Crazy Discoveries

"I fucking knew it!"

Euri bounced on top of his bed in frustration, hitting his head repeatedly on the bedframe. 

He had hit the sacrifice option ten times in a row, and every single one of them had given him the same output. 

[ No beast cores detected. Sacrifice failed. ]

No wonder the sacred ground had been able to trap more than a hundred creatures in one hunt! None of them were powerful enough to make the tentacles spend enough effort behind them! 

To the tentacles, trapping so many locusts was just equivalent to trapping two normal Rank-0 beasts who had complete cores. This seemed to be the only explanation he could produce from the information he had in his hands.

"Are these damn locusts not high enough on their evolution chain to produce beast cores? But they aren't ordinary creatures either! They have special attributes! How does this work?"

Even as he said that, he recalled how he himself was proof that these rules of climbing the ladder of power could be stretched and twisted. Normal humans couldn't improve their physique without gaining a special attribute first, but he was doing it every day!

Scratching his head furiously, Euri thought for a while and started clicking on each and every locust carefully. He'd press the sacrifice option, watch the popup, and then move on to the next locust. 

Twenty, thirty, thirty-seven—

[ Rank-0 Beast Core deposit +1 ]

[ Beast Cores Sacrificed: 15/100 ]

"Got one! That means there's more here!"

Hope trickling back into his heart once again, Euri focused his full attention on the task. 

On the eighty-fourth sacrifice attempt, another locust was devoured by a tentacle as thin as a thread, and the deposit of beast cores into the well went up again.

The third and final one came at the very last attempt. Euri made a mental note of this number, making a hypothesis that if the invading beasts were weak enough, then each hunting mode could trap more than two beasts. 

Now Euri still had a hundred and two locusts left to deal with. As Scavenger Rat hadn't returned yet with a haul of common foodstuffs, Euri could not deposit any of them inside the ambrosia pool either. The stock there had to be cleared first. 

Euri's situation was like a man with all the money in the world, but all the shops were closed, and he couldn't spend a single credit.

"Can I even open up hunting mode again without endangering all these delicate locusts? If another beast runs into the tentacle wall, it'll crush them all in the struggle."

These locusts were still a huge mine of resources for him now. The amount of ambrosia he could produce by using them was absolutely monstrous. If he risked killing them and ruining their bodies, he would have to return to the previous routine of waiting half a day for new beasts to roll in. 

"Let's run a test first, even if it's risky for me..."

Euri ordered the four familiars to continue with their cultivation, took a deep breath, and chose the [ Cultivate ] option on one of the locusts.

His [ Shepherding ] skill came into immediate effect as a searing burst of pain in the back of his head nearly rendered him unconscious. When the aching went down enough in intensity for him to process information again, he realized that he had been rolling on the bed for more than five minutes.

"The first time I felt the pain of memory implantation, I had three beast familiars. The pain at that time was a lot more intense compared to the later instances of attempting to bond with single beasts. The only exception was that time when I tried to bond with the Giant Centipede..."

He remembered distinctly that the memories of training a Giant Centipede had brought a worse wave of headache. It was nearly comparable to the first one. Yet, when he compared the pain of bonding with this locust to any of those past instances, none of them came remotely close!

If he analyzed all of these incidents, some patterns gradually began to form!

If bonding with a single beast was equivalent to pain at level one; bonding with a beast that had a twin resulted in pain at level two; bonding with three different beasts produced pain at level three or more; and bonding with a beast that had one hundred twins accompanying it begot him pain at level ten or above!

"The only explanation behind this could be that when it comes to beasts with twins, the rules of bonding are different from bonding with single beasts. Could it be..."

Euri stared at the miniscreen, having reached the most obvious conclusion, and tried to command the locust which he had just bonded with.

According to his memories, these locusts had a level of intelligence just as low as those Giant Centipedes. He had not managed to instill any discipline in it except recognizing his identity as its feeder.

So Euri mimicked the sound he'd make while calling over the locust for feeding time. However, the locust wasn't the only one that became excited upon hearing the call. One hundred and one other locusts also went nuts, screeching creepily as they tried to extricate themselves from the tentacles.

"So it can be hypothesized that there is another implicit rule in using the [ Shepherding ] skill. If multiple beasts have the same affix and stats, then bonding with one of them is the same as bonding with all of them!"

Euri's excited mind began to race. This was another milestone in his exploration so far of the mysterious sacred ground. It opened up paths he had never even considered before.

"What would happen if in the next hunt, more locusts invade the sacred ground? If all of them have the same affix and stats, will the [ Shepherding ] Skill take effect automatically?"

Wouldn't that make his headache a near-permanent thing? The more beasts he bonded with, the higher his risk of being attacked by sudden headaches would be!

"The rules can't be so unreasonable. No, I have to run more experiments and figure out the exact details, understand where the line is, and learn not to cross it!"