Starting with rogue ninjas, building the insect kingdom.

Chapter 36 Construction Bugs and Light Bugs

As Yu Nuzhicheng approached his home, he saw several figures standing at the door.

Besides the summer sun, there were also two men and one woman, all dressed in ninja vests, with unfriendly expressions.

Aburame Shisei could clearly sense the hostility emanating from them, especially from the tall man who had his hand on Natsumi's shoulder.

Summer lowered her head, her face showing embarrassment: "Xiujun..."

"Summer, who are these people?" Shisei Aburame stopped and maintained a friendly smile.

"These are my teammates," Natsumi introduced. "Captain, this is Takikawa Hide, my childhood friend. Hide-kun, this is our team captain, Aoki; this is Shota; this is Miu."

The man named Aoki looked him up and down, and said in a cold tone, "I heard you just returned to the village? Xia Ri fed mosquitoes all night in the woods while waiting for you."

"I'm sorry, it was my oversight," Aburame Shigeaki apologized frankly. "I was just about to apologize to Summer and invite her to lunch."

"No need," Aoki interrupted him. "We've received a temporary mission and need to leave the village soon. Summer, it's time to go."

Summer bit her lip, her voice full of apology, "I'm sorry, Xiu-jun. The mission came so suddenly..."

"It's alright, the mission is important." Aburame Shisei waved his hand. "Be careful."

Aoki snorted and turned to walk towards the village entrance with his two teammates.

Summer hurried to catch up, took a few steps, then looked back at Aburame Shisei, opened her mouth, and finally just waved.

Aburame Zhicheng shook his head, took the newly acquired scroll, and pushed open the door to enter the room.

As for Aoki's hostility, he didn't care.

Although he and Xia Ri are childhood sweethearts, he doesn't like Hei Pi; moreover, they seem to be in a romantic relationship.

Hmm, we can find an opportunity to lock them down.

He placed the headband and scroll on the table, temporarily putting the little incident behind him.

The most urgent task is to consolidate his position in Takigakure as soon as possible and use his Chunin privileges to obtain more information.

The remaining task is to focus all efforts on building an underground insect hive and cultivating new intelligence insects.

Three days passed in the blink of an eye.

Yu Nu Zhicheng has been having an unusually leisurely time these past few days. During the day, he only tends to the vegetable garden in his own yard, and at night he manipulates insects to continue cultivating the underground space.

After three days, the first level of space, located 20 meters underground, has been completed.

Unfortunately, due to the soil conditions here, there is a risk of landslide if we continue to dig deeper.

The soil-eating insects, which can produce firm, sticky soil by eating soil, have only differentiated into fewer than a thousand individuals within their population, and their genetic characteristics are not very stable.

Initially, he didn't want to use petri dishes to accelerate this evolutionary process because these insects differentiated extremely quickly and at a very stable pace. They simply continued to eat soil, die, and reproduce in a predictable manner.

With his manual guidance, a stable type of adult insect can be differentiated after a few years.

Furthermore, he wanted to save the original energy in the petri dish to cultivate a kind of insect that could break through the limitations of his current strength.

But now that underground construction has hit a bottleneck, he has no choice but to use it as a temporary measure.

He collects soil and rocks into a petri dish and adjusts the evolution time to a thousand times. During this time, he must keep a close eye on the soil—because once the soil in the petri dish is consumed, the petri dish will automatically extract primordial energy to create soil in order to continue the experiment.

This is a very energy-consuming process. In fact, the petri dish is very powerful; it records any adult insects that it cultivates, as well as any experimental materials that enter the petri dish.

However, all experimental equipment generated out of thin air within the petri dish consumes energy, accounting for 90% of all energy consumption.

Clay clods are everywhere, so he certainly wouldn't waste his precious primal energy on something like that just because of his momentary carelessness.

After another three days, Yu Nu Zhicheng worked tirelessly, barely closing his eyes.

The one impersonating him above is a shadow clone, which comes down once a day to exchange information and avoid suddenly forgetting the people and events he encountered the next day, thus revealing a flaw.

Even if those ordinary villagers weren't that observant and wouldn't notice so many details, his caution was something he had naturally developed over the years.

After consuming the equivalent of forty years, he evolved this differentiated insect to its ultimate form in one go.

Of course, this does not mean that they cannot continue to evolve; it is just that, so far, these insects can be stably inherited and are almost impossible to change abruptly through external environment or chakra stimulation.

For them to continue to change, they must undergo thousands or even tens of thousands of years of evolution.

Therefore, it is not wrong to say that they have reached their limit.

He named the new insect the Civil Engineering Bug.

These insects are three times larger than normal parasites, are brownish-yellow in color, fly slowly, and survive solely on soil or a small amount of chakra.

However, simply absorbing chakra alone cannot keep these insects alive for long. To put it simply: soil is like food, and chakra is like water.

Insects can survive on water alone, but they will eventually starve to death due to malnutrition. Fortunately, there is soil everywhere here.

After the earthworm has devoured the soil, it excretes a highly viscous slurry that cools rapidly and solidifies into a highly resistant building material.

After conducting numerous experiments, Shisei Aburame discovered that the viscous sap produced by these insects could be controlled and shaped by his chakra, and could even slow down or accelerate the drying process.

He originally had no earth-style chakra, but by controlling these insects, he was able to unleash an even more powerful Earth Release: Earth Flow Wall.

After that, he worked with these insects to build underground, and after a day, he finally completed the reinforcement of the first floor.

This is a 100-square-meter, 3-meter-high space where he built a pond to raise buoyant insects and planted many fluorescent plants to provide oxygen.

In addition, he caught many fireflies from outside, since stealing electricity would be easy to expose, and the best way was to cultivate insects that could emit light.

Although these insects are not very powerful, they are still essential for survival.

With the space of a petri dish, and with the knowledge of insect cultivation of the entire Aburame clan stored in his mind, he successfully cultivated light-emitting insects that were bright, long-lived, and easy to feed, using only the equivalent of fifty years' worth of raw energy.

Their food is simple; they only need some fluorite, which is a type of stone with slightly radioactive material. However, the light they produce is not radioactive; it is bioenergy.