There was a limit to how much special techniques and enhanced mental processing could allow a person to pick up entirely new information. Anton was able to pick up human languages that branched off relatively quickly, but even on Gnadus it had taken him months. To fully grasp the meerkat’s language he thought it might take him a year. But given his progress after a week, perhaps he might be able to converse about simple basics after a full month. He was already far too late to pretend to be a native speaker, and he might be a bit too tall to fool any of them.

But Anton couldn’t spend all his time with them. So while Three Squeaks was busy during the day, Anton was now exploring the surrounding area. As long as he didn’t get more than a thousand kilometers away, his ability to respond to trouble wouldn't be diminished in the slightest. And against anything at the level the meerkats were dealing with, he could honestly go nearly anywhere on the entire planet, though his senses would have to loop around outside the atmosphere at a certain point.

Having confirmed meerkats, warthogs, and eagles having some level of greater intelligence- including communication with each other- Anton suspected it was more than just those. He began picking out all sorts of behaviors in the surrounding area, and he was beginning to identify that a significant fraction of the beasts seemed to have proper sapience. Significant as such things went, at least. Having previously only seen Paradise, void ants, Fuzz, and to some extent the phoenixes of the Sylanis cluster, three more was already a lot.

Even the others of Paradise’s species didn’t have an ascended intelligence, at most being clever beasts driven by instincts. But there were some important differences.

Fuzz was the first of his kind, but Anton heard that with his mate in the upper realms they produced true offspring that could think much like a human. Paradise had no offspring, but Anton doubted there would be a guarantee of that if the other partner was not the same. The phoenixes had been on the lower end of sapience, though some of that was likely suppression by the Phoenix Sect so that they would not grow difficult to command. Their lifespans were long and they were slow to develop, so Anton hadn’t seen much else from them.

The void ants seemed to be the oddity. All of them were intelligent as far as insects were concerned, but the vast majority of them didn’t have individuality or consciousness. Not until they grew powerful enough. On the other end were the meerkats, where all of the members of the colony seemed capable of understanding, even if they had no discernible natural energy.

All of this together brought Anton to the point he was staring at a twig. On that twig were leaves, and on both twig and leaves were a marching group of ants. Largish ants that seemed like their fangs had some sort of venom, but just ants. They found food, brought it to the colony, and fulfilled their roles in a boring manner.

It was the twig and leaves that Anton was interested in. Not because he was expecting plants to gain an ascended intelligence on this planet as well- even the Grandfather Willow wasn’t at that level to Anton’s understanding. No, it was simply because… neither twig nor leaf was as it seemed.

The line of ants brought them to a beetle, and then back along their same route through the low bush. It was a small beetle such that a small number of them could carry it together, as well as various other bits of food they found along the way. And when the last of them stepped down to the ground, the bush followed. Or at least, a half dozen parts of it. One stick bug, and a handful of leaf bugs.

Such creatures were normally herbivorous to Anton’s understanding, but that didn’t stop them from following the ants back to their mound and then beginning to pick them off. Anton wondered at first if it was because the ants were competition for the others’ favorite leaves, but then he saw that they ate some of the ants and the beetle as well. To break through the beetle’s shell with small mouths, they used a bit of natural energy. And thus the very small amounts of natural energy inside the smaller insects made its way into the stick and leaf brethren.

Anton stepped closer, but any time they got a whiff of his natural energy they froze and tried to appear dead. And not just dead, but completely devoid of natural energy. Unappetizing to anything that could actually damage them, Anton figured.

This time he’d had enough of simply observing, and decided to actually approach them. He picked up the leaf insects and the larger stick bug, laying them on his flat palm. “I don’t suppose you happen to speak?” he muttered quietly, not wanting to disturb them with too much sound pressure. Of course he knew that if they did have language, it was probably related to their body movement or very low level sounds.

Anton watched the insects carefully turn, looking each other in the eyes. Or something like that, at least, since they were one of the sorts with compound eyes. Perhaps they couldn’t make him out as one distinct thing. But they could certainly sense his natural energy, restrained as it was.

The creatures did a very good job of sitting still. Ultimately, with no response Anton just put them back down, grabbing a few leaves from further away to pay them back for their time and stress.

He shook his head. This variety would take longer to communicate with. Time to go see what the meerkats were up to.

-----

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Three Squeaks spun around with joy as he not only created a spirit bow and fired a spirit arrow, but actually hit his target. The target did happen to be several times his size, and not all that far away, but he was actually making progress. “Success!” That was at least close to the meaning of the sounds he was making.

