I didn't have a mind for tactics - I didn't have a brain at all, actually - but a few ideas on how to improve my chances of survival came quickly. For all of them, I would need more bugs.

The Lower Puddle - not to be confused with The Puddle Around My Heart - would continue expanding, as long as I was still pumping out blood. More of the small beetles would naturally stumble into it, and fall under my control. But that would take time that I wasn’t sure I had.

The bugs I’d sent searching for the borders of the cavern returned at just as slow of a pace as they’d departed, with new orders - feel around blindly for other beetles, and rub blood on them.

It wasn’t as simple as it sounded. Remember how I said I couldn’t get any complex orders across? I very quickly had to translate ‘explore for other bugs and get blood on them’ to be not just idiot proof, but insect proof.

The first attempts failed spectacularly. My bugs would bump into something on their journey back towards the puddle, and I would have them bump into it again and again, leaving little bits of blood on whatever they had stumbled into, but nothing would happen. It took me a few tries to realize that I was probably having them bump into a rock.

The next few tries, I had beetles get together in groups of three, and had them move as a single unit together - stumbling into each other just as much as they’d crawl into anything else. It was a simple way to get more blood in an area at once, to get a better image of whatever I was trying to see.

I found a bug with this - I was sure I had, because it blood-sensed like a rock but it was moving away at about a beetle pace - but it still didn’t work. Maybe there wasn’t enough blood? I sent a few more beetles, completely surrounding this new bug in them, and I saw crusty dried blood smear onto it - but nothing happened.

What about fresh blood?

Moving as one unit, I had that small group of beetles herd their capture towards the Lower Puddle, but not into it. I then had another beetle under my control walk into the puddle, and then walk over the captured - sure enough, fresh blood did the trick. I felt the drag on my consciousness, and then I had another bug under my thrall.

Having identified the precise process for gaining control of a new ‘unit,’ I wasted no time further with trying to smear blood onto bugs directly. Instead, I sent out small swarms that herded bugs back to the Lower Puddle, and then into it.

This caused problems of its own, though.

Several beetles I shoved into the puddle just stopped moving after a while, and died soon after, disintegrating into motes of nothing. Too much blood, I realized - coating them completely, they couldn’t breathe.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Just the same, even if they weren’t completely covered, too much blood in their little bug joints meant when it coagulated they’d be unable to move. Several of my new troops experienced Locked In syndrome until I identified what was happening, and had mercy on them by shoving them into the Lower Puddle to end their suffering.

In the end, it took several thousand heartbeats of trial and error, but I managed to double my forces, to reach sixty-odd bugs strong. I had also managed to grow my heart a bit from the biomass of the dead beetles from my mistakes - which I decided I’d look at as a net positive, as I was pretty sure the quantity of blood spilling had increased because of it.

For few hundred beats, I kept up the routine, until I realized something while absentmindedly watching the Lower Puddle spread.

If it isn't modified through medication, or disease, blood exposed to open air ought to coagulate within about two minutes. For me, that meant probably somewhere between every one-hundred-and-twenty to two-hundred heartbeats, if my heart beat within the normal range for humans. Yet, the puddles that had formed of my blood - both around my heart, and at the bottom of the drop, were still liquid.

Well, technically speaking, blood isn't actually a liquid - no, don't get distracted, hold on.

How was this possible? Why wasn't my blood clotting the way it was 'supposed' to?

I took a closer look at each puddle, and found that there were actually a few clumps of clots her and there floating around, but they were actually dissolving and reforming constantly. They seemed to be outliers, exceptions - glitches, even. Additionally, the blood on the bottom of each puddle formed a contiguous clot, almost like a moss on the stone beneath.

I widened my sight, and then focused on the smaller specks of blood I had spread around the cavern via my bugs, and on the bugs themselves. Compared to the puddles, this blood made more sense - it was all clotted and dried. I watched fresh blood be applied to a fresh recruit, and watched it clot within the expected time.

Alright - so, clearly, when the blood left the puddle, it began to function like normal blood as far as clotting was concerned. That answered one question, but prompted another - all of the blood came from my heart, and pooled in the Puddle Around My Heart. Then, it left the puddle, and formed the Lower Puddle. So, shouldn't the Lower Puddle be one big clot?

What did the Puddle Around My Heart and the Lower Puddle have in common? Was it that I had named them? No - the lower puddle hadn't clotted in the interim before I had named it. Also, the Puddle Around My Heart had never clotted from the start. What else did the puddles have in common?

Well, they were puddles. Was it just basic quantity that activated this strange anti-clotting property?

I took a group of twenty bugs, and had them get as much blood on themselves as they safely could from the Lower Puddle. Then, I had them trundle a foot away, and get as much blood off of themselves as possible in the same spot. Over time, a few of them died, but I would replace them to keep the process going. Progress was slow going, but I kept at it, and eventually my efforts were rewarded. After several thousand heartbeats, a critical mass was reached, and the small amount of blood - which had been clotting and drying out as expected - dissolved in the span of a few heartbeats. A thin layer of clot remained on the surface of the stone, underneath - and just like that, I understood.

My blood was activating some sort of anti-clotting weirdness through a bastardized version of quorum sensing - when a certain density of blood was reached, it wouldn't clot.

Some small part of me almost expected that strange text box to appear, to give me some sort of message, maybe a congratulations, for figuring this out - but no, it was just me, my puddles of blood, and my bugs. I didn't really even know what to do with this information, to be honest. At the moment, I couldn't conceive of a benefit of making more puddles, not when the one I had was continuing to grow at a rate that far exceeded anything the bugs would be able to do.

Huh. Well, maybe it'd come in handy later.