After somewhat careful consideration I decide, the following morning, that it would be best to use sanguinism growth acceleration to mature the hunting spiders into full maturity early while all of my homunculi and I are assembled near them. While this will leave them immature developmentally, that can be offset by having a couple of homunculi spend the day training them to basic obedience. Stay, fetch, follow, attack -- that sort of thing. It will also serve as a true test of how well the intelligence and sociality traits have “taken”, given that the first time I tried to imbue domestication in spiderzillas it took four generations to get where I needed it to. This does, however, have the side effect of cutting down the number of menial minions available for work down from seven to five. Not the end of the world, really, considering how effective they’ve been at the tasks I asked of them.

Case in point: my root cellar now has a couple of small casks with a rather tart berry juice filling them. I’ll need to work out a way to sweeten the stuff at some point, because the sample I tried was rather like sucking on a sour lemon and that’s just really not my thing. Going from “here’s a couple of berries that give you explosive diarrhea” to “here’s a couple of casks of sour lemon berry juice” is an impressive task to accomplish in a single day. Reduced in total options, I set one of the minions to regular maintenance as always, but have one split attention between farming and garden maintenance, have a third work on reorganizing the library and adding cataloging because I’m starting to have enough books now that it’s difficult to remember where I put what, a fourth split its attention between producing more linen-cloth and improving the storage of my foodstuffs, and as an experiment I have the fifth start writing out the logs of what I had accomplished in the last couple of days while I instead helped the pair of homunculi in training the hunting spiders.

Over the course of the day I discover a few things about said hunting spiders. First, they are indeed quite imprinted on me, and to a lesser extent on the homunculi. Second, they take to training far better than I’d anticipated, as though they have some sort of instinctual understanding of English. Third, they are incredibly aggressive when it comes to actually attacking something. My best-educated guess is that the domestication process actually shaped their natural predatory instincts rather than eliminating them. While ordering one to “kill” one of my homunculi caused the hunting spider to instead look back at me and hiss in what I knew to be a whine of confusion and pleading, when I instead gave it a bit of untreated rabbit hide and said “hunt”, not only did it launch itself up into the air and then crawl over the gate to get to the woods outside, but so did all twelve of the rest of them. It was barely an hour later when they all came back, five of them with rabbits in their chelicerae. That was … remarkably efficient, actually.

Interestingly, while the rabbits were not alive, they were also not dessicated. Not knowing exactly what their dietary needs would look like, I decided to cut the rabbits up after ordering the hunters to drop their kills, and proceeded to distribute the cut up products to each of them. As un-threatened as I was by the hunters themselves, I could not say the same about their feeding habits. The process was anything but attractive, and I knew then and there that I would largely be allowing the critters to feed on their own.

Now, when I originally set out to try to create a pack or flock of intelligent and violent but obedient animals, I had done so with the intention of having something that could effectively play the role of guard-dogs for my home. Seeing what I had managed to produce, I decided that it would be worth the effort to see how far down the rabbit hole of their being capable of tool use I could go, and with that thought I left the two homunculi there to continue the hunters’ training and made my way over to the workshop where I proceeded to start working on some gear specifically for the hunters. Namely, barbed spring-loaded “punch” daggers that would be strapped to their forelegs in a manner that they could use their foreleg manipulators to trigger them without losing their general use of said claws, blackleather barding for their bodies and legs, and also -- and this is where I entered more questionable territory but based on how intelligent they already seemed to be I was willing to risk it -- a single-shot quartzite heat-beam weapon that would be mounted on the abdomen section of said barding, positioned such that by raising its abdomen and lowering its head it could fire the weapon by pulling down on the wire cord that would be tied to its chelicerae. After a few moments’ thought, I decide to add a small reservoir of knockout tonic to the punch daggers, allowing them to work as non-lethal poison injectors. I only manage to make the equipment for two of the hunters before I am confronted with a text popup.

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Huh. Hadn’t expected an increase in the sustainable agriculture thing but I suppose the grow lights would qualify for that purpose. There’s still plenty of daylight left, however, so I decide to allocate what’s left to another fugue-state for constructing the barding and gear for my new magical murderbeast companions. Who were adorable and not at all terrifying or malignant. Honest.

