In the end, System didn't find any living animals, but he did find a dead one—a zombie rabbit.
The zombie rabbit was still jumping around like it used to back when it was alive, but its zombie body had become too stiff to handle its movements. Basically, it smashed heavily into the ground every time it nded, and it took the rabbit more than ten seconds to struggle up from the ground after each jump.
This zombie rabbit was obviously a failure as an undead creature.
System could also smell the bacteria from his [Pgue Mucus] on this rabbit.
This time, System didn't ask Shava to help. He just directly used his [Pgue Mucus] to assimite the bacteria from the rabbit's rotten meat.
With the loss of the [Pgue Mucus], the zombie rabbit's flesh began sloughing off little by little. Over a period of just a few minutes, System watched the zombie rabbit turn into a skeleton rabbit. Its rotten meat and internal organs were scattered all over the ground.
After that, the skeleton rabbit still managed to jump a few more times. However, as the st of its bckened brain matter was jostled out of its skull during one of its crash ndings, the blue fme floating inside the skeleton rabbit's skull also went out.
The skeleton rabbit finally stopped moving.
'It seems that just removing a zombie's flesh and blood won't turn it into an undead skeleton.'
System continued running his tests on other zombies. He quickly selected two nearby wolf and ratman zombies.
Their endings were the same as the skeleton rabbit's. After System assimited the pgue bacteria infecting the zombies into his [Pgue Mucus], the rotten flesh on the two zombies quickly fell off. When the blue fmes in these zombies' skulls went out, their skeletons also colpsed to the ground and stopped moving.
...
After System finished running his experiments on the zombies, his health value had returned to full, his hunger had completely disappeared, and he'd also filled up nearly ten percent of his experience bar.
In some ways, as long as there were enough zombies, System could quickly improve his level and strength.
Unfortunately, zombies did not have the ability to reproduce. As long as he kept killing zombies like he had today, there would be fewer and fewer of them in the Warren Pins as time went on.
It was obviously unrealistic for System to rely on recycling the pgue bacteria in the zombies to improve his level.
Moreover, compared to simply increasing his level, System was more interested in improving his life level. His goal was to undergo his fourth pupation.
He still needed to make some preparations before that could happen, though. The minimum conditions for System's next pupation were reaching level 60 and leveling his [Pupation] talent up to 21.
Gaining levels would get slower and slower in the ter stages, but it was only a matter of time before he reached level 60. However, it was obviously going to be more difficult to level up [Pupation].
At present, System's [Pupation] talent's limit was level 19, and eating slime was no longer able to increase the talent's level cap.
He had to find some other method that could raise the upper limit of his [Pupation] talent. If he couldn't, it would be impossible to continue improving his life level.
However, System, who was thinking, soon had a realization and managed to rex a bit.
Whether it was the removal of the [Severance Curse] or the improvement of the upper limit of his [Pupation] talent, they were obviously not things that could be changed in a short amount of time.
Even with the [Severance Curse] reducing his lifespan, he could still live for more than seventy years, so there was no need to be so anxious.
...
After he observed the nearby area from the sky again without finding anything, System decided to return to the nest.
On the way back, he found a bck scorpion that was nearly twenty centimeters long in a pile of rocks.
This scorpion, which was probably hibernating for the winter, had squeezed into a crack between the rocks. Obviously, the temperature being close to zero degrees didn't have a big effect on it.
System casually grabbed the scorpion and decided to take it back to the nest to eat as a te-night snack.
But just as he was removing the scorpion's stinger and legs, he discovered something unusual. He could sense the scorpion's angry and pained emotions.
It seemed that after his third pupation, the strength of his [Mental Transmission] ability had improved, allowing him to feel the emotions of a wider variety of creatures.
System guessed that he could now feel the emotions of all arthropods. He could send mental messages to and communicate with creatures like centipedes, scorpions, spiders, and crabs.
However, being able to communicate with scorpions or spiders wouldn't bring him any obvious benefits.
System thought about his improved ability briefly before quickly killing the unfortunate scorpion. Originally, he'd pnned to keep the scorpion fresh until it was time for his midnight snack, but the way that it had kept expressing its pained emotions had just been too noisy...
...
After returning to the nest, System immediately instructed Queen Linda to start ying eggs so that they could begin expanding the colony to an appropriate size.
After her second pupation, the ant queen's egg-ying ability had improved a lot. In just a few minutes, she id more than a dozen eggs roughly three centimeters in diameter.
According to Queen Linda's mental messages, as long as there was enough food, she could y nearly a hundred eggs this size every day. If she wanted to, she could y thousands of smaller eggs in a day.
These eggs were several times rger than the eggs that had been id by the queen before her second pupation. Back then, the queen had adhered to System's intention to produce offspring that were as high quality as possible, so she would only y two or three eggs each day.
However, after System used his tentacles' [Perception] ability, he saw that these huge eggs didn't actually exceed the scope of ordinary eggs. They were still eggs containing ordinary ants without any special powers.
The change may have been reted to an ability that the queen had obtained during her second pupation. These eggs were already level 5 when they were just id, and their bloodline talent was better than the queen's earlier offspring.
The high starting level of these ants also meant that their level would be higher after they pupated and became adults.
System specuted that each worker ant would reach about five centimeters in length after becoming an adult. As long as these ants grew up a little bit more, they would reach level 11 and undergo a second pupation.
As long as their [Pupation] talent was high enough in level, these ants would undergo their second pupation naturally, and they would either become worker ant knights about sixteen centimeters long or they would turn into rge worker ants like Excavator.
After a simple estimate, System figured that as long as they ate as much slime as possible to improve their [Pupation] talents, half of these ants would be able to undergo a second pupation naturally. With his help, the amount of ants that pupated twice would increase even further.
However, if the colony raised their ants this way, any future ants would undoubtedly consume an unimaginable amount of slime. System estimated that cultivating a thousand worker ants at the same time would be the colony's limit.
If there were more ants, the slime's regeneration speed wouldn't be fast enough, making it difficult for all of the qualified worker ants to undergo a second pupation.
System also had to factor in the winter when food was retively scarce. If there wasn't enough slime avaible to feed the young ants, it would be difficult to make up for the shortage with other food.
System looked over at the queen before finally deciding to start from the root of the matter. If he wanted to improve his ant subjects' [Pupation] talent, he didn't necessarily have to let the ants eat more slime. He could also directly strengthen Queen Linda's reproduction ability.
