Disregarding Katherine's antics, Mitch focused on the important things at hand.
The rats were already breeding, but he hadn't finished his preparations yet. He couldn't isolate them in fear of them getting depressed. From experience, Mitch knew that depressed rats were much less responsive during experiments.
He also couldn't separate them by gender, as that would undermine his effort of making them reproduce.
That only left the option of hurrying his plans along.
He hadn't planned on doing it this quickly, but it seems like he has no choice.
Mitch climbed his tree and retrieved the legio corpses. He then cut their skulls open and removed their brains.
Walking over to his training site, he dug a small hole in the ground and dropped the brains in, after which he smashed them together.
The purpose was to mix different genetic variations and different neural structures together. Hopefully, this would allow the rats to mutate in the least amount of time possible.
When everything was mixed into a mince, he roughly carved another bowl and transferred everything over.
Once finished, he started training Hailey again. But this time, he used the mixture instead of fruits.
Hailey responded weirdly at first, unfamiliar with this new type of treat. However, she soon found it to be much more delicious than apples.
Mitch had already opened her mutation window and located the mutation necessary for her to become smarter.
[Advanced Gyrification]
[100% / 15% Complete]
[Changed from: Gyrification]
[An evolved specimen. Compared to its peers, this organism already has a folded brain. This mutation will lead to the folds taking on much more efficient structures, leading to an increase in brain capacity (among others).]
[Time needed in hibernation: 1 day]
Mitch was quite lucky that legios had rather big and advanced brains.
Hailey had already eaten as much as she did yesterday, yet she barely reached 15% progress in the mutation.
Obviously, Mitch wanted the germline mutation. Specifically for Hailey, he would have her go through both mutations, but the rest of the rats only needed the germline mutation for now.
"She has quite the appetite, doesn't she?" Katherine queried after a while.
"Appetite doesn't fit the description any longer. She has already eaten more than her own weight's worth of food. Most likely, food that can lead to mutations gets stored in the body in some other way, allowing the creature to eat more than they usually would be able to."
The same thing had happened to him and Madeline. They had eaten several ants in one sitting. In Madeline's case, she even ate an entire queen with not as much as one break in between.
Something similar was now happening to Hailey.
It got to the point that Mitch went and brought the ants' brains too, testing if the problem once more was caused due to variation.
Her mutation showed progress from it, but it did not finish until Hailey ate half of the total gray matter Mitch had collected.
"What will you do now? She may have reached 100% progress. But if this is the amount needed by every rat, we will at most be able to mutate one more before running out of food."
"Let's not jump to assumptions just yet. Technically speaking, the mutation that will show up on the other rats is not the same as Hailey's. For now, I need to find some place to put Hailey."
He picked Hailey up off the ground and brought her towards the isolated hole while sneaking peeks at her stats.
[Name: Hailey (Brown Rat)]
[Power System: Devouring (6%)]
[Mutations: Locked]
[Faith: Devout (temporary)]
After his last training session with her, she had become a devotee.
It was expected, really. He had given her food while drilling a single phrase into her head for the last hour or so. It would be weirder if Hailey didn't associate that phrase with food.
Mitch's plan was to reinforce the prayer so deeply into the rats' minds that just breathing air would remind them of it.
"But it still says temporary. So, if I stop giving her food for a few days, or maybe just stop saying the phrase, she will no longer be praying to me. That's annoying."
Nevertheless, that didn't affect his plan.
Even after hundreds of years, people on Tellus never forgot about their religion. It was just too baked into human culture and society for people to forget.
His vision for the rats was exactly that: a cult of semi-intelligent beings that constantly reminded each other about his presence.
Reaching the isolated pit, Mitch let Hailey drink as much water as she needed to wash down the food.
She still hadn't started the transformations since Mitch decided to keep his skill locked away from rats.
Who knew? Maybe one of them would eat a worm or something that would devolve their mental capacity. He really didn't want that to happen.
Seeing that she was about to curl up into a ball to sleep, Mitch started Hailey's mutation.
As opposed to Madeline, whose shell ballooned into an egg, Hailey's fur started growing very rapidly before whirling around her body. She, too, became an egg.
Placing an additional slab on top of the hole to prevent anything from disturbing the transformation, Mitch made his way back to the rest of the rats.
Their fun time seemed to have ended while he was training Hailey. They were now lying on the ground, drinking water, or still clawing at the walls.
"What if one of them got pregnant from that?" She worried that it would affect Mitch's plans if the rats got pregnant too quickly. Although she was right, Mitch wasn't worried.
"It will take a while before the rats ovulate. Even if they can be inseminated right now, it will still take some time for the spermatozoa to fertilize the eggs. If I mutate them right now, it should be fine."
He took both the female rats with him and made his way towards the training area.
Although he told Katherine that everything was fine, he himself was not convinced. After all, he was applying human anatomy to the situation.
He was unsure if it would even take an hour for rat eggs to become fertilized because of their size.