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The next day passed largely in a similar manner to the previous. I spend more time training up my hunting spiders along with a pair of homunculi; this time I dedicate effort to having them train to patrol the area around my palisade wall in groups of three or four, lead by one of my homunculi. They practice coordinating fire with the heatbeam weapons -- a kind of training that has me whipping up bulk batches of sanguine healing tonics until they get the proper knack of arching their abdomens enough to avoid getting caught in the thermal bloom of their own weapons, as well as practice in using the punch daggers. They take much more to the punch daggers than they do the heatbeams, though that has to be because of how much more natural it is to attack something by striking it than by pointing your butt awkwardly at it. I did try to keep the weight of the barding down as much as I could due to having the sense that the hunters were more “dexterity” than “endurance” builds -- their apparent natural tactics were more ambush pack coordination than sticking it out.

I did get one rather pleasant surprise, though, when I lost track of one of the hunters only to find it actively assisting the farming homunculus by digging at matured carrotatoes and carefully placing them next to the little guy who would then add them to the rickshaw-cart. This was behavior I should have anticipated after seeing how easily they took to the tools I had given them, but still managed to be blindsided by. After witnessing this, I started breaking up the hunting spiders into two groups of three with a training homunculus each, and the others in groups of two or three to assist the others by pulling rickshaw carts or the like as directed by the homunculi, with any left over to be left to their own devices to do basically whatever. So not only do I now have proper active defenses to go with my passive ones, I also have delegation of duty by allowing my workers to work and have extremely basic tasks performed under supervision.

Given that the hunting spiders are so eager to assist the homunculi in their assigned workloads, I revise the orders of all of my homunculi to try to train the hunters to do whatever basic tasks they deem the hunters capable of learning to do. It’s largely not much more than monkey-see monkey-do, but this will expand the capabilities of my home even further than the homunculi could in the first place. To the point where I start to have moments where I feel like I could just sit and watch the sun with nothing important to do, rather than race against the clock to fit as much as I possibly could into every single hour to stave off boredom, terror, and mental breakdown from discomfort.

It’s late afternoon before I decide to take a stab at revisiting something from my day-long field-trip and take a look into what I could accomplish with those glow beetles. As it turns out, in the time I’d been ignoring them, they’d fully matured from their grub state and were clacking around in the chitinite terrarium that my homunculi had been keeping them in. This wasn’t that much of an issue; there was plenty of room in it for them along with the other few other animal samples that were in the garden. Of the dozen grubs that had pupated, I only had ten that were still alive. The corpses of the other two were still in there, largely dessicated. They didn’t seem to have any kind of mildew or fungus or anything, so I couldn’t really say why they had died. Perhaps it was simply a product of their maturation, or maybe they had some sort of traumatic insemination as a species? I really just didn’t know.

The thing that I found really interesting about glow beetles was what my survivalism lore told me about their potential use in fire starting. Apparently, if you soaked glow beetle lymph into shredded wood fibers or dried grass, it would hold a burn a lot longer than would otherwise be the case. Having not actually seen the phenomenon myself I didn’t really know how that stacked against flammable oils or waxes, but it definitely held a kind of potential that I very much wanted to explore. So over to the essence extractor these little guys would get to go, once I’d used my sanguinism fertility trick to force the ten left to produce viable eggs within the terrarium, and again to get their eggs to develop into the grub state. From ten adults I got seventy grubs. Killing the adults and removing fifty of the grubs, I took the collection of critters over to the alchemy lab and began sorting through the essences of the species, trying to see what I could recognize and what I might find useful.

