With Wante's little mycelium figure as material for analysis, the Mother Nest soon developed version 2.0 of the Insect Swarm, specifically designed to counter Fungus Beasts-every insect now had tentacle-like siphons on its body, ready to use Soul Siphon whenever it caught one.
For these insects, born to be weapons of war, sufficient nutrients meant they could rapidly produce army after army. As luck would have it, nutrients were the one thing the Mushroom People's Fungus City never lacked.
Later, towering subsidiary nests sprang up one after another. The ever-growing Insect Swarm was already pummeling the Fungus Beasts into submission, capturing plenty of strange fungal creations along the way.
The Insect Swarm was certainly skilled at slaughter, but that did not mean its members were mindless creatures that knew nothing else. Quite the opposite: they were astonishingly efficient at organizing and allocating supplies.
-Whatever they collected was sorted by category and delivered to the Mother Nest and Lina.
And so the apprentices' work became... collecting treasures.
Among them were many fungi that simply did not exist outside, along with what appeared to be magical creations of the Mushroom People. They even discovered mushrooms of the four elements, besides Space-Time Illusion.
There were simply too many things here. Even they could not identify them all, so they could only group them by similarities in their magical fluctuations and leave the identification to their teacher, the Tower Spirit, once they returned.
Still, there were some things they could analyze-
"Is this nutrient solution?"
An apprentice holding a bucket of utterly unremarkable black liquid said in astonishment, "Its nutrient readings are absurd! It's far more nutritious than even Pure White Sea Spirit Coconut juice!"
Lina glanced over and was indeed taken aback. According to the comparison chart on the instrument, it contained twice