Superorganism Formation

A Super Individual

Simply put, it is a tightly knit collective.

When you discover a herd of deer in the wild, perhaps what you have found is not a "herd of deer," but a group of individuals that happened to gather together.

Each one hunts, gathers resources, reproduces, and thinks for itself, but they do not divide labor in detail or unite into a single social whole.

From this perspective, a Super Individual, or eusocial organism, has three characteristics.

Reproductive division of labor, overlapping generations, and socialized child-rearing.

So, why carry out Superorganism Formation? What benefits does it offer?

The answer is resources—in other words, sustainable development.

The problem lies with the Kikaichū. The group of Kikaichū you see is not a true colony of insects. They have no sociality and can be said to be forcibly thrown together under human influence.

It could even be said that Kikaichū are not true insects. They have no sociality, and this highly specialized species is unlike any natural species Mimi has ever seen.

Their species has no future.

You would not see even a single wild Kikaichū anywhere in the wilderness.

The development of their species is deeply bound to their host. When a host dies, the insect colony is destroyed as well.

Every child of the Aburame clan receives Kikaichū insect eggs during childhood.

The moment the child successfully extracts Chakra, the rise of an insect colony begins.

The Chakra causes the insect eggs to hatch, and adult Kikaichū crawl out.

In other words, these insects are born adults.

Then, here comes the question.

Who plays the role of reproduction?

The adult Kikaichū?

No. Adult Kikaichū only mate and lay eggs. What comes next is none of their concern. This is the result of extreme specialization after coevolution.

The host plays the role of a mother who raises the insects to adulthood, even though these insects have no larvae and develop directly into adults inside their eggs.

But the Chakra provided is the nourishment that allows the larvae to grow.

This means that once they leave their host, Kikaichū lose the ability to reproduce, and their only possible ending is destruction.

To put it vividly, Kikaichū are a group of completely nonproductive professional warriors. In their daily lives, they do nothing but play, eat, and mate.

They generally do not work. When they do, the job is one hundred percent guaranteed suicide.

A species like this has no future in the wild.

This also means that the size of the insect colony is actually proportional to the size of its own Chakra reserves.

Keeping them alive consumes food—or, more accurately, Chakra.

As a result, the size of the insect colony is limited, which places an extreme restriction on the upper limit of the Aburame clan's strength.

Mimi knew that if this problem was not solved, she had no future.

To support the enormous insect colony that far exceeded what was normal for her age, Mimi had already ordered the colony to hunt independently.

This offset part of the Chakra consumption.

When she truly could not withstand the consumption, Mimi would have part of the colony commit suicide on the spot to prevent environmental damage, then collect their corpses as reserve food for the colony.

But this was not a good solution in the long run.

Therefore, resources and sustainable development were enormous problems.

Besides that, over the year or so since she obtained the Kikaichū at the age of four, many other problems had emerged through her experience using them.

The Kikaichū could be called the laziest beetles Mimi had ever seen. Without specific instructions, they would dare lie around doing nothing, continuously consuming Mimi's Chakra, more parasitic than a Parasitic Insect.

The greatest problem was execution.

Without a doubt, Kikaichū could faithfully carry out Mimi's orders, although there would be minor issues during execution.

Take Nest Building, for example.

They could not perfectly execute overly complex instructions and could only proceed in the general direction. This was true not only of Mimi but also of the insects of the same species.

It was a matter of intelligence. Compared with the others of their species, Mimi's advantage was that she could perform real-time micromanagement, manipulating the colony's movements as delicately as her own hands and feet.

This allowed her to make the colony complete extremely complex commands.

And this was precisely where the problem lay.

When she first began excavating the Underground Cave, Mimi had been careless for a moment, and a large group of insects suffocated to death inside the caves they had dug because of ventilation problems.

Therefore, once the Kikaichū colony was allowed to act freely, it went from having brains to having none.

Instead of doing anything, they simply lay around.

Once their current task was complete, they had no idea what to do and would fall into a dazed state, instinctively entering standby and lying still. If there was food, they would lie on top of it and eat. If there was no food, they would only instinctively search for something to eat once they became unbearably hungry.

Forget coordinated hunting—even whether they could find food sometimes depended on the heavens.

Even mating and laying eggs were carried out under the leadership of the Aburame clan.

To a certain extent, the Kikaichū had been trained by the Aburame clan to perfection.

They were obedient biological weapons.