I spend the day puttering about with the various traits of the glow beetle, just trying to get more experience with my apparent intuition about traits and how to separate or sort them by sight. Trying to get a sense of whether there’s any specific action that has a mana cost associated with it and whether there’s variation in the mana cost, and that sort of thing. I do manage to learn that the first time I identify a specific trait, it has a cost of about one tenth of my mana bar. But thereafter each time I identify that trait, if I try to ‘narrow it down’ there can be a fluctuating cost associated with it from either none or so little I can’t notice it, to a quarter of my mana bar if I’m somehow exceeding what the animal the trait is drawn from can do. There seems to be an inverse relationship, thus, between the mana cost and the total amount of a specific essence I can extract. By way of example; the bioluminescence essence cost me perhaps a twentieth of my mana to extract from the cauldron I rendered down the ten adults from, and so little I couldn’t even notice from the rendering of the grubs -- yet I got about three times as much of it from the grubs. I set aside a trait dish for future use of the bioluminescence, as I had all manner of ideas for what it could be used for given how reliant I was on natural light for much of what quartzite could do. On the other hand, getting any ‘flammability’ at all cost me three quarters of my mana bar when I tried to extract it from the grubs, and I got barely a few drops of it. After setting it aside in its own petri dish I then went on to attempt to make a ‘flammability tonic’ just to see what it would do.

Now that was a fun experiment. By which I mean I had apparently invented a form of self-immolating kerosene. Just add contact. I might have been a little bit more successful with that than I had planned. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem I could actually reduce the intensity of the tonics by diluting them: they either worked completely, or not at all. So I would have to go back to the infusion of essences into critters approach, but to be honest that was probably better anyhow because it didn’t tie up alchemy lab time to create. Plus, it gave me the opportunity to attempt something I hadn’t actually tried out before -- modifying an already-living organism with essential infusions. I could easily do organisms during gestation, but adding infusions wasn’t something I’d tried out before. So I slaughtered one of the male cattle spiders on the premise that I still had another two males and that would be plenty to ensure the next generation grew correctly, and proceeded to render it down to its base essence. The next step was actually the inverse of what I normally did: rather than trying to sort the essences, I had to fuse them. Normally, the alchemical rendering process created emulsions. After a few minutes of sitting there staring at the self-sorting psychedelic colors in the cauldron, I stumbled upon the idea of using a ‘neutral’ catalyst to essentially act as a binding agent and thus turn the emulsion into a solution. Having long-since set up a second rendering cauldron up, I drew a sample of the domestication essence into the cauldron and began the process of converting it into its own negation, as I used to need to do before I developed the extraction technique.

Afterwards, I re-added an exactly equal amount of the domestication essence once again into the cauldron, this time with a vapor hood over the secondary cauldron which would capture the released alchemical vapors from this reaction and rather than allow the vapor hood to simply vent the gas outside, had it pass through a pipe that would percolate it through the cattle-spider essence emulsion, to which I had added the ‘flammability’ essence.

I had to repeat this process three or four times to actually get all of the essence in the primary cauldron to fuse together, but once it had, I had myself a cauldron full of the essence of flammable cattle-spider. Using that as a reagent for the trusty old sanguine healing technique on one of the female cattle spiders was the next step based on what I was hoping to accomplish, and … well, I managed to not set the farm on fire, when the spider I was targeting converted itself into a living fireball.

Which at least means that in general principle, I was onto something. From there it was just trial-and-error to get a working solution down. Apparently, I needed to add a negation essence of the fused-base type while simultaneously adding the new type in order to prevent the kind of “exciting event syndrome” from reoccurring. Well, that and to reduce rather more than I’d anticipated the amount of ‘flammability’ I was introducing, by first fusing it with the hemolymph essence and then fusing it with the base, so as to have some kind of control over where in the resultant animal the new trait would occur.

By the time I was done I had gone through two full generations of cattle spiders, and had to re-grow the grass in their pen six times. But what I got at the end was overall worth it. Rather than simply tossing out all of the cattle-spider except for their chitin from now on, I’d be able to press and filter their hemolymph in order to obtain something I couldn’t really tell apart from lamp oil. I didn’t really have a specific use for this yet, but the targeted trait engineering would certainly come in handy. I was rewarded with something I very much anticipated when I finally recorded the process I had gone through for sorting into the library, though. One separate description of the mana costs and another for the trait rearrangement process.

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