The decision on a body shape was jaded by his personal preferences. Giant toads were somewhat fun from an outsider’s standpoint, but he just couldn’t bring himself to actually become one. At the same time, he also refrained from being just another serpentine dragon. Form follows function. In this case, the more complex his biology became, the more Body Power it would require. Even so, there was a limit to the amount of Body Power that could be focused upon any single attribute. The rest of the body would have to be properly reinforced and supportive to continue pushing one feature forward.

For example, if he were to pursue an unstoppable piercing horn he couldn’t just put 90% of the Body Power into the horn itself. It would just end up three times larger than the rest of his body. Sure, it would be extraordinary, but he would barely be able to lift it, let alone strike with it. To truly benefit, he’d need a powerful body. One that was fast and strong to allow him to close with enemies and bring the horn to bear. He’d also need to reinforce his neck and spine to survive the impact of using the horn and even have good enough senses to make sure he struck the target. Similar principles would apply to any other physical feature.

In his last transformation, he’d learned how to sort out the more powerful bloodlines, using stronger muscle structures and blood composition from the mix of different creatures and their ancestors that he’d merged with. Now, with Guan Zhenyan’s help he didn’t just pick out what seemed to be the most powerful, but instead could tailor his decisions to support his plans. The experience was somewhat surreal, he was fulfilling the dream of so many geneticists. Tailoring his own personal evolution as he wished. Sure, there were constraints, but it was still something so many others pursued for their whole lives without making a fraction of his current progress.

He followed the most orthodox cobra form. As a venomous snake, they were very long rather than thick and heavily muscled. There was also a defining feature of a cobra, the hood. From there, he included the features he was going to focus on. Hypnotic Eyes were the main focus, followed by Poison Meridians, and finally Regeneration. Of course, he wouldn’t leave out the special structures required to perform the techniques from inherited memories, like Cosmic Traction and Soul Fragment, but that was something of a given. Once he’d integrated each feature he started experimenting with how to distribute Body Power to get the greatest effect. Soon, he found a ratio between the Hypnotic Eyes and body size where it seemed to fall out of proportion. As he’d found before, Body Power would also determine his size and growth rates. Adding more and more Body Power to the eyes would start to make them larger after a certain point, and then they wouldn’t fit in the head. Then he’d have to make the head bigger and soon enough there’d be a point where it became ungainly and he wouldn’t even be able to lift his head.

With a proper ratio figured out, Sage distributed Body Power and took a look at the end result. Simple, but functional. Guan Zhenyan spoke out at this point, “Good. That will do nicely. Hurry up and start the metamorphosis.”

Sage agreed, but the process took months so he was going to experiment a little bit before he made things final. It was like playing with the character editor on a video game. Sure, he could just click a preset build and change a few features before hitting ‘play’, but he wasn’t planning on changing again for a while so he was going to see what else he could do while he was here. Guan Zhenyan was annoyed, but he didn’t say anything more, just letting Sage mess around for a while. On the plus side, he continued to analyze the end result as Sage played around, which gave Sage a better idea of how to gauge the resulting aura and power levels he felt from each possible end result. Without Guan Zhenyan looking over his shoulder this whole time, he wouldn’t be able to accurately gauge how he would end up. Just like before, he’d be picking a body based on appearance and not actual ability.

His experimentation was not without benefit. He attempted to include different features and tested how they performed with different amounts of Body Power or being placed in unusual ways. The first harvest came when he experimented with using Chameleon Skin. He was just messing around, but when he devoted more Body Power it allowed the skin to change colors faster and with more degree of control. When a sufficient level was applied to the hood of the cobra it improved the hypnosis effect. Not finding this surprising, Sage happily integrated the change. He carefully focused the Body Power into the scales on the hood instead of the whole body. Now the cobra’s scales could change colors and patterns, but the scales on the hood and head were now powerful enough that he felt it could even act as a weirdly shaped tv screen.

Having success with the change, Sage tried out other unusual combinations. He tried filling the snake’s mouth with poisoned fangs that could launch themselves. Wall crawling, web shooters, spinal swords, and many others. He messed around with all the old tricks as well as coming up with new stuff. Tiny wings, large wings, multiple wings, fur, long hair, short hair, antennae, pincers, and plenty of other bug and bird related features he’d never experimented with. Since he was only messing around, he even tried taking the absurd reproductive power of a Silverbee or Stonecutter Ant Queen. As expected, it only worked when he devoted almost the entire amount of Body Power to that faculty. Sage had no desire to just be a big fat egg laying machine so he quickly moved on to other options.

Eventually, he exhausted his creative energy and returned to finalizing his choice. He’d found one other improvement along the way. Just like the Chameleon Skin, he found another feature that was quite beneficial with a small and focused effect. The pheromone ability of the Charming Lance Beetle that it had inherited from the Succubus Beetle was quite useful. While he could eventually develop a gaseous poison for this use, it would be even more effective if he could use an airborne pheromone in addition to a blood or contact poison. His Body Power was spread a little thinner, and pheromone control was included, at the same time, Sage reshaped the fangs a bit to allow the cobra to spit its poison.

With that last set of changes, he was quite pleased. Although it wasn’t extremely specialized upon one body feature, the synergy between abilities meant he only lost a slight bit of efficiency while also gaining many other benefits. His hypnotic abilities would lose out to a huge eyed toad, but he’d drastically increased his stealth abilities, and also had access to powerful poison.

With the decision made, Sage slowly lost consciousness, fading into a deep sleep state. Guan Zhenyan also stopped paying attention to their connection. Only later would Sage realize that the tiny ball of energy that linked their minds had not faded away. Instead it fell to the ground next to the sapling inside Sage’s Inner Core and a little flower sprouted where it landed. Sage’s soul had closed its eyes and curled into a fetal position, unaware of the world around it.

In the outside world, a powerful defensive formation had been formed around a large green ball that looked like it was made out of overlapping leaf shaped pieces of chitin. It was a sort of pupae form the size of a truck, and it had been thrumming with a large amount of energy. Only when Sage made his decision did the energy fall. Those outside the strange pupae would stop feeling any energy being emitted, all of that power instead concentrated into the metamorphosis and now that it had begun, it was shielded from outside ‘eyes’. The outer shell did not provide much in the way of physical protection, but it drastically dampened energy emissions. While he could hide before transforming, it was very important that an enemy couldn’t just stumble upon him with Spirit Sense or a simple check with their aura.

Just like that, six months passed.