And this is why perseverance and intelligence should be rewarded. True, you can wear down a wall with a single drop of water in the same spot over and over, but there’s a chance that the wall will find a new form, guiding the water to where it can do the least damage. An intelligent man will guide that drop of water to a crack.

A simple request from a very powerful, very intelligent friend. Find a plant that could help with the Green Sickle Warriors and Scouts. A not so simple request for a plant to dissuade the scouts from exploring further. Surely she understood what she was asking from him?

Silent Howl sighs. It’s been years since his “treason”, but that didn’t make him safe. The Sickle Warriors weren’t the only weapons at their disposal, but they were by far the easiest and cheapest. Just set up a disturbance, and watch them go. Not subtle, but excellent for causing chaos.

The only redeeming quality of the plants were their insidious nature. They spread quickly, and, with a little help, mutated just as fast. What might have been seen as a tool for treason became a new shield against their enemies. A shield he’d steadily tweaked over the years.

A field of consumable poisons and deadly sedatives that could also be used to incubate some of the more subtle insects. How would the guards on duty like to know that the puppeteering insects don’t come from within Renegade Valley? To have a whole system of produce peddled as insect repellent reaching far markets and actually stunting the growth of fire essence cultivation, along with its more devastating sub-types?

Truly one could always make the crack in the wall with a little effort, if they were wise enough.

A field of life and death producing copious amounts of material to study and modify. Although he hadn’t been able to get his hands on what he now knows was a prime specimen, Shimmering Steel had managed to gift him a barren plain and a desolate valley in apology. And he’d worked wonders.

He’s not sure when he became a hidden weapons instructor. He’d been working on insect and poison manipulation, and isn’t propagation just another form of such? He’d manipulated plants from flowering fungi. Surely that was worthy of merit? Was he well rewarded? Not for his works, but for the results of the works. Stunting fire cultivation? The pool of their shallow praise isn’t enough to raise his merit, nor is it substantial enough to feed his spirit.

“Instructor!” Silent Howl looks up from his notes to see one of his more eager students flushed with excitement. “... Look!”

Silent Howl activates his protective sigils, donning his protective gloves and face cover, pulls up his hood, then grabs up a tray for Short Spring Grass to place her project on. He knows what he’s capable of, but many people still under estimate him. He’s not a physical combatant, and he’s part of a Sect that specialises in remote manipulation. True, they don’t consider their magics to be tricks and sorcery, but they still look down on him for his penchant for poisons and his more delicate cultivation.

He offers a stool, nest wall embedded with nesting insect eggs, and Short Spring Grass is smart enough to don her protections before sitting down. He nods in approval. His entire classroom is made of various active insect nests, and he forces his students to practice aura suppression as part of their studies. Those who can’t help hatch his swarms. Useful lessons.

He’s looking at a very ugly wart of a melon the size of his clasped hands. He pulls out several prodding tools, keeping an eye on Short Spring Grass out of the corner of his eyes. She looks excited, but she’s always been excitable.

A bit of vine with a thinner vine looping like a handle. Firm, nearly immovable, retaining its shape, an excellent handle... There’s a light modification, a bit of twine nailed in with wooden pins on either side of an incision. He can’t feel the actual texture of the gourd, it looks fleshy, doesn’t yield, and is highly pigmented green.

It still seems like a melon or gourd of some kind.

Gently hooking the loop and tugging the “lid” free, he keeps the opening away from himself, using a flat tool to attempt to scrape the inside of the gourd. He pulls back when the tool disappears. He’d placed the tool inside and it had either eaten it or stored it. On a whim he grabs another tray, places a cloth on it to absorb any runoff, then shakes the tool out of the gourd and onto the paper. There’s no runoff.

He caps the gourd, setting it to the side, then begins running tests on his tool. Is it his tool or a reproduction made out of some deadly material. Instead of checking to see if the tool registers as metal, he checks to see if it registers as insect or toxic. Several tests later and he’s got a lightly damaged, but clean, tool.

“You’ve made a spatial storage chest from a modified honey trap that appears to have mutated into a gourd?” Silent Howl asks thoughtfully. He understands how the trap could mutate, but not how it would become a spatial storage container.

“Yes!” Short Spring Grass shrieks, excited. “I cut together the storage gland of a Green Sickle Builder with a honey trap that demonstrated expansive internal storage, and continued to propagate the mutated results until they developed a functional storage chest!” she beams, her voice high and fast.

“Very impressive,” Silent Howl murmurs, taking scrapings from the underside of the lid. He notes that Short Spring Grass starts fidgeting nervously as he takes his samples. “Anything else you’d like to tell me?”

“Sir...” Short Spring Grass falters, her energy dropping and her flush going from bright to pale.

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Silent Howl looks up at her, frowning beneath his protections before checking for elemental affinity. While there’s no guarantee that the affinity is related to the essence needed for development, he’s got a feeling that the growth of the plant required more than basic plant upkeep. The fields are rife with the corpses of imported pets, peoples, and other plants, so why is Short Spring Grass upset? He counts the markings on the floor and notes that she’s moved closer since her initial find. He makes a note to assume hostile intent when she passes the bore impression and turns back to his tests.

Scrapings with treated tools and he has a line of results and weapons. He’s not sure what the plant feeds on, but it generates Heavenly. Not much but enough that it would be considered lightly blasphemous. There are rumors that the emperor is constantly searching for pockets of Heavenly aura either as a cultivation resource or to squash any competition, and, while the rumors may be dog vomit, no one wants to risk it.

