Beast Taming Immortal Clan

Chapter 305 Optimizing the Jade Spirit Bee Bloodline [Please Subscribe]

Zhou Daoyi had actually engaged in dual cultivation with Lin Hongyu long ago!

When Zhou Chun learned of this from Zhou Mingde, he was also extremely shocked.

His intense curiosity compelled him to immediately delve deeper and ask for more details.

However, out of consideration for Zhou Daoyi's feelings, Zhou Mingde did not want to reveal the real details, and only said that it was a special case under unexpected circumstances.

Although he was unwilling to say it outright, Zhou Chun recalled the previous interactions between his family and Lin Hongyu and was able to roughly guess when the incident occurred.

Then his feelings became somewhat complicated.

This also reminded me of how I met Su Yuzhen.

In a sense, the emotional experiences of these two generations of Zhou family patriarchs are quite similar.

No wonder Zhou Daoyi didn't object to his actions when he returned from the Su family.

With his intelligence, he naturally understood what Zhou Mingde meant by "I've figured it out."

I'm afraid it's the same as before with him. Over the years, Zhou Mingde has done a lot of work on Zhou Daoyi's mindset, trying to get him to accept Lin Hongyu and marry her into the Zhou family.

It now seems that Zhou Daoyi, like him, finally couldn't hold on any longer and chose to compromise.

Zhou Chun didn't know whether to be happy or sad about this.

If Lin Hongyu were to join the Zhou family, it would undoubtedly be a great thing for the Zhou family.

In that case, apart from the Golden Core families, the Zhou family would be considered one of the top families among the great immortal cultivation clans.

But for Zhou Daoyi personally, making this choice must have been extremely difficult for him!

But since things have come to this point, and Zhou Daoyi has made his decision, what can Zhou Chun say?

He could only watch as Zhou Daoyi took Lin Wan'er and left the Zhou family to go to Cheng Kingdom to see Lin Hongyu.

Less than half a month later, Lin Hongyu returned to Lanzhou with Zhou Daoyi.

However, because the Su family patriarch was still stationed inside the Zhou family's mountain gate, Zhou Mingde had no choice but to go outside the family compound to meet her in order to prevent the news from leaking out.

The meeting between the two went smoothly.

Lin Hongyu has agreed to become Zhou Daoyi's Daoist partner and become the Zhou family's honorary elder.

He also agreed to go to Yang Kingdom to mine the [Earth Element Crystal Jade] vein.

However, she also made her own demands.

That meant taking Lin Wan'er away to help her, and getting the Zhou family to fund the formations, magical artifacts, and pills needed to establish a base.

The Zhou family would naturally not refuse such a request.

Zhou Mingde personally ordered the relevant array equipment from the You family, and also transferred some magical artifacts and pills from the family treasury to give to her.

Once she had all these things, Lin Hongyu didn't waste any time and quickly set off with Lin Wan'er.

By this time, the insect plague had been eradicated, and the reconstruction of Yang Kingdom had begun. The sooner she arrived, the easier it would be to make progress.

After all, the cultivation forces of the original Yang Kingdom suffered heavy losses, and many of them had their lineages cut off.

That land is now almost entirely undeveloped; whoever gets there first will gain a competitive advantage.

It would be perfectly normal for Lin Hongyu to occupy the place with the [Earth Element Crystal Jade] mine at this time, and it would not arouse any suspicion.

After settling Lin Hongyu and the [Earth Element Crystal Jade] mine in this way, the Zhou family no longer had any important matters that required the attention of Zhou Mingde, Zhou Chun, and other high-ranking members.

The Zhou family returned to its previous state of calm yet rapid development.

Half a year passed quickly, and the Su family patriarch fulfilled his promise to the Zhou family and returned to the Su family in a successful manner.

At his request, Su Yuzhen temporarily bid farewell to Zhou Chun and returned to the Su family for quiet cultivation.

Zhou Chun didn't feel too much reluctance about Su Yu's departure.

Although his relationship with Su Yuzhen has progressed considerably in the past two years, and the two often discuss the path of dual cultivation together.

But perhaps due to his personality, he really finds it difficult to feel that kind of deep attachment to a female cultivator.

Perhaps in the quiet of the night, he would reminisce about the pleasures of his intimate moments with Su Yuzhen, but most of the time he was focused on his spiritual practice.

Zhou Chun is now very focused on cultivating the art of insect breeding, because he recently had an idea to use it to raise the Jade Spirit Bees that the Zhou family had previously tamed, and increase the population of these spirit bees.

Demon bees are also a type of demon insect commonly used by insect cultivators, but the demon bees used in combat are usually carnivorous poisonous bees.

