Silver (2)
A silver cocoon, utterly unlike the pure-white ones.
An oval roughly twenty-five centimeters long.
In outward size it matched a Heavenly Silkworm cocoon exactly, yet the silk itself felt completely different. It seemed to catch and throw back the soft glow of the night-luminous pearl on its own, glittering with every shift of light. No—it was not a mere impression. The thing was actually flashing, reflecting light in hard little bursts.
What… what is this? A different species?
The dimensions were almost identical, but the alien color made that the first thought that rose. Even though I already had the symbiotic Heavenly Silkworms, the idea still surfaced, because a termite nest is rarely home to only its apparent partners. Ordinary termites alone feed some eighty species of birds and beasts, and dozens of insect species live off the nest’s direct or indirect hospitality—stealing eggs, raiding the fungus gardens, snatching wood by-products, or simply using the fortress walls as shelter. Natural enemies are plentiful, yet a termite mound is like the Tang Clan itself: a rich house crawling with freeloaders. The difference is that the Tang Clan accepts only useful guests; termites, when you look closely, are the softest marks in the insect world.
So, half hoping it might be some other rare moth with habits like the Heavenly Silkworm’s, I reached out and gently pressed the cocoon. If a larva still slept inside I had to be careful.
It did not give a millimeter. The silver cocoon felt as hard as wire wound into a shell. Wondering whether the ordinary ones were the same, I tried a white cocoon beside it—equally unyielding. Thinking it over, that hardness made sense if you had to survive soldier termites. I decided to pick it up and examine it properly.
“Please still be unhatched… please.”
The moment it settled in my palm I felt no weight at all. Turning it over revealed a neat round hole at one end—the exit scar left by an adult that had already emerged.
“Damn it.”
I had clung to the slim hope it might still be a pupa mid-molt. What I held was an empty husk, its owner long gone.
Just as the thought So much for that crossed my mind, Shintu’s voice drifted in from the mouth of the tunnel Bin had dug. He had probably heard the commotion and wanted to know whether I had found any Heavenly Silkworms.
“Well? Did you find the Heavenly Silk?”
I turned. Far down the narrow passage Shintu’s bulk was only a dim outline; the hole Bin had opened was too tight for a man of his size. At his question I decided to bring the cocoons out first. Stuffing them into the pouch I had carried in, I called back toward the entrance.
“Yes—about thirty of them.”
“What!? Thirty!?”
Shintu’s shout rang with pure astonishment. The cocoons were large; I would need two trips. I carried out roughly half first. The moment Shintu and his disciple Yeong-ryeon saw them they both cried out.
“Ohh! Th-they’re real! So many Heavenly Silkworm cocoons! The previous generation only ever obtained a little over ten!”
“Master, so these are the cocoons that produce Heavenly Silk!?”
While the two of them emptied the pouch to confirm, I ducked back inside, gathered the remaining white cocoons plus the silver one, and returned to ask Shintu.
“Have you ever seen this before?”
I held up the silver cocoon.
“Th-this is—!?”
“Oh, so you know it!?”
His eyes went round. Then he shook his head.
“No. I’ve never seen anything like it either. Is this also a Heavenly Silkworm?”
No, this guy…!
The answer was the one I expected—he didn’t know. At that moment Bin’s cry rose again from deeper in the tunnel.
-Chirrrr!
A heavy rumble followed and dust boiled out of the hole.
-Krrraaack!
-Rumble…
“Bin! Are you all right!?”
Fearing a collapse, I sprinted to the dust-choked mouth and shouted inward. Bin’s answering cry washed over me together with a calm mental pulse that said not to worry. A moment later he shoved out a broad, flat rock the size of two human torsos laid end to end.
-Chirrrr!
A smooth, oval slab of reddish stone. He had found the queen’s birthing chamber.
“Oh! You found it!”
-Chirut!
Bin was telling me something was inside. I ran my hands along the rock’s rim until I located the single entrance. Depending on the species a queen chamber can have one or several openings; here there was only one. Startled workers kept poking their heads out and vanishing again.
“Bin, bite here—along this line.”
