Insects.

Insects were the solution to everything. They were small, fast, and could get into hard-to-reach places. In some cases they even could dig, fly, or both, making them the ideal candidates to unleash on the unsuspecting humans. They also had the benefit of being able to reproduce quickly which was vital not only to saturate the human plains, but I also expected them to die in droves against the humans.

Luckily, I had already collected a few insects when I had been experimenting with downtiered cilia. The majority of the insects were mundane with only their big mandibles and those smaller creepy mouth nibblers insects used to chew their food. The fact that these mundane creatures were able to compete with their more magical brethren probably said something about the state of the world, but that was a puzzle for another day.

The minority of the insects were attuned to some element or other. The most common was a posse of earth-aligned beetle-like creatures. Their exoskeleton gleamed with a gemstone-like shimmer and a closer examination of the structure revealed that their attunement simply incorporated corundum nodules into the chitin. Functionally, the enhancement increased their resilience to a frankly ridiculous degree, but the additional weight made their vestigial wings useless. Regular chitin shells were already pretty damn indestructible against most other insects which made me think that the attunement process didn’t give the insect much choice in the matter.

Other elements existed, including air, lightning, and a peculiar assortment of nature-attuned insects with way too many legs but a quick perusal showed that none of the captured insects would work for my purposes. They lacked...hunger. I wasn’t looking for an evolutionarily optimal creature. One refined over millennia to survive and thrive in its developmental niche. No. I was looking for a virus. A locust. A suicidally aggressive zerg that would eat and spread and consume even to the detriment of itself or its own kind.

Instead of hemming and hawing for too long on a suitable base to build off of, I simply grabbed an unattuned insect that looked vaguely like a locust but in reality, was more similar to a grasshopper. It was a right pain to separate it from its friends without killing it as I had to poke and prod at the other insects with long stone sticks since I would kill the little guys if I got too close. Eventually, I got it though, and I managed to get the lone grasshopper into a stone cage on its own.

Since the grasshopper wasn’t one of my minions, its soul existed to prevent any direct modifications I might want to instill in it. To remedy this, I summoned a Nothic in the roof of the floating stone box and restricted its growth to a single thin claw. The dark of the box coupled with my Nothic’s natural dexterity had the grasshopper stabbed in short order and I siphoned its soul out with the Dagger of Geas.

Let’s begin!

With its soul safe within a space unaffected by my cilia, I dove in. Cilia flooded the insect's body from head to thorax. Instantly, everything about it was known to me. From its exact dimensions to the composition and integrity of its various limbs and organs. To help my understanding, I made a dozen minor changes as I familiarized myself with its structure. I lengthened its forelegs by 20% and grew a pair of ultra-sharp talons at the ends that were perfect for tearing or hanging from ledges alike. In addition, I refined the muscle insertion points of its wings and expanded the tight cavity for more muscle to increase flight speed while maintaining the theoretical flight time by shedding weight from the armored exoskeleton since, against a human, any attack would kill anyway.

The exercise resulted in a rather ferocious insect but served to give me some practice in manipulating the slightly different insect cells.

I took a proverbial step back as I organized my thoughts. I needed a self-replicating swarming creature to flood the human plains while consuming everything in sight. In addition, the swarmling had to be able to replicate exponentially, or else I would never be able to build up the numbers to take on such a massive area. Other features such as high stats or gene diversity were secondary as I had little interest in creating a global apocalypse and it would be even better if my creation would be locked at tier 1 so that it could never be able to enter my domain and be used against me.

To make all of this would be trivial with mana. I was already proficient in creating creatures far more complex than a mere insect, but I would never be able to sustain production if I had to create every single insect. The reason for this was that while I changed the body of the insect, I didn’t change how its progeny developed. It was the same reason why a person could get a bikini wax, and their kids would still grow hair; the change wasn’t made to the eggs or sperm. The gametes.

The only viable way to create an exponential replicator was to grant it the ability to recreate itself. Therein lay the issue. To tap into the wonders of biological replication I would have to delve into reproduction and subsequently the genome.

