*Omnomnom*

Aaah...piiizaaaa spiiiice…fuck, this tastes nice!

In fact...why the hell does this dried mushroom-powder taste like pizza-spice? And why isn’t this thing more popular? I could see nobles killing eachother for this sort of flavor, especially in trade-wars!

When I asked Quan about it, he explained that the mushroom’s base-species itself wasn’t special, as it could also be found anywhere outside in the world, but rather it was the weird conditions of the catacombs which gave it it’s unique “flavor” and darkened coloration, as it usually grew on top of the grave-caskets and mummies of the old saints and arhats buried below, using them as “fuel” for the fungal growth.

That particular fact had made all of the traders who had ever stopped by the village and had tasted the spice to immediately reconsider their offers, as nobody wanted to buy or sell corpse-mushrooms, as the general culture around these parts considered everything that derived from humanoid dead bodies as “dirty” and “dangerous”. Of course, since the Monks never lied, they had always told the truth about the origin of the mushrooms, so none of the traders had accepted any deals about the “dangerous” fungi.

The traders were partially right, in the fact that corpses can indeed become vectors for spreading infections and diseases if not disposed-of properly, but this was not the case for the mummies in the Old Monastery, which had already become decayed and desiccated hundreds if not thousands of years ago, leaving only the bare-bones and the bandages as existing proof that someone had been buried there at a particular point in time.

Meh...silly traders...My gain, their loss.

MMM...PIZZA! *Homer Simpsonizes Inside*

I wondered if we could make any pizza for reals though…What was the recipe for that again? Pineapples and what other evil? Grasshoppers? Hehehehe...

*Clunk*Clatter*Clunk*

While I was still savoring my pizza-flavored chicken-cube dinner and taking it slow, Carmine had already “inhaled” hers a long time ago, and was now back at the anvil smashing metal. I could see her with my Qi-vision as she kept working the material from the inside-out, tossing away the internal impurities like crazy with her branch-tentacles. The floor was now getting filled with pieces of silica, unwanted chunks of carbonized stuff, and some smaller glowing-metal pieces that weren’t iron, but rather something else.

As it all looked like a decently wasteful process, I immediately called Wall-E over, retrieved a bunch of glass jars from his storage, and then told Carmine to attempt and put the “impurities” that had been separated from the main-metal inside the jars instead, for further processing.

After a few more stacks of iron bars that she had furiously “purified”, we now had a large amount of “impurities” available, which I immediately dumped onto a ceramic-plate. We then started to sift-through them in an attempt to separate the leftovers into almost-base chemical substances, but it was a daunting task. I told Carmine to try and use her Thermal Qi vision to try and differentiate between the materials, as the higher valence chemicals, aka the substances which had a larger amount of electrons in their atomic electron-cloud would “glow” more when seen with the Thermal Qi vision than the ones with a lower valence, as long as every substance was kept at the same equal room-temperature.

From this, we slowly began extracting some of the “base” metals and other “solid” materials that existed in nature, and then placing each of them in their own labeled “jars”, just like inside a grade-school chemistry lab. Of course, it was absolute chaos for now, since a lot of the “impurities” were oxides and other chemical compounds which would not “count” as a base-element, but at least we were getting SOME sort of a chemical separation done. Metals were the easiest to separate from each other by far, but when it came to the precision needed to do some proper molecular separation, only the Mother System had such a “grace” available for the moment.

This had led Carmine to another conclusion: she had too few branch-tentacles to work with, and too few of them had “specialised” tooltips at the end. Before this point in time, she had been very cautious about creating extra branch-tentacles, as she thought 3 would be enough-of-an-investment when it came to my “untested” cultivation method. But now, after she had seen how useful they truly were, she had become convinced that it was the right path, and had begged me to help her create even more of the branch-tentacles, as well as opening more of her meridians.

As it was already evening, I told her to leave the whole thing for tomorrow, and get some good night’s sleep, as she would definitely need the rest if she were to open all of her meridians in a row the next day.

The other guys left for the inn and the Alchemy shack as well, but also promised to be back tomorrow morning. Only Yi Gore stayed behind, as he kept staring at Carmine with his artificial eye while she fell asleep like some sort of a psycho stalker.

>>

Next morning, I got pulled away from my sleep by the sounds of pots and pans, as the midget was struggling to make some tea in a kettle because of his small stature, requiring him to climb up on a stool to properly reach the top of the kitchen's oven. Still, the tea turned out to be incredibly good, as Yi had somehow managed to create a heavenly mix from the brewable plants available, and it reminded me of the multi-flavored “forest fruit” tea-packs from Earth. It was also sinfully sweet from too much honey, which was quite ok in my book.