But being too obedient meant losing their autonomy, so they had to rely on the Aburame clan for everything. Even their food had to be delivered to their mouths. Independent development was completely impossible.

And Mimi could not possibly keep her eyes on these insects every moment, instructing them how to divide labor and cooperate, how to farm and raise livestock, or how to produce and raise their offspring.

Besides, teaching them would be useless. They had no memory at all.

There was no shortage of solutions, and Superorganism Formation was one of them.

Take ants, for example. Their actions and behavior were engraved in the expression of their genes.

What Mimi had to do was copy those genes from ants and carve them into the genes of the Kikaichū.

In other words, it was the transcription of programs—or behavioral algorithms.

The ants' algorithms determined that every ant was born because it was needed. From the moment they were born, they acted according to the algorithms in their genes. They needed no leader and no meetings to discuss matters. They simply carried out their assigned work according to their behavioral algorithms, each performing its own role.

Every ant acted according to the optimal behavioral algorithms their ancestors had developed and trained through billions of years of evolution and accumulated data.

Therefore, after extensive observation, Mimi chose a local species of ant with an extremely cool appearance.

She named them Pheidologeton diversus.

They were the dominant ant colony in the Konoha region.

Their distinguishing feature was their large heads. Although they were called leafcutter ants, they did not cut leaves. Instead, they cultivated mushrooms. They were a kind of Army Ant that was not technically an Army Ant, marching out from their nest entrance as a base to sweep and raid the surrounding area.

There was a huge difference in size between individuals. The largest individual was at least five hundred times larger than the smallest, which was why they were called diversus—because every one of them was different.

When they marched, small ants rode on the giant ants, looking remarkably like coordinated infantry and tanks.

The benefit was reduced energy consumption during marches.

They excelled in all aspects, not just combat power.

Most importantly, these ants were not aggressive. Despite being incredibly powerful, they were extremely cautious.

The Honeypot Insects cultivated earlier could be said to have failed, but they had not failed completely.

The original intention had been to modify an insect that could independently produce and store Chakra. However, these tiny insects had not passed the mental requirements for Chakra synthesis. They could store Chakra, though the amount was small, but it was sufficient as a means of replenishing Chakra.

This was a viable solution for expanding the insect colony, but solving the fundamental problem still depended on Superorganism Formation—in other words, sustainable development.

At present, she needed to cultivate a new Insect Queen and discard the Kikaichū's low egg-laying efficiency and method.

She would change it to a single fertilization lasting a lifetime, producing thousands per day.

What needed to be done was still a long and arduous project.

This was only the beginning. The ability to seize and copy genes meant that in this Shinobi World, Kekkei Genkai were likewise resources Mimi could harvest.

Mimi took down several experimental bottles. They were all modified insect eggs.

Most of the insect eggs had already died, succumbing to genetic collapse during the initial stage of gene recombination.

As the master of the insect colony, Mimi could sense their life, death, and state of health, saving her a great deal of trouble when it came to observation.

And this was neither the first batch of Experiment Subjects nor the last.

Such results were within expectations.

Mimi had no means of independently manipulating genes for genetic regulation. She did not even have equipment such as a microscope. She could only use Chakra to carry out crude transcription, then leave what came next to natural selection.

In other words, she had to leave it to luck.

Therefore, even the insect eggs that survived the initial stage without collapsing could not be called successful products. Most were malformed, while even those that were less deformed fell far short of Mimi's expectations.

There was only one solution: continuous cultivation.

Until success.

And once she succeeded even slightly, Mimi would be able to record the expression template of those genes and use it for production.

She could then continue cultivating them on that foundation, selecting the best from among the best to achieve the desired result.

It was an extremely time-consuming project.

"They really do each have their own unique features."

Simply put, she would first perform cross-species gene transplantation, then conduct molecular breeding through gene aggregation, and finally carry out population-generation selective breeding.

Under the catalysis of Chakra, some insect eggs did not become adults. Gene recombination caused them to lose the Kikaichū's basic ability to mature rapidly.

As for some of those that crawled out, each had its own unique features.

Mimi selected some deformed ones missing limbs and destroyed them on the spot. She kept the rest alive for observation and would decide whether to retain them later. At the same time, she cultivated another batch of insect eggs.

Mimi continued with her work.

After repeating this process, she threw the selected Experiment Subjects into the completed Nest ecosystem and let them develop on their own.

Their genes would drive them to act.