NOVEL NEXT 31. Venom Farm
Almost immediately after I was finished with my slime work and collected my crystals, I ran back over to Gerankir and exchanged another bottle of venom. 11 credits. A decent increase, around half again as much as what I had earned earlier. I had expected a number like that though, Nightwing Amphisbaena venom was not normal, even by multiheaded magical snake standards, it was a living venom that acted like a supercancer that used the body's own energies to grow so fast as to often kill victims just from the heat. That was the reason Medea had assimilated it from exposure. It was practically made for it. I didn't linger for long there now that I knew that just buying other venoms wouldn't be useful.
There were many creatures that interested me in the terrariums that were not even prohibitively expensive, just slightly out of my budget. Nothing that was something massively special but they were just what I needed to get started. I mean I was not sure if I intended to make another swarm general or feed it to Medea when I was done yet. But having different creatures in my swarm was vital for what I had in mind. Something that would let me get seriously started on a few projects at once.
So many projects that all took root when I was reading the Polycerebral serpent book last night.
Crossbreed Amphisbaena are extremely rare in the wild but can be in possession of traits superior to each individual parent. The Areni that are tamed by the Mimmish started as one such crossbreed that possessed blinding speed and ferocity. Initially born sterile, the artificial creation of fertile and domesticated Areni is one of the greatest achievements of the Mimmish Beast Tamers.
I knew why crossbreeds were rare in the wild, for Amphisbaena and for every other species, even with magical super fertility. Behavioral differences including in mating rituals and diverging mating seasons. But that was simply not an issue for me, I could simply take over insects and command them to mate. Of course that still left the issue of actually creating a successful offspring but baby —larva— steps. Mosquitos, the bane of my existence, in this world and the last, had egg to egg cycles that could be completed in a week if the temperature was right. And Fauna Archive told me the exact ways to optimize the temperature for these demons. Mosquitos were my ideal test subject precisely because they had stupidly fast life cycles, I could see the results of my experiments in only a few days. And experiment, I certainly did. I learned that because they were so weak and mindless, my control could spread over touch of my swarm itself. And so I could have my two female mosquitos grab a male each and mate but I didn't do just that. One did just that, but another had different orders that I had to personally take over it to see to completion. Find a male of a different species. Unfortunately I couldn't find anything in the night but morning was a different story. A different species, kinda smaller than the other, and male. I had them mate too. Of course, I had no way to know if the child would even be born or have functional organs but that was what testing was for! The idea was that if I kept doing that, I might eventually get something to create powerful crossbreeds. Obviously I was not a moron and didn't want to be known as the girl who accidentally let loose super mosquitoes on the world. I had ordered my thralls to lay their eggs in a specific jar. I had no intention of letting my hybrid monstrosities survive for long after hatching. At least for this species.
For my first serious attempt, I had to pick something that had easily available normal variants and relatively quick reproduction cycles but also had something exotic in the Emporium so that I could actually test the offsprings and see what was passed down if anything. Or maybe I was thinking too small, no need to only stick with the Emporium.
I popped back over at Devan's shop to buy another two bottles and thank him for guiding me to the Emporium.
"Don't mention it, kid. Now, what do you want?" Crap, was I really that obvious?
"So I was wondering if you knew any place to buy insects, like exotic ones?"
"Nope." My face fell. "If you want birds, I know a place but the Emporium's your best bet for bu…" He trailed off when he heard the sound of the store's door opening.
"DEV? YOU STILL ALIVE IN THERE?" A woman's voice rang out in the store room.
"YEAH. JUST GIVE ME A MOMENT. I HAVE A CUSTOMER." He called out before turning to me. "Alright, that's enough. You should go now, this is something I have to attend to." He hurried me out of the store. It came to me later that I never actually managed to see the woman despite there being only one exit.
Now back in my dingy apartment, I finally had clear short terms. First, I would keep saving so that I could enter this elusive archive that Rev had spoken about. It sounded just like a regular library to me but what did I know? Once in the supposed library, I had a list of topics in no particular order or priority that I was going to read up on.
Magical beast taming and breeding
Magical beast creation
Biomancy
Blood magic
Healing magic
Insect or just arthropod related classes
Pet classes
Powerful magical insects
Monster evolution
Powerful monsters in general that were not too difficult to find or subdue for Medea to eat
Same but for venomous and/or poisonous monsters
Same but for heavily armored ones because Medea was a close range combatant and judging from its performance so far, it really needed better defenses. Especially since
Hasten Swarm
did mitigate the speed issue to an extent.
The gods, more specifically Quiraion and the Unaugured God
I could have instead decided to buy some insects for my burgeoning breeding program but frankly I had no actual idea what was a good baseline creature to start off with. I didn't want to waste weeks or months only to discover that I had created nothing useful. I lacked the knowledge for what I was trying to do and I needed that first and foremost. Unless of course, I was intending to trial and error for a long, long time. I wasn't that patient even if that might be useful for unlocking some class or the other.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
The other option was buying the most venomous creatures I could afford and letting Medea eat them and that was a genuine toss-up but ultimately information was my greatest tool. I was not really suited for overwhelming things with power right now and I had to think long term. An extra week or two until my income seriously increased again was not a huge setback even if the Archives didn't point me towards something good, and I doubted that would happen.