"Trina...can you help me open my meridians as well? And maybe give me a few hints for making some of those branch-tentacles?" Yi Gore suddenly asked while fiddling with his mechanical arm again.

"Sure...No problem. I should start writing down some of that cultivation stuff anyway. It’s annoying to have to repeat myself for each person. I think Quan could use the pointers too, so he’ll make for a good guinea pig before I disseminate the method to the rest of the Awakened at the Temple." I sinfully slurped from my tea-cup."I’ve been “awakening” about 10 people each day anyway, during the evening hours. Yesterday I skipped on that because we had new discoveries that ate all of my time, but I think I’m going to “open” a few more people today as well. I think I must have already done like 50 or 60 already...I’ve lost count. Those people are going to need a proper cultivation method to go with their “awakened” state as well, so I'll need to write one ASAP. Lingfeng can create more copies of the manual after it’s ready with his [Scribe] skills."

"Sure, that sounds nice, but aren’t you forgetting something?"

"Hmm? What?"

"Most of the villagers here are illiterate! How are they supposed to use your cultivation manual, if they can’t understand the written words in the first place? The Monks are all literate because they need to know how to read and write for the Sutras and the other Buddhist stuff, but the other normal folk are all as dumb as rocks, at least from the reading point of view."

"Ugh...oh shit...you’re right! I’ve been taking literacy for granted way too much! I keep forgetting that in this world, schooling is hard to come by! FUCK! We’re going to have to start some sort of schooling system! DAMNIT!...Should I start teaching them Low Common or High Common? For that fact, in what language should I write the manuals?"

"High Common, most definitely. From a literacy point of view, that’s your best pick for the moment, at least if you want for the villagers to be able to read and write SOMETHING in a decent time-frame."

Indeed, the midget was right. High Common was an Alphabetical Language unlike its counterpart, the Low Common, which was an ideogram-based language.

In truth, High Common was basically the regular Earth’s alphabet, with some minor modifications. It was labeled as “High” because most Official Documents at the Court were written in it, since it forced a lot less miss-interpretations of the written words to occur, at least in comparison to the Ideograms used in the Low Common, which could possess dozens of meanings for only a single “picture”.

The Court usually needed to know exactly how many people had been involved, how much terrain had been lost or gained, where and how things had occurred and other details like that, which would become a nightmare to depict accurately if they were to just use the Low Common for the documents. Instead, they used the Alphabet-based High Common, and it worked just fine.

Writing in this part of the world was more like a form of Cuneiform, rather than the Chinese ideogram script that you would expect from a bunch of Eastern Empires. If I had to describe it somehow, it would be “full of triangles”, as the typical strokes one would create, be it in “High” or “Low” common would get “jammed” into clay tablets with the end-tip of a square wooden stylus, leaving certain triangular depressions into the material.

Paper and papyrus were both stupidly expensive, and were usually reserved only for Court Letters or Books and Tomes, so most records like cargo manifests and transactions were simply kept on clay tablets instead.

Of course, this wasn’t Earth’s Cuneiform by any means, as I could still recognize the general shapes of the Earth's Alphabet that appeared in the words which had been written in “High Common” immediately, at least if I were some other Isekai victim that had just landed on the planet. While I would definitely not be able to understand the words themselves, I would still be able to “mumble out” the words letter by letter, until I learned them properly.

I could bet that the Mother System had intentionally designed the Languages over here for some easy-access when it came to the incoming “Players”, even if they had not picked a “translator” module like my own.

As I was musing about the Alphabets and the Languages, Carmine strolled into the room and derailed my thoughts. I had forced one of my sleeping pills upon her last night, as I knew that she would not catch a single wink if I had simply left her on her own, due to all of the new volume of information she has been assaulted with, so now she was decently groggy and disheveled, as her morning-hair was sticking in all directions and making her like some sort of a pissed-off red panda.

"Ah...You are awake! Morning, my Goddess!" Yi Gore beamed.

"M...mornin’…"*Yawn*Scritch*ScritchBeard*

"I see you have some wild hairs there, my love. Do you want me to fix them for you? I have all tools ready and available on me!" Yi Gore’s arm-attachments suddenly all sproinged out, displaying a wide variety of hair brushes, scissors, curlers and hair-sprays.

"Ugh...s...sure? Just beh careful an’ don’t pull too hard. Oi hate gettin’ mah hairs yanked out."

"I will be extra careful! I promise." Yi Gore immediately sprang into action, and then began giving Carmine what I could equate to a full-course turkish barbershop treatment, hot towels and massages included. Damn, now I wish I still had hair! Look at the midget work on that scalp section!

Just as the “barber session” was ending, the other guys walked into the Smithy building, just as they had promised.