Ahh, the genome. A bloody mess of directed randomness with little to no organization that was the bane of every living creature ever to exist. The smallest error could have huge knock-on effects as every system was interconnected in a maddening web of unnecessary dependencies.

I really didn’t want to mess with the genome without a very good reason, so to start I tried to burn a little mana to see if I could read the genome using mana. It worked...sort of. I got a complete image of the grasshopper's genome but I didn’t gain any information on what the DNA did.

Not to be deterred I tried to see if I could create a mana construct that cloned the grasshopper as it was. If I could make an automatic construct that wasn’t too expensive — or was able to replicate an arbitrary number of insects — then I would be able to craft the perfect creature without having to worry about genetics.

I wove mana into complex webs as I instilled my desire into it. Since using mana to create mass was infeasible, I made the construct siphon mass from the grasshopper and organize it to the side.

Time passed like water as my construct grew vast. I fashioned it after a photocopying machine, with thousands of individual mana strands reading the individual atoms composing the grasshopper and storing them into a rudimentary binary shift register. Once the whole structure memorized the insect, it would siphon off 10% of the mass and recreate — a smaller — clone one meter to the side. It was expensive -- hundreds of mana burned to build the monstrosity of the creation -- but I could feel my excitement building. This was going to work. This was right! I knew it in my bones.

< You cannot craft Artifacts >

My great creation wilted as my impeccable control faltered. Weave after weave dissipated into the wind as I fumbled to hold it all together in a desperate struggle. Despite my efforts, the construct vanished like sand through my fingers.

I screamed in rage, perfectly silent, and yet every creature in my domain froze for a fraction of a second as if they heard me. I turned on the notification and tore into it with my cilia, ripping it into a thousand weightless shards as my anger dissipated.

This was fine.

Everything was fine.

There were always other methods available. If mana was a no-go, then I would pull up my Lululemons like a big girl and do it the old-fashioned way.

The first step in any genetic endeavor was always understanding. The genome was just a complex language, inscrutable only due to its vast size and inaccessible nature. Luckily, I was perfectly suited to tackling such a challenge.

I focused on the insect’s body with my powerful omniscience. Cilia converged, and I pumped hundreds of mana into forming new fibers to saturate every single cell with a discrete strand. I felt more than saw the air distort from my attention. My single Nothic inside of the cage wriggled in either pain or fear as a disturbing radiation glow lit up the pitch-dark stone box the insect resided in.

I brought the entirety of the insect’s genetic information to the forefront of my mind, tangentially aware of my mana reserves dipping as I unconsciously used the mana to accelerate my cognition. Its genome was vast. A time and a half as large as the human genome for whatever reason, which meant I would have to choose another insect to build off of. I set about corralling another insect — a fruitfly of sorts this time — and once I got it into the enclosure I siphoned off its soul and dug in.

The fruitfly wasn’t nearly as ferocious, but its genome was tiny. Slightly more than 1% the size of a human’s genome and less than a percent as big as the grasshopper. This was just one of those weird things about genomes. There wasn’t a significant evolutionary pressure to keep them small, so sometimes they spiraled out of control for an inscrutable reason.

Regardless, I easily filled my working memory with the fly’s DNA and began working.

I began by just watching. Watching and recording every single genetic operation. How the cell behaved when nothing was wrong. What special changes overcame it when it became hungry. What segments of DNA were related to waste disposal.

The works.

Such an action would have been impossible without my special perception. There were many microscopes back home that were able to see cells, but none were able to witness cellular operations in real-time as I could. And so, I was witness to one of the greatest creations in the world. A tiny little cell, working its tiny little heart out. A complex machine working with killer efficiency. A driving force that had no care in the world, except for the instruction set that it followed to a T.

I watched the cells, mesmerized. My anger at [Soulbind Artifact] faded, made irrelevant by the beauty arrayed before me. Each cell was similar but subtly different, and I reveled in identifying the differences and figuring out what caused the changes. I watched and recorded. Memorizing patterns. Learning.

Then I began to poke.