Honey-producing bees like the Jade Spirit Bee are not strong in combat and are usually cultivated by insect cultivators as economic insects to earn spirit coins to support their swarms.

Han Yuan, the insect cultivator, did not have much research on demon bees, and his research focus was not on bees and insects.

Fortunately, the Thousand Spirits Sect's classic texts he left behind contained a great deal of knowledge about cultivating honey-producing spirit bees, providing Zhou Chun with feasible materials to refer to.

In addition, the Zhou family has been raising the Jade Spirit Bees for so many years and has recorded and studied various aspects of these spirit bees, which can save Zhou Chun a lot of observation and recording time.

Normally speaking, given the reproduction rate of bee-like demonic insects, the Zhou family's [Jade Spirit Bee] swarm should be expanding at an average rate of doubling every year.

However, the expansion of the Jade Bee swarm was actually constrained by two factors.

Firstly, there's the growth potential of the demon insects. Not all eggs laid by the Jade Spirit Bee will grow into demon bees; in fact, most eggs that grow into large honeybees are just large honeybees.

Secondly, there is the food supply for the bee colony. The Jade Spirit Bee mainly eats pollen, nectar and the spirit honey it produces. The best pollen comes from the flowers of various spirit herbs and spirit trees.

However, the quantity of medicinal herbs and trees is limited, and many varieties do not bloom once a year.

This forces bee colonies to consciously control their numbers and avoid having too many offspring in order to prevent starvation.

The second factor is easier to explain. The Zhou family is currently enjoying great influence. If they were to extend cooperation requests to some cultivation families in Lanzhou and even neighboring states, based on the conditions they initially offered to the Wang family of Red Medicine Valley, there would likely be few who would refuse.

By using other families' medicinal herb fields and orchards for beekeeping, the size of the bee colony can be increased several times, or even ten times!

The first factor is the direction Zhou Chun needs to focus on.

He had to use the insect breeding techniques passed down by the Thousand Spirits Sect to weed out the weak and keep the strong, actively promoting the optimization of the bloodline of the Jade Spirit Bee population, so that the appearance rate of demon bees among their offspring would greatly increase.

In this regard, the help of some secret medicines and techniques is necessary.

It must be said that the Thousand Spirits Sect, as experts in insect handling, has indeed achieved a very high level of expertise in the research and development of various insect-repelling and insect-breeding techniques.

In the art of insect breeding, they possess special secret techniques that can stimulate the appetite and mating season of demonic insects, and even extend their dormancy period.

These secret techniques can greatly assist in the growth of demonic insects.

For example, one of the most common combinations is to use secret techniques to stimulate the appetite of the demonic insects, causing them to devour a large amount of food at once, and then use secret techniques to extend the insects' dormancy time, allowing them to digest the nutrients contained in the food during dormancy and grow and mature faster.

These secret techniques may have some adverse effects on the lifespan of demonic insects, but they can indeed save a great deal of time when conducting certain research.

When Zhou Chun was doing his research, he took thirty larvae from the beehive and raised them separately.

Under his individual cultivation, the larvae, which normally take about three months to mature, mature in just one month.

Whether the offspring of the Jade Spirit Bee can become demon bees will be revealed the moment they mature.

With very few exceptions, the vast majority of demon bees evolve from larvae to mature forms.

Under normal circumstances, the Jade Spirit Bee, which evolves into a demon bee after maturing, will be accepted by the bee colony and become one of its members.

Those bees that did not become demon bees were either driven away or killed.

It's unclear whether Zhou Chun was lucky or because he invested a lot of money in cultivating these larvae.

The original one-in-ten success rate of evolution has almost doubled this time. A total of five Jade Spirit Bees were cultivated from thirty larvae.

These five Jade Bees are no different from normal bees, but they are all worker bees.

Although worker bees can also lay eggs, these eggs are unlikely to hatch and evolve into monster bees.

Zhou Chun's next task is to make one of the five Jade Spirit Bees become a queen bee.

According to Qianlingmen's research records, the most effective way to optimize the bloodline of a bee colony is to optimize the bloodline of the queen bee herself.

Since the other bees in the colony are all born from the queen bee, as long as the queen bee's bloodline is optimized, the bloodline of her offspring will naturally be stronger.

However, there is only one queen bee in the Zhou family's beehive. Zhou Chun cannot use that queen bee for experiments. If the experiment fails and the queen bee dies, the loss would be huge.

Therefore, he could only first raise a small bee colony, raise a new queen bee, and then conduct experiments on the new queen bee.

