“Ssssh.”
“Alright, alright,” Valerius mumbles in answer, his mind completely occupied by the awesome sight in front of him. The group of a dozen ants is silently and reverently staring out into the open space. For the first time in what felt like weeks, light enters his eyes. The minuscule pinprick of illumination high up above shines light down upon a massive open space. Valerius looks up into a round cave, at least a kilometre in diameter, and seemingly endlessly high.
“Here is where we found our voices and reason,” intones one of the ants.
“Instead of following the smells, we thought for ourselves,” chants another.
“Trudy died, though,” interrupts the first one.
“Oh yeah, she is super dead. We put her over there,” another ant waves a tarsal limb at a dark pile laying to the side.
“She didn’t want her voice, so it killed her.” Once again, all the bulbous ant heads nod in unison.
“What did you all do with the power?” asks Valerius.
“We kept it, duh.” He isn’t sure, but the ex-mage gets the feeling that ant would have rolled her eyes at him if she had the capability. Instead, she just moves her head in a circle, the light sparkling off of her faceted eyes. For some reason, Valerius has assumed that all the large insects are female by now. He isn’t sure where this certainty comes from, as their voices sound like high pitched gravel raining down on a collection of wooden buckets and dry leaves.
“You all kept it?”
“Trudy didn’t. She wanted to give it to Mother, even after she knew better. She was old anyway. Now she’s dead.”
“Super dead.”
“The first thing she could keep, and she didn’t want it.” All the ants shake their large heads as they mumble some more banalities concerning their deceased fellow insect.
Valerius, in the meantime, has trouble keeping standing as his mind is blown again and again. Previous certainties are shattered as the bickering army of oversized ants keeps commentating on the truths of life. For as far as the gardener knows, animals are too dumb to doubt what qi is for. They can’t freak out about having more possibilities inside their bodies, thus allowing this pure potential to grow wild like a cancer. Animals do stuff, and they unconsciously use qi to do that stuff even harder or better.
These ants seem like some freaky border case. Initially, either their thinking capacity should have been suppressed, or they were truly too limited of mind to let qi go wild. After being contaminated by qi, however, their mental faculties seemed to have either evolved or been released from some limitations. Valerius thinks over his encounter with the Mother, the cute and bright face displayed in highly dense earth mana coming to the forefront of his mind. His desire to go out into the world was minimal at best, but he had gone through the aura detection training program and test Database required everyone to go through before being allowed to leave Tree. He is pretty confident in his ability to read people, and that bug-assed girl didn’t have a single shred of maliciousness inside of her.
“What do you gals want to do now?” he asks after the insectoid tea party has calmed down. The chittering of mandibles and tapping of chitinous limbs fades as all heads point in his direction. “This shouldn’t have happened too long ago, right? A few days at most?”
“What is a day?” asks one of the indistinguishable beings.
Valerius has no logical reply to that question. He thinks a bit more before pointing upwards. “That’s when that light goes out.”
“Then it hasn’t been a single day!” replies the same ant, a proud inflexion to her answer.
“Does it ever go out?” Valerius asks.
“No,” is her immediate reply.
Valerius hears water dripping far away, some distant stream of moisture tapping out a rhythmic pattern in the oppressive silence. “What do you gals want to do now, though?”
“Ah, I think we should not bring stuff to Mother anymore,” is the spoke-ant’s answer.
“I don’t want to end up like Trudy.”
“Super dead, she is.”
“I’d like to chew my own food for once.” All the ants stare at the latest speaker. One by one, they all enthusiastically start expressing their consent to this statement. It takes the group a while to calm down, and Valerius uses this time to get his thoughts in order.
“Alright, ladies. Let’s get back to hunting!” Until this happy sentence is shouted by the most vocal ant. She receives a bunch of agreeing comments in return, and the small group storms off, back the way they came.
Valerius stares upwards for a bit longer, the extremely faint bit of light high up above somehow calling out to him. He has the weird feeling that this place is somewhat familiar, but he can’t recall how so. His introspective mood leads him to glance at his cultivation core, and the large leaf sticking out from the side of the kernel is quite the shock.
“Ah, miss? Sorry about that. Making decisions is still quite tough, you know, so we get distracted easily. Come this way, please.” The ant standing behind him nervously rubs her two forefeet together before swiftly turning around and running away.
Valerius decides to follow her, casting a single longing glance upwards before he leaves the massive pit. He runs after the oversized scuttling insect as she disappears from the range of his mana vision. He needs to put some effort to keep up this time, the group seemingly having forgotten to slow down to allow him to keep up. Instead of complaining, Valerius takes a bit of qi from his core and lays it over his legs in a thin layer. Just like fertiliser, he realises. Too little has no effect, yet sprinkle in too much, and things go wrong.
He loses himself in the taxing task of having to sprint through narrow runnels while seeing nothing but the mana inside the rocks around him, and the occasional blip of recognisable qi from the ants in front of him.
“No, sister! Don’t bring that to Mother, keep it for yourself!” A gravely yet feminine plea shakes him from his oddly serene sprint. Patting all the wet dirt from his stained robes, Valerius stumbles to a halt. He spots a tangled mass of limbs and chitin, all of it wriggling in a confusing struggle.
