Chapter 398
Chapter 398
Jake had never liked the idea of humans knowing where his main lair was located. He had always known it was only a matter of time before someone uncovered it and suspected they might even attempt to raid it despite his warnings against such a reckless endeavor. That’s why, shortly after destroying the Los Demonios main base and returning to the city, he began work on a new lair.
He wanted his new lair to remain a complete secret from humans, not only keeping them unaware of its location but making sure they didn’t even know it existed. And the inspiration for this new lair’s site came from his enemies, now all dead. He had admired what Los Demonios had done with their main base and the location they had chosen. The placement of their stronghold gave him the idea of where to build his own.
After days of wandering through the Scarlands, he finally found a nearly perfect place for his new lair, which he planned to turn into his main habitat. The place was a quiet, large cavern, access to which could only be gained through a chasm in the earth above, located at a significant distance from the city.
The cavern wasn’t situated directly at the bottom of the chasm. Instead, to reach it, one first needed to traverse the length of a natural, pitch-black, winding tunnel. For that reason, the cavern was not visible from the chasm above, so even if someone flew over the chasm, they wouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. Even if they looked down with night vision, they would only see the unaltered bottom of the abyss.
The cavern was quite large with a high ceiling, but the space still wasn’t quite big enough for Jake’s taste, so he spent some time expanding it. To do this, he absorbed magical gems to give his attacks a temporal explosive effect. Afterward, he blasted the walls of the cavern with his smashfists. With each strike of his smashfists, rock shattered and walls retreated, making the cavern larger. Once it was big enough for his goals, he began turning it into his lair.
The process was straightforward: he used a tumor to open a transfer maw to his lair in the city, through which his arachnoxes carried biomatter into the cavern. Since his minions had amassed a large quantity of biomass, all he had to do was watch as the arachnoxes spread it across the cavern walls. As they worked with methodical precision, Jake slipped back to the city in search of mana orbs.
The whole process took just a few hours. After every inch of the cavern’s surface was covered with Corruption, he formed a Mana Core using one of the mana orbs he had found. Afterward, he began constructing all the necessary structures: Hive Nexuses, Extractors, Biomass Processors, Storages, and others. One by one, the foundations of his lair took shape. Since the ten-story building contained a great deal of biomatter and mana in reserve, the process of building those structures went quickly.
He also upgraded the Mana Core from one Rank to a higher one, unlocking new structures and immediately instructing his larvae to build them. Having large amounts of biomatter and mana stored in the previous lair made the entire process smooth and uninterrupted. As soon as the Mana Core advanced to its new Rank, he ordered his larvae to construct all the newly unlocked structures before driving the Mana Core toward the next stage of its evolution.
When the Mana Core finally reached Rank VIII, the same as the Mana Core in the ten-story lair in the city, he built a Fleshport to link the two lairs. Now he could teleport between them instantly, covering hundreds of yards in the blink of an eye. After that, he began constructing a Behemoth Cavern.
This structure was massive, oval in shape and resembled a giant egg. Upon completion, it was so tall it reached from the floor all the way to the ceiling. Jake set the monumental structure neatly in one corner, making sure it didn’t hinder the other installations.
Along the walls, smaller structures clustered in orderly rows, while dozens of biomass storage sacs clung to the ceiling like alien growths. The center of the cavern remained clear, leaving the center of the cavern open and spacious.
The front section of the oval-shaped structure was transparent, offering Jake an unobstructed view inside. The interior was filled with a vicious greenish liquid, and the purpose of the Behemoth Cavern was to nurture a huge, Kaiju-like beast within. The Hive Nexus simply couldn’t accommodate such a creature, which was why a separate structure, designed specifically for this purpose, was required. Also, as Jake had learned a few days ago, when he began raising a Kaiju, the process was somewhat more complex than cultivating regular creatures and took more time as well.
The initial process of creating a Kaiju involved instructing one of his larvae to crawl into the Behemoth Cavern. After that, the larva slowly developed into the first stage, known as the primorph. In this phase, the creature did little more than drift lazily through the cavern’s greenish waters, its body gradually lengthening and hardening as it prepared for the next step in its evolution.
To keep the process going, Jake needed to provide certain resources so the primorph could advance to the next stage. At this stage, only basic resources were needed, such as biomass, mana, brain matter, and rigidbone.
Jake had all of these in abundance, but unfortunately, he wasn’t allowed to simply give them all at once so the primorph could evolve immediately. Instead, the process demanded patience: each resource had to be given in measured portions, only in response to specific requests.
Upon consuming the resource, the primorph continued to grow and develop, while Jake’s role was simply to wait until the next request appeared. As a result, the growth of the primorph had been progressing slowly for several days.
So, upon stepping through the Fleshport in the ten-story lair, Jake immediately emerged in the Fleshport of the Apex Hollow. This was what he called the lair situated in the cavern below the Scarlands to distinguish it from its ten-story counterpart in the city.
After quickly glancing around his new lair to make sure everything was in order, he crossed the space to the Behemoth Cavern to check on the development process of his Kaiju in the making, a secret project known only to him.