Two weeks, that was what it would take at most to finally be allowed into the archives's second floor. Not two weeks at Medea's current one bottle a day rate; but at double that, and I had a different plan for that. For once, money was not the most limiting factor. It was time.
First I needed more bottles to collect the venom in. Five worked for me. At any given day, I could leave two at the Emporium to be sold and have two for filling with me and one for backup in case one broke. And then a box, a simple cardboard box. That was surprisingly hard to find in New Delport, if not actually impossible. But eventually I found something close enough, a large crate that still fit in my apartment. But only barely so.
I had Medea prepare some very specific eggs that were still growing within it by the time I arrived home. Quiraion bless Parthenogenesis. For this and for the future. Parthenogenesis was a process of asexual reproduction in which an offspring is born without the mother needing to mate.
The child born is genetically identical to the mother. That was how it worked normally. But for spider scorpions, the genetic variation was introduced by what they ate. Still, there was no point in assimilating them as they only have what the parent copied over to them. But that was a start. It was not much but it was something I could work with.
Medea's Birth Drones skill, which it acquired after my familiar skill upgraded, let it further modify what was passed down and at what intensity at the cost of dramatically shortened lives and total inability to reproduce or grow. It was as if Medea had a set amount of energy that it could put in an egg and it was up to it to decide how that was distributed to create the perfect disposable soldier. It unfortunately didn't give Medea perfect control over them, but they could follow basic commands given at the time of their conception. These had only one command. Produce venom when the hivemother, that is to say, me, asks.
And that, that was the crux of everything.
The eggs that Medea was preparing to lay all contained offspring with the strongest venom production capabilities Medea could pass on at the cost of everything else. Armor? Soft and skinny. Physical power? Speed? They would waddle. Skills? None other than venom. Lifespan? Less than a week.
I did not need them to survive for long. Medea's venom was always getting more potent and it could not pass that on to children that were already born. I would have to get Medea's spawn to live short lives, produce as much venom as possible, and then die. Hell, I was even going to make Medea kill them if any proves particularly resilient and I found myself without the space.
They would hatch and be ready by the time I returned from the guild tomorrow. My own venom farm.
I had taken over Medea to see exactly how its Birth Drones had worked to control what genes and skills passed on and how, just in case it helped me acquire something similar. I mean it was not just mundane genes, there was a lot else going on in there. And even the mundane gene stuff was kind of beyond me, my skill named things like 'Horizontal Gene Transfer', 'Transcription' and 'Gene Expression' in my mind that I only vaguely understood the gist of. I watched from two perspectives, that of Medea and my own with a judicial application of Planning Phase to commit the flow of mana to memory.
But when it was all said and done, what I had was a crate with massive eggs in it and just enough space to not cause the drones to kill each other once they hatched.
On the second day, I beheld the drones at last. Fleshy pinkish cuticles and oversized stingers and waddling legs. I killed a rat and threw it in the crate for the hungry creatures to tear apart. The sounds of ripping and tearing flesh filled my apartment.
23 credits. Medea's own venom's value had jumped up a bit on its own, but I couldn't always count on that happening. Still, I welcomed it. It was still almost five entire crystals worth of extra money, on top of what I was already making. Not much for one day, but it would build up.
It remained the exact same on day 3. And on the fourth.
Day five: I decided to take another break from slime culling. [LESSER HEMOTHEURGIST] was not a class I was going to rush through with just slimes and the Emporium paid better than the guild did. I could afford to focus on something else for a day. Medea had laid some new eggs as the older drones had finally started to die off. For the first half of the day, I just kept trying to manipulate the mana currents swirling around the eggs using all I'd learned from watching Medea use its skill and how the Molt spell worked to empower the embryos or at least hurry their development along. It felt like I was close but still no new skill to show for it.
At some point, a house centipede had wandered in and I had tried to take over it, just to see if I could but I couldn't. I hadn't expected to. Fauna Archive was clear that they and spiders aren't insects. Medea was one because its species was a weird messed up chimera and that's why it had workers, drones, queens and presumably soldiers. I was still disappointed because Earth had giant prehistoric millipedes with heavy armor and this world might have something similar. Bah, no point dwelling on it. I dismissed the vision of taming an enormous millipede that could constrict around its prey to restrain it while Medea killed the target. That was a plan that has to wait until my skill evolved again or I could get a spider scorpion to subsist entirely on myriapoda and see how it evolved. Medea ate the long arthropod and I went back to work. What I did get was a nice confirmation of Hivemother's Crippled Dominion leveling up again from all my work the last few days. Perhaps because it was so high level or so complicated but it levelled very slowly.
Maybe it was because I was treating it as a lazy afternoon's project and taking my time just observing how mana worked, but my pocket started burning. The gem from the forensics department! I could only hope that it wasn't just moving records like last time. No wait, what was I even thinking? The other option was that someone important died. Most likely murdered.
Grumbling to myself, I left the eggs alone for now and made my way over to the HQ. Once again I was greeted by Agitjin first, but this time his face was grim and he just wordlessly gestured to me to follow him inside. Tiamim was already there, but not Novas, which was off considering that for all I knew, he lived down here. I thought the only reasons I could be called here was because of an important death or for menial chores. I was wrong. I was very wrong.
There was a third option.
It could be because the red powder that had been confiscated and handed over to the council was stolen. The place it was kept in was now the site of a total massacre.