What happened if I destroyed this segment of DNA? What if I mutated it? Would the cell produce more protein? Or would the entire system collapse? What if I changed the areas that controlled replication? How could I change them in precisely the right amount so that the insect would grow faster but keep the cells from turning cancerous?

It was a grand game that I lost myself in. A beautiful cycle of numbers and change. Spreadsheets and data. Action and reaction, and I was its master. Never before had I felt so powerful. Cells died by the millions, but each little death lead to knowledge. Information I could use to build upon the complex foundation of the fruit fly.

I learned.

Over hours and days, I answered the question: What if...

The fruit fly was barely recognizable by the time I deemed myself ready. Much of its mass had been lost and regained as I cannibalized other insects for mass to feed the hyperactive cells. I had moved the fly’s corpse into the room where I was storing Recover Sources. To my pleasant surprise, the gaseous liquid helped the cells recover from my harsh experiments. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise, but I was lost in the endless helices of DNA at the time.

The first thing I changed permanently in the fly was to pin the metabolic rate at redline. This increased cellular growth by 217% on average. I was as close as I dared to the diffusion limit of molecules into the cell from the bloodstream, and any faster would spell disaster. Even this modest increase alone caused massive downstream errors that I spent hours upon hours repairing, modifying, and rebuilding. Eventually, I managed to get the system stable by forcing in a genomic switch that would trigger when blood glucose levels dipped dangerously low.

The result of this was a creature that was ravenously hungry until it ran out of energy where it would revert into a state not too dissimilar to restless sleep. To test my efforts, I manually fertilized one of the fly’s eggs with a synthetic sperm and dunked the egg into the Recovery fluid.

Two hours and fourteen minutes later, a fly larva burst out of the egg and...flopped down. Lifeless. Oh, its cells were alive, and the blood-like substance in its veins carried nutrients as it should, but its mind was blank and it had no soul to speak of.

Oh? Exciting!

I was onto something, I was sure of it. To test, I repeated the experiment, except this time, returned the fly’s soul to its body just before it lay the fertilized egg. I continued to optimize the fly’s DNA as I waited, and another two hours or so later, a healthy larva burst free.

Its soul was tiny. Nearly imperceptible to one such as I. If I was being precise, the soul of the parent diminished slightly upon ‘birth’, so it wasn’t an infinite soul glitch. This also meant that my initial idea of using mana to photocopy the insect’s body would never have worked, even if [Soulbind Artifact] hadn’t butted in to ruin things.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

It was the miracle of life and I couldn’t help but cherish the young life as if it was my own. What a cute little worm!

I stabbed it with the Nothic claw and began the cycle anew.

I dub thee: Swarmling v2.

To v2, I made more radical changes. Gone was the inefficient cardiovascular and pulmonary system for a far more optimized mammalian centralized heart and lungs. The developmental time increased by 17% in the larval stage, but by doing so I increased overall cellular replication and recovery by a flat 31%. In addition, the improved nutrient circulation allowed for short bursts of energy output as high as 400% in dire circumstances.

Ha! I've invented adrenaline.

I dub thee: Swarmling v3.

Then I worked to reduce the time spent in the larval stage. There were dozens of important milestones that guaranteed the nervous system developed properly and that the organs were placed where they should be. Most pertained to the mind, and my little swarmlings would never be a rocket scientists so I scrapped them. Instead, I hardcoded the exact brain structure inside of the DNA so that each of the bugs would always have a functional brain. This was terrible from an evolutionary perspective, but I had no intention of having my swarmlings adapt over generations.

Larval stage down to 54 minutes.

I dub thee: Swarmling v4.

The chitin exoskeleton was the next optimization. A fly wasn’t fearsome, and my swarmlings were weapons of war at the end of the day. I expanded the exoskeleton until it was roughly as large as someone's nose and changed the coloring from a dark brown to a glossy black. Its mandibles gained additional muscle mass to chew up hardier substances, and the front legs gained taloned claws that grew sharp as razors. To my surprise, modifying the legs for specialized purposes like claws or mandibles was easy, but building up the infrastructure for nails that regrew over time was beyond difficult. That was fine. My swarmlings would have one pair of claws and if they break, so be it.