“Good,” Anton hoped he was replicating relevant sounds. He was still uncertain how much overlap in understanding there was with the eagles and warthogs, so he had to limit himself to synthesized chittering and the like. Warthog sounds would be easier, though.

“Fire training!” Three Squeaks demanded.

Anton nodded. “Okay. Remember caution.”

He picked up Three Squeaks, carrying him down next to the nearest river- an inconvenient walk for a creature so small, but a short trip for Anton even if he didn’t make use of his true speed. They had begun training with fire and its relation to the sun, as Three Squeaks had shown great interest after he saw Anton cooking something. It had taken Anton some effort to convey the danger inherent before he would start teaching, but his little disciple had shown proper respect for all things dangerous- be they arrows or flame.

Three Squeaks barely even showed off for his friends. He also seemed to be trying to convince others to learn from Anton, but they were still hesitant. Anton didn’t mind letting them make their own decisions on that.

Down by the river, Anton had Three Squeaks create a simple ball of fire, with the water being convenient in case he failed to properly insulate himself. Fire cultivators would always get used to it eventually, but Three Squeaks was still a novice in intentional cultivation. But he’d managed to complete the first full body tempering- which mostly involved retreading the same path the meerkats cultivated naturally- and Anton was now trying to figure out how to explain the choice involved with the second star to him. Ultimately he settled for a slightly gruesome but practical demonstration, separating out the parts of a dead rat. One that Anton had been quite sure that lacked sapience, of course. The main part that Anton couldn’t physically show were meridians, which were only half physical. And he didn’t think he got across the message about how tempering the head and brain would help with thinking.

Or maybe he did, because Three Squeaks had chosen that first. That had forced Anton to come up with a way to demonstrate to Three Squeaks, and come up with ways to exercise his mind to speed the process. It wasn’t just about flooding the head with natural energy. The traditional things were reading and puzzles, but reading was not possible. He didn’t know if the meerkats could read, but he certainly hadn’t seen any writing of theirs even in their dens. So it was either so obscured he couldn’t recognize it or they didn’t have any. As for puzzles, most of them were meant for humans who already understood certain concepts.

Ultimately, Three Squeaks got baby toys. And rather than having difficulty understanding that he had to fit square pegs in square holes and ‘star’ shaped ones in the same hole, he had greater difficulty moving the carved chunks of wood with his paws. Which did give him good practice using his natural energy to help lift and maneuver, so that was an indirect win. They moved back and forth between that, archery, sun observation, and fire practice.

Three Squeaks looked at the ball of fire in front of him, and dunked it into the water. He watched steam rise, and his power fade. Then he did it again. And then he jumped into the water and tried to create fire inside the water. Three Squeaks probably thought he just wasted his energy for his last attempt, which was basically true, but ultimately he did heat the flowing water a little bit as it passed by. Just barely enough to notice.

Then it was time for him to go home, and Anton carried Three Squeaks to just outside meerkat territory. He didn’t want to barge into their space.

Since the attack by the eagles and warthogs, there hadn’t been any further incidents. Not with those, at least. There had been a few mundane snakes, but the guards were prepared for them and swiftly defeated them.

-----

Anton wondered if he had a problem. Then he rationalized that what he was doing was a solution. And ultimately, it didn’t matter what his mind was doing when his body automatically went through the motions of planting.

His small field was on the far side of the hill, surrounded by a little fence to keep out stompy warthogs and the like. Planted there were a number of plants that grew well with natural energy. He wasn’t quite certain if they would grow with the red sun above, though its intensity should be within tolerance given the distance. It was a good star, even if its ego was a bit inflated and it was puffed up.

The plants were to feed himself, Anton said. He had to work on himself, after all. But of course inevitably some of it would go to his newest disciple, and he’d want to teach the meerkats to manage fields themselves. They could manage the important parts just fine, and the local area rained sufficiently that they could get by with natural water.

And Anton was already committing to improving this planet long term. Even though he’d been there for a month. And even though he wasn’t completely certain that it would be a good idea to interfere with a planet of beasts developing sapience by teaching them to cultivate intentionally.

On the other hand, it was better to do that than have their best method of growth to be eating others with cultivation. The only problem was that doing both was probably even faster than individually, so if they were willing to meditate on insights and consume others things would be quite different.

In other words, Anton was going to have to teach beasts why it was immortal to eat thinking creatures, and he couldn’t use his traditional fallback of transmitted diseases. Or at least it wasn’t quite as relevant between different species, though there were likely some shared diseases or parasites. But before he could truly do any of that, he needed to be able to talk.

He wondered what people would say- or might have already said- in response to his messages about a variety of thinking beasts. He would find out soon, as the messages returned to him.