With a cough, I laid my head down on the floor letting my mind drift off to sleep. With the mental exhaustion, I felt there was no way other than this to repair the damage quickly.
When I woke, I found the strangler curled up against my side sleeping there as well as a group of ten larvae pigged out on the small mountain of corpses. One larva was sitting on the monkey slowly eating the entire thing, its belly already swelled to the point it looked as though it could roll faster than it could walk.
More powerful beasts seemed to give a lot more biomass than their weaker counterparts. The drone was eating off large pieces of it as well, and seemed to shiver in excitement every time it ate the meat. The Godly Drone, on the other hand, didn't seem to have changed at all.
With a stretch, I picked up the small blob of shadows with legs and pet it like a cat as I walked to the mass of corpses. Placing him on the head of one of the creatures I smiled softly, "Go ahead and eat with your sons and daughters!"
Planning on resting my mind, and mana since both were not fully recovered with the nap I had, I went out to gather herbs and plants from the surrounding area. With my creation magic, I should be able to make some of the tools alchemy needed, and the corpses would provide me with the gasses for fire producing tools. Otherwise, I would have to buy a cow and harvest the methane gas from it.
After thinking about the tubing situation, I started to write down what I would need to make a methane farm. After much consideration, I chose to instead rely on the death of creatures around me as they will be in heavy supply in the near future.
"Drone, start digging a hole for me." Pulling up the evolution menu for the creature, I checked out the buildings it could create with its body. These would be of course only evolved into once the drone could create a superior version of the construction.
There were four buildings that I could make currently, the harvester, the meat pool, spawning lake, and evolutionary testing facility.
The Harvester was a building that took in raw materials and broke them down to make them easy to assemble or harvest. A drone would bring materials to it and it would turn it into a biomaterial that could be upgraded using various things. Like should one bring in hemp, and spider webs the harvester could produce a hemp-based fiber reinforced with spider webs.
The meat pool gathered magical energy and infused meat that was let to rot and dissolve into it. Creating a pool of rotten meat paste which is more nutritious for my creatures than just plain meat. Lesser meats would almost instantaneously be upgraded, and more powerful meat will take time and effort to process into the pool.
The spawning lake was a giant hole in the ground filled with toxic fluids from a tumor-like existence in the middle of it. It constantly leaked out these fluids and they would be very beneficial to the larva, enhancing their foundation to create better evolutions in the future. This took a long time though, soaking their bodies for several weeks, ripping and healing their bodies in a slow process. It was the perfect system to create elites among their kind though.
The evolutionary testing facility (ETF) was a long term investment. What it did was continually test a single trait that slowly pushed the evolutionary boundaries of it to try and give more options for later evolutions. It could also be used to create something like an evolutionary template, customizing creatures to a certain degree but only if you had the meat pool available as it created formulas for it.
The first thing I wanted was a meat pool so I could begin enhancing larvae in the quickest amount of time into better upgrades. Next would be the ETF, for their synergetic abilities. This was of course if nothing else came up on the list as I grew my drone to the maximum biomass so the building will have the maximum benefits.
A shiver ran down my spine as I was thinking and a little voice was telling me danger was coming. I ignored it to look where the source of the danger was and saw the grand crystal to the God Drone was cracking. With a muffled screech the shards of crystal flew everywhere leaving the full glory of the Godly Drone visible.
The drone was ten feet tall, with a radius of twice that. It looked like a small hill when it roared out to the sky a blast of psionic energy exploding outward in a circle and swirling like a tornado. In the center stood a white and gold shell that wiggled from left to right as the drone stretched, its mandibles snapping every once in a while as if it woke up from a long nap with a sore jaw. A golden beard swayed as its large body moved, and a grumble came from its belly.
The huge size was a great boon, as its psionic mandibles gained power based on its weight. With a lift of its head nearly half of the corpses floated into its waiting maw! All of the flesh went into it getting crushed into a paste and pouring into its stomach.
A full two minutes passed as he gorged himself on a bunch of rotten flesh, making its body bulge a bit before it let out a belch. Its body wobbled a little bit before sitting down the ground shaking a bit under its giant girth. It seemed to finally realize that others were staring at it, it lazily stared back at me.
"That... Took so long to gather, what the hell are you going to do to get that back?" An angry spark of energy went around me the wind flowing up from the ground.
The Godly Drone arrogantly threw psionic power at me making me take a step back before I created a shield of energy destroying it. Pouring my energy into a single place before shooting it at the creature. It screeched in defiance before throwing a large amount of sand my way.
"Shit, is this my flaming salamander?" A push of wind sliced forward throwing away the dirt.
"Eat lead!" Pulling up my rifle I rained down shots on the giant thing, the drone quickly hid away in its shell as I went to town on it, twenty shots rocked the little shell back and forth as it let out pitiful shrieks. After I stopped it took a full five minutes before it peeked out, "What? You asked for it."
The Godly Drone looked betrayed as it slowly crawled out of its shell, ready to duck back into its shell at any moment. It looked to be afraid of me now, it probably didn't help that I was laughing maniacally during my shots.
"Now, go hunt, you can take care of yourself." I put away the rifle, staring dangerously at the crab as it wobbled away. Fighting it truly wasn't fair as it literally only minutes before that the creature was born, it couldn't use its powers effectively.
This would probably be the last time I'd be able to threaten it so easily, I hurriedly ran away before it figured out I wasn't as powerful as it thought. Apparently turning godly meant that what it's limited abilities were ramped up to an extreme degree. I can not make another one of these guys any time soon! Luckily this guy had eaten a whole bunch, so I'll be turning him into a structure as soon as possible.