I dub thee: Swarmling v5.

Next the wings. They had to be fast and capable of long-distance flight. Instead of trying to recreate the wheel, I pulled up a memory of a dragonfly and attached those to the back of my swarmling. The rear muscles were supersized and I wanted to optimize its natural flight pattern to preserve energy but DNA was surprisingly fickle. If something didn’t already exist in some capacity it was difficult to jerry-rig it in without screwing something else downstream.

I dub thee: Swarmling v6.

The reproduction system was a pain this entire time, and I had no idea why I saved it for so late in the process. I was sick of manually editing an egg to fuse with another to form the fertilized zygote. Instead, I rebuilt the entire system from scratch. This took the longest of all my changes, as I had to steal examples from a dozen other species to get the exact behavior I was looking for. In the end, I settled for a strange plant-inspired system where the swarmling self-fertilized using some of the same technology of certain snail-like creatures Cortana found for me.

This resulted in a surprising reduction in the actual size of the DNA as I could forego many systems and organs that were designed to attract a mate, or fertilize external eggs. These optimizations allowed me to reduce the weight of the adult form by 2% and cut down the larval stage to 46 minutes within the Recovery fluid. How long it would take outside I didn’t know as I wasn’t willing to wait that long before creating the next variant.

Unfortunately, the rate of fertilized egg production was tied to an internal timer involved in hormone and neurotransmitter production. My initial attempts at speeding this up, left v6 a vegetable as the brain shut down and the hemolymph was flooded with lethal levels of hormones. I could theoretically create a separate biological clock to run the ovulation period off of, but the existing system was already painfully complex. Instead, I shifted one of the less useful muscles associated with locomotion to wrap around the egg sack. This way, every time the swarmling landed, it would squeeze its egg sack and ‘encourage’ an egg to pop out.

I dub thee: Swarmling v7.

And...I was done. With phase one that is.

It was ridiculous to assume that a nonmagical insectoid would have any hope of taking on a magical society. That was plain silly, so I would need to attune the swarmling to an element to remedy that. I had loads of Shadow Sources clogging up my maze and this felt like the perfect opportunity to use them.

Using a hint of mana I attached great smoky tips to each of the swamling’s four wings until I was satisfied with how it looked. In my head, I imagined my minions covering the sky in darkness In a great unstoppable wave, and to do that properly the wings would have to tile smoothly to a certain degree. For simplicity, I chose the hexagon, because hexagons are the bestagons, but also because it allowed me to very easily attach shadow to the head and thorax in an arrangement that pleased me.

Hmm, now how to code this into the DNA. I had v7 lay an egg just for the hell of it, and as expected, the progeny didn’t have shadow-enhanced wings. As I pondered, I tried all the low-hanging fruit. Enchanting the swarmling with shadow didn’t pass it on to its children, nor did steeping the eggs in shadow during their developmental stage. The closest I got was enchanting the DNA itself, but that led to an annoying consequence where most of the first generation were shadow-enhanced, but the percentage reduced with each subsequent generation. After five generations barely 5% of the progeny had any enhancement to speak of.

Hours passed as I thought about this conundrum. I noticed Gella and Kellar leave and come back several times. The human town steadily grew, as more former slaves — led by my two paladins — traversed the path I had left open into my domain. It was one person wide and followed a trigonometric curve so that no matter how far it extended, the humans who knew the pattern would be able to enter. It was a simple, yet efficient way to put a lock on my slave city. To get in, you needed to know the exact steps to take to get in.

There were also several forays into my domain by external forces — be that church or otherwise — but they were all dealt with by either my minions or my high-tier cilia making it impossible to delve for long. Gella had also assassinated a bold pair of high-level humans, but so far no ultra-strong humans had tried which was nice. It would happen eventually, so I funneled most of my mana not used for the swarmling experiment into growth so that I would have the greatest amount of warning.