The way to open a termite queen’s room is to split it horizontally. The walls are hard, but the equatorial plane is the weak seam. Ask Bin to score the entrance side and the whole thing cracks cleanly in half. A sharp crack answered my request.
“All right—let’s open it.”
Termite concrete—saliva and soil—is surprisingly light. With Shintu’s help I lifted the upper half like a lid.
Both floor and ceiling boiled with workers. Right in the center of the lower half lay the enormous queen. The army-ant queens we had seen before were larger in absolute size, yet relative to their workers this termite queen was far more extreme. Termite queens commonly grow dozens of times the bulk of a worker, and their abdomens swell into something closer to a gigantic larva than an ant. Some species live more than fifty years, sealed forever inside this chamber, doing nothing but laying eggs. The ovaries—only two of them—contain over two thousand ovarioles; that is why the body looks so monstrously swollen.
Beside her rested the king, a male whose white body looked less like a termite than a pale cockroach. Given that termites are closer to cockroaches than to true ants, the resemblance made perfect sense.
“Eeeek! Wh-what is that!?”
Yeong-ryeon recoiled in horror. Sister Seol wrinkled her nose as well.
“Th-that’s pretty disgusting. What is it, So-ryong? Another empress like last time?”
“Yes. These are the White-clad Empress and her Emperor.”
After everyone had taken a good look I snapped the lid shut again and turned to Yo-hwa.
“Yo-hwa, bind this tight with your silk. We’re taking it home to the Tang Clan. Bin—now we only need the larva inside.”
-Kish!
-Chirrrr!
While Yo-hwa sealed the chamber, I dragged Bin and Yeong-ryeon back into the tunnels to hunt for the Heavenly Silkworm larva I had hatched earlier to confirm the symbiosis. It had not been near the queen, so it had to be somewhere in the fungus gardens—the food stores. I needed to know exactly what it ate. I had assumed trophallaxis fluids or termite larvae; if it turned out to prefer the mushrooms themselves, the entire plan would have to change.
“Eeeek! M-me too?”
“Would you rather I take Elder Shintu in?”
“No, that’s not—!”
“Even if he wanted to, he’s too big to fit. So the young lady has to go. It’s fine—Bin’s already cleared out the White-clads. We’re safe for a while.”
“But the other young ladies…”
“None of them can crawl in dressed like that.”
I pointed at Hwa-eun and Sister Seol. Yeong-ryeon’s face crumpled. She alone wore the tight night-clothes thieves favored; Sister Seol had on the short skirt common among Yunnan minority women, and Hwa-eun the long, flowing robes of the Central Plains—neither outfit allowed crouching and crawling through a narrow termite tunnel.
So, with a tearful Yeong-ryeon in tow, we spent a long time ransacking the fungus gardens, harvesting spare mushrooms for later while we searched. At last, on a cluster of fungus growing from the wall, we found the Heavenly Silkworm—now a second-instar larva the size of a palm—calmly devouring a termite grub it had somehow obtained.
“Th-there!”
“Oh! There it is!”
Yeong-ryeon spotted it first. I looked where she pointed. Beside a mushroom scored with clear bite marks, the larva was finishing its protein snack.
“Does this little guy eat the mushrooms too?”
Yeong-ryeon tilted her head.
“It’s eating a bug right now.”
“It’ll probably start on the fungus once it finishes.”
“Really?”
“Those tooth marks look exactly like its mandibles.”
Sure enough, the larva polished off the grub in moments and, just as I predicted, began chewing the mushroom.
“Oh! You’re right!”
Yeong-ryeon seemed delighted that my forecast had come true, but the sight only told me one thing: I could not take this larva home yet. It was clearly using the fungus as its staple and topping up protein with termite brood.
Then I can’t bring this one along right now.
Even the double-tailed blue butterfly starts on trophallaxis fluids and only turns to ant larvae later when protein runs short; so the carnivory itself made sense. But a second-instar already eating both fungus and brood at that speed would strip an infant colony bare. I had planned to leave it with the founding group we were transplanting, yet it would devour the very mushrooms and larvae the colony needed to establish itself.
