The elemental body conveyed the human’s findings to the Queen, her giant frame sagging slightly with disappointment as a result.

  ‘Is there nothing you can do?’ the creature asked in a tired, shaky voice.

  ‘Not with these eggs,’ Micky shook his head. ‘How long has it been since you laid them?’

  ‘A while,’ the Queen admitted after thinking for a couple of seconds. ‘Do you think a fresh egg might stand a better chance?’

  ‘Maybe. There needs to be at least a trace of a soul there to accept my own, otherwise I have no way to possess them. I’ve no idea what state they were in the moment you created them, but souls tend to dissipate fast in a dying body.’

  ‘I can try again,’ the Violet beast offered.

  ‘Sure. But we can’t afford too many attempts. I don’t want you to exhaust yourself to death over nothing, and my friend is almost out of time. If the first few eggs come out like this, I’m going to place her soul in a different body.’

  The Queen nodded, accepting his terms.

  Over the next hour or so, countless smaller wasps swarmed into the chamber, hastily preparing the place for the upcoming operation. They drank the viscous goo from both pits, the sight of them gulping down the green liquid looking quite disturbing.

  Even worse was the imagery of them crushing the inert royal eggs between their mandibles, consuming them. The objects appeared a lot softer and squishier than Percy had initially thought, their membranous shells bending and tearing with ease. Regardless, he tried not to let this scene bother him too much, even though he was essentially planning to permanently shove his soul into one of these things.

  ‘Well… if this is anything like the last time, my mind won’t be present in the familiar anyway. If Nephthys is okay with the idea of being reborn as a bug, who am I to judge?’ he thought with a shrug.

  Beyond that, the creatures also carried the live Starry Breeder eggs out of the room, to make space for other things. As soon as the pits were both empty, they took turns vomiting nectar into one of them, filling it up for their grandmother to feast on. By her own admission, she’d been starving herself for a while, for the sake of her hive. Starry Queens had to only consume as much mana as they needed to survive and tend to their responsibilities.

  They couldn’t afford to go overboard, or they risked their beast cores progressing toward the next grade – which even the rich environment beneath the Fungal Spire was unable to support. Sadly, their voluntary fasting left them in a perpetual state of weakness.

  The good news was that indulging every once in a while shouldn’t be enough for the Queen to reach White, and she was going to need all the strength she could recover if she wanted to fight against her own body – to overcome the very limits of her species. The nectar her subjects fed her paled in comparison to the royal jelly, but it didn’t seem like she had the time to generate her own meal.

  ‘She does look a little better,’ Percy noted at some point.

  He hadn’t realized this earlier because he wasn’t that familiar with the bugs, but the Queen had been rather lethargic throughout their meeting. This was probably why she’d constantly sounded tired and hadn’t moved around much.

  Thankfully, her hearty meal had made her a lot more energetic already, the golden watermarks and the colourful dots on her carapace shining a little brighter, as even the silver silhouette beneath her exoskeleton surged with renewed vigour.

  Evidently, the creature had been putting on a brave front the whole time. In hindsight, it didn’t seem like Percy and Micky had been in any danger. The Queen wouldn’t have been able to take them both on, even if they fought her without pushing the Symphony to its limits.

  ‘Good for her… We should focus on our own preparations though,’ Percy thought, returning to the task at hand.

  Percy hadn’t twiddled his thumbs as he waited for the Queen to recover. Gathering some soul mana inside the human body’s head, he’d wrapped it carefully around Nephthys’s wisp, trying to slow down the leakage. Unfortunately, Soul Stitching wasn’t applicable in this situation, as there wasn’t much of the goddess’s soul left. Worse still, it didn’t have any open wounds for him to close, nor anything else to stitch it to.

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  However, he hoped that the soul mana’s natural tendency to flood wounds by itself might help a little. He didn’t know how much time this would buy him, but he needed every second he could get.

  On top of that, he’d also resumed mending his own injuries, the stiff, frost-bitten sections on his soul having shrunk further. He still wasn’t in great shape, and he doubted he would recover completely anytime soon, yet he wanted to do everything in his power to avoid any unpleasant surprises during the familiar’s creation.

