Rewrite That Witch
CH830 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 830: The Function of the Mutated Bug

The creature looked, as Agatha had written in her report, like something between a hairless spider and an ant with an engorged belly: slim upper body, joints that projected outward at unnatural angles, and a lower body almost as large as a grown man’s torso. It lay motionless now, pinned to the ground.

This was not, Roland suspected, its maximum size. To accommodate a Mad Demon inside its abdomen, the belly would need to swell to two or three times what he was looking at. The photographs from the ruin scene had shown the bugs in that state: heads pressed into the dirt, distended bellies facing upward, each one resembling a giant, fully-formed egg.

“Did you kill it?” Phyllis asked.

“It saves us trouble. It wasn’t aggressive, but it moved quickly.” Agatha closed her hand around the ice sword she had formed and drove it into the bug’s belly.

A milky-white liquid poured out, thick and faintly acrid.

“The slime can be used as a preservative,” Agatha said, watching it spread across the ground. “It’s fluid under normal conditions, but over time it solidifies — becomes something like egg white.”

Faldi wrinkled her nose. “Are we going to eat it?”

“I haven’t tried it. My guess is it would not be pleasant.” Agatha was already working on the bug’s dorsal surface. “The useful substance is in here.”

Seven or eight minutes of careful dissection produced a slimy green organ about the size of a fist.

“It looks like a gallbladder.” Phyllis had pushed her way to the front, fascinated.

“What’s inside isn’t bile.” Agatha cut it open with precision, added two drops of the dark green contents to the white slime on the ground, and produced a pair of ice pitons to mix the two fluids together. “Now watch.”

Roland held his breath.

The mixture moved sluggishly at first. Then, gradually, it thickened. The ice pitons slowed in Agatha’s grip. In two or three minutes they had stopped moving altogether, caught fast in whatever the substance had become.

Roland pressed a fingertip to the surface. It gave — yielding and springy — but only a few millimeters. He pushed harder. The same resistance, consistent, neither liquid nor rigid.

“Biological rubber,” he said. The excitement was difficult to contain. “This is what held Fran in place.”

He had flagged the peculiarity in Agatha’s first report — the way the solidified slime clung to surfaces and yet had the give of something flexible — and had thought at first of cobwebs. Subsequent reports had corrected that. This material was not fragile. It was tough and elastic. It could adhere to surfaces and could be molded. Both properties at once.

He had been looking for rubber for some time. Not a specific plant, but the underlying property — any natural source that produced a durable elastic compound. He had thought Leaf might be able to enhance a rubber tree or rubber grass if they could find a sample, but every inquiry had come back empty. No one in the Kingdom of Dawn, which had the most biodiverse territory he knew of, had heard of anything matching the description. His production lines had been forced to rely on Soraya’s ability to generate elastic materials directly — a bottleneck that grew more consequential with every new machine tool that came online.

The absence of natural rubber had become a quiet, persistent problem. As the factory’s capability increased and new machine tools came into service, the need for seals, gaskets, belts, and flexible joints multiplied. There was no elegant workaround.

Then Agatha and Lightning’s reports had arrived from the snow mountain ruin.

Roland looked at the material slowly congealing between Agatha’s ice pitons and felt the particular satisfaction of a solution he had not expected to find.

He had made the right call, bringing the bugs here.

“For practical purposes,” he said, “I don’t need extraordinary durability from this material. If it can seal connections and hold moving parts in place, it qualifies. That’s what I need rubber for.”

Agatha withdrew the pitons and set them aside. “When Summer reconstructed the scene at the ruin, we found it was the bugs that immobilized Fran. They netted her with slime ejected from their tails — the same substance. But the liquid from the belly alone won’t solidify. It only becomes adhesive and elastic when it mixes with the green organ liquid. Without the multi-eyed monster’s control, we had to learn this through dissection. If Sylvie hadn’t located Fran with the Eye of Magic, we would have spent another ten to fifteen days searching.”

Pasha nodded slowly. “Good material for fishing nets and ropes.”

“For nets, perhaps,” Alethea said flatly. “Not for ropes. No one wants a rope that stretches. And I suspect our learned mortal king did not transport these creatures across two ranges of mountains to improve his fishing.” She turned to Roland directly. “Whatever mad research you intend to pursue — do not forget that you now represent parties beyond Graycastle.”

The remark surprised him. Alethea had spent the better part of their acquaintance studying him with the wariness of someone who expected the alliance to collapse under the weight of his ambitions. That she would now say something that, in its own prickly way, acknowledged the legitimacy of his leadership — that was not something he had anticipated.

He smiled. “Of course. If everything goes as planned, you’ll see a wide range of applications in the near future.”

Pasha said, “One practical question: how do we get the bugs to produce slime without the monster controlling them? We can’t dissect one every time we need material.”

Agatha sealed the green organ into a leather bag and wiped her hands on a cloth. “That’s what the research phase is for. If nothing else works, we grow them in large numbers and treat them as a crop.”

The rubber worm was the most significant find, but Roland checked the other new species as well before leaving. The fruit plant that emitted a faint ghostly glow turned out, on inspection, to be a product of symbiosis: hundreds of luminescent beetles had colonized the fruit, and when the flesh decomposed, the beetles dispersed, carrying the seeds with them. The glow was not sufficient for street lighting — too diffuse, too dependent on living insects to be reliable. The transparent, boneless fish from the underground river was another matter of modest interest: edible, reportedly quite good, but confined to the lightless underground water and resistant to any attempt at open-air cultivation. A luxury at best. An oddity at most.

He had not expected every species from the ruin to be a revelation. The rubber worm was more than enough. He left the Third Border City feeling that the expedition had been worthwhile.

Before he could depart, Pasha found him near the entrance.

She brought two God’s Punishment Witches he had not met before, one on each side of her. They stood quietly, with the particular stillness of people who had been told something important was coming.

“Your Majesty — these two have volunteered to transfer their souls into devouring worm carriers. But before they do…” Pasha hesitated, just slightly. “Could you take them to the Dreamland first? To let them experience it — just once?”

Discussion

Suggest a change