His innate ability rapidly compressed the sack full of aura, and all that remained was handing it over to the vibrant Auric spirit. In the past week its faint golden colour had changed to a bright glow, although rather annoyingly he noticed a strengthening sweet smell coming from his body whilst merged with the spirit.

Not knowing the exact type, it obviously had to be some sort of candy. When wasn’t it?

Disregarding that, he saw the aura sink into the spirit as usual and the glow instantly vanished. He saw the entire spirit quieten and fade into his scales, retreating into a state akin to it being a web of aura from so long ago.

It seemed that the improvement process required time, and he intended to give the spirit however much it needed. But now came the other matter to discuss.

After a week of feeding, that rat he kept had yet to reveal any food-related traits!

It did not evolve. It did not mutate. And it certainly did not enjoy being forced to eat several sugary tail cones every day with the threat of being cooked. So he fulfilled his promise, using Mental shock to knock out the rat and carrying it a distance from his cave before letting the poor thing go.

Sure, it might die tomorrow, but better to live that one more day than nothing more.

Back in the cave, he continued the process of learning Beasten words. With a full remembrance of those couple hundred characters, it was purely a time-consuming event. But with every day his ability to both understand and communicate improved. At first he could barely say hello to some of the other beasts.

But now he faintly knew that many of them disliked him, hating how a weaker creature received a far better relationship with the lord. The potential of a dragon was lost on many of these beasts, and the wyvern did not care enough to clarify it.

The only other things he did in spare time were building his Mind palace and creating more crystals for his heart. In the past week he finally built up the wall around the platform he created, so far raising it up six layers and now completely covering him.

The benefit of such a thing is obvious as it directly resisted any mental attacks without him having to take action. But he could further reinforce the walls in case of stronger psychic attacks.

For now, his mind roughly matched the power required to fully defend any Basic psychic spell, although any higher was extremely shaky. A Mental shock wouldn’t do much, but a powerful Mental blast absolutely suppressed him greatly.

He needed to get this building finished soon and reach the requirements for a low-level Mind palace.

Nothing as impressive happened for his heart though. It stored a tiny bit more mana now, but he still needed thousands upon thousands of crystals to achieve this basic modification. Any progress meant something though, and for the rest of the day he stayed in the cave whilst questioning what went wrong with the rat.

He already asked the Nexus too, but its data all showed not even the slightest mutation within his target. Clearly, feeding a creature alone could not force a mutation into a food-based bloodline. At one point he grew frustrated enough to ask, “Does the Nexus have any ideas on how to see a different result?”

[No, the Nexus is not designed to extrapolate data. Instead, you may try using new initial conditions to see how they affect the odds of forcing a mutation]

While not exactly an idea… It was a direction. And it meant more than he actually had at the moment. The first guess was the idea of using bugs instead of mammals like the rat. After all, it might be some strange property inherent to insects over the other kingdoms. As such, he quickly got to finding some insects.

He chose a large grey woodlouse and smaller cricket to be the next subjects of his experiments. To store these, he created two ice boxes with removable lids. Every day he dropped half the cut off tail in each box for the two to eat. Given their small size, just this alone filled them up.

Hopefully it proved fruitful this time round.

Now it became a waiting game to see when his spirit finally finished this improvement. Except it took longer than imagined, quite a bit longer at that.

* * *

Three days later, and the bugs showed no signs of becoming ice-cream or changing in the slightest. However, that only mattered on the outside. With his mana sight it was a breeze to check the internals of both insects, revealing a pleasant result. There was no need to wait any longer as the Nexus could now answer his questions on the matter.

With Telekinesis to keep their wriggling bodies still, he cut them in half with an Ice bolt. The first insect, a woodlouse, released its goopy brown internals when cut apart and now he had to clean the cave floor. It was no different from a regular insect, and its dark purple body quickly stopped, the thing died a rather gruesome death. But how many insects actually lived their lives to completion?

As for the cricket…

When cut open, he was amazed to see a smooth, bright green layer within. His mana sight very clearly saw the bug’s entirely new internals, but just that alone did not confirm the product of its mutation. It took a few moments of actual thought and moving over to sniff the body before he realised. This was ice-cream!

It actually did mutate, but he still had no clue why this happened. He also had no clue what flavour ice-cream this was, but in no way did it match his vanilla body! Not hesitating for a moment, he quickly ate the whole bug. A refreshing and chill sensation melded with the somewhat sweet flavour of ice-cream coating his tongue, and he guessed this had to be mint for whatever reason.

Swallowing it soon after, he somewhat regretted not savouring this new flavour of ice-cream some more. Didn’t this count as completing that request for the Nexus long ago? Perhaps it now had some more information on the topic.

