My Emporium credits, combined with what I had acquired from my work with Tiamim, ensured that it wasn't long until I had enough crystals to visit the Archives. I just hit one small snag. The Archives were not a library, it was a tall obelisk with a teleporter that led to a set of libraries situated all over the city, each on a separate topic and with my crystals, I could get into one of them.

  There was a whole library dedicated to just classes and unlocking them. Then there was wildlife, politics and history, magical theory and much more. But no fction of any kind. I just had to pick a topic to focus on.

  It was a conundrum. I hadn't known that the Archives were divided like that. Why would I? That basically made cross referencing information virtually impossible. Still, the libraries were not insanely specific so I could afford to pick and choose.

  Ultimately, I could boil down my options to a binary choice. Well, a trinary choice, considering I could always not enter the Archives and instead spend everything at the Emporium, but it was simpler to compare the other two first. On one spider-scorpion hand-leg, I could read up on magical insects and monsters. Hivemother's Crippled Dominion was on the cusp of letting me have another Swarm General, and so I needed to get something that didn't compete with Medea for resources soon. On another leg-hand, just knowing about them didn't mean I could get to them. If something that caught my eye lived halfway across the world on a different continent or was a denizen of some other realm altogether like Sitra Achra then I was out of luck and I would have wasted my crystals. And now on the third leg-hand, I had to consider that anything too strong might be above my capabilities to subdue, and to make it a nice round four, I couldn't forget that something too weak would just be a waste of a slot. There were good reasons to choose to read up on insects and equally good reasons not to.

  And as for the other option, I could read up on biology based magic. It could help me unlock new skills and classes. But I was confident that my accomplishments had that handled for the immediate future.

  And so I made my rather obvious decision. Monsters, it shall be. I inserted my crystals into a slot on a desk in the obelisk shaped building. A screen before me lit up in green.

  “WELCOME, SEEKER OF KNOWLEDGE. THIS IS THE NEW DELPORT BRANCH OF THE ARCHIVES OF KULJINU. YOU HAVE PAID FOR ACCESS TO THE FIRST TWO FLOORS OF THE ARCHIVES. WHAT IS THE SUBJECT OF YOUR RESEARCH?”

  “Entomology and magical monsters.”.

  “ACKNOWLEDGED. ARCHIVE 7: ZOOLOGY IS ASSIGNED TO YOU. KINDLY STEP INTO THE TELEPORTER.”

  A white rectangle appeared before me and I stepped on to it. It worked exactly like the teleportation array back at the guild. In an instant, I was in a mundane looking library. Mundane if not for the fact that I could not see any end to the building in at least one direction. An expressionless old man in blue waited for me. And then a system notification appeared.

  “TIMER: 2880 minutes left.

  Once the timer reaches 0, you will be ejected out of the Archives. You can save your reading list to resume your progress. You can request refreshments and a place to rest. These do not count against your time limit but you must leave all your books outside the resting area.”

  Okay then. 2880 minutes was uhh, two days? More than enough for my purposes.

  The old man was simply called The Archivist. The owner of this place and someone directly on the payroll of the Illustris Council. I even saw a few other people, all escorted by their own copies of the same man. Apparently that was how he levelled up. Being an Archivist. The Archivist was not talkative but he was very helpful. I liked that, silent but willing to handle the boring parts for me.

  I could ask for books on specific topics and he would fetch them for me; he would even make me notes if I dictated them but I had to do the reading myself. But since I was realizing that I was woefully unprepared, I didn't have an actual plan about what kind of stuff I was looking for, other than that it had to be close to New Delport. He just nodded and a staircase made of blue starlight and glass materialized before us.

  “Come. The second floor will have what you seek.” His voice was remarkably unremarkable. No emotion, no accent. It didn't even sound robotic. It just was. Still, I followed him and climbed up as the ceiling above us melted into the same starry glass before disappearing altogether. Once on the second floor, I turned around to see the floor meld back together. Then a reading desk with a cushioned chair appeared at the same spot.

