GREED: ALL FOR WHAT?

1171 Unnatural Weakness.

Legion-8 had ancestral trials to go through while he had nothing. If not for the mind network and the entertainment it brought, he would be tempted to break out of his egg early.

Legion-5 remained in his incubator for hundreds of years. It was almost a thousand years after his reincarnation that he finally got his freedom. He stopped growing for a while. His egg sensed that his potential had been saturated so it began to crack. He doesn't have neighbors in the womb to delay him so he hatched as soon as he was ready.

"This can't be right. I am still weak." He said to himself when he sensed the change.

He can sense that his body is still weak. It is so weak that he can't move it much less use it to break out of his egg. But his egg doesn't care. Air entered through the cracks in the shell and reacted with the contents of his egg. The content began to turn bad and toxic. If he doesn't leave his egg soon then he will be poisoned to death.

Fortunately, he is not without help. The managers of the hatchery noticed his situation and came to his rescue. They took out his egg from the incubator and cracked it open with care. Then they brought him out of the egg. His body is soft like a worm's. In fact, he looks like a white worm with a squishy head and small ropes for limbs.

The managers wiped off the liquid on his body and placed him in another incubator. Apparently, he is not done yet developing. He still has another round of development to go through before he can be considered fully gestated.

He is not the only one in this situation. All the hatchlings were placed in incubators in a sealed room that contained thousands of them. They are all white and soft like worms. It is the only side effect of using the Mother plant to reproduce instead of a natural egg.

The Mother plant prioritizes the survival of the hatchlings over their development. Development uses too much nutrients and causes too much stress on the eggs. It is much better for the eggs to develop the bare minimum to survive on their own.

This mechanism reduced the requirements for the eggs to hatch. Then the incubators will supply them with the nutrients needed for them to develop. At this stage, they are not in danger of dying anymore.

While is it normal for all of them to use an incubator, Legion-5 did stand out. He thought he was weak but he was at least two times as strong as the other hatchlings.

It is not a spectacular achievement since the other hatchlings couldn't even breathe on their own. The muscles needed for inhalation were not strong enough to help them breathe in and out. So he is still weaker.

They are all weaker than normal offspring that can walk and eat immediately after they are born. They needed an extra attachment of tubes for breathing. He didn't need it but he was given one just in case in addition to the tubes for nutrition. They needed the nutrition tubes because none of them developed teeth.

Legion-5 couldn't believe the abysmal condition they were all in. He said to himself, "This can't be natural. The offspring of powerful creatures shouldn't be born this weak. How are we to survive on our own without parents? We can't even hold our heads up ourselves."

It came as a surprise to him since he expected the offsprings of a powerful race like Supreme beasts to be capable of surviving on their own like the offsprings of other powerful creatures.

He has only ever seen this kind of weakness in the offsprings of weak beasts that haven't reached the mana entity stage. They are weak and have little potential so their offsprings are also weak.

But each hatchling was born with a vitality core within them so there is no doubt that they all have high potential. Unfortunately, no one bothered to explain to a baby why he was weak so he remained ignorant of it.

The only thing that made him relax was that he wasn't the only one born weak and there were caretakers caring for them night and day. The only issue is that he was placed in a tiny sealed space but it wasn't a big problem because he couldn't move.

"What's the situation?" Legion-5's father asked.

The sovereign replied, "We got 113 hatchlings from this batch."

Legion-5's father observed, "That's more than 10% of the expected output."

"Yes. We were lucky."

That's the explanation that they can come up with for why 13 extra hatchlings were produced from Legion-5's batch. They don't know that the siphoning of Legion-5 by the mother plant helped the others greater than it should. His supply of mana from Soverick was shared with them for a short while and it increased their survivability.

The ignorance of his caretakers made them accept it was due to luck and chance.

"What about the mutant?" His father asked.

"He survived and successfully hatched. It took him 219 years more than the others but he managed to hatch. He is significantly stronger than the others in his batch."

His father