the space empty for possible new acquisitions, but the other half would be filled with breeding pairs of his most valuable insects. In case anything happened to his Insect Shed while he was gone, he didn’t want to suffer any irrecoverable losses. After this year of focusing breeding he also felt he’d squeezed all the potential out of the Spirit Insects he’d collected so far. It made it far easier to sort through the individual cages and pick out what to keep. The rest of the individual species were taken and distributed to the habitat areas. He released them into all the habitats, the ones in the wrong habitats were experiments to see if they might find a niche or adapt quickly enough to survive.

In the end he was left with about a dozen individual species cages to maintain, which was much more economical for his spirit stones than the hundred cages he had going before. The first few species were kept to maintain his income: Silverbees, Spirit Jade Beetles, Alarm Crickets, Steel Silk Webspinners, and Thorn Cloud Hornets. These were the species he continued to breed in large numbers to provide an income for himself. His three unique creations had even started to make a name for themselves in some of the outer world. In fact all five species could be bred at a hundred times the amount he did now and it still wouldn’t satisfy the demand for their products, it was merely a shame he didn’t have the time for it now.

The rest of the individual cases were filled with the results of his year of experiments. Each of the species was created to solve a type of problem Sage thought he might run into and then modified a bit more to help with issues related to the primary problem he was solving. Since his Insect Taming techniques didn’t work on reptiles, or amphibians he kept them out of his ‘main team’ this time. Using the standard taming techniques he could skip the need to ‘Merge’ using Insect Immortal Index if he was in a time crunch or to have a second bug in play at the same time. The simple pheromone control techniques he knew only allowed for basic commands like; guard, attack, return, and hide. There were other methods of commanding insects, but Sage had the Insect Immortal Index and limited contribution points so he’d never learned many more of them. He had also picked up basic techniques for taming Spirit Animals and Demonic Beasts, but he’d only studied the most crude of techniques given the contribution point cost of better ones.

The Insects that Sage had chosen to bring along this time were the five types that were still secluded back in the Insect Shed, as well as five others that he’d developed over the last year. They were respectively called Chameleon Mantis, Steel Silk Centipede, Emerald Dragonfly, Charming Lance Beetle, and finally the Warp Worm.

Sage had unfortunately never recovered his Fire Weaver Mantis decades ago. As such he had to make do with different species of Mantis that could be found at the marketplace or bred from the other Insect Tamers. Eventually Sage found a Spirit Insect Mantis of a decent quality. It wasn’t quite as strong as the Colossal Iron Mantis from the Lang Clan, but it was a decent second. The Ghoststone Mantis. It’s carapace was as hard as stone but somewhat translucent like a smoky crystal. An adult would reach a height of 12 feet with a much greater length. It wasn’t as large or tough as the Colossal Iron Mantis, but it wasn’t a pushover. Sage bred in the traits of the only Spirit Animal Chameleon he could get his hands on. It took many attempts, but eventually he was able to give the Mantis the color changing skin of the Chameleon along with its uniquely shaped eyes that can swivel to cover 360 degrees without moving. Now the Chameleon Mantis had a translucent green carapace, but it could change colors to match its surroundings and become near invisible. It also had the signature strange eyes of the Chameleon and could watch in every direction without moving its head or focus both eyes on a target for stereoscopic depth perception to prepare for a strike.

The Chameleon Mantis was chosen for stealth, information gathering, and assassination. It was also no slouch in open combat, but it’s main focus was to strike from concealment with its powerful forearm blades.

Sage had almost decided not to bring along any Steel Silk Webspinners, since the Steel Silk Centipede was better in nearly every way. In the end he brought the Webspinners for one reason, behavior. The webspinners he bred were trained to constantly spin webs onto rods, while the Steel Silk Centipede required Sage to ‘Merge’ in order to maintain control. Sage had chosen the Webspinner because its silk was similar to a silkworm in that it only produced one variety of consistent silk, and it produced it faster, more efficiently, and more often. The Webspinner had spinnerets in its forearms and Sage naturally chose to maximize this feature by picking the bug with the most forearms.

The first three pair of the Steel Silk Centipede’s forearms were equipped with blade and pick like spines and scoops. The rest of its legs were equipped with spinnerets and the silk it produced was as strong as the Steel Silk Webspinner. In addition the Steel Silk Centipede could spit a corrosive acid that was very effective at softening soil and melting stone. The Steel Silk Centipede was built as a construction crew. The acid and bladed forearms were excellent at destruction, demolition, and digging while the rest of the legs could spin Steel Silk to reinforce structures, create makeshift objects, or any number of uses.

While the first two were exciting, Sage was far more proud of his results with the last three of his creations.