After sharing with the new arrivals Yi Gore’s wonderful tea-blend, we finally moved onto the main “session”, which was the opening of the meridian pathways and then the forming of the extra branch-tentacles for Carmine, Yi Gore and Quan. Of course, the other guys had joined us as well, as everybody still had meridians that needed opening, or tentacles that needed forming.

During this occasion, I finally had the chance to get a look at Jin’s Fire Roots, and they confirmed my suspicion that “extra tentacles” was a “Player” feature, as he probably possessed even MORE ungrown root-tentacles than I owned on the overall.

During the opening session, my intention had been to write the entire process down by myself, but Lingfeng had taken over that role, as he had been indeed the most qualified for the job because of his [Scribe] profession and his passive skills, so now I only needed to dictate or speak out loud whatever was happening, and he would write it down for me.

My overall method needed to be modified as well, because all of the people that I had recently “awakened” would need to begin the meridian opening process starting from their Crown dantian instead of their Lower dantian, and by creating a branch-tentacle first instead of using only plain Qi in woven form. Fortunately, this made the entire process a lot simpler and also a lot safer, because piercing a meridian membrane by using a branch tentacle was a lot safer than just forcing it open with a Qi-woven “rope”. The fact that the branch tentacles could be given a specific shape also helped immensely, and Carmine together with Yi Gore had given me a lot of help with explaining how to create one of those corkscrew-tipped branch-tentacles, which was probably the best at the job, at least for opening meridians.

Quan the Monk had been silently following all of my instructions without questioning me even once, and after a couple of hours of struggling, he was now the proud owner of a corkscrew branch-tentacle that was both long and strong enough to probably open all of his meridians.

I was also not surprised at all that Yi Gore had been the fastest person to assemble a functional branch tentacle though, as the midget was rather fast on the uptake of new information, so he had managed to construct one in somewhat under an hour without me having to explain too many things to him. Of course, he had also become rather sad because he had also realised that he had a whole lot fewer remaining branch-tentacles that he could grow and modify compared to us young people, as vast sections of his spirit roots had already been used up, and were basically now just fossilized stiff branches that could not be moved anymore.

As I kept talking about the branch-tentacles, Carmine had jumped with a suggestion, and said that we should probably name the aforementioned appendages as “spirit-manipulators” instead, at least in the written manuals, because calling them branch-tentacles simply sounded stupid and perverted, even if it was somewhat true.

I wholeheartedly agreed with her suggestion, since “spirit-manipulators” did indeed sound a whole lot cooler, and would depict the whole process in a more virtuous way instead of simply making the whole thing sound like a tentacle-hetai's wet dream.

Before we started opening some meridians, there was one more issue that we had to address though. Since Yi Gore was level 49, if he were to start opening all of his leftover meridians, he would most likely hit level 50 and then get smacked by his First-Tier Heavenly-Tribulation, as going over level 50 was considered as breaking away from the shackles of mortality, and a Tribulation was necessary.

To prepare for that eventuality, I had told Carmine to quickly create an entire full-body plate-set for Yi Gore out of whatever available iron bars were still available, as it did not matter if the plate set was made out of pig-iron instead of it being made out of steel, since we only needed the damn thing for its Faraday cage properties, and not for any actual combat.

A few repurposed gear pieces and some newly-crafted plates later, we now had a fully-plated midget, ready and willing to take on the Fury of the Heavens in front of his beloved. Still, just to make sure that no accidents would occur, I had told Yi Gore to remove his cybernetic arm during the tribulation, as there was a chance for it to get damaged, or to conduct the wild currents in some improper way and then zap Yi Gore to death as a result.

Agreeing with my suggestion, Yi simply detached his mech-arm right out of his shoulder-socket, leaving only the metal ball which was the buffer between the mech-arm and Yi's flesh-and-bones exposed to the world. Damn, that thing looked freaky!

Since the tribulation was going to arrive and then attempt to smack down Yi Gore, we had been forced to move our entire group to the outsides of town, and into the middle of a barren field.

After getting bandaged some more all over his body and then getting dozed in fire-retardant alchemical substances, Yi Gore put on the plate-cage then opened his third-eye chakra, which funnily enough had been the same meridian that Lingfeng had also been struggling with, proving that it was indeed one of the more troublesome meridians. With his third-eye now opened, Yi Gore immediately found himself over the leveling cap, and into a brand new level 50.

He immediately fainted as a result, and then was left totally in our care for the proximate future. It took a couple of hours until the Tribulation clouds also arrived, but after they furiously charged up their mojo and then struck the plated-figure of the midget, very little happened. Of course, the plate section which had been struck directly by the lightning bolt now glowed with metal incandescence, but outside of that, Yi Gore had been mostly unharmed. We immediately pried the hot plates away from his body, and I also kept on tossing my healing spell on him over and over again, keeping him topped-up at 100% HP.

