Chapter 62 Radio (Patreon)

                   Immortal Suiko received a rather interesting report. The toddler offspring of the essence humans from the Great Black Tree Labyrinth appeared to be able to talk to each other mind to mind over great distances. This was something legitimately new, and it was Suiko’s job to find out if it would help to produce more immortals over time.

                   The only reason why they found out about the mind-talking ability was because the toddler’s mothers pointed out some strange occurrences, like words, experiences, and abilities that their toddlers had that they had never been exposed too. When the mothers brought this to the mage tower's attention, as was the mother’s duty, the mages first checked to see if anything was wrong with the toddler's mind, as mixed offspring from essence and mana humans often produced offspring with corrupted minds. It was puzzling as nothing like this had happened with the previous five generations of the Great Black Tree Labyrinth’s essence human offspring. As mages checked toddler after toddler, they soon realized the toddlers were learning what each other experienced, and thus, they had more knowledge than they should. As soon as this realization was made, they sent word to the immortals, and Suiko began giving commands.

                   Suiko had all the living essence humans from the Great Black Tree Labyrinth, all the essence human offspring, and their mothers brought to another moon via gate. If they could communicate with each other, it was possible they could communicate with the dungeon, and they did not want to give any dungeon too much information. Alongside them, she called for a staff of four thousand mages, including twelve tier three mages, to oversee the experiments on them.

                   In the end there were more than ten thousand offspring of the essence humans, as the mages had been using the essence humans as breeding stock for over fifty years at this point, and many of the living essence humans were already great grandparents. That said, most of this work was unnecessary as it turned out that only the newest stock of humans had the ability to talk mind to mind. That wasn’t to say there were not interesting changes from the earlier essence humans, as those had some interesting bone and muscle adjustments with the incredibly strong threads weaved throughout, and they provided data on how to breed out the useless cores and essence channels while keeping their other beneficial changes.

                   Although it took Suiko nearly a month to determine that only the latest batch of humans had the mind talking ability, that was fine. Suiko could point to examples where it took centuries to notice an essence human ability given by other dungeons to every essence human they made. Finding out in just three years in, as the oldest offspring with this ability were three years old, as their mothers had mated with the newest essence human a little over four years earlier, was a boon.

                   Suiko needed to find out if they could talk to each other’s minds due to essence channels, or a material change in their bodies, as the first generation offspring of essence humans always had their parent's cores, essence channels, and any material change in their body. She used her tier three oracle core to peer into the young children. The oracle core was a third-tier core, and it was linked to the second-tier time and soul cores. It gave her some precog abilities, but it also allowed her to peer into the innards of living creatures without vivisecting them. That wasn’t to say she was against vivisections, but using her oracle sight was usually far faster, and she didn’t have to heal anyone afterwards.

                   When she peered into the offspring, she found normal mana channels. Earth channels for defense, wind channels to increase oxygen supply, and lightning channels to allow them to survive and produce lightning. Suiko was a bit disappointed when she found out that mana channels were not responsible for the mind-to-mind talking since that would have been something instantly given to mages and perhaps made lightning warriors practical as a class.

                   With the mana channels mapped out, she had to look for the material cause, and it did not take long to find extra brain material. In fact, the extra brain material was a pair of little knobs. Both were on the left side of the brain, one just past the halfway mark on the front of the brain and the other halfway to the back of the brain. The little knobs had the special super strong string coming out of it that the dungeon’s essence creatures tended to produce. The string extended down the neck, into the shoulder, down the arm, and reached all the way to the hand, alongside the nervous system. Albeit one knob’s string went to one arm, and the other went to the other. Suiko figured one was for talking, and the other was for listening, and she would figure out which one later with a few vivisections.

                   Now that she knew it was a material ability, she had to determine how far the ability extended. The first thing she did was have the mates of the essence human ask him a lot of questions because he was the only adult she had access to with this ability, and perhaps the dungeon gave him information the toddlers had no way of knowing. He answered what he could, although, to her surprise, he kept mentioning how happy he was to be back in contact with his children, as when his mates left, they went out of range of his ability. Suiko was relieved when she found out there was definitely a limit to how far the signal could go. She was far less pleased to find out that their captive had been actively talking with the dungeon in his captivity in the mage tower near the Great Black Tree Labyrinth.

