Chrysalis

Now, with my privacy secured, it's time to mutate. 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. It 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 funny by now. I've been in ant form for months now, and even then I've been in five different ant bodies so far. It's hard for me 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 has been 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 are 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! Gweheheh!

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 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 looking for: 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 what I'm looking for in 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 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 Gandalf is known for, the stingy bearded bugger. I wonder if this became some sort of standard mutation for more intelligent bugs down in the depths? It does 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!

gift mutation in the pheromones… or whatever. What do I want here? To be honest, most of the upgrades here seem like a waste to me. There are options that do all sorts of things in here, turning pheromones into weapons, as a sleep poison, even a choice that helps create sensory illusions in organisms that smell them, basically hallucinogen scent! But since I use them strictly for communication purposes, most of

Pheromone Gland +20 will become the Loud Convincing

reasons, namely that the Gravity Bomb takes a huge chunk of mana to cast and the better I get at condensing mana the more mana I need to fuel the spell. But I want to take something different this time, I want to borrow a leaf from (of all the beings) Tiny. His lightning glands have a great little mutation that condenses the mana inside the gland. It doesn’t condense it much compared to doing the work manually, but it gets the process started. It also has the benefit of making every spell I weave with mana straight out of the gland a little bit stronger without me having to do

+20 will now become

the business district and the neural network, not all of which are sitting at +20 yet. This part is going to be expensive, I hope I have enough to afford it, I really don't want to have to eat anymore right now. Firstly, I'm going to look at the neural network. Who would have thought that starting to mutate my nervous system would have such a beneficial effect in the long run? Combined with my carapace and my antennae, this nervous system has been what kept me alive long enough to reach this level. Having impossibly fast reflexes is always a win, no matter what. The question is, what do I want to mutate into the network now? Trawling through the list, I can see upgrades that will help me make it even faster, but at this point,

in the body that help manage coordination better. It's like how an octopus has a separate set of nerves for each tentacle, helping to coordinate the movement of each limb so they can work together. If I'm not wrong, this may even synergise with my existing mutations, since the hyper fast signals will be transmitted

Sub-Neural Network +20 shall become the

I've upgraded it to increase the range of my acid shot and introduced a scattershot mode. I'm pretty happy with both upgrades as is, to be honest. I don't need to have absurd range with my acid, I'm not trying to turn myself into a sniper or artillery like some of the scouts are, and the scattershot does a good job spreading the acid over an area when I'm shooting at max range. If I upgraded that mutation more, the acid

add to the acid, including elemental damage, somehow. There's actually an ignition option here as well, which I suppose would be handy if I turned my acid flammable. Hang on, I could literally shoot fire out of my backside?! Holy moly! It's a bit more extreme than what I'm looking for though… As usual, I'm more interested in mutations that move along the lines of what the organ was intended to do in the first

to the nozzle that assist in making unconscious aiming corrections. Combined with my rapidly climbing

Pressurised Scattershot Acid Nozzle +20 will become the Guided Hyper Pressurised Scattershot Acid Nozzle + 25! That's a mouthful. I

acid gland's hype man. It makes whatever the acid is already doing, do it better, and I added the weakening property to try and drain my enemies during long fights. It's a solid combo and I think I'm going to stick with it by enhancing the weakening property this time around. It's pretty simple to find the mutation I want and

Nice.

to have enough to squeak all of the necessary mutations in, although the last one is going to be the priciest. The Fatiguing acid stimulation gland of +10. I need to upgrade this dude three more times! Better get to it. Activating the menu I upgrade the gland to the +15 mark and choose to consolidate the existing mutation. The stimulation gland works to

plenty to choose from, as usual. Most of them are around different ways to increase the regenerative speed of the acid, but others are a little more creative with their interpretation of what 'stimulate' means when it comes to the acid gland. Stimulate it to do what? Make more acid? Thicken the acid?

the end, I select something that works with what I have already. This mutation drains stamina, but rather than increase the production rate of the acid, it thickens it, making it more potent. This obviously synergises on multiple levels with my existing setup. By the time this is done my acid is going to be craaaaazy! At +25, I choose another mutation