It took even more hours for Yi Gore to regain consciousness, but after he woke up, he became absolutely jubilant about how smoothly the entire “Ascension by Heavenly Tribulation” process had gone down. After attaching back his mechanical arm, he then began to do his silly little midget dance in place, even though he's still stank of singed flesh and ozone.

Carmine, Jin, Liliam, Xibei, Quan and even Lingfeng, who had been through the process by himself, had all been left flabbergasted as they had watched the process from far away, with Fungus being the only person that did not look even remotely surprised and kept displaying a body language that basically screamed “Of course, I expected this. All according to keikaku.”

After safely promoting Yi Gore to over level 50 and then returning to the Smithy, it was time for everybody else to start opening their own meridians. Under my guidance and close monitoring, the opening process went without a hitch. It took a while though, as everybody had found themselves getting hit by the Qi-rush every time a new meridian got opened, and they reacted in very bizarre ways, from spasming uncontrollably to even attaining orgasm.

At the end, I had joined them as well, and I had “popped” any-and-all leftover meridians that I could find inside of my body, for some minor CXP gains.

Timmy: You have earned the achievement [Cultivation Spiritual Mentor]

Description:

All of your students from now on will cultivate 5% faster and safer. All reputations that you gain with your students and their factions increased by 25%.

You may also assign a group of “Direct Disciples”, up to 20 people, who will gain 10% increased cultivation benefits instead of the 5%.

You may add or remove people from the Direct Disciples list at will, but no more than once a day.

Of course, I immediately added all of my lovely goofballs to the list, except for Will-E, which the System still considered as Fung's pet and would not allow me to put the list.

The “hardest hit” out of everybody had been Quan the Monk, as he had gone from barely-awakened to fully-opened meridian-wise, which was incredible. This couldn't even count as “jumping over a few cultivation steps” anymore, it was outright flying all over obstacles with impunity. I was actually surprised that the Mother System was allowing stuff like this to happen, as it was absolutely game-breaking. But then again, we were still in the Beta.

The poor guy has come into the Smithy building this morning as a mere mortal, but was now ready to leave as some sort of a minor superhuman, as he had been re-adjusted by the Mother System with each meridian opening, and was now stronger or better in any conceivable way from his former self. He had also leveled a bunch of times, from his former 21 to almost the end of 26, which gave me a good approximation about how much CXP a person could gain from opening their whole meridian network early in their life.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

The “boost” had been so significant, that he was now actually having problems with adjusting himself in the environment, as his brain was still functioning based on its old “benchmarks”, with values that were now obsolete. Fortunately, Quan had been a well-trained Monk, so he knew the value of patience, and was now trying to slowly re-adjust every portion of his body to the new changes while currently meditating and moving parts of himself.

Carmine had also been a hilarious spectacle, as every time she had “popped a meridian”, she had involuntarily glowed in all colors of the rainbow, making the whole room look like some 70’s disco club. Yi Gore had kept fiddling with his orange-eye every time she had opened a meridian, and I could bet my nonexistent hat he had been recording her squeaks and moans for “further study”. Pervert!

Still, Carmine had now been transformed into a REAL cultivator, at least by any Sect’s standards, and the difference seemed even more pronounced than it had been in Quan’s case. Of course, this had also led to the uncomfortable process of her having to re-adjust her entire body, but it was slowly coming along. Because of her metal-earth-fire combo-roots, her strength had been boosted by a significant amount, and she kept ripping the handles off of chairs, or squishing handprints into the tin of the drinking cups without meaning to.

This became somewhat upsetting to her, because she had always prided herself with her precision. It was why she had picked [Clockwork Engineer] as her secondary profession in the first place. But now, she was totally off-scale, and was even involuntarily trashing the Smithy building with her wild movements, so I had been forced to guide her to the anvil and then make her to carve straight lines into some Iron bars, just so she might adjust herself to her newfound strength. The first few bars had come out horribly mutilated, but with each new stroke, she diligently kept on adjusting herself power-wise, and became more and more accurate as a result.

I left her to continue on practicing, and then went to analyze the other people. None of them looked like they had been affected negatively in any way, and I was rejoicing at that fact. Having some random cultivation mishap at this current moment would have sucked bigtime! Everybody had also leveled up, and were currently grossly over-leveled compared to their actual age. If any of them were to show up at the entry-exams of any of the Sects including the “big” ones, they would most certainly wind up on top of everybody else on the listing, without any doubt.

But for what we needed to do, aka successfully face against an Ancient Evil, we were all still woefully underprepared and underleveled.