  The Archives also apparently had an area wide reading speed and focus buff. And honestly that was needed because even the first floor had so many damn books that just reading the titles to find a relevant shelf would have taken me hours. Still I just gave up on that after some time because other than spider scorpions, nothing really appealed to me. Ants and wasps and mosquitos and the likes. Actually now that I thought of it, if anything too dangerous was around then they would be already clashing with spider scorpions.

  “Alright, can you direct me towards insects that have that are high tier and can be found near New Delport? The weirder the better.” The Archivist nodded and snapped his fingers. A pile of books appeared on the desk before me.

  The first book was just about spider-scorpions again. The second was about some colonial large ants that lived out in the forest. Very boring.

  The next was almost infinitely cooler. Giant acid spraying herbivorous beetles that melted minerals and absorbed them to improve their shell. They sounded like walking tanks to me, complete with weaponry. That was definitely something Medea would want to eat. I made a note to have the Hunter’s Guild get me the corpse of one since it could be found deeper into the Great Forests. Or if I was feeling daring then I could tag along. Or, maybe if I was a bit less daring then I could send only Medea along so that I could call it back if things went south.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  “So do we have any other insects that use metal? Nearby, of course.” A new book. Iron Reavers, Mantis-like flightless insects with powerful limbs. Exoskeleton with iron in it and literal scythes for arms. Small but with great jumps and limb strength, they could slash prey apart. Interesting, but my skill prickled. They would not do much other than offsetting the extra weight of the armor until Medea's stats picked up the slack. And did I really want to have to have a dependency on metal mages? I was already reliant on the Emporium. Still I added both of them to my notes.

  “Hey, can I briefly go over to a new building to cross check something?” I figured that getting a look over at metal magic would be helpful. The Archivist smiled apologetically.

  “No, you can, however, pay extra to do exactly that.” Oh well. I bet it wouldn't be hard to find a creature that produces its own organic metal. Another note. Some turtles and pseudo-elemental monsters did precisely that.

  “I want something about armored insects.” A new book was flopped on my desk: “Superhard chitin in magical arthopods.” And once again my notes grew when I found another giant beetle with an organic shell and mandibles made of a very hard and tough substance that almost rivalled the previous one in defensive capabilities, if not size and offensive strength. This one lived really out there and would take a team of high level hunters almost a month to get to and back just from the distance.

  Frustrated at the dearth of strong insects, I rose up again and started wandering through the shelves. Each shelf had a plaque over it that briefly mentioned what it was about. One read “Non-Standard Evolution/Insects”

  Hmm, let us see. “Mimic Worms: Obligate Neoteny in Predatory Caterpillars”. That certainly didn't sound that good but I still had a look. My intuition was right. They were neither useful for Medea nor were they strong enough for me to integrate into the swarm.

  A lot of other middling creatures and books passed me by on that shelf —at some point I even asked for permission to summon Medea just so that I could possess it to skim through more books— and Fauna Archive greedily levelled up multiple times before I saw The Book.

  The moment my eyes fell upon the picture on the cover, I was filled with a primal instinctual terror that almost terminated all thought. Medea too froze right besides me, its human-like hands just about to turn a page. Frigid Mind levelled up instantly and I could breathe again, the pause, by itself, only taking up half a second in my increasingly messed up mind. Whatever it was, Medea's instincts were screaming at both of us to get away from it. And that, more than anything, attracted me to it. The cover depicted something that vaguely resembled a pitch black wasp with blood red wings that curved across the book's jacket, almost like a Tarantula Hawk wasp. I knew what Tarantula Hawk wasps were, of course; wasps that paralyzed large spiders and laid eggs on them that ate the still living spider alive from the inside after hatching. Messed up. But this was not that, only similar. And only vaguely so now that I looked closer. The torso looked like a wasp's. The head’s general shape was also correct but that was where the similarities ended. The head was massive with jaws and mandibles that seemed oversized for its body. Except the legs were even longer and had serrated edges. The head also had a bony crest akin to a headdress that rose and curved halfway across its entire length. The creature’s round abdomen was proportional but the stinger at its end was again oversized. And then I noticed that the ‘wasp’ had two extra wings in its body, almost hidden by the larger ones.

