Chrysalis
chapter-895

When did he begin to hear the call? Even I can't be sure. Long before I warned him, of that I'm sure. Such a subtle thing, that siren song, the incessant pull that pushes them to dive ever deeper, until they are crushed by the pressure or forged into something new. I firmly believe he would have gone there even without my influence, it's inevitable, the call will find all of them in the end.

I have to believe that.

He is gone now, to places that I can no longer reach, where the mana is so thick my very cells would disintegrate within minutes. None but those born of the Dungeon can ever hope to touch that ground. I desperately hope that he finds what he's looking for there, perhaps he will be able to save himself, and in so doing, save us all.

Perhaps he would have gone, even if the Dungeon had never spoken to him, never sunk its claws into his mind. That's the kind of person he always was.

But part of me believes that he felt that call very early. Perhaps even from the moment he was born in this world.

• From the private journal of Granin Lazus.

It doesn't take long for us to secure a little hideaway and I ask my companions to shield me whilst I trawl through the menus. My current haul of Biomass represents several weeks of hunting, though I've share the haul the final total is still quite respectable, if I do say so myself.

Seven hundred and fifty six, in total.

Not bad at all! Even if the first hundred was left over from my last mutation binge.

I'll be able to buy quite a few things with this little stash, push a few more things towards the max. At the rate I'm going I'll be maxed out on mutations a heck of a long time before I come close to reaching level one hundred and sixty, but that's nothing bad. I'd much rather be maxed out by the time I hit the level cap than have to hang around waiting and eating like I did last time.

Now, which of my lucky organs will it be?!

My business district needs a fair bit of love, or I could take my brains all the way… I will absolutely upgrade my eyes, the old classic, the first body part I ever mutated. Just thinking back to how bad my eyes were when I'd first hatched… yuck. Absolutely made the right call there. Fighting monsters when almost blind is not exactly what I'd call a good time.

Okay then! Eyeballs it is!

Where was I at with those things… Sharpened Perimeter Eyes +25. So far the upgrades I've taken have given me all around better vision, emphasising being able to have a better view in all directions, and I also took an upgrade to have certain areas of my sight be more in focus than others, letting me see straight ahead much more clearly, for example. I've noticed that having pockets of better vision is bringing back the human habit of turning to face things so I can see them better, whereas an ant generally wouldn't have to do that. I know for a fact that some of the castes have been leaning in this direction though, mainly the carvers, but a few others as well. This mutation is simply the cheapest and easiest way for our compound eyes to provide a patch of super clear vision.

Which is handy to have. I'm not saying being able to see in every direction isn't useful, it absolutely is! Just being able to see in all directions clearly is better.

With that thought in mind, I think I'll just continue down the path I'm on and fuse here. Which is a hundred and forty Biomass down the gurgler. Now, what's next?

Ah! The stomach! Obviously this should have been a priority earlier, though I suppose I can be forgiven for prioritising things that were more combat oriented. I've taken the same mutation at every level for the stomach, one that reduces the penalty for consuming prey from lower tiers. As long as I keep it fully upgraded I can cut that reduction in half for the tier below mine, which I clearly want to do! I do wonder if I might eventually end up reforging the stomach into something else. I mean, will there be much of a need for this mutation down the line, when I've tier eight or something? Maybe… might have to talk to Granin about it.

Alright, bam, that's done, another hundred and forty gone.

What's next?

Ah! My musculature! I should really get onto that, in fact, I actually have an interesting decision to make on that front… I've made my muscles incredibly reactive, able to fire at full power with only an instant of warm up time, which obviously synergises exceptionally well with my nervous system of foresight antennae. Predict the future, react with hyper speed and have my muscles fire in the same moment, it's been a winner that has helped me position to attack and defend perfectly, but the problem I ran into was a lack of penetrating power.

The mana infusion mandibles gives me a huge amount of utility in terms of what I can do with each of the different mana types I can pump into the chompers, but it does mean that I haven't used my mutations to increase the pure chompiness of my mandibles, making them sharper, stronger or more damaging, aside from a couple of early choices when I picked up the savage option. In order to compensate for that lack I decided to do what the famous trap jaw ants did back on earth, introduce a locking mutation which let my muscles coil like a spring before being unleashed, slamming my mandibles shut with increased force, increasing their ability to shear through bone and punch into tough armour.

It's worked a treat, all things considered and I think I want to emphasise that aspect of my current mutations going forward. So that's another one forty tossed to the wind. Yeesh, these mutations are expensive…

Currently I've spent four hundred and twenty, so one more will put up to five sixty, which will probably do me for now. I don't mind the idea of keeping a little Biomass in reserve for emergency purposes, you never know when you might need a particular mutation to push you over the line.

Alright, next I think I'll mutate my neural network. It's been a mainstay of my defensive tactics and probably the only clever thing I've done in working out my mutations over the journey. Every choice I've made for this part of my body has been to increase response time, even allowing distributed decision making in my extremities. I have to fuse those just to keep the wagon rolling. More speed can't be wrong when it comes to my nervous system.

So in the end I lock in the following choices:

Sharpened Perimeter Eyes +25 -> Focal Compound Eyes +30

Vast Hungering Stomach +25 -> Discerning Stomach +30

Lock Hyper-Twitch Musculature +25 -> Coiling Hyper-Twitch Musculature +30

Coordinating Instant Transmission Sub-Neural Network +25 -> Distributed Instantaneous Sub-Neural Network +30

Looks good. Lock it in!

… wait.

Dammit…