Hah...I wished I could have been able to open Will-E meridians as well. The poor golemn had been left staring at the jars of elements that we had previously “separated” for the entire duration of our meridian-opening procedures.

Actually, he had been staring at those jars a little bit TOO much. Had he discovered some of the base materials that his dwemmer plate was constructed from in there?

When I asked him about it, he pointed to a few jars, and told me that a few “trace elements” of his dwemmer plate were among those residues indeed.

When I asked him about how he “knew”, he told me that he could “see” what each type of material in the environment was made of, therefore he knew what to look for. It’s like he had a permanent “appraisal” skill activated for base materials all of the time.

When I directed him to some unprocessed impurities, he immediately proceeded to separate them in different jars at my behest, and it was amazing how fast he was able to do that. He kept the materials he needed for himself in a few jars, and then tossed everything else aside, but I began to wonder whether I could exploit him some more.

After I allowed him to “swallow” the materials that were considered “good” for himself, I watched as he simply dumped all of the metal residues down his gullet, then started whirring with a horrible grinding noise. After a couple of minutes, a small block of compacted stone got spewed out from his rear-port, and it was obvious that it had been made out of the “rejected” materials that were considered “useless” to him, like the sand and earth that had been interlaced with the metals he had eaten.

Ok, so the damn robot had a molecular separator inside of himself! Time to see if it could be abused! I immediately asked him if he would be able to “process” even other materials aside from his “favorite” ones, and then turn them into cubes like the one he had just spewed from his rear a moment ago, and he indeed confirmed that his “internal factory” could separate materials like that, but it could not alter their current chemical structure. That was enough for me at the moment, as it did not matter if I got oxides or compounds out of the separation process, as long as the substances remained homogenous across the cubes or the dust.

As a result, Will-E was now shaking continuously, and was “shitting” cubes of all sorts of materials inside some glass jars that I had laid across the Smithy’s floor.

Good, this had been an unexpected boon. The damn construct was a true blessing to have around! I wondered then if he could even be used for other purposes as well. Since his joints were able to spin at 360° angles continuously, I wondered if he could be made to function like a lathe, or a CNC milling machine. Heck, even a spinning grinder would suffice. I’d have to run this by Carmine, and see what she might need. Automation FTW!

Just as I was about to go and consult with her, I heard a knock on the Smithy’s door, and opened it only to see a bunch of people lined up on the front porch. A damn, right, I had promised that I would assist with the “awakening” of 10 more people from the village today, and it was already evening-time.

While I had still been in the process of healing my spiritual-roots, I had been allowing a small group of 10-or-so villagers to drop by every day, and get their spirit roots awakened. Of course, everything had gone smoothly until today when I ran into a bit of a problem, as I now had before me a couple of unusual villagers, both being beastmen.

One was a hybrid between a human and some sort of a cat, and I found out that he was a called a Tigon, and another one which was a mix between a human and some sort of a bug, and I found out that he was a called a Formic. Since I had no idea what to do with them at the moment, I simply told them both to return tomorrow morning at the first hour, and that I would try to awaken them the next day, as I wasn’t sure about the validity of the procedure when it came to their particular cases.

After that, I tucked all of the people that were still unsure of their own movements into a corner of the room, and I drowned them in a myriad of fluffy pillows that we had stolen from the Ming Imperials when we had looted their warehouses. I then told Lingfeng to wake me up at the first hour tomorrow morning, and also come together with those two beastmen, as I was now rather curious about them. Since he was the only person that had not been affected by the meridian opening processes because he had been already “fully opened” even before we had started, it was once again up to him to act like a nanny for the rest of us, but he did not seem to mind it at all.

>>

Next morning, I got awakened by an annoying beeping noise, as Will-E began shaking me and asking for a spirit-stone change, as he was running low on power. Apparently, that the “separation” process was rather power-costly, and he had been doing it all throughout the night, causing him to become “low” on juice.

Once he had run out of “impurities”, he had then switched to the leftover damaged or rusted gear pieces that we had recovered from the Dungeon, and he had broken them into smaller pieces while proceeding to eat them like candy. I immediately switched his Grand Spirit Stones to fully-filled ones, as he had two of them side-by-side in his “power slot”, which allowed “hot swapping” of the power sources without having to shut him down at all, which was a nice engineering gimick.

As a result of his hard work, I now had jars upon jars of diverse materials, some of which I was able to recognize like the red iron-rust powder, and some others which looked totally alien. Fortunately, Will-E was very prone to order, and had already labeled and arranged all of the jars in a logical fashion for me, even though he himself did not know the REAL name of the substances that he had been separating. The jars were basically labeled something like “C-124” or “BB-23-25”, which weren’t the actual names of the substances, but rather what his internal software-codes called the output powders.