  I read the title.

  “The Black: Terrestrial lifeforms warped by the Unformed Chaos.”

  ‘Mother, stop. Don't read it.’ Medea sounded desperate.

  Still, I had to look closer despite Medea’s pleas. I didn't, couldn't know if Medea was just scared because of the possibility that this thing, whatever it was, might have the relationship with spider-scorpions that regular tarantula hawks might have with regular spiders, or it was the divine limiter but I had to know. My curiosity was piqued now, and I was reasonably confident that my skill would protect me from any sanity shattering revelations. Still, I asked, just to be sure.

  “Does this book contain knowledge that would hurt me by just knowing it?”

  “No. No knowledge contained in the first four floors of my Archives will hurt you. Directly, that is. What you do with the knowledge you gain here is up to you.” That settled it then. I cracked the book open.

  I almost wish I hadn't. And then I was happy, I had.

  Chaos-warped hawk wasps were pretty large, and they were fucked up. Their wings produced a sound that paralyzed everyone around them until they stung and killed them for food. Except for when a wasp was pregnant with a queen. In that case, it would deposite a single egg in the victim before dying. The egg would then hatch almost immediately into a tree like creature that would entwine itself within the organs of the host and replace them until it couldn't be removed without the host’s death.

  Then the host would be transformed into a living biological factory for birthing new wasps as the tree enslaved the host into its servant. Such a creature would even be able to transform herself into a swarm of wasps and reform by infecting a new host to move quickly and escape danger. Thankfully there was nothing in there that mentioned the host needing to be a human.

  Chaos-warped hawk wasps didn't necessarily have any place they were native to, they existed everywhere hawk wasps did and were exposed to the energies from the Unformed Chaos. They were extinct in the wild but there was a market for classers here.

  If someone was really stupid, lucky, smart or any combination of the three, it was not unheard of to instead subvert the tree to one's will. To become a human queen instead.

  It felt like an age had passed since I first took [SWARMCALLER NOVITIATE] but it had mentioned something that sounded familiar. I opened my mastered classes section and read the description again.

  \\SWARMCALLER NOVITIATE (0/15)

  A SWARMCALLER NOVITIATE understands that the most successful form of life in the world is that of the insectoids and that's for a reason. She can tame insectoids to make them do her bidding. She can further enhance her minions’ ferocity by sacrificing her mana.

  At higher class levels, SWARMCALLERS can bring down apocalyptic swarms of insects on those that dare oppose her or she can command a few titans that can even wrestle with drakes. Or maybe, even darker paths await a SWARMCALLER that eschews the weaknesses of the mortal races.

  MASTERY BONUSES:

  +2 to VITALITY, ACUITY, WILLPOWER AND ATTUNEMENT

  “... darker paths await a SWARMCALLER that eschews the weaknesses of the mortal races.”

  I now knew what one of those darker paths entailed.

  Yeah, I don't think I wanted one in my swarm, but I think Medea should eat one. Maybe I should see if I could take over a queen somehow? How would that work with Medea's own rapid evolution? Maybe I could even throw in the Nightwing Amphisbaena’s super cancer growth venom? I just needed to grow until I could combine them safely to see what that would create.

  If that was not enough to get past the divine limiter, then I don't know what could ever be.

  Ultimately, my quest for a worthy new Swarm General was not a success but I had learned enough about the critters around New Delport that I was feeling good about myself when the Archivist handed me my notes and made me walk back to the teleporter.

  Medea was going to have a veritable feast, mom had so many creatures for it to try.