                   Testing the range was easy and did not need the adult. They separated the toddlers into pairs and showed one a picture, and if the other could answer correctly, they both received rewards. The toddlers were excited to play this game. It took a few weeks of testing to find out that the essence human offspring were able to talk mind to mind within line of sight almost endlessly, albeit distance seemed to make the communication less clear, and they were able to communicate through walls, although enough material stopped the communication. When they got far enough from each other on the moon, the curvature of the moon put enough materials between the offspring that they could no longer communicate, and they had trouble communicating when landscape was in the way.

                   Once they found out the range of their ability, they began testing if the toddlers could turn off and on the ability by giving rewards to those who could keep a secret. Then, they tested to see if they could give a secret to one person instead of the whole group, and it became obvious that the toddlers could pick and choose who they talked to. Furthermore, they never had to meet each other to be able to talk to one another, mind to mind.

                   Although that was interesting, that did not help Suiko determine if this would help make the humans immortal. Although the oldest were only three years old, and these essence human offspring were still being conceived at an increasing rate since Suiko needed more test subjects, all the toddlers that were able began getting tutored by the best teachers on the twelve moons. Although this meant that some mages would have a slightly worse education, Suiko did not care. If this ability somehow increased learning speed, it may increase the number of people able to become mages and also increase the number of mages able to become immortals. Even if this ability only gave them one more immortal, it would be worth the cost.

                   The results from their education were outstanding. When one of the children did not understand something, they would ask the others to explain it, and pretty soon, as a group, they taught the ones who didn’t get a subject right away. Furthermore, they were able to use their mind talking ability to teach the younger ones, including the ones who did not know how to speak yet. One of the things that slowed down the creation of mages was the fact that they had to have a lot of understanding and precision to draw mana channels, and it looked like the mind-talking allowed them to learn far more quickly.

                   In order to see if they could learn magic, Suiko ordered the mages to give the toddlers, the oldest few being five years old at this point, the ability to draw lightning mana channels in the air. The toddlers already had so many mana channels in them due to their heritage that the mages could not put the mana channels in them to allow them to draw earth or wind mana channels. Despite that, it was astonishing to Suiko how quickly they learned their lessons, and in just three short years, most of the children over the age of four were able to draw artificial lightning mana channels in the air. That was an outstanding result. It normally took experienced mages a year to learn to draw a new mana channel, and it was not uncommon for new mages to take a decade to learn to draw their first artificial mana channel in the air.

                   One of the many problems was that the offspring before Suiko already had a tier-two core. That meant that they could not get any more tier-one cores. Furthermore, even if they did not have the tier two core, their bodies naturally produced mana channels due to their heritage, which would have made it impossible to give them all the mana cores anyway, much less connecting mana channels to those cores. Although these toddlers had excellent learning abilities, they were incapable of becoming immortals.   

                   Suiko needed to start a breeding program. The goal of the program was to allow their offspring in a few generations to retain their mind talking abilities but to lose their cores and essence channels. Once Suiko came to this realization, four more immortals and three hundred tier-three mages joined her to oversee their eugenics project. Their first step was to force-age the toddlers until their bodies were old enough to breed and then call in thousands of peasant women to carry the hope of future generations. Suiko suspected that they would be able to breed a new generation every three years. With tens of billions of people on the twelve moon there would be no end of suitable mates for these children.  

                   In the coming years, the children born in this program would learn how horrible they were going to be treated, but the immortals stopped any chance or hope of rebellion. They told the mind talkers that if they wanted to change things, they would have to become immortals, and twenty-seven generations, or eighty-one years later, the immortals finally started producing mind talkers who could become mages. Mages motivated by the suffering of the other mind talkers, but that didn’t matter to the Immortals. The immortals had long ago decided the death of mortals did not matter, all that mattered was the production of more immortals.