Mushrooms we could manage—the Tang Clan was obsessive about poisons and already cultivated all sorts of toxic fungi. Bringing back the termites’ strain should make a fungus garden easy enough; I even remembered hearing that termite mushrooms were sold as food in China in my previous life. Brood, however, was another matter. Everything we were carrying was inside the single queen chamber. She would lay more, of course, but while the colony was still small and living on dead wood we provided, an early-stage carnivore would starve them out before they ever took root. Ordinary double-tailed blues wait until the fourth instar before they start eating larvae; this one’s appetite was far too premature.
We needed thriving mushrooms and a growing termite population before we could raise Heavenly Silkworms properly. Leaving this larva here was a shame, but necessary.
“Can’t be helped.”
“We’re leaving this one.”
“What? Why?”
Yeong-ryeon’s eyes went round.
“It looks like it feeds on both the fungus and the ant larvae. Until the colony we take home has time to grow more mushrooms and more brood, it would eat them into the ground.”
“Ah…”
Releasing one back to the wild isn’t the end of the world. As long as the two eggs we still have turn out to be a male and a female…
A little uneasy, I left the larva where it was and crawled back out of the cave. Termites were already pouring from the gas-cleared faces of the mound; the tower was repairing itself at impressive speed.
We brought the termites home to the Tang Clan and buried them on a slope of Tang Clan Mountain thick with standing dead timber. Most people treat termites as pure pests, yet they are beneficial insects: they grind up fallen wood that would otherwise rot slowly and turn it into rich soil. Scoop that red earth onto crops and the fertilizer content alone would make anything thrive.
Within a single day a neat little mound had already risen. Worried the fungus might take time to establish, I asked the clan to start extra mushroom beds and begged the Poison Pavilion to keep the specimens we had collected well fed.
Shintu seemed content for the moment with the cocoons we had secured. He set to work with the silk artisans who had settled in the Tang Clan, reeling the cocoons into thread. Only someone with internal energy could draw Heavenly Silk properly, so both master and craftsmen were required.
In the meantime I began the work of unlocking the silver cocoon’s secret.
-Splash.
“I’ve poured it all in, Lord So-ryong.”
“Thank you. All right—let’s see.”
Into a large tub of lukewarm water the warriors had brought, I placed the silver cocoon I had already named Silver Silkworm and one ordinary Heavenly Silkworm cocoon. I was not trying to reel silk; I wanted to examine the owners. A cocoon is the chamber a moth builds to protect itself while it transforms. Inside remains the empty pupal shell. Soften that shell, restore it to living shape, and you can see roughly what the insect looked like and how it differed from its cousin.
The warm water was simply to loosen the shriveled, stuck-down cuticle so it could be peeled free. Two cocoons—one silver, one white—floated half-submerged. After a short wait the shells released. I lifted them carefully, blotted away the water, and began the restoration: two pins to stretch each body back into its natural posture, glue and paste for any detached fragments, cotton packing inside, and a firm seal along the dorsal split where the adult had emerged. Two large pupae took shape before us—one translucent white, one pure silver.
“Ohh! Incredible, Lord So-ryong! I’ve never seen skill like this!”
The watching warriors were openly impressed. I wiped the sweat from my brow and waved it off.
“Heh. Nothing special.”
In my previous life, anyone who raised poisonous insects or rare bugs learned basic taxidermy so they could keep a record of size and form when a specimen died. The old skill had not rusted.
I set the two finished mounts side by side and compared them carefully, hunting for differences. The conclusion was almost comical.
They’re identical except for the color. Why?
Spiracles, body segments, eyes, mouthparts, abdomen—every structure matched. The Silver Silkworm and the Heavenly Silkworm were the same species painted in two different hues. I was still staring in mild disbelief when Hwa-eun, whom I had set to document work, came racing up with news.
“So-So-ryong! You told me to check the Compendium of All Poisons Under Heaven in case it was listed, remember? Look!”
She thrust open the volume near the front. Only a few pages in, one of the Ten Great Poisons leapt off the paper:
One of the Ten Great Poisons
The name of the legendary venomous creature shone up at us from the page.