“Well, Nexus? How does this process work?”

[Process still unknown; more information is desirable. Please perform more experiments and try to create a far more developed evolution instead of Mint Ice-cream]

He visually deflated when reading that, upset that the Nexus didn’t so easily give him the validation for his efforts, but so be it. He too wanted those evolutions, and obviously needed to realise how they came about. He instead asked a different question, “Can I have whatever data the Nexus obtained from that cricket then?”

[Yes. From the moment of ingesting your body, no changes were recorded. This followed through until 26 hours ago, when the cricket underwent an evolution. Your bloodline, still being digested within it, suddenly began to replace its evolving structure and after a random evolution became Mint Ice-cream as seen]

A few immediate differences appeared, but only one of them actually mattered for this process. He asked, “was this evolution triggered by my body? Or was it natural?”

[Unknown]

Either or then… And he was willing to bet that his body had no impact on this. If it did, then the queen would have needed to consume his body for weeks on end to cause any change!

He did have one final question about the whole matter though. “Why didn’t my body change to a mixed ice-cream?”

[Mass consumed was too low]

A reasonable simple answer, and he didn’t have any further questions for the Nexus. Now, with a clear direction in mind, the hard part was finding suitable targets. Fortunately, didn’t he have a powerful leader more than capable of such a thing?

The next morning, he travelled over to the cave as usual to receive a bowl of blood.

[Consumed Blue storm wyvern bloodline! Assimilation progress 39%]

This was the 12th time doing so, and progress continued steadily. But instead of returning back to continue studying, he asked something of the wyvern. “Are there any bronze tier beasts nearing evolution that I could hunt nearby? It could even be magical beasts below bronze…”

“Can you speak yet?” The wyvern replied simply, not bothering to send the dragon out if he couldn’t even communicate with his peers. But as he nodded slightly, the language barrier was no longer a problem, and his leader replied with, “Head north to a node tree. Tell the anaconda I sent you to deal with an annoying frog.”

Already knowing which node tree the wyvern referred to, he thanked the leader and returned home.

Before setting off, he checked over some notes on Beasten and prepared the cave to secure this frog. In particular, he strengthened the bars against the cave’s back. Now the little cell he maintained should withstand anything below bronze tier

Whether this worked in practice was a different matter altogether. Not many more preparations could be made now though, he needed to feed it his body immediately or risk losing a creature close to evolution. And he quickly began the journey to the node tree spoke of, this one different from the snowy heaven tree he’d grown used to seeing.

Reaching it did not take long, just being a 10 minute journey with a Windburst seal as aid.

And this tree, instead of huge rings of snow, featured thousands of small teardrop-shaped crystals hanging from its white branches. Curled around the main trunk was a huge snake, easily tens of times his own length! He slowly approached the tree on level ground with him, and when near the periphery spoke out in shoddy Beasten.

“Our leader sent help! I was told about a frog to deal with!” Whether or not it was perfectly translated did not matter, he just wished to get his message across.

He had no clue if it worked until the anaconda unfurled from the tree and lowered its body slightly to peer at him from all sides. It spoke soon after, “Yes, to the east is this foe. Show me proof of your victory.”

It returned to its coiled position up the tree and left the dragon alone after just a few moments. He had expected several more questions, but with this result he simply looked to the right and began walking towards his enemy. This whole battle for the king position was far more cladden in rules than he originally believed, for example the reason he had to deal with this frog rather than the anaconda or wyvern.

Because respect was required, simply exterminating all the current leaders simply wouldn’t work, so instead the standard way of doing things was recruitment and dissemination.

In other words, sending subordinates to do all the killing.

As more node and mana gatherer trees were captured, the range of influence of every candidate increased. And from there the intelligent beasts were more likely to pick a leader based on their desires.

Join a strong force with sufficient backing, or a weaker one where they’d rise in position far quicker?

However, the lords were forbidden from attacking one another for the first year. At best small battles between subordinates could occur, and in these cases the leaders could absolutely not be involved. If broken it could greatly affect their clan’s reputation, and even relinquish future opportunities to fight for such lands.

Which is why the wyvern and roc killed a bunch of beasts around the snowy heaven node tree, but did not exterminate the crane or its subordinates.

The restrictive rule set made the concept as a ruler so much more important.

And it trained their young far better, so either way it worked as a win.

The mana gatherer trees for the anaconda’s node tree were also winter’s hope trees, a surprise for just a few moments before he caught sight of the frog sitting beneath its canopy. Like all the other trees, hundreds of beasts weaker than it gathered around to bathe in the denser mana.

Now just came a single problem. How to start a fight and get rid of all those small beasts hanging about nearby?