He stays well away from the flailing mass and taps one of the standing ants on her abdomen. “What’s going o-” he tries asking, but he’s immediately snatched by large mandibles.
“No! Don’t take her to mother. Think for yourself, you dummy!”
Another ant smashes into his kidnapper, sending him flying. Having learned his lesson, he avoids all the large insects as the six-legged monsters duke it out. It doesn’t take long before a single ant lies on the floor, unmoving, with a large crack in her head carapace.
“Super dead.”
“How come this one is dead?”
“Same as Trudy.”
“Yep.”
“Hey, we’re near the heap, let’s toss her.”
“You don’t want to keep her for yourself?”
“No. Why?”
“Nothing, just asking,” replies the ant who is trying to hide the fact that she is drooling.
Valerius once again follows the group, who are slowed down by the fact that they are carrying a dead ant. “Hey, I think you could take on Mother, then you could keep all of her stuff.”
The entire group freezes. The two ants responsible for carrying the dead insect drop their burden as they all face him. Valerius keeps a part of his consciousness trained on the slowly moving leaf that is sprouting from his seed-core as he does his first bout of conscious and pre-planned bit of social manipulation ever. “You took her on easily, you know. Maybe you could all beat Mother that way?”
His unease slightly growing, he sees that now two of the ants are drooling. “F-fight Mother?”
“How… quaint.”
“That would be… That’s actually possible? I’d never…”
A wry feeling of triumph and guilt worms into Valerius’ heart as he sees the small little leaf turn a little sharper and more vicious. “Maybe take out some of her workers first? You could g
et swarmed, maybe?”
The feeling only grows as he sees his words take hold, small thorns now sprouting from the plant that’s growing from his cultivation base.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Antsy 3
“IT’S TERRIBLE! They are coming. You should prepare!” Screaming at the top of his lungs, Valerius runs through the dark tunnels. The small trickle of guilt inside his heart is now overshadowing the slight feeling of victory in its entirety, yet he perseveres. He isn’t really sure why he is performing these social experiments all of a sudden, but the results are honestly too interesting to give up.
He is expending a massive amount of effort to minimize harm, but the farmer still suspects that a certain chaotic sword wielder and bunny scratcher is having way too much influence on his actions. The results speak for themselves, though. The single leaf on the one side is blooming into a small plant at a visible rate. The small sprout on the other side of his seed core is also moving, the slow germination speeding up the closer he approaches his destination.
“Oh, hey girl! How’s it going?”
Bursting into the throne cave, he skitters to a halt as he lies eyes on the horribly cute girl again. Blazing with earth mana of absurd densities, the smiling girl waves at him. Then she scrunches up her face like she’s on the shitter, and with a wet squelch, another large round sphere pops free from her horrid hind section. Valerius barely manages to hold in his lunch.
He is hit with a sudden wave of clarity and confusion both. How long has he been awake? Hours? Weeks? He isn’t sure. He suspects that he slept on the long stretches of running underground, but it’s honestly all a blur at this point.
“Hey, Mother, I found your missing workers…”
“Oh, thank you so much! I was getting worried.”
Ignoring the stab of guilt in his heart, Valerius continues. “But they’re not coming back. They don’t want to keep doing stuff for you without getting anything in return.”
And the cute girl turns on the waterworks. She tries to sit down on her knees, but the fleshy protrusions stuck to her back prevent her from sinking down into a crying heap. “But why? Why don’t they love me anymore?”
The mage keeps staring at the large sack of egg-producing flesh behind the weeping girl. He doesn’t look at her trembling lips, nor the impossibly dense mana inside her tears, making each dripping droplet look like a small explosion of power in his senses. “What do you want to do about them, though? They keep fighting with your workers.”
“Why, though? Why do they hate me noooooooowwww buu-huuuu.” As the girl devolves into a sad pile of hiccuped sobbing, Valerius observes the small sprouting grow quickly.
“I… I can help? I might not look like it, but I’m pretty strong.”
At his hesitant comment, the girl looks up. “R-really?”
“Sure. And you don’t even need to give me a male in return.”
“R-really? But a few in the latest batch can walk! You sure you don’t want one?”
“I’m very sure,” he replies quickly.
“Al… Alright then.”
⁂
“She’s not willing to…” Valerius’ thoughts grind to a halt. He had been completely caught up in figuring out what his cultivation base does for the last few days. He had been running around between the growing group of cultivating ants and Mother, playing both against each other just to see what effects his actions have on his seed. The rebel faction’s side has bloomed into a beautiful plant, a thorny bush of flowers, each lovely bloom representing another ant firmly under his control. Mother’s side is a single massive flower, adorned with a complex web of fine branches and a myriad of small leaves.
He has been making up excuses here and there, leading Mother’s workers into ambushes, guiding the rebels to stockpiles of lesser importance while weaving a complex web of lies and intrigue. But he had been so caught up in this entire farce that he failed to see the core of the matter.
“What do you guys want to keep?” he softly asks.
