Hanging out on the third stratum is uncomfortable, that much has been established. While I’m here, I may as well get something out of my time, but as a tier seven, there isn’t a whole lot I can do to gain experience. I get a bit of Biomass, obviously, but the most important thing to mutate is my Altar, and I’m still not entirely clear on how the thing works.

As the mana level gradually rises, Tiny, Crinis, Invidia and myself stick to Colony territory, hunting and grinding as the Colony works itself into a frenzy around us. Farming the waves has become something of a Colony tradition, and this time around is shaping up to be no different.

I’ve no doubt that the already existing network of farms in the Shadow Sea are being massively expanded, but it’s here on the Demon Plains that the biggest push is being made.

I had a chat with a few engineers when I walked past, just because I was curious as to how they were going to go about it. The main goal of the farms is to create an enclosed system wherein the monster spawns have a high chance of forming a core. Getting Biomass out of them is nice, obviously, but the dramatic increase in core inflow is the real prize of the waves if you ask me.

There are a ridiculous number of ants now, and more being born every day. There are something like twenty egg-producing nests now, each with three queens hitting their quotas daily. Thousands and thousands of eggs every week! The Colony is well on the way to reaching Super-Colony status!

I feel extremely proud of our progress. On Earth, there were some truly massive ant Colonies that we can compare ourselves to. A single nest, or Colony, of some species could hold up to several million individuals, a number we are rapidly approaching.

A super-colony is created when ants in multiple nests recognise each other as the same species, and therefore cooperate. For ants, this isn’t normal. The pheromones of one Colony are usually too different after a single generation, so the children of a Queen will fight and compete against ants from the nest she was born in!

When this doesn’t happen, when the children still recognise their parent nest as being friendly, they cooperate and act as one massive Colony. There were several of these on Earth, numbering hundreds of millions of ants and tens of thousands of queens. The largest was the Argentine ant super-colony, covering over six-thousand square kilometres, with capital B Billions of workers!

One day….

Anyway! The farms… it’s quite interesting how they’re going about it! Obviously, monster spawning on the third works differently than anywhere else we’ve attempted this. The larvae just pop out of the ground in truly absurd numbers, immediately start murdering each other until a select few survive to evolve. Then they kill each other and a few evolve. Then they kill each other and a few evolve. And so on.

Our research ants have determined that the ratio of larvae that survive to reach tier six is close to one in a million.

So wasteful!

The Colony has already succeeded in selective demon rearing. Picking out a promising larva and tending it to ensure that it matures, feeding it cores to fuel its development.

By far the biggest issue with demon evolution is that precious few larvae form cores before evolving to the second tier, but those who do, and then go on to survive to level five again, are waaay overrepresented in those who make it to tier six. Which is expected, since they have better evolutions. So how do we create a system wherein the maximum number of tier one larvae achieve a core?

The answer can be found on the Plains of Leng right now.

It’s basically a multi-floored maze. The interesting thing about demon spawning, is that they tend to always want to spawn on the ground if they can. If you build a wall, they’ll spawn on top of it, but not inside it, if you take my meaning.

So the engineers have fashioned a massive network of rooms, each roughly fifteen by fifteen metres. They’ve calculated that this is enough floor space to generate enough larvae that a tier two will be formed every five minutes. The hope is that the victorious monster will clear out the room, find no threats and therefore feel comfortable forming a core. By the time they wake, the next round will be ready to spawn, which they can farm up and evolve.

Here’s the interesting bit. There’s an iron grate on the roof, which will only open if a tier two pushes on it. An ingenious mechanism that utilises the latest in enchanting techniques to measure core strength. Impressive to say the least! And what do the demons find when they climb through? A whole new room, larger this time, connected to exactly twenty of the lower rooms. The floor here is made of iron, no spawning allowed, so only tier twos will make their way in here.

So what happens then? They fight each other! Over and over again until a tier three is created. Once the tier three has cleaned out the room, there’s nowhere to go… except… you guessed it, up!

The next level, they find an even larger space, in which they fight, until a tier four is created! Then they climb up the final grate, ready to achieve freedom… except they get harvested by the Colony instead. If it’s a particularly useful, or powerful demon, we may end up just recruiting them. Help them get to tier six and then move them into a city within our borders.

It’s still a wasteful process, but the boffins crunching the numbers and doing the antgebra believe this is five times more efficient than just leaving the demons to spawn on their own.

The whole farm is enormous, covering well over a hundred square kilometres, and should produce a steady stream of demon cores. And that’s just one of the farms. More are being constructed around the Roklu nest as we speak.

It’s a fairly brutal process, especially when we consider that demons are rapidly approaching true sapience once they reach the fourth tier. In reality, this is simply a streamlining of the process we are already undertaking across the plains. Teams of ants scour the terrain between the cities for Biomass and cores, or plunge down into the caverns for it.

The demons themselves don’t seem to care. As long as the larva spawning is uninhibited, they don’t really mind what happens to their weaker brethren.

According to all reports, the spawn rate of larvae goes absolutely gang-busters during a wave anyway. Considering the entire floor of the stratum is a literal living carpet already, I honestly can’t picture what it’s going to look like.

Sadly, I’m not going to have to wait too long to find out.