Molting the Mortal Coil

The barriers to his strength weren’t something he could solve just because he wanted to. Sage spent the rest of the night in the cave, waking up in the morning to find the body of a shadow-tailed civet. The Chameleon Mantis had done its job well and Sage stored the body of the beast before collecting the Mantis and starting on the next leg of the journey.

He’d lost a couple days with that pair of adventures, but the journey wasn’t too long in the first place so he didn’t have an issue with hunting for fortune along the way. It was also useful to compare the maps he found in the libraries to the actual current situation. The topography and major landmarks were sure to be the same, but the maps wouldn’t have any information about powerful beast territories or any recent changes.

A few days later, Sage saw movement over a large area of territory but couldn’t quite pick out what it was. One the side of a scree covered mountain it looked like the rough gravel was shifting. Like a small scale landslide, everything was shifting. The only problem was that the gravel seemed to be moving uphill and not downhill. The Dragonfly flew a bit closer before its excellent vision finally had a good look and Sage realized it wasn’t gravel. The motion came from tens of thousands of tiny ants. They were colored a slate grey and each was carrying a piece of rock over their heads, each of the bean sized gravel rocks was easily two to five times larger than the ants that were carrying them. Interesting!

Sage looked down on the ants from above as they moved closer through the air. Eventually reaching a few hundred meters away and starting to follow the flow of the ants to find their goal. Near the midway point of the mountain the flood of ants started to disappear into many cracks and crevices in the rock. There’s not enough room for even my own body to fit down there, let alone my other huge bugs.

Flying up higher, Sage had the Dragonfly land on an outcropping before he stored it into his Beast Bag and drew out a different type of egg along with a few spirit stones. A few minutes later he smiled at the Warp Worm in front of him and was quite pleased with his planning. He had once read a story where a hero used a technique that allowed him to burrow through the ground like a mole which he used to escape from encirclement by a dozen villains. It was merely a sort of fairy tale about a knight rescuing a princess. At least that was how he saw it, even though it wasn’t a knight or a princess in the story, but a wandering hero and a peerless beauty. The story was the inspiration that led to him focusing on having a method to move underground. Many Spirit Insects had wings and could fly, while his own body was quite well suited to water travel. The search for a way to move underground had led him to stumble upon what would become the Warp Worm, so Sage was quite happy to have read that storybook. Entering the new Warp Worm’s internal space, Sage had it burrow downwards towards the location of the cracks and crevices the ants were using. It would be easier to follow their trail than to just move around blindly within the mountain.

The Warp Worm was quite excellent at burrowing, it would open its mouth wider than the width of its body and bite into the rock and soil. Once the pieces were small than its mouth it could swallow them right up. The debris would be slightly digested and then passed right out the back of the worm. The rocks and soil would have energy extracted from them and usually end up crushed up or cracked to a smaller state than before. The only downside was travel through solid stone wasn’t very quick. While it could nearly swim through soil like a fish, with rocks it was a slower crunching and crushing to bite itself a tunnel. It had a very sharp set of teeth that were constantly coated with a powerful digestive fluid, but it still took time to tunnel through stone. Of course, it was many times faster than a person could ever be and they moved through the rock at the same speed as a quickly walking person.

Soon enough they came to the ant tunnels and Sage had them stop before they moved too close. He had the Warp Worm chew open just a tiny gap into the ant’s tunnel network, creating a path for him to send his spirit sense inside. He could have done the same from the surface, but he wasn’t sure how deep the tunnel system would extend and even if he found something he couldn’t go after it from the surface. Down here he used the gap to extend his spirit sense into the tunnel network as far as possible. He noticed a couple different types of ants within the network and was suddenly inspired.

Ants in colonies can have different ‘castes’ that can turn into ants with vastly different appearances or abilities yet still be part of the same colony and species!

With this idea in mind, Sage wasn’t even upset when he didn’t find any treasure within the Ant den. In fact, these ants had turned into the greatest treasure. As he observed the colony he found that there was a larger caste of this ant, as big as a marble, that could surround its mandibles with Qi which it used to cut through stone and rock like it was butter. Seeing this, Sage was even more excited and he followed his Spirit Sense to have the Warp Worm circle them around and behind the colony to the chamber where he sensed the biggest and largest of the ants. Theoretically he should be able to just capture any ant and use mutate to shift it into a queen of its species. The problem was that process was not guaranteed to succeed and also highly likely to cause other mutations. He always preferred to start with a pure and established species to try and preserve their unique abilities since it wasn’t always obvious how they worked or where they came from.

The best method would consist of taking away either the Queen herself or a large number of eggs. If he were to take the Queen it would cause a huge disturbance in the colony and it would make escaping quite difficult. If he took the eggs it would also cause a problem, but it should be far less. An ant queen like this was probably laying hundreds if not thousands of eggs every day and there was a small army of ants acting as nursemaids to carry them to nursery chambers as well as feeding and caring for them. The Queen itself also had a number of assistants that brought her food and kept her clean, which Sage would have trouble capturing along with the Queen, but the same could be said of the many nurses for the eggs. Sage of course went with the safer choice of targeting the eggs. It would take a bit of experimenting to get the right mix of food, pheromones or nursing to get an egg to hatch as a queen instead of one of the other castes, but as long as he took enough eggs, it should be possible.

Observing the colony, Sage watched them all carefully to learn their habits and behavior. He paid special attention to the treatment of the Queen and the rearing of the larva by the nursery ants. Depending on how a larva was fed it would determine the future caste and role of the ant when it grew up. Sage observed them with his spirit sense to see how they did it. What stunned him was that he realized all the stones that the ants were bringing back to the cave were unrefined spirit stones. It was like raw ore that needed processing to extract the metal, the stones were brought into the ant colony and broken down into the consistency of sand. The sand size particles were separated and the ones filled with energy were used as food for larva, the queen, and the large Qi using ants. The regular rock was ground down further and used as part of a fertilizer for a sort of fungus that fed the rest of the colony. Seems they’re similar to the Spirit Jade Beetles. They grow their own food from rare materials.

After watching them for a few hours, Sage found the most isolated egg chamber and had the Warp Worm tunnel close. Biting through the wall, Sage’s hand extended out of the Worm’s opened mouth and scooped up the contents of the whole egg chamber into one of his Insect Cages. Hundreds of eggs, a dozen nanny ants, and a few pounds of spirit stone dust were swept up all at once before his hand retreated back into the Warp Worm and quickly escaped. The Worm smashed up the path behind it and returned along its previous path. Following the tunnel it had already carved through the stone, the speed was multiplied by many times more than before. All Sage had to do was get the Worm to dig a loop back onto its old route and it was able to follow the old path back at rapid speed. Once they returned to the midpoint of the mountain where they started, Sage checked on the Insect Cage and smiled. Success!