The Hoplites had not let him down. Their memories were working perfectly and they could act in complete unified formations. The partial human seals were working quite well, looking like tattoos on their chests over their hearts. Their appearance was shocking enough that the little tattoo was barely noticeable. They looked very similar to humans except at their extremities. From the elbow and knee down they had insect exoskeletons. They also had a carapace on their heads with only the face and a line down the center of their skulls exposed. They looked like they were wearing bracers, greaves, and open faced helmets made out of emerald green bug carapaces.

The Hoplite men had mohawks poking up from the small strip of skin on top of their heads, while the women had slightly more space at the top and back of their head to grow hair so they wore ponytails or other human styles. Aside from their insectoid hands and feet, their most unusual feature was on their faces. Instead of lips they had eight tentacles a few inches lower. The tentacles could intertwine and lay flat to look sort of like lips, but when they ate the tentacles would grasp and writhe around. It was an unsettling sight.

Each of the hoplites was armed with a spear, a silk shield, and silk armor. The equipment wasn’t much, but it only took a spearhead and some wood. They wove the silk themselves into thick many layered breastplates and skirts. The shields were just made of wood and covered in many layers of silk. Since they were using Sage’s current most powerful silk, the shields and armor were stronger than steel and when combined with their emerald forearms and shins their appearance matched Sage’s name for them. After a few battles, Sage told King to start training some of them as Smiths and Miners. Spears alone weren’t enough, so it would be a big improvement to get more weapons for them all.

Currently, Sage was standing over the body of the Grim Skywolf and a dozen Hoplites stood guard around him. They had previously been spread out over a large area to keep others from interfering with Sage’s battle and he called them back once the wolf died. He had fought the natural instinct to just tear apart the wolf and start eating it raw. Previously, he’d done such a thing after dying as a way to practice Blood Refining. After eating a beast, he could run the technique passively in his stomach. Such an activity was actually very inefficient.

Sage formed some signs with his hands and then placed his palms against the side of the dead wolf. Blood flowed rapidly out of its huge cuts, pooling on the ground. Strangely, the pool was getting smaller instead of growing larger. Some of the blood that had splashed in the area began to run across the ground. The technique Sage was using seemed to attract all of the wolf’s blood into a single puddle, one that wasn’t just laying flat. It grew taller and taller, forming into the shape of a sphere and even floating upwards into the air. In just a few minutes every drop of blood in the wolf’s body as well as all that had spilled in the area had collected into a large floating sphere.

The sphere started to spin, swirling and whirling around. It grew to twice its previous size and Sage pointed to a Hoplite. The Hoplite brought over a large bucket and as if on cue, the sphere of blood fell down into the bucket. Or at least most of it did, where the sphere of blood had been floating there was now only a few drops left behind. Sage bit his finger, drawing some blood. Then he waved his other hand and the floating blood drops flew over and landed on his open wound. He circulated the Blood Refining technique and the drops of blood were absorbed into his body. The cut on his finger healed up almost immediately and he waved his hand to collect the corpse of the Grim Skywolf into his Universe Ring.

His new body was at least twice as strong as his old body. He had drawn out the maximum potential from the draconic bloodline that came both from King as well as the Golden Egg. Ruanfu was a combination of the two, which meant she carried two different dragon bloodlines. Instead of building his body on looks or physical features he thought might be strong he focused on bloodline and added other features later.

The egg that he had Ruanfu combine with was a combination of the Fat Grass Worm, Fire Bellied Cobra, Viridian Gecko, Fire Crested Iguana, and Blade Tailed Viper. The end result, which he lazily called a Winged Snake Worm, would normally be a terrible choice to completely merge with, but he had always planned a second metamorphosis. Luckily, his plan to use mutate was also successful and so he picked out the strongest bloodlines to use as a base. That gave him a dragon body to which he then added the most important features from the other beasts.

There was regeneration provided by the Fat Grass Worm. Unfortunately, he couldn’t clone himself. The worm had such a weak soul that it was almost non-existent and new bodies only needed a tiny spark of soul stuff to function. The smaller horizontal scale patterns on his hands and underside had a second set of muscles to let them undulate and they were made of the same structures as gecko feet, which let him slither or climb across walls. The strange spine ridge was from the Blade Tailed Viper, forming a segmented whip sword just as the snake had. Surprisingly, it also came from a somewhat powerful bloodline and enhanced the dragon line further.

Of course, Sage couldn’t leave out the most powerful abilities from before and he still had hypnotic eyes from that toad, pheromone control from the Succubus Beetle, and silk spinnerets from the Steel Silk Centipede. He also shifted the contribution of the Chameleon Mantis, ditching the blade forearms and accepting a reduction in scale armoring to gain the color changing power of chameleon skin. There was also the mouth and inner lining from the Warp Worm, but instead of trying to use it for burrowing, he just kept it around for energy refining and defense. He could swallow up energy sources, refine some of it, then release the rest out of his body.

Normally, the Warp Worm was able to discharge energy in such a fashion because of its body composition. It was a worm with just one simple passage through its body. Sage’s new body wasn’t constructed like that internally, but he got around his problem with another additional part. He’d only added it in on a whim. The Fire Crested Iguana. It was just a silly little pet that had a spine ridge of flame. It didn’t seem like much, but Sage was hoping for a technique in its ancestral memories to create the flames. Instead, he learned it was caused by a special organ. It was something like an extreme acupoint or Qi pore. The normal route for Qi to exit the body and affect the outside world, cultivators could open up, widen, and strengthen their Qi pores to perform different techniques. It was like adding in more taps or faucets to release energy.

The Fire Crested Iguana actually had a special organ that Sage had named ‘energy vents’. Instead of just an energy pipeline they were like jet nozzles. Using less energy for a much greater effect. The downside is that they were always on. Most of the Fire Crested Iguana’s natural Qi recovery was expended on simply maintaining its flaming crest. Thankfully, it had only a handful of those energy vents along its spine, just enough for it to be manageable, but not enough to be all that effective for anything else. The vents were directly connected to its meridians and without a way to close them, they were a constant energy drain.

Sage found a workaround. The Fire Bellied Cobra. It had a whole second set of meridians. It even had its own special cultivation art just for the poison meridians, Blood of Fire. It was something no human could do as they had only one dantian and one set of meridians in their bodies. With the Fire Bellied Cobra, Sage formed a whole second dantian and set of meridians. Using that as a blueprint, he formed a third set of lesser meridians. Since the energy vents couldn’t be closed he chose to link them up to a third set of meridians, one that he linked up directly to his mouth. Now, any energy in his mouth could be filtered to the third set of meridians and sent out of the energy vents that lined his spine, tail, and other joints.

Blood of Fire was a strange technique. It drew poison from the blood and body, pulling it into the dantian and combining it with the other poisons there. The Qi transforms into a poison Qi, using the dantian as a mixing pot. The normal set of meridians were interconnected with the body in an integral fashion and if they were suddenly filled with poison it would seep into every part of them and soon lead to death. Theoretically, Sage thought there might be a way for a human to use it if the poisons were combined into a tonic. The only problem is the person would have no other cultivation and if any other poison were to enter their body their tonic would be ruined and they’d be poisoned.

The true second set of poison meridians were carefully placed and sealed so there was only input Qi pores with the only output being the fangs. It was quite an elegant design and when combined with the energy vents from the Fire Crested Iguana and the mouth of the Warp Worm, it made for quite the system. Even so, it only barely matched up with the abilities that came from the dragon bloodline.