The ant legion

The reason Aman had chosen ants as his familiar was simple.

They were already colonial creatures. They already had a strictly hierarchical society with distinct class division.

As such, they along with bees were the perfect organisms to begin learning the art of heavenly communion with.

And compared to bees, ants were a lot easier to find and introducing nano-photons within them was as simple as feeding them a bit of blood.

Try feeding bees blood and see how well you do.

In fact, Aman had found an anthill in one corner of the lawn in front of their house, hidden beneath the unkempt weeds.

So, he had a readymade source for his experimental material.

The act of using familiars has been a large part of fantasy literature whether eastern or western.

In western fantasy, mages, wizards and witches were said to have familiars like cats, toads, owls and rats.

There was a special class of mages known as druids whose powers solely dealt with communicating and controlling wild animals.

In eastern fantasy, there are mentions of contracted beasts and guardian beasts.

In fact, the method of binding either familiars or contracted beasts more often than not involved some sort of blood ritual, much like the one Aman had performed.

Who knows how much truth is hidden in these myths and fantasies?

That is what a large number of historians and mythical scientists are trying to uncover.

After an entire day of trial and error, he had finally managed to connect with one ant.

Right now, it was the morning of the next day, Sunday.

He had gotten up uncharacteristically early and trudged to the roof of their house.

Who needed an alarm when they had an AI in their head.

Yawning grumpily, he walked out onto the rooftop, watching the horizon obscured by the concrete jungle that was the cityscape.

Their house was only two stories tall and very little of the sky could be seen through the blockade of the towering skyscrapers that surrounded them.

There was still time for dawn to arrive and the sky was coloured a light purple by the sunlight that leaked from the horizon.

Taking a deep breath, Aman joined his palms in salutation in front of his chest and stood straight with feet shoulder width apart, facing the east.

Closing his eyes and activating his soul sight, he noticed his soul flowing languorously throughout his body.

In this pose, it seemed to stagnate a bit at the base of his spine before flowing on.

That was the position of his root chakra.

Concentrating, he made the speed of the soul's flow faster and faster until his soul began to automatically form a swirling vortex around his root chakra, growing denser the faster he made his soul flow.

He held the pose until the first rays of the rising sun leaked through the maze of buildings and fell on his face, tinting it a bright red.

Raising his joined palms above his head, he bent back, causing the flow of his soul to change.

This time, the vortex formed in the position of his sacral chakra, at the position where his spine bent when he leaned back.

Then he bent forward to touch his toes.

Then, posed with one foot forward and one foot fully stretched back with his hands touching the ground on both sides of the forward foot while his chest touched its knee. The half horse position.

Next, he stretched even the forward foot back, getting into a push-up position.

Bending forward, he let his forehead, elbows and knees touch the ground with his hips raised.

Sliding forward, he let his thighs touch the ground and arched his back.

Sliding back with his palms still on the ground, he raised his hips again and lowered his head till it was in line with his arms, finally leaving him in an inverted v position. Like a mountain.

Then he was back to the half horse position.

From there, he transitioned to a position of touching his toes, then straightened up and bent his body back with his joined palms raised above his head.

Finally, he was back to his starting position with his palms joined.

During each transition of posture, known as 'asanas' a different chakra was stimulated.

This entire set of exercises was known as the surya namaskar and was the most basic of yogic postures.

Surya meant sun in Sanskrit while namaskar referred to saluting someone with palms joined.

Thus, the set of exercises were originally a form of solar worship where one saluted the rising sun.

Breathing out a lungful of impure air, Aman relaxed.

He felt totally refreshed and inspecting his soul, he felt that it was a bit brighter than before.

Nama confirmed his suspicions.

[It seems that there is a slight improvement in the condition of your soul after practicing yoga. Let alone, even if there wasn't, it would be worth your time and effort simply because of the increase in cultivation speed upon performing the exercises in tandem with soul manipulation.]

He continued, [Now that our soul is at its peak condition, let's try controlling some ants again.]

Eager to try, Aman walked over to the glass jar with a perforated lid that he had brought from downstairs.

Closing his eyes, he focused on his Heaven chakra.

This time it was much smoother and soon, he could feel the tiny clusters of nano-photons that were his freshly ingested blood cells within the ants.

Focusing on one cluster, he tried to impose his will upon it.

Suddenly, his senses seemed to expand and it seemed like he was touching an alien consciousness.

It was an extremely rudimentary consciousness that seemed to think in terms of unitary actions like start, stop, bite, eat, return home.

It had no concept of past, present and future and hence it had almost nothing in terms of memory.

It was almost like a machine programmed to perform a particular task and all the previous instructions were modules of its programming.

The first time Aman had felt it, he had been so creeped out that he had lost his connection with it.

But this time he was prepared and now, he wanted to try and command it.

He tried to mimic the activity of the ant's soul when it was performing the actions and force its soul to behave that way with the nano-photons embedded within it.

It was too difficult. The main problem was that the nano-photons were too few to control the whole soul.

Now he understood what Nama meant when he said that the degree of control was dependent on the degree of integration of his soul with theirs.

But how was he to integrate more of his soul into them?

It was not like he could walk up to a hospital and say: "Hey there can you use your Gene Fuser to put my genes into this ant?"

And even if he could… it wouldn't be worth it.

Thinking hard, he came up with a solution the moment Nama spoke up.

[You don't have to control their whole soul, you can just imitate the stimuli they receive from the pheromones they emit. That is what makes them function.]

Ants emit a cocktail of chemicals known as pheromones… basically, they communicate with smells.

When they pick up a certain pheromone, they treat it as an instruction of what to do.

Ever wondered how ants find their way back to their nest? Pheromones are how.

When an ant finds food, they release a pheromone that says "food here" and other ants can follow it to there and as they walk, they keep releasing a trailing pheromone which they can retrace to find their way back to their nest.

Even, as more and more ants reach the food and make their way back, the path to it gets optimized as more ants chose to use the shortest path back, hence, making the concentration of pheromones on that path the most.

After observing the changes in the ant's soul and its reactions to the various pheromones, Aman finally had enough idea to attempt again.

This time, the nano-photons acted like a trigger and the ant itself did most of the work of moving.

It was like the difference between giving a machine commands versus giving every component of the machine its own command.

The burden on him reduced drastically.

Aman also found that this way, he could give several ants the same commands with the same effort.

He threw himself into his practice, only stopping to meditate to alleviate his fatigue or have his lunch and visit the washroom.

By the end of the day, he had dark circles around his eyes and his head hurt from excessive thinking but his eyes were bright.

They were filled with confidence and anticipation for the next day.

The setting sun cast a long shadow as he left the roof.

If someone were to take a closer glance at the shadow, they would see it filled with neat rows of ants arranged in rectangular formations.

His ant legion.