[You might want to rethink your idea of picking carapace on this evolution,] Granin tells me.
[What! My carapace is a lifesaving, incredibly shiny part of my body! What could possibly be more important than that?]
Granin holds up both his hands.
[Whoa there. It’s beautiful and amazing, we all get that, just take a second to hear me out.]
He waits until I settle back down and get to shovelling Biomass into my face before he continues.
[I agree that your carapace is important, it’s your foremost defensive tool after all, but there are two good reasons that you should hold off during this evolution. Firstly, the options you may get at this stage of evolution are inferior to what you’ll get next time. In my opinion, your carapace and plating, upgraded to +30, could be sufficient to protect you through the third stratum. If you evolve before you attack the fourth, you’ll be able to upgrade to a much better base material.]
Something about the tone of his thought suggests he’s aware of something he hasn’t said.
[Do you happen to know what I might get if I hold off?] I ask pointedly.
[There are a few different diamond-flavoured materials you could see, but all of them are good. Living Diamond, Void Diamond, Liquid Diamond, just to name a few. All are seen mostly on the fourth stratum, but there’s a chance they’ll show up when you evolve to tier seven.]
All of those sound so awesome! Liquid Diamond? How does that even work!
[Alright,] I say, trying to hide my excitement and totally failing. [What about the other reason?]
[Your inner carapace plating. I rather love this addition and think it’s done more than you realise to keep you alive up to this point, but it can do more. The synergy between the carapace and plating isn’t what it could be. I’m suggesting that when you reset your carapace, you reset the plating at the same time. This will let you pick options that harmonise and allow you to reconfigure your mutations to line up perfectly, giving you the best possible outcome. Does that sound reasonable?]
He does make a good case.
[Alright, I’m convinced, and I’m also full. Step back a second for me, would you?]
The golgari Shaper hurriedly steps out of the way, and I back up a bit, my gaster having swollen to absurd proportions after cramming both of my stomachs full of Biomass. Geh, I feel like I’m gonna chuck. Is this what a replete feels like? I used to wonder what it was like to be one of those ants who just hung around inside a nest and allowed other ants to fill up their social stomachs with food to the point they couldn’t move. Living food storage units…
With all of this Biomass, I should have enough to at least make a serious dent in the remainder of the evolutions I need to make. Let me check what’s going on in here. According to the menu, I have seven body parts still in need of mutation, some of them more than one. Eyes, pheromone gland, neural network, my three new acid additions and the Gravity Mana Gland. I think it makes sense to start with the eyes and take them from +20 to +25. Let’s take a squiz at the options.
[I think I’m going to focus on my mutations for the moment. If possible, can I get some privacy for this?]
It’s hard to tell, but I think Granin quirks an eyebrow.
[You sure you don’t want any advice on this?]
[Ah, no. I can handle this bit. I’ll be sure to speak to you again before I evolve, don’t worry.]
He shrugs.
[Alright then, have it your way.]
After a brief argument with Torrina, in which she gives me a massive case of stink eye, he leads the Triad out of the chamber.
[Alright, team, let’s assume formation C!] I instruct my pets.
In an instant, Crinis has leapt into action, blanketing the chamber in complete darkness using her magic whilst also expanding her body to cover my frame in a sphere of inky black shadow flesh. Invidia uses his shield magic to erect opaque barriers before every doorway, blocking line of sight as well as physical entry into the chamber, whilst Tiny takes up a vigilant guard position halfway between the entrances and my body.
Like this, there’s no chance anyone will see me when I mutate. Now I can focus on the menus. Let’s do this!
13. Final Mutations, Part 2
With my privacy secured, it’s time to dive once more into the depths of the menu lists and bring back only the finest mutations. It’s time to begin where it all began: my eyeballs. Seems like a lifetime ago that I first mutated my eyes in order to improve my then-terrible vision. Even now, I’m not satisfied with my eyes, but then, my memory of what it was like to view the world as a human is more than a little fuzzy. I’ve been in ant form for months now, and already, I’ve been in five different ant bodies. It’s hard to remember exactly what my eyesight was like as a hatchling at this point, let alone remembering what it was like in my previous life.
I might have been a human for fifteen years, but recency bias is real!
Alright then, my vision is currently sitting at +20. The Heightened Perimeter Eyes have served me well during the siege. The improved clarity is a massive boon, helping me make the best of my reflexes by seeing the threats coming at me from all directions.
In hindsight, my focus has really been to try and take all the best parts of compound eyes—multi-directional vision—and combine it with the benefits of a more humanish eye setup. The end result is that I still have compound eyes, but each one of the thousands of tiny lenses that make up my eyeballs is almost as good as those within a normal eye. It’s pretty crazy to think about. That level of precision and complexity would be completely impossible for a normal creature on Earth, yet here I am on Pangera, an ant with super vision.
And there’s no need to stop now! I want sharper eyesight! Better motion tracking! In all directions at the same time! Gwehehehe!
The only way to achieve something like that is to just keep piling on the upgrades, one by one. The list of mutations in the menu is as overwhelming as ever, and the crazy options overflow. X-ray vision, firing heat blasts from the eyes… Why, though? TIME VISION? See things… after… they happened? Isn’t that just normal vision? Or is this like a peering into the past kind of thing? Seems far less useful than the future vision I get from my antennae… Weird.
I can’t even begin to imagine the sort of things that would pop up in here if I cashed in my eye mutations when I evolve. Laser eyes? Curse eyes? Goodness knows. I trawl through the seemingly endless list until I find the sorts of things I’m after: upgrades that continue to track in the direction my mutations are already going. Plenty of stuff to expand the range of the vision, another upgrade like the one I chose earlier which creates patches of sharper focus. Eventually I find something for a generic focal enhancement. With this, my eye shall become the Sharpened Perimeter Eyes +25!
Lock it in, what’s next on my list?
The Pheromone Gland! The ol’ faithful. Who would have thought that the simple mutation of the language gland would have such a far-reaching impact? Come to think of it, packing the capacity for language into one mutation is a little generous of the System, isn’t it? It’s not the sort of thing that the great bushy bearded one is known for, the stingy bugger. I wonder if this became some sort of standard mutation for more intelligent bugs down in the depths? It doesn’t teach language, not really, it just expands the range of scents the pheromone gland can produce to have sufficient gradient that language can be expressed. It does increase it a lot, though… The pheromone gland went from “danger, food, warm, cold” to “hello, guest, please be welcome. Care for some tea?” all in one mutation!