Chapter 1 After throwing the sundries into the shredder, Li Ang walked out of the alchemy workshop.

The automated pet breeding box was as peaceful as ever, with warm sunshine and shady green trees.

Swarms of bees flew over the canopy, collecting tree sap.

Brain worms and worker worms toiled in the reclaimed farmland, sowing seeds, spraying water, harvesting mature medicinal herbs, and performing preliminary processing of the medicinal herbs in a temporary workshop next to the farmland.

It's starting to feel a bit crowded.

Li Ang scanned the breeding box, his brow furrowed slightly.

Currently, the propagation of the insect swarm mainly relies on the queen bee and the insect nest.

The swarm of bees that Li Ang bought on the online shopping platform was just the most ordinary Chinese honeybee.

After hundreds of rounds of iterations, the swarm had completely lost its original appearance, no longer limited to Hymenoptera, Pterygota, or Insecta; some had even broken away from the Arthropoda phylum.

This couldn't be helped.

Although insects like the Palawan giant stag beetle and the Hercules beetle could be considered invincible within organisms of the same size, having evolved their combat power to the extreme,

the limitations of arthropods were still too great.

The chitinous exoskeleton limited the size, and it had to molt and shed its skin every so often.

The open circulatory system determined that the transport efficiency of nutrients and metabolic products was slow.

In addition, there were the inefficient respiratory and motor systems. All these factors determined that the size of insects could not be scaled up arbitrarily.

If the swarm of bees was to be able to adapt to battles between transcendents, it had to be modified.

The open circulatory system had to be evolved into a closed one, so that blood always flowed in a circuit formed by blood vessels and the heart, making circulation more efficient and faster.

The chitinous exoskeleton was retained but divided into multiple components so that it could be shed periodically without affecting immediate combat power.

More spiracles were opened at the joints of the chitinous exoskeleton.

These were connected to the closed circulatory system to improve respiratory efficiency.

A skeletal system was evolved. Lightweight bones grew in the arthropods, increasing muscle density. There was a spine.

And based on the spine,

the concentrated chain-like nervous system of arthropods was transformed into a tubular central nervous system,

in order to increase the transmission speed of nerve signals.

(The concentrated chain-like nervous system of insects is inherited from the ladder-like nervous system of annelids, which is relatively primitive and inefficient. If there are large insects, their reaction speed will be very slow.)

After such a transformation, many "mismatched" species have emerged in the swarm of bees.

Some scout bees are more like birds covered with a layer of chitinous armor than insects.

The swarm of bees still retains its previous three classes:

queen bee, soldier bee, and worker bee.

The queen bees have an average body length of nearly one meter and live in the canopy. Each day they can lay thousands of eggs.

These eggs are taken by the worker bees to the southeastern corner of the automated pet breeding box and placed around the Abyss Mirror.

This allows the newborn insect eggs to receive radiation from the Abyss Mirror – the mirror has a [Compensatory Alienation] special effect, which can cause mutations in the surrounding living organisms.

Among the thousands of insect eggs, about nine hundred will die directly due to excessive mutation.

Only one hundred can hatch normally.

These one hundred newborn larvae will be taken by the worker bees to a simple nearby hive for feeding and raising, in order to observe the mutation status.

After a period of time, when the mutation is basically stable, the surviving larvae will be inspected by Li Ang or the brain worms.

If the mutated traits are beneficial, the larvae will be retained for further observation.

If the mutated traits have no potential, they will be cultivated into ordinary worker bees, or directly eliminated and recycled to save biomass and space inside the breeding box.

The insect swarm is the same.

Under the influence of Li Ang and the Abyss Mirror, they have broken away from the limitations of the Nemertea phylum and have stronger motor, circulatory, and respiratory systems.

Originally, ribbon worms could reproduce asexually through fission, one giving rise to two, two giving rise to three.

But after having advanced evolutionary features such as bones, asexual reproduction became a little unsuitable.

Finally, Li Ang decided to use the [Compensatory Alienation] function of the Abyss Mirror to evolve a non-conscious, building-like insect swarm organ.

This organ is called the insect swarm mother nest.

It looks like a semi-open biological factory.

Inside, there are production lines and worker worms responsible for working.

The insect nest retains the fission reproductive ability of ribbon worms and can periodically produce egg-shaped insect eggs.

Part of the egg-shaped insect eggs, along with the bee eggs, will be placed by the worker worms next to the Abyss Mirror to receive radiation.

The other part will be adjusted by the brain worms – the brain worms can use the [Synthetic Beast Creation Table] in the alchemy workshop to adjust the gene sequence of the insect eggs, based on other biological gene information collected by the worker worms,

so that the newborn larvae initially possess the characteristics of other kinds of organisms.

It's a bit like Aliens and Genestealers.

However, in this way, the space is not enough.

The volume of the automated pet breeding box is 1000m * 1000m * 1000m.

In addition to the water and soil necessary for a complete ecosystem,

a lot of space has to be left vacant to build temples, reclaim farmland, and plant trees.

Thanks to the magical function of the breeding box, which can create a habitable environment, the growth of trees has largely gotten rid of the limitations of light and nutrients.

Li Ang consumed a lot of divine power to cultivate many giant trees, one hundred meters or even two hundred meters tall, in the breeding box for the insect swarm to live in.

Even so, the insect swarm, which is adding new members every day, is still constantly compressing the remaining space in the automated pet breeding box.

It can't go on like this. It seems that it is necessary to transfer some of the insect swarm out...