Immediately after I changed Will-E’s stones, he resumed his material sorting duty, as we still had a crapton of rusted stuff to sift through, as all of the unusable materials recovered by all of the dungeon exploration parties were now getting dumped right here at the Smithy each day, which in turn was producing all of their gear for free, at least for now. I knew that I would have to create some sort of a trade or contribution system in the nearby future, but for now, rusted shit for decent gear worked so far, as Carmine was still leveling back her smithing.

Immediately after my morning tea, Lingfeng also walked in the building, and he had indeed brought with him the two beastmen as I had requested, which were now fidgeting very unsurely under my gaze.

Of course, I had seen people like these before, so I wasn't really that surprised about their weird outer appearance anymore. What intrigued me was what the hell were they doing out here in the East, inside what was basically a human-supremacy Kingdom that had very little tolerance for their kind, especially in this village in the boonies which had very little access to any traveling caravans.

The Tigon explained to me that he had been found by the village's Woodcutters in the woods when he was just a little cub, and that he had been raised inside of the village all of his life without being discriminated against too harshly by the local populace, as they were usually very gentle because of the mental influences that “poured down” from the Buddhist temple, as the Monks were basically very Pro-Equalitarian, and did not look upon any of the other humanoid races like they were “lesser” in any way.

The Formic, who had been wearing a Monk kasaya, told me on the other hand that he had been sent by his Hive to learn the ways of Buddhism, and try to ascertain whether any of its ideologies possessed any sort of threat against the Swarm.

He had also seemingly forgotten to return back home after finding the Dharma, even though he still sent regular updates to his siblings in the form of letters. He had also become totally intrigued by the prospect of “awakening” after he had heard about it from the other villagers, even at the risk to his own life, as very few of his kind had been known to possess magical abilities. Those were considered “royal” powers, which were usually reserved only for the Queens and the soldier-maidens that were guarding them.

I told him that I had no idea if my method of awakening could work on him, since he had a totally different anatomy from the basic human, even if he was still a bipedal creature. He had four arms, blue-green hemocyanin copper-based blood like that of crustaceans, and except for a few bits at the joints, his entire skeleton was on the outside, unlike the internal skeletons of most mammals. Of course, those changes had also been reflected in his meridian pathways, which also looked a lot different compared to those of a human being. On the other hand, his spirit-root was still present somewhere inside of his head, so I had something to work with that looked somewhat familiar.

Since the Forminc was too strange, I started the awakening process with the Tigon first, as he was closer to “normal”. While I was poking at his head, I couldn't help myself but touch his fluffy fur, and it was AMAZING. IT WAS SO FLUFFY I COULD DIE! Ah, mobile tiger-rug, where have you been all of my life! This guy was an Earth Furry’s wet dream!

I wondered what the females of his Race looked like? From what I read, the animal-like traits in Beastmen varied wildly across the spectrum, from only having a few patches of fur and some animal ears on top of the head with the rest being human, to the other side of the gene-pool, which was basically how this guy looked like, aka a full-blown were-tiger.

While I was carefully filling his Crown Dantian with White-Qi, I also kept petting him like some silly cat, and he even began involuntarily purring, which I thought was hilarious. It did not even take too long for me to get some good results, as he awakened fully after about 35% concentration. Still, I filled him to the brim with Qi just to be on the safe side, and I also abused the fluffiness sensation for a while longer.

I was now seriously considering if I could somehow rent this guy as a living body-pillow, so when I straight up asked him, he turned so red that I could even notice it through his fur, and he ran out the Smithy in embarrassment before I could even say anything else. AH NO, BODY-PILLOW SAN, DON’T GO!

"Did you just seriously proposition the Tiger-man?" Lingfeng gave me a weird look.

"WHAT! NO! I WANT HIM FOR HIS FUR! THE FLUFF! NOT FOR HIS...UGH! CATS HAVE BARBED ONES, YOU KNOW, AND I’M NOT A MASOCHIST!"

"Cats, yes. Cat-Beastmen, not so much."

"Oy! That was an anatomical detail that I did not need to know about!"

After awakening the Tigon who had possessed very few differences on the inside compared to the regular humans, as the only major anatomical discrepancies had been his tiger-like head, soft padded paws with extendable-claws which still had five digits and an opposing thumb like a normal human would have, plus a whole body full of white fur with black stripes, I was now left facing the Formic and I was feeling very unsure of myself.

Looking at the bug-man with my Qi vision, his meridians were all over the place, and were looking significantly different compared to those of a human being, even though they still performed the same basic functions when it came to Qi circulation.

