They moved on to the second experiment area, which covered a few acres. From a distance it looked like rows of trees and hedges, but as one got closer their unusual nature became apparent. Of course, as a Cultivator he could see such details from a great distance, but the hills and other vegetation blocked their view and he even specifically took a route that only showed this section once they were right up next to it. For some reason, he felt compelled to hide things from Guan Zhenyan, like the man was going to steal away everything he had. The worst part was that Sage found himself continually offering things up.

Once they’d neared the area, the mass motion finally caught the eye and it was very obvious that the trees and bushes were veritably blanketed in ants. Their little bodies were traveling up and down the plants with dozens of little traffic lanes. The alternating motion almost made the ants look like blood running through veins on the surface of the plants and hedges. Sage had only attained the most basic manual on the Profession of Arborist. As such, the products that were being created were only at the lowest level. The branches of the trees were long and perfectly straight. Sage reached up and pushed some of the leaves aside and the point where they attached had a strange u-shaped joint. He observed it carefully, taking a bit longer than usual because of all the ants obscuring his vision.

“A genuine Magic Tool. It looks like some of them are flawed, but most of them just barely reach normal quality.”

Sage nodded at the assessment that Guan Zhenyan made. For these trees, each of their main branches was actually the haft of a polearm type weapon, each tree growing a different style. The u-shaped joints were created so a suitable head just had to be mounted and lashed on, and a magic tool would be created. Of course, it would be more powerful if the weapon head was also a magic tool, but these were grown by a colony of ants over the course of a few months. Other trees had pre-sharpened spear points or a tapered head with a cut in it to mount to an axe with a wedge.

The bushes were more unusual, most of them were a collection of thin slightly curved trunks coming up out of the ground that had dozens of perfectly straight branches coming off their sides. Each bush was actually like a dozen bow staves with a hundred arrows growing from it. The many arrow branches even had leaves directly fused to their tail as fletching. Just like the other weapons, it would only take a few moments to strip away all the small branches and leaves to reveal these weapons. There was a little variation between the bushes as some had arrows with pointed thorns to tip the arrows while others just had small joints like the trees to make it easy to attach a different head.

Sage walked past the grove of weapons and back towards a more haphazard patch of plants. In this area, no two plants looked the same and before Sage could comment, Guan Zhenyan butted in, “So, this is your test area? What a mess, Kid. I see now why you wanted my help, these are atrocious.”

“Of course they are. I’ve only ever looked at one basic Arborist Manual. Without more knowledge, I’m pretty much starting from scratch here.”

He felt a little offended at the insult, but giving it a closer look it really was pretty poor. In one place he’d tried to grow a form of very large grass into blades, but the large green leaves had curled up. Instead of looking like a knife it looked like a green corkscrew. In another spot, he attempted to grow a cactus variant into a type of thorn covered armor, but it was stunted and twisted, one piece even looked like thorn covered underpants. Guan Zhenyan mentally pointed out one large tree and laughed even more at the weird curves and shapes, “Hah, that is a terrible excuse for boxes. Are you trying to grow Storage Chests? Ridiculous!”

“Those aren’t boxes. Those are parts for an Airship. I wanted to try and grow higher grade pieces for the cabin.”

Guan Zhenyan didn’t know what Sage was talking about, so his laughter slowly died down. After a moment of awkward silence he mentally yelled, “Alright, hurry up and start moving! Just build an island near that main Hoplite Village and move it all over.”

Sage was startled and remembered what all of this was for. He shook off the confusion and started working. The main Hoplite Village was placed around Ruanfu’s home and Sage formed a new island just off the coast from there. The reasoning of the island being that if there were any problems with his ants, it would be good to have a natural barrier to keep them contained. As he was working, Guan Zhenyan spoke again, “So, those little ants are doing the work of an Arborist?”

Hah! He couldn’t control himself!

Sage gloated inwardly and started explaining. Those ants were indeed doing the job of an Arborist. The mind of an ant was quite weak and could only contain a small amount of ancestral memories and behavior guides. He’d got quite a bit of experience with this while creating the Hoplites. Their creation is what led him down this line of reasoning and he’d been experimenting with them for quite a few years. Since it didn’t take any maintenance from his end, it had continued even while on the run. The key to this process was actually compartmentalization. Just like the concept behind an assembly line, or as he was more familiar with, individual functions in a program, the key was to break a problem down. For programming, the key was always to break things down into simpler pieces. Then break those pieces down into even simpler parts, and so on. Eventually, the parts became extremely simple and it was just a matter of organizing them efficiently.

A computer at its core was a massive collection of ones and zeroes. All it really did was store data and do basic mathematical functions on that data. Through many layers of organization and obfuscation, that very simple core could do amazing things. Once it could do billions of those simple calculations in a second and with the addition of color data they became marvels. Without electricity to work with, Sage couldn’t even attempt to reproduce a computer directly, let alone him knowing little about the microscopic internal architecture of a microprocessor. In his old life he programmed software, he didn’t develop cutting edge hardware.

All that said, he could use the ideas as inspiration. Instead of trying to cram a lot of information into a single ant, Sage just decided to break the problem down into smaller pieces. There was no way he could cram all the information on an Arborist’s Profession into a tiny ant brain. On the other hand, with a little tweaking, he created an ant species that could handle a single array symbol. A hundred different ant colonies meant a hundred different array symbols.

The Stonecutter Ant had an inborn ability to create little Qi blades which they used to tunnel through rock and mine Spirit Stones. After a series of many tests he was able to breed a species of ant with less power and more finesse. Different ages of said ant would have different levels of Qi infused into their mandibles. This way, the varying levels of Qi involved in the creation of an array symbol could be formed by differently aged ants in a single colony.

Normally, a Formation Master would carve a single line of an array symbol with careful control, varying their power through the slash of the line. For an Arborist, they slowly grew a magic item and slowly imprinted the array symbols as the plant grew. It was a long and slow process, but an Arborist could also grow a whole forest at once. They took months to complete a project, but grew dozens or hundreds of items all at once. They also used far less precious resources than a Blacksmith, so it was sort of like comparing custom crafted items against mass produced ones.

These new ants, which Sage simply named ‘Array Ants’ were further differentiated by where they had to place their array symbols. So, each of these trees and bushes growing in this Arborist experiment had dozens of individual ant colonies attending to them. That of course was the reason that each of these trees and bushes were spaced well apart from the others, there had to be plenty of room for all the ant dens in the ground beneath them. Thankfully, once the ant colonies were all set up, there wasn’t any further involvement required. A few Hoplites made sure to restock some food bins nearby and every few months they’d harvest the plants and replant new saplings.

“I’ll add Arborist Manuals to the shopping list, now grab that Stonesap Tree now and let’s go, you’ve already wasted enough of my time.”

Sage had already finished transferring the billions of ants and their plants to their new island. He also moved over the Hoplites that had been attending to them and gave orders to the nearby city to take care of them. With that done, he also moved the Stonesap Tree as ordered and was about to leave the Universe Ring when he heard a voice.

“I thought I felt you here! Where’s my tea and snacks?”