One more idle scraping before he plans to discuss his findings and he gets a positive return that the plant is anathema to his most prized species of puppet insect. To be fair the field is covered in several colonies that he’s attempting to develop, so access wouldn’t be a problem, but this feels oddly targeted. There are other breeds of insect he’s developed for various other high acting members of the sect, and some more open minded members of the clan, so why this particular species?

“Alright then, while you’ve done an admirable job on your binding, good instincts, by the way,” no way will he not give credit where credit is due.

She had supposedly found his Blissful Dungeons, which were, essentially, modified honey traps. She’d also found his more resilient and versatile transporter insects. And she’d managed to get the gourd to generate a form of Heavenly energy similar to that of the former imperial family. He’s not going to assume coincidence at this point, but he doesn’t know what the message is. Does someone know his connection to the former princess or is she sending people to him?

“First and foremost, we’ll have to find a way to change your plants essence cycle. It’s giving off Heavenly --.”

He doesn’t get much farther as Short Spring Grass’s face goes from slack and pale, to pinched and still nervous, her eyes hard as she swings wide with a prodding tool of her own. He’d pushed for his students to always carry testing kits, just in case they found something worth mentioning, and she’d taken this to heart. Endearing.

He blocks with his forearm, her wrist smacking into his limb with enough force to fracture the bone. He curses his weak constitution while simultaneously burying the treated end of one of his tools into her neck. This particular scraper was treated with Blood Harvesting larvae, an excellent way to test for hunan remains, particularly blood and blood moving organs. There were other insects that can be used for fat and bone, among other things.

He’s not particularly fast, nor particularly strong, nor particularly resilient. In fact he’s such a non-threat that the poor girl didn’t think to block. Now he’s sitting watching as the larva, just a few eggs on the end of the scraper being fed into a very stable food source, hatch and begin to break down her blood for the essence contained in her body. Her eyes dart around, she attempts to speak, but the blood to her brain is already contaminated, her brain is already contaminated. “Boiling” blood leaks from her eyes as she stammers before the seizures begin.

He doesn’t reach out to push her away as she collapses, the stool she’s on folding with her, going from a twice folded item that looks like two boards bound to a square, to a loose sheet as the nesting material absorbs her essence, becoming pliant as it accepts her, the eggs bound inside hatching as well. No, while this is going on he gathers the poisons needed to instruct the well-documented insects into behaving the way he wants them to.

They’ll avoid any pieces of flesh that have been heavily modified in comparison to the whole. This usually results in a loose collection of tiny pieces that fit together like a puzzle and reveal a tattoo or a brand if there are any. They’ll avoid her clothing, outside of special circumstances that have one poison canceling out the command poison, but that would be telling in and of itself. They should avoid any spatial storage items, which he will have to test and check for traps, and paper, which wouldn’t normally hold up to a battle, should be left unharmed as long as they consume or transmute her body fluids before she leaks.

Truly, insects and poisons were marvelous things. He’s not sure why so many people are against them. He’s done truly marvelous things with them that his constitution alone would not allow. His testing of the gourds flesh and inner tissue have contaminated it enough that he hopes the insects won’t go after it, he’d rather leave the freshly hatched swarms for further testing over losing them to a trap, but he keeps an eye out anyway.

By the time he’s finished noting down his findings from his tests the body is neatly packaged and sorted by the numerous inhabitants of his office. Flesh, fat, bone, marrow, the frothing mess that was formerly his students blood processed again into a hard jelly. True, he’d have to undress the skeleton and separated items, but they really have saved him so much work. His transporting swarm, the modified puppets he’d used to do most of the heavier lifting, have set a few scraps of what may or may not be paper off to the side for him to check at his leisure.

He cleans and resets his tools while going back through the interactions he’s had with Short Spring Grass over the year she’s been studying under him. He hadn’t always been an official instructor, just a team supervisor with a penchant for keeping calm and being able to treat his fellows when their idiocy or compliance would have gotten several people killed. There’d been a few times when it was suggested he be sent out to work his magic on farmlands or at the blockades, but, luckily, he’d proven himself to be much more valuable to keep close at hand.

And those were just the projects they knew about. The fact that Short Spring Grass had one item that implicated several of his projects --. Who was targeting him and for what? Or was she supposed to replace him? Was he not as clever as he’d thought, just more clever than the people at his level? Is he not pushing himself enough?

“Hmm...”

When’s the last time he focused inwards with the thought to better himself? He’s gained insights into modifying things outside of himself, things that anyone could do, he’d even left notes. What was he cultivating? If someone killed him and took his notes what proof would anyone have he’d done anything? He has a core, he has essence, he’s strengthened against poisons and has developed techniques to think through problems, but he’s woefully underdeveloped. Even a quick scuffle with a junior researcher has left him with broken bones.

Hells, he hasn’t even used the poisons in body strengthening techniques for fear that he’d find a way to counter them or even accidentally destroy himself when he encountered an antidote. But he could develope a counter for that as well, couldn’t he?

This will require testing. He packs away his new specimens, materials and tools, idly reading the bits and pieces of encrypted messages left on Short Spring Grass as he pulls out “paper” and “writing” implements. He’ll need specimens, tissue, bone and hair samples. Blood as well. Bile from various organs. And he’d need to develop a way to harvest them without leaving himself crippled. Extensive preparation and testing. Trial and error. He’s got work to do.