He kept insisting that I should not worry about his well-being, as he was simply just another worker among the myriads of the Swarm, and he was easily “replaceable”. That self-devaluation fact had been rather disturbing, and even though I admired his selfless attitude, I did not know what to think about a species which paid so little heed to the well-being of their own individuals.

I mean, it's not like the bug-people were dumber in any way compared to the rest of the humanoid species. If anything, they were even more successful at completing goals than the other humanoid races because of their focus-driven and completely selfless mentality, as they lived and died for the good of their own Hives.

Of course, this did not apply to EVERY bug-type of the beastmen races, as some were quite selfish like the Mantids (praying-mantis people) and the Anisopteryx (dragonfly-people), but the “swarm” mentality was present in almost all of them to a certain degree, with the Formics (ant-people) and Apiforms (bee-people) being the most hive-oriented.

Actually, I was wondering if I wasn't somehow making a faux-pass here by calling the bug-person a “HE”, since from what I could remember, most ants were usually born female, and this might have been a valid fact for this person as well.

On the contrary, he assured me that HE was indeed a MALE member of his species, as the Formics kept an equal balance between males and females inside of the Swarm, unlike their insect counterparts where the males were basically just flying Sperm Banks who died immediately after copulation with the Queen.

Still, he told me that the males were lower on the “totem pole” compared to the females, as the Swarm still employed a caste system for regulating itself, and they were usually the first bodies to get assigned to either the most disgusting or the most dangerous jobs, before the females were even taken into consideration.

No wonder that the poor guy did not want to return back home! Going back to a place where the Feminazis ran the show by default after experiencing the “free life” would have been a traumatic experience for anyone indeed!

After talking some more with the bug-Monk about his Swarm, I finally got my “hands dirty” and attempted to awaken him as well. It took quite a significant amount of White-Qi, almost similar to the quantities that I had been forced to stuff into that old man a while back, before the Formic even began to feel anything. Still, after being exposed to a continuous stream of White-Qi, his spiritual-roots began to absorb it at an alarming rate, and started to visibly grow right before my very eyes like no other root had done before.

Sure, other people's roots had also displayed signs of rejuvenation and had shown visible differences from “before” and “after” being infused with the good Qi, but none to this extent. His initial spirit-root which had basically resembled a peanut or a bean, was now germinating and was spreading around its branches at incredible speeds, looking like one of those YouTube videos that recorded the growth of a plant and was being played in fast forward mode, except that his accelerated growth was happening in real-time instead.

I could barely keep up with the White-Qi demands of his spirit roots, as I kept shoving more and more of the good stuff inside of his head. He had already consumed about two entire 100% Grand spirit stones worth of White-Qi already, but he was showing no signs of stopping. This immediately piqued my curiosity, so I kept adding more and more Qi inside of him, because I indeed wanted to know what his limits were as well. It took about five more Grand spirit stones before the growth spurt stopped its visible acceleration, and the guy now literally had a whole mini-tree sticking out of his Crown Chakra, even if it was just a young sapling.

Satisfied with the results of my work, I then returned my attention back to the bug-man, only to find out that he had become literally paralysed by what I had been doing to him sometimes during the whole procedure, and he had been unable to scream in protest and tell me to stop, as he had even wet himself because of all of the new sensations that had been flooding inside of his head.

Shit, did I just break the ant? I had been focused so much on feeding his spirit roots with an adequate quantity of White-Qi, that I had forgotten to pay attention to his general state of well-being! I immediately forced a healing pill down his throat after prying apart his mandibles and then I tossed my Regen spell on top of that, but they did not seem to be doing anything, as it hadn't been any bodily damage that had been done to him, but rather something related to the mind and the soul!

Which actually made it worse, because I had no idea how to heal a damaged soul yet, outside of maybe just stitching it up and letting it heal by itself like I had done to my own. Simply because there wasn't any visible damage, it did not mean that any trauma had not occurred!

Serves me right for trying to play around with other people's lives and souls! I should have been more careful! Ack! What the hell was I supposed to do now? I immediately yelled for Carmine to come and help me with the paralysed Formic, and we laid him down in my bed after changing his clothes and the sheets which he had unwillingly soaked during my intervention.

After he had been placed down comfortably in my bed, I cradled the ant-man's head in my lap, and I began to go over his entire root-stem to check for any hidden damages or other things that might have looked wrong. Sadly, nothing screamed “defective” to me, until I accidentally touched one of his tree-branches with one of my own tentacles, and I got assaulted with an immense amount of information that made me go numb as well.

It's like all of the Formic hives all across the world were now screaming inside of my mind all at the same time, including all of the Queens which seems to be terribly pissed that someone had dared to intrude inside their secret mind-network, and were launching one mental assault after another towards the poor ant-man which was now basically paralysed by fear and did not know what to do anymore.

