Aside from Fire Release, Hayato also had Earth and Wind Release. With the successful precedent of the Exploding Insects, he naturally tried using Earth and Wind Release to cultivate Kikaichū as well. Yet there had been no progress at all. Hayato had already shelved those experiments and would not spend any more energy on them until he came up with new ideas.
The success of the Exploding Insects showed that, aside from Hayato's stubbornness, he had truly stumbled into sheer dumb luck. Otherwise, in the Aburame Clan's hundreds of years of history, he certainly would not have been the only one to attempt such experiments.
Yet he was the only one to achieve results.
In fact, Hayato's method of cultivating insects by feeding them chakra of different attributes was considered unconventional within the Aburame Clan. Or rather, it was a method that had "reached a dead end."
Over hundreds of years, the Aburame Clan had cultivated dozens of insects with different functions using Yin and Yang chakra. In recent decades, this cultivation method had not produced any new insects.
The mainstream approach was the [External Stimulation Method], which stimulated insects by changing their external conditions, causing them to develop corresponding adaptations.
Take the high-temperature-resistant Kikaichū Hayato had used against Uchiha Shinsuke today. The cultivation method involved selecting Kikaichū with relatively hard carapaces and breeding them in high-temperature conditions, then gradually raising the environmental temperature. After more than a dozen generations of reproduction, the desired heat-resistant insects could be cultivated. It was stable and efficient, far easier than feeding them chakra.
This method was not without drawbacks: once the external stimulation disappeared, the Kikaichū would degenerate and revert to their ancestors within a few generations. Exploding Insects, meanwhile, could be passed down generation after generation and develop into an entirely new