The inability to create magical swarmlings was a real problem. One that might make or break this option's viability. If I was doing the math right, a single elemental attunement might increase resilience or damage by up to 300%, without even mentioning the special traits associated with it. Even the minor enhancements, such as the earth-aligned beetle, imparted a level of resilience that could make a stone cry.

In addition, I knew this world ran on counters. It wasn’t explicit, but the very fact that you could increase your maximum resistance past 75% implied you could get to 100%. And if you can get to 100% then you were immune to that damage type. It was such a broken concept that it bothered me on a visceral level. Its only saving grace was the fact that it was possible — and easy in fact — to deal damage of different types. So if your opponent had 100% physical damage resistance, you could find a weapon that either had physical damage penetration or dealt fire damage to bypass their resistances.

The worst thing I could imagine happening to my swarmlings was some archmage in the city summoning a great storm of lightning that would zap my entire swarm. If all my efforts died like that I would give up from sheer embarrassment.

I also couldn’t increase the level of my swarmlings until such area attacks wouldn’t affect them. The resource cost for such an endeavor was far beyond my capacity.

Perhaps...hmm. Perhaps I was too limited in my thinking. Up until now, I had assumed that the only way to pass information on to the next generation was through DNA. It worked, obviously, but it was inherently physical. That wasn’t a bad thing, but it was limiting. What I wanted was some way to attach more than mere physical characteristics to the swarmlings. Except what else did the parent swarmling pass on to their progeny?

Oh.

I’m an idiot.

I re-watched the process of v7 laying an egg and I witnessed a tiny fragment of v7’s soul pass on. It was obvious in retrospect, but I reveled in the discovery. Parents passed a piece of their soul to their children in this world. Poetic really, and made me want to dissect a noble to see what epic skills they inherited from their grandparents.

Back to the topic at hand, if I wanted to do this right, I needed two things. One, the swarmling’s soul needed to be attuned, and two I needed to reinforce its soul to be able to support a huge number of progeny. Excited with how close I was to a perfect war machine, I zoomed my attention to my Nothic that housed v7’s soul.

I hesitated.

The soul was...inscrutable. I had never seen it. Every time it had come up, it was always there...but not. Just out of my vision, yet so tantalizingly close. Oh sure, I could see mana just fine. It was everywhere and oozed out of the soul like mud from a swamp, but the soul itself? It was beyond me.

What I needed was a skill to allow me to see souls, but I had yet to receive something like that. Perhaps I could find an artifact in the world that would allow me to do that. Except, the chances of that were astronomically low. Even if I could get Gella to find an artifact and steal it, the chances that it was exactly what I needed were slim to none.

It was annoying, but I would have to do this blind.

I took a shadow source and — with no small amount of trepidation — shoved it into where I knew the swarmling’s soul was. The source resisted, and I forced it to liquefy, but even then it wouldn’t merge. I bore down on it, but it was like trying to grab air. It was as if I was asking it to do something it was entirely incapable of. This wasn’t changing its state of matter; a mere alteration in the rate of molecular movement. No this was something more. Something magical.

I resorted to mana, burning through my pool to get the source to move to the soul dimension, and with surprising ease, it did.

Shocked, I froze as the source vanished into the soul. The Dagger of Geas vibrated briefly as it accepted the sphere, except, I immediately could tell that something was wrong. The soul was leaking shadow stuff. Not much and it didn’t seem to harm the soul, but slowly the Shadow Source was getting expelled from whatever purgatory I had shoved it into.

Twenty-one minutes later the last of the shadow oozed out of the soul and I was left scratching my bum. For an inexplicable reason, the shadow source stopped being a source when I phased it through. That was weird, and completely out of left field. Like, why does something that produces infinite shadow stuff in the real world suddenly...stop?

I needed to be able to see what was happening to properly diagnose what went wrong, and in lieu of a proper solution, I could temporarily jerry-rig something. I channeled my mana into a mana message, except this time I made it larger. I pulled a whole hundred points before I stopped. The construct pulsed, visible in the real world as a terrible heat haze in the air. With practiced ease, I instilled upon it my will.

Go into the soul. Attach the source. Dissipate.

The construct thrummed a gentle melody, accepting the shadow source I placed inside of it.

Go into the soul. Attach the source. Dissipate.

A thread of mana was all it took to phase the whole assembly into the swarmling’s soul and...did it work?

I quickly returned the swarmling’s soul to its body and studied it. It...worked? Sort of. The swarmling didn’t have shadow wings like I wanted, nor did it ooze shadow. Instead, it had a tiny affinity for shadow. Its carapace was just a touch darker, and its blood was just a hair blacker. Its movements were also more fluid as if emulating the silky darkness it had attuned to. To my relief, v7’s progeny retained 99.3% of v7’s attunement which meant the half-life of this craft was 100 generations. More than enough for what I needed.

It was strange, but I figured it worked well enough that I should attempt to invest more into it. I pulled v7’s soul back out and recreated the mana construct. This time, I gave it 10 shadow sources and upped the mana.

100 mana passed in an instant.

500 mana.

1000.

By 2000 mana the construct was radiating out energy that washed over my cilia like waves through kelp.

By 3000, I noticed the humans grow restless more than a mile away. They shifted in their sleep and clutched their chest and heads and joints. Complaining of aches and bone-deep exhaustion that seemed to have come out of nowhere.

By 4000, some of the humans were vomiting inexplicably, and their veins bulged a stark blue against their pale skin.

That would do.

Construct and sources phased out of my perception and into the soul. My Nothic containing the soul stiffened, and I heard a sharp crack. I whirled on the source and froze as a huge crack extended down the Dagger's blade. I reached out and grabbed the artifact, pushing it together and preventing the crack from growing, and it bucked and shuddered in my grip.

Seconds passed, and the vibrations eased.

Oops. I may have overdone that. The humans’ distress should have been an indicator, but the Dagger still brought up the same interface it always did so no harm no foul.

Swarmling soul went back into the body and...wow.

I marveled as the Shadow Swarmling pulsed its wings. Black tendrils of shadow flowed off it like waves, leaving dark pools behind on the edges of its stone box. It leapt at the failed experiments littering the ground, phasing through the air like a wraith and consuming them in seconds. It dashed around the box. Violent and angry as it twitched in search of more food. When it couldn’t find any, it started on the walls, turning into liquid darkness in a vain attempt at sneaking through a crack.

Minutes passed as I examined it from afar. I dared not get too close in case I killed the soul I worked so hard to make, but I could feel its power from a distance. It was still tier one, but at the pinnacle or even slightly beyond — however that worked. Weak in the grand scheme of things, but I had never designed it to be strong alone.

Eventually the swarmling tired. It fell into a clumsy hibernation as its energy reserves burned out, and I gently had Cortana move it to my outskirts.

All this time I had been expanding my borders, but I hadn’t bothered capturing more than a couple of feet off the ground. It was the bare minimum my Eyelit Effigies needed to retain a connection to me and boosted my efficiency. As expected, all the plant life in the area had grown rampant due to [Eternal Spring], making their upper canopy extend beyond my domain. A vast volume of leaves unprotected by my draining cilia.

Cortana gently set the Shadow Swarmling on a particularly succulent leaf and I attached a Recovery Source to its back. It laboriously opened its mandibles and took a timid bite. The first mouthful entered its mouth, and the magic of [Eternal Spring] healed the leaf. The swarmling took another bite. Larger this time and it swallowed faster too. In real-time, I saw it awaken as it processed the plant matter to fuel its coming rampage.

Then it went to town. The leaf it was on vanished like water as the swarmling voraciously ripped it up. It paused, chewing maniacally as the plant it was on healed before its compound eyes. It swallowed and ate the leaf again.

And again.

And then it lay 4 beautifully pitch black eggs.

An hour later. Five figures of shadow and smoke lay another 20 eggs.

Five hours later, the canopy of my forest was covered in 1,300 eggs that glittered maliciously up at the night sky.

By the time the sun bashfully peeked over the horizon, there was not a single surface not covered in chewing and biting insects.