After assigning the tasks, Benjamin continued sorting through the intelligence obtained from soul-searching.
During his earlier cursory search through the Mushroom People's memories, Benjamin had discovered that quite a few of these Level 6 Mushroom People had been only Level 5 individuals not long ago.
The moment Benjamin began tearing open the Plane Barrier, they had started frantically devouring other Mushroom People under the orders of the Level 7 Mushroom People, forcibly breaking through to Level 6 in an extremely short time.
"It seems that after detecting the invasion, the Mushroom People's upper ranks were not entirely unprepared. They had merely buried all their preparations deep underground." Benjamin fell into thought.
The exchange of information between dormant colonies, secret food stockpiles, the rapid advancement of Level 5 elites—all of it had been quietly completed during the time he was laying out his formation beyond the Plane Barrier.
Looking at it this way, the wisdom of the Mushroom People's upper ranks was indeed not low. It was even quite high.
But more importantly, the Mushroom People's ability to forcibly advance simply by devouring enough of their own kind was truly rather frightening.
As long as they ate enough, they could level up, with absolutely no bottlenecks to speak of.
In the eyes of any normally developing civilization, such a trait was an utterly shameless talent capable of throwing one's mentality completely out of balance.
Fortunately, even these forcibly elevated Level 6 Mushroom People had once been elite individuals at Level 5. Only because their foundations were strong enough to withstand the impact brought by advancement were they qualified to be selected.
And judging from the state of their souls, this method of rapidly advancing through devouring clearly came with considerable side effects.
The Stability of their soul structures was visibly lower