“What do you mean, ma’am?” asks the single ant with which he has been having most conversations.
“All of this… You have been fighting. Mother has been defending. What is the resource that drives this conflict?” Valerius feels like he just woke up again, an absurd form of haze lifted from his consciousness.
“Uhm, it’s food? What else did you think we were taking down the foraging crews for?”
Explosions going off in his mind, Valerius looks at the towering insect. “Food? Is that scarce here, or something?”
“Oh, yes! Drones like our poor dumb brethren need to forage all the time in order to feed Mother. We could only keep half, and that barely fed us.”
“So…” he asks while regaining his wits, “what do you eat?”
“Grubs, fungus clumps, moulds, mushrooms, all sorts of stuff. Mother always yells at us when we bring large beasts or workers from other colonies, so we usually don’t do that. Wait, no, we never do that now! We keep it all! Come on, ladies, WE KEEP IT ALL!”
“KEEP IT ALL!”
“ALL FOR ME!”
“GIVE NOTHING!”
Taking a deep breath, Valerius observes the crowd of a dozen cultivating ants. He slowly reaches in his pocket and pulls out the mushroom he found. Injecting a bit of qi inside of it, he drops it. All heads snap towards him and his actions, water immediately dripping down every single massive mandible in the room.
The mushroom takes root immediately, cracking the hard rock underfoot with ease as its qi-enhanced roots dig in. It takes less than a minute before a faint waft of spores falls from its gills. Valerius blows on the fine dust gently, smiling peacefully as he grows something for the first time in weeks. The minuscule spores land all over the cave, new mushrooms growing within seconds.
“There, that’s food taken care of. Just inject some qi inside one of them to make it produce another bloom like that.”
“FOOD!”
“EAT!”
“SHROOMS!”
A right ruckus breaks out when the couple dozen ants realize that there is food around. It takes them half an hour and several more mushroom spawnings before they are sated enough to converse again.
⁂
“Observe!” Dramatically, Valerius twirls around. “Using the power of qi, you can grow as many mushrooms as you want! You no longer need this fight to continue.” Smiling at the awestruck girl, Valerius realizes that he might have let things go on for a bit too long.
Just like a plant must take any and all possible advantages in order to grow, it seems that his core might have made him into somewhat of an opportunistic and ruthless profiteer. His core had become his entire world the moment he observed it sprout and grow a plant, he sees now. The gift of hindsight makes him wonder how he could have spent such a long time in such a haze, running all over in order to forcefully grow his core.
“This is… Amazing!” Happily clapping, the girl named Mother looks around at the slowly blooming mushrooms. Opposing the awestruck bug-ended humanoid is a group of shamefaced ants. “Couldn’t you have done this before… you know, before half of my drones got killed?”
“Yeah, our bad. They are super dead.”
“I’m feeling sorry. But I just wanted to keep my stuff!”
“Shush, it’s okay. All we did was keep food so we could live.”
“Ah, no worries about that. I didn’t want to lose any of my precious leaves, so I patched them up and put them in the chamber where I was dumped.” Valerius calms the chattering insectoids. The true reason he had been feeling extremely exhausted over these past few weeks is that he had been saving all the ants from death. The massive insects had turned out to be near unkillable without massive force, not something a few newly cultivating and unskilled brawling insects could have done.
He had healed them all to the best of his abilities before dousing them with a sleeping draft before storing them in the pit he himself had been dumped in. “They’re all fine and should wake up
in a few days at most.”
The girl jumps forward, only to be halted by the massive mass of flesh attached to her backside. Frowning at the large mass of egg-bearing tissue, she takes a deep breath, before stepping away from the horrible looking slug. “This qi energy is super great! I can even step away from egg laying for longer now!”
Flabbergasted at having a naked and extremely attractive girl plastered to his side, Valerius ignores the chattering and chittering of the cultivating ants around him. “Thank you, miss! How can I ever repay you?”
Avoiding looking at the bouncing globes, Valerius coughs drily. He wonders why an insect queen would need to be conventionally attractive, but quickly concludes that the tales of child-kidnapping insect-kin must have some core of truth somewhere.
As he basks in the somewhat absurd conclusion that this entire escapade has come to, he observes his seed core. The two plants on the opposite sides had started moving towards each other the moment he had started planning how to bring the groups together again. It had taken him quite a bit of talking and explaining, but the results are very apparent.
The lower stems are already fused, a single and strong branch emerging from his perfectly smooth core. The many small flowers have all merged in beautiful patterns around the single bloom representing Mother, all the little leaves showing signs that they could turn into flower bulbs at any moment. The possibilities stretch on endlessly, and brief images of ruling over a planet-spanning empire of insects, a beautiful queen mother on either side of him, flash through his mind.
That will require more food, though. The mushrooms he has been planting everywhere are a massive improvement on the lacklustre food situation down here, but that can be fixed too. “So, here is a plan. How about we start expanding? Introducing qi to other workers will allow us to recruit them to our cause. A queen without her spawn will be an easy target to convince to cooperate with us, no? Then we could grow more mushrooms and even plants!”
The Dao of Magic: Book IV Page 13