Before obtaining the inheritance of the Thousand Spirits Sect, it would be extremely difficult for the Zhou family to cultivate a new queen bee.

However, for Zhou Chun, who has now obtained the inheritance of the Thousand Spirits Sect, cultivating a new queen bee is not too difficult.

In a bee colony under natural conditions, if the queen bee dies unexpectedly, one of the worker bees will take her place and become the new queen bee.

At the same time, when a bee colony swarms, the new queen bee also comes about in this way.

【Jade Spirit Bee】As a type of demon bee, the birth of the queen bee is much more difficult than that of an ordinary bee, but the general process is still similar.

At this time, Zhou Chun fed a strong worker bee with a secret medicine made primarily from royal jelly, and used secret techniques to stimulate its growth.

In just two short months, a new queen bee was bred.

However, this new queen bee cannot be used for experiments yet, because it was induced by artificial means and its quality is relatively poor.

Its true purpose for Zhou Chun was to contribute to the new bee colony and expand its population.

Once the colony has expanded to a certain size, Zhou Chun will kill it and allow the colony to automatically produce a new queen bee.

Only then can the new queen bee be used for experiments.

While conducting these insect breeding experiments, Zhou Chun also simultaneously began negotiating collaborations with other families.

The Zhou family is currently enjoying great influence and possesses a variety of unique spiritual items. As expected, most families did not object to the cooperation plan proposed by the Zhou family.

In just one year, the Zhou family signed cooperation agreements with twenty-five large and small cultivation families. In the future, the Zhou family's Jade Spirit Bees could collect flowers and make honey in the mountain gates of these cooperative families, and then settle accounts with spirit honey or spirit coins as payment.

As part of the cooperation, the Zhou family will give priority to supplying these partner families with young monsters such as the Eight-Cornered Water-Splitting Deer and the Dragon-Scale Horse.

Of course, all the supplied monster cubs will be male and will be castrated.

The Zhou family would never sell a true breeding beast to just anyone.

The price of purchasing a breeding beast cannot be the same as the price of an ordinary mount.

Now, besides the Zhou family, only the Su family, who just helped the Zhou family a lot, possesses the eight-horned water-repelling deer and the dragon-scaled horse breed given by the Zhou family as betrothal gifts when Zhou Chun proposed marriage.

Time passed slowly, and three years have gone by in the blink of an eye.

In these short three years, the Zhou family has undergone some changes.

Several elderly cultivators of the "Jia" generation passed away, and one Zhou family cultivator failed to establish his foundation after taking a Foundation Establishment Pill.

The cultivator who failed to establish his foundation was Zhou Zhengtao, who was of the same generation as Zhou Chun.

Zhou Zhengtao was once a prominent member of the Zhou family among the "Zheng" generation. In recent years, thanks to the rapid development of the Zhou family, he has also accumulated a lot of good deeds for the family.

This time, after accumulating 5,000 merit points through borrowed merit, he exchanged them for a Foundation Establishment Pill and consumed it.

Unfortunately, he was clearly not as lucky as Zhou Zhengyong, and ultimately failed to achieve Foundation Establishment.

As the second person in the Zhou family to fail after taking the Foundation Establishment Pill after settling in Jiufengling, Zhou Zhengtao's failure this time had a much smaller impact than Zhou Jiacheng's failure.

This is, of course, because the Zhou family is now vastly different from what it used to be. Whether it's cultivators at the Purple Mansion stage or those at the Foundation Establishment stage, they all have successors.

Aside from Zhou Zhengtao himself being frustrated and upset, only the cultivators who had lent him merits were affected.

After all, the person who could lend him good deeds must have had a decent relationship with him, no matter what.

As the clan leader, Zhou Chun took this matter in stride, because he himself had failed once before.

Therefore, he had no objection to Zhou Zhengtao. On the contrary, just as Zhou Daoyi had comforted Zhou Jiacheng, he comforted Zhou Zhengtao with great tolerance and generosity.

This action made Zhou Zhengtao, who had previously been quite jealous and resentful of him, feel ashamed and guilty, and from then on, he was truly convinced of his superiority.

However, the biggest change in the Zhou family over the past three years has come from Zhou Chun.

First, his spirit pet, the Golden Armored Rock Turtle, successfully broke through to the second-tier mid-grade, which further increased his own strength.

Then came the crucial moment of the optimization experiment of the Jade Spirit Bee, which he led the research on.

At this time, the newly cultivated bee colony had reached thirty members, and the second-generation queen bee had been trained to a level that was not much worse than the queen bee in the current large bee colony.

Next, he can officially begin the bloodline optimization experiment on this second-generation queen bee.

(End of this chapter)