To him, the Queens were supreme existences that could not be defied, so he just kept on taking all of their mental assaults and admonishments without daring to retaliate even a little bit, and his mind was slowly being eroded into pieces by the Will of the Collective.

Enraged by the callousness that the Queens were displaying towards their own kind, I immediately proceeded to defend him with all of my mental abilities, as I stuffed a rather large amount of my own branch tentacles inside of his head and then I wrapped them around his young sapling of a spirit root, to create a decently strong bridge-connection between myself, the Ant-Man, and the Queens on the other side.

After that immediately flooded the connection with a bunch of memories of my own which depicted images that I thought what might be traumatising for any Ant-creature, like pouring hot liquid aluminum down the entrance hole of an entire hive, encasing all of the ants inside in metal and creating a rather gruesome sculpture as result, frying the ants alive by focusing the sun upon them with a handheld magnifying glass, ripping away their antennae and legs while still being alive under a microscope, killing the entire hive by gassing it with insecticide, pouring hot boiling water down the hive entrance to boil all of them alive, and also images of the zerg losing the StarCraft world championships to the Protoss alongside with a video cinematic which showed Tassadar destroying the Overmind by slamming his carrier-starship against the creature to kill it forever.

Surprisingly, those last few images had been the most effective, as they had confused the daylights out of all of the Queens of the Swarm, which did not know how to make heads or tails about the new information that they had seen. To them, it must have looked like some sort of battle between ancient cultivators from lost times, when the Swarm had been at the peak of its power, but had been defeated by some other immortals and reduced to its current state.

Suddenly, instead of hostile mind spikes, I was receiving screams of curiosity which demanded that I relinquish the information pertaining to that particular Fall of the Swarm which they had just witnessed, but I was having none of it. I immediately transmitted back across the connection to the Queens that if they wanted to know more, they needed to stop assaulting this particular “mind-terminal”, as he was one of their own in the first place.

Immediately after the Queens had found out that this particular “terminal” was MALE, all hell had broken loose, as the Queens began to squabble among themselves about the revelation, with the Progressive Group which advocated for gender-equality now rubbing the new discovery into the faces of the Conservative Group, as they had to just been proven correct that even the males could awaken, and were not as useless as the Conservative Group thought they were.

Of course, the Conservative Group retaliated as any group of Feminazi usually did, by threatening war against the Progressive Faction's hives, but that did not concern me anymore. I couldn't have cared less if I had just triggered some sort of an ideology war between the Formic hives, because in the end, no matter how much the Conservatives screamed or complained, the Progressive Faction was actually right and would win in the end.

What I was truly worried about, was the current mental state of the poor Ant-Man that I had been defending, who had also inadvertently witnessed the flood of information that I had forcibly sent across his newfound connection to the Hives, and was now basically hugging himself and rocking back and forth somewhere in a corner of his own mind like a traumatised little child, and I had no idea what I could do to placate him and drag him back to reality.

All I could do was to send all of the feelings of love and safety that I could muster through our branch-entangled connection, and hope that he would respond well to the stimulus.

Fortunately, he did respond positively to my mental encouragements, and finally stopped his trauma-victim behaviour, as he followed me out of his mindspace and back to reality.

After he regained consciousness though, he immediately jumped up from the bed while screaming, and retreated into a corner while looking at me like I was some sort of an ancient monster.

"W...what are you? I h...have seen things inside of your mind that I could have never have imagined! You! You're not from this world, are you? Why do you know so much about the Ancient Swarms? When the hell did that happen? AAAAARGH! AAAAAH!"

"Calm down, I'll explain everything as soon as you'll stop screaming! Enough of that, nobody is going to hurt you in any way."

"Aarghh…huff...puff...ok...ok...I'm calm...I'm calm... It's not like I just discovered some lost ancient history of the Swarm, nor did I just suddenly trigger the Third Hive-War by awakening as a MALE...Nope...everything is fine...Sunny and smiling...all dandy and roses and butterflies…huff...puff…WAAAHAaaRGAAAaaaARaGHH!!!"

"Ok...enough of that...come on, it's not all THAT bad! I think you are misinterpreting a lot of the information you have just received. Sit down, and let's talk about it!"

It took about 10 more minutes to calm the poor guy down, and five more hours continuous explanations for him to realize that all of those images of the Swarm had been just some fantasy movie-clips from another world, and had not actually been real.

On the other hand, the fact that he had indeed awakened as a MALE had not been any sort of an illusion or made-up fantasy, and that could indeed trigger some sort of an internal conflict inside of the Hives, so I had shot myself in the foot once again without even knowing it, as this added one more problem to my list of things that I needed to fix in the future.