New Sili

Over the course of three more days, bringing us into my second week spent at the waterfall steppe Sili underwent several slow but steady changes. The first day was a softening of her embryo-like sac of flesh that began expanding overnight. The second morning it had already begun solidifying again. The most distinguished masses were currently their long and narrow upper body as well as several coils of thick tail.

Their back legs formed first during the second day, become long and bony before muscle began to develop from the magic proteins. After the back legs had distinguished themselves with the development of thick haunches the front legs began to form like short crocodilian shoulders. Overnight, though, they grew into long and narrow forearms with only slight muscular development

These forelimbs were somewhat raptor-like and ended in four-clawed hands with a fourth off-set appendage like a thumb.

Over the third day is when Sili's body finished its growth of mass and began developing ivory-like protrusions from some of its joints and the last few yards of its thirty-foot tail. Along its back grow a combination of spaced out keratin scales in general rectangles with low dorsal ridges of ivory along and on either side of its spine.

The last things to form were their elongated snout proportionate to their broadened head and then the skin separated to begin excreting a small amounts of an incredibly viscous slime that changed the density of the pool.

On the fourth morning, Sili was awake and walking upright on their stretched back legs around where I slept near the altar in order to wake me up. They were awake, mobile, and HUNGRY. I fed this serpentine behemoth four entire rat bodies preserved by the void.

Sili's upper body had grown to be roughly twenty-two feet in length, eight feet greater than before with two feet just in the snout. Their tale had grown tall and slender near the base like an eel's but the last two thirds thickened out before tapering down into a bony whip. With another awakening, Sili could potentially grow into something terrifying with a careful diet.

I almost wanted to keep them with me on my pilgrimage but they still had an important role to play. Eventually, though, I realized I would have to find a proper mate for HER. Curiosity got the better of me.

While monitoring Sili's growth I spent three days slow-roasting three butchered rat bodies into thick fillets and strips of jerky. Throughout this process I also crafted a new crossbow from magical wood and a high-tensile length of twisted rat sinew. Even I was proud of it.

The bow itself was a compound product of a magic maple variant and a similar hickory. The cross piece was a pliable length of tough maple while the limbs were whittled from more flexible hickory limbs and connected with a heavy binding spell. The body of the crossbow was an arm-length rifle stock with simple fittings for the lever trigger.

The maple wood was simply imbued with raw mana and set in the front center with a fingernail sized quartz stud. The stud carried its own enchantment that worked on the enhanced aspects of the imbued wood in a more concentrated fashion. The limbs also bore similar quartz studs close to their ends.

The stock bore several studs with a few different purposes. A single agate prism the length of my index finger was embedded in the underside of the 'barrel' and meant to channel the energy of three synthetic quartz studs embedded along either side of the stock behind the barrel. In the back of the stock itself underneath a soft hide wrap was another small quartz stud that augmented the imbued wood.

Overall, the limbs were four inches longer than the previous white oak bow of the last crossbow and the body was also a little longer and larger.

This crossbow was also twice the strength and range of the last to accurately cover several hundred yards with only around six inches of sway or drop. On top of this, I can dry-fire the gun to fire off bolts of either kinetic energy or attributed mana depending on circumstance. It was entirely possible to rapid-fire Sili or the serpents with a stream of healing energies after firing an exploding bolt into the distance.

Shade spent most of their time wandering the area while the serpents slept off their feasting. Somehow I had managed to sufficiently feed a couple hundred giant snakes with most of the rats that were the size of small bears. Somehow.

Around the time that the serpents began getting peckish and waking up, Sili had already spent a day wandering around the steppe and swimming to familiarize themselves with their new body. Everything was in order and everybody was almost ready to start to final campaign.

The biggest serpents were the first to awaken and over half a day on the fifth day since returning I selected the oldest and largest of both cave terror species. I had one hundred of either serpent selected and at the ready while I recharged the light golems and preyed the previous tactics worked. afterward, with Sili crocodile crawling close behind me, I lead the company of cave terrors into the waterway caverns.

Even though there were more than three times as many serpents and one giant semi-reptilian that could slide on level or declining ground, the speed of our progress was relatively the same as the last exploration. After around two hours, we arrived at the entry to the second level and I sent Shade ahead to fetch Grimm.

I did the same as the previous trip and sped ahead with kinetic pads under my feet.

Grimm met me at the end of the second floor entry tunnels and returned home in my body before reporting on everything that had taken place while on duty. There were long hours of nothing at all going on but eventually there would be brief glimpses of life and magic signatures in the distance from both species nearing the barricades. Usually it was one to three of one species at a time but sometimes either species would be seen beyond the barricade at the same time.

These scenes left behind zero bodies from either the insects or rodents despite the smells of fresh and old fluids in the still air.

Satisfied with these finds, I walk on ahead through the larger second floor cavern- or the 'foyer'- and drink a few potions before spending half of my overall mana recharging the dozen-plus stone golems. Fueled up and awaiting orders, I sent them on ahead to the tunnel where the rats came from. Their orders were quite simple, spread out ten feet apart and turn into boulders the block the tunnel.

When they eventually ran out of juice, they would just crumble into dust and fall away. However, that would not be for about a week in stationary mode. While they plugged up the rodent tunnels I was free to lead the serpents down the tunnel further down the cavern to the right from the dead-end middle.

I was finally going to make my push against the bugs and hopefully find the big boss. However, the insect tunnel was pitted with large and small empty caverns and short tunnels that lead both up and down. After three hours of riding my wisps the most interesting things I saw were bloating rats or the first left behind insect carcasses I had ever seen.

Of only a little less interest were the potential mineral and metal deposits deep in the walls. There were even more superficial agate veins in most of the tunnels. Aside from the mana that enriched these deposits there was not much value in them for the time being.

Finally. Though, my probing awareness found a space that widened out to beyond sensory feed. I had reached at least a medium sized cavern similar to those on the entry second floor. As I slowed down to let the serpents catch up and lazily hovered forward, I fed more of my attention and mana into the probe to broaden my range of picking up life and magic signatures.

Finally, I started picking up on a few small clusters of mantis signatures roughly a dozen bodies per cluster piled together like rocks.

If not for the 'spectrum' I was viewing with, I would have considered them corpses. When I was finally hovering at the end of the tunnel entering the cavern, I could see many more clusters of both larger bodies and larger numbers of smaller drones. It seemed that beyond drones were a larger and more combative class of insects that stood over five feet tall and had a second set of smaller forelimbs.

These smaller forelimbs ended in three-pronged magic chitin pincers that could probably crush mundane iron or even basic steel plating. The very middle of the cavern was a veritable farmland of experience points and materials with several hundred combined bodies in concentric rings of clustered dormant bodies. It honestly reminded me of how I found the serpents when I first showed up.

If not for the strength of the big boss that was not even present yet I would probably be siding with the insects over the serpents because of their hive mentalities. If I could dominate the queen I could breed an armor of dauntless soldiers in just as short as a few years. The most I would wait, though, was a decade of controlled breeding.

With the presence of these new drones, I would see if they had different genders for breeding purposes. Even if they all turned out to be males or eunuchs I would capture a pair for guard dogs at home and one for Gryn and his party. For now, though I had to spend a total of five percent of my wisps' overall mana suppressing sounds within the area.

The cavern was massive, old, and rarely disturbed. This did not mean that the place was otherwise empty, the ground was littered with rubble from the ever-shifting ceiling and walls. Sneaking Sili's two thousand pounds of body into the cavern took three percent alone.

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