  Finally, he’d taken out his Cauldron, working together with the second body to brew a few healing potions.

  ‘It would be so much faster if we could split up and brew separately,’ Percy thought with a heavy sigh.

  Now that they shared their thoughts and memories – including their knowledge of alchemy – and since Micky’s body could theoretically shapeshift freely into a humanoid, they would have loved to split the tool into two identical copies, to brew twice as many potions.

  Sadly, there were a few issues with that.

  The elemental body didn’t have the Sovereign’s Eye, so it couldn’t use the scaling principle or the oversized cauldron by itself. It should still be able to brew with a regular cauldron, but its output would inevitably be reduced to a mere tenth of the human body’s, rendering the whole idea impractical.

  And that was without taking into account the decreased yield – since the lack of the Atlantean mutation would cost more than just the ability to scale the quantity. If that wasn’t bad enough, the human body was still missing an arm, so it needed help to manipulate the countless enchantments on the cauldron.

  At least, the two bodies were able to coordinate flawlessly, one contributing its eyes as the other lent its limbs. This was completely different from their clunky attempts to cooperate in the past. Once again, it was clear that their recent fusion had turned them into something closer to a single entity than a pair of deeply connected individuals.

  As for what they needed the healing potions for?

  Well, even if they compressed them twice into Green, they wouldn’t do much for the Queen. Not to mention that they didn’t even have that many gravity herbs left. However, the Starry Princess would be born at Orange, so the standard potions would still be effective on her.

  Of course, Percy’s current goal was to get his hands on a serviceable egg, and it wasn’t like the egg itself could drink potions. That said, life mana had the same natural tendency as soul mana to flow to open wounds – only, it applied to flesh injuries rather than spectral ones – so Percy hoped that placing the egg in a healing bath might preserve it a little better.

  While he worked on alchemy, the Queen’s subjects filled up the second pit too, though they only dumped dirt in this one. They left just a tiny crater open, barely wide enough to fit a watermelon. This was the spot where the Violet beast was going to lay the new eggs.

  As soon as he was ready, Percy walked up to the hole, emptying enough of his recent brews to fill it up with another type of green liquid – this one shining brighter than the Queen’s goo.

  Having prepared herself too, the colossal bug stepped carefully over the hole, lowering her abdomen close to the opening. Percy had to duck, to avoid getting accidentally impaled by her enormous stinger. The base of the darn thing was as thick as a tree’s trunk, though it led to a narrow tip sharp enough for a person to easily prick their finger on.

  Admittedly, her control over her venom glands was commendable. Percy hadn’t forgotten about the Starry Knight’s stinger dripping with acid during his previous visit, yet not a single drop seemed to leak out of the Queen’s stinger without her explicit wishes.

  Either way, none of that mattered right now.

  ‘I’m ready if you are,’ the creature told Micky as soon as he reestablished their connection.

  ‘Give me a few seconds. I need to prepare my bloodline too,’ he replied.

  Coating his fingertips in mana, Percy grabbed his soul with his one good hand, pulling out a portion of the grey silhouette sitting inside his head. With it, a broken pyramid emerged, the crimson structure having almost snapped into two pieces by now, its once-glossy faces now dim and riddled with cracks.

  Ignoring the tapestry of colours hovering right above his eyes, Percy used his family’s technique, sending waves of soul mana rippling through his body. The grey substance bounced countless times along the fluctuating surfaces of his soul before flowing into his head. The mana accumulated flawlessly inside the blob, causing it to expand greatly with each forceful throb.

  Suffice to say, Percy had grown quite proficient at this over the years. His efforts already resembled Baldy’s, though his version of the bloodline thankfully required less time to activate. That was only to be expected, since he only had to fill up a tiny piece of his soul with mana – rather than slowly generating an exact replica of his whole body.

  Of course, the soul variant of the bloodline had its own share of drawbacks, but Percy’s limited clone capacity and the strain the ability put on him didn’t affect the current situation much.

  He only stopped once the wisp in his palm had reached the size of a grapefruit, at which point he estimated that it couldn’t stretch much further without damaging the pyramid more than was acceptable.

  ‘Do it,’ he told the Queen, watching with bated breath as she began the process.

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