Percy’s heart thrummed wildly as the Violet bug leaned forward, opening her mandibles above a shallow impression on the uneven floor.

  The sooner he succeeded at upgrading his elixir recipe, the sooner he’d be able to double his cleansing speed, halving the time to his next natural advancement. Ideally, he would have loved to do this the moment he’d learned about the miraculous resource, but the hive’s rulers hadn’t had any spare royal jelly for him until recently.

  Unlike Machaon, Percy had no intention of accelerating his own growth at the creatures’ detriment, so he’d patiently waited for the Queen and her daughter’s situation to stabilize before requesting their assistance.

  A narrow rivulet of thick, amber fluid flowed out of the wasp’s cavernous mouth, trickling down the jagged edges of her mandibles to drip into the small hole. The pitiful display was a little anticlimactic, but it couldn’t be helped.

  The nectar glands of the Starry Wasps only tripled in capacity with every advancement, despite the creatures’ overall volume increasing by a factor of twenty-seven, making the organs disproportionately small at the higher grades.

  It was unavoidable, because generating enough excess beast mana got harder with every promotion, meaning that the creatures’ glands would have been useless if they’d scaled proportionally to their frames.

  ‘This is probably the same reason why mana cores store denser mana but don’t grow any larger, no matter how massive the beasts become,’ he realized.

  The only exception to that rule might exist at the opposite end of the spectrum, where an animal was so small that merely having a Brown core wouldn’t cut it – they had to have a smaller organ too for it to fit in their body.

  Focusing back on the Queen’s secretion, Percy noted that the substance didn’t look that different from regular nectar – besides its markedly higher viscidity, more pronounced colour, and greater uniformity.

  Examining it with his mutated eyes, he noticed a lack of impurities or grains in its texture – probably the very property that made it twice as effective at core cleansing as its cheaper variant.

  ‘Hopefully, it’ll help with brewing too,’ he thought, rubbing his hands with anticipation.

  The Queen was done a couple of breaths later, having poured a respectable amount of royal jelly into the makeshift basin. In the past, she hadn’t been able to produce much even for herself – let alone anyone else – as she’d been forced to keep her body on the verge of starvation, to ensure that she never advanced to White accidentally. This was no longer necessary, since she had found a few ways to limit her stamina consumption should she ever evolve.

  Granted, many of those methods could still use some work. Her second core was several grades weaker than her first one, so its contribution was negligible for the time being, even after taking her multifaceted boosting art into account. However, according to her estimates – that she had shared with Percy – she was going to greatly close the gap by the time she turned into Remior’s first Starry Empress.

  More importantly, Hibernation already allowed her to greatly slow down the flow of beast mana in her body, vastly decreasing her expenditure. Percy knew that it wasn’t the most pleasant feeling to always keep that particular spell active, as it left the creatures perpetually tired, but that was ultimately a small price to pay to reduce the strain on their reserves.

  ‘I’m sorry, Percy,’ Nephthys’s voice echoed in his soul. ‘I can spare some royal jelly too, but its quantity would be laughable compared to hers.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ he replied, shaking his head. ‘For now, you should prioritize your own development. I’m sure you’ll surpass her in no time.’

  Technically, the reincarnated goddess was already producing jelly more efficiently than her mother, since her second core was just a single grade lower than the other one. She was more proficient with Hibernation too, probably due to her experience as a former deity and her Divine Spark mutation constantly filling her with inspiration.

  Her composite affinity would give her three additional mana networks to work with as soon as she was done clearing and tempering them, allowing her to easily upgrade the spell into a very potent version of Regulation. After mastering the Dance and unlocking the next set of mutations, she would probably end up with Consumption or something on par with Micky’s Symbel of the Savage Gods.

  However, her current output was still low as a flat quantity.

  Percy removed his palm from the Queen’s foreleg, walking to the tiny magical puddle and kneeling by its edge. The Violet creature helpfully moved her limb closer to him, gently placing the colossal appendage by his side in case he needed to talk to her again.

  Dipping his finger in the jelly, he stored all of it in his spatial seal, neatly separating it into multiple empty vials. This was the quickest way to measure exactly how much the oversized monarch had gifted him.

  ‘Twelve hundred and fifteen drops, or just over twelve doses…’

  He frowned. Truth be told, this wasn’t very surprising – it was precisely how much he would have expected from a Violet wasp after considering that the capacity of their glands tripled with every grade. Unfortunately, twelve doses of unprocessed ingredients weren’t even remotely sufficient for their current needs.

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  The good news was that the creatures could produce more than a single refill per day if they volunteered it – as opposed to having it looted from their remains by the Guild’s hunters.

  Percy had asked the Queen about this months ago, wondering why her kind hadn’t formed a more peaceful collaboration with humanity. The Violet bug had explained that sending a fraction of her descendants to their deaths every single day was her primary way of culling her weaker subordinates to maintain the quality of the hive’s members.

  As for gathering the relatively small amounts of ambient mana leaking out of the mushrooms or providing the alchemists with nectar – those were just fortunate side-effects. Thanks to Percy’s mushrooms offering an alternative use for the dead insects, as well as his own function as the connective tissue between the two species, they hoped to greatly change the dynamics of the Fungal Spire for the better.

  Reestablishing his link to the creature, he asked, ‘how much do you think you can generate?’

  The Queen appeared to consider his question for a few seconds. ‘It won’t be pleasant, but I think I can manage enough jelly to fill up my gland one-and-a-half times pretty consistently, without exhausting myself to death.’

  Percy nodded, satisfied with her response. According to her, the wasps atop the giant mushrooms could only manage about twenty to thirty percent more nectar than their glands could naturally contain, depending on the level they were grazing on. Ambient mana was apparently gushing out more aggressively near the top of the Fungal Spire, before slowly drifting down to lower altitudes. This was why the strongest wasps frequented the higher levels.

  All of that paled in comparison to the mana density in the very depths of the hive, where the creatures could potentially produce about a hundred and forty percent their capacity per day. Thanks to Hibernation, the Queen could manage a little more than that. Once Nephthys fully mastered her abilities and caught up to her mother’s grade, she should easily reach two hundred percent or more, and the raw quantity would continue to grow as she advanced to White or Clear.

  Percy had no idea what exactly would happen to his familiar’s body should she ever attain divinity again, but he guessed that she would produce a lot of royal jelly.

  ‘There’s something I never quite understood,’ Percy said, thinking back to his days of hunting Workers and Soldiers atop the mushrooms.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Every gland I ever harvested was full of nectar. Shouldn’t there be some variance? After all, I’m sure I would have caught a few of the bugs at a bad moment – before they had a chance to fill their organs up.’

  The Violet creature shook her oversized head. ‘This is indeed the case, but to understand why that happens, you need to learn more about our kind. We store beast mana in three separate ways: inside our cores, scattered throughout our bodies, and inside the glands. The first two methods aren’t unique to our species – they are shared between every beast I know of.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So, our glands have two functions. Increasing our capacity slightly is merely the lesser one. Their primary feature is allowing us to freely convert beast mana to a stable variant that can be expelled from our bodies and stashed externally: nectar.’

  Percy knew all of that already, though his eyes still widened as he realized what the Queen was trying to tell him. When a regular beast died, the mana in its core and channels swiftly dissipated. In the Wasps’ case, it had a better outlet.

  ‘Does all the mana in your body rush to your gland when you die, flooding it with nectar?’

  ‘Exactly,’ the Violet bug confirmed. ‘Some is still wasted, but this ensures that your kind never ends up empty-handed.’

  ‘I see. Well, eighteen hundred drops a day will certainly help, though we’re still a few doses short,’ Percy said, shifting his attention back to the matter at hand.

  When he normally brewed Aurora Dew, he started with regular elixirs as his base ingredient, undergoing two alchemic steps to bond the cyan powder and deattune the product. Unfortunately, this wasn’t an option when it came to the royal jelly, as elixirs that used it as their primary ingredient simply didn’t exist on Remior.

  He would have to brew them from scratch, going through the entire, five-step process. If he took the additional losses induced due to the scaling principle into account, it was closer to a six-step process.

  ‘Considering my current yield, I’ll end up with about six finished doses per day… not bad, but not enough.’

  Leaving aside his friends and family for now, Percy needed enough elixirs for a minimum of five cores: Nephthys and the Queen’s second cores, as well as three non-beast cores for his own bodies. Obviously, he couldn’t leave the royal wasps behind. Not only did the jelly belong to them in the first place, but accelerating their advancements was the only way to eventually get more of it.

  Over the past few months, the creatures had been using raw jelly coupled with the cyan paste. It was much cheaper for them since it didn’t involve any alchemic losses, and it was already about four times as fast as regular elixirs, but not quite as quick as it could be.

  ‘At least the beast cores are fine. They’re already advancing fast enough without it,’ he thought.

  Either way, their current output was too low. They would need to undergo fifteen cleansing sessions per day to support five elemental cores, though they thankfully only needed seven-and-a-half doses to accomplish that, due to the Cascading Cracks technique halving their expenditure. Still, Percy was currently a dose-and-a-half short…

  ‘Maybe I can produce a little more if I push myself,’ the Queen offered.

  ‘Forget it,’ Percy said, shutting her suggestion down immediately. ‘It’s not worth harming yourself over it. I’m sure your efficiency will gradually improve with more practice. At worst, I’ll just have to let one of my cores fall behind for a few years. It’s not a big deal. Besides, I’m not entirely out of options yet.’

  If they couldn’t procure more jelly, then Percy would just have to improve his own brewing yield. One way to do that would be to simply ditch the scaling principle and switch back to a regular-sized cauldron to avoid the extra losses. When it came to such limited and precious resources, it was better to prioritize efficiency over raw output. It would only take him a couple of extra hours per day to process all the royal jelly.

  Of course, he estimated that this was still not quite enough. It would get him just over seven doses, though he would be a few drops short of his target. The Queen and Nephthys’s gradual improvements were bound to solve that in due time, but Percy luckily had another trick up his sleeve that might get him there sooner.

  ‘For now, I should focus on figuring out the new recipe and cleansing four of our cores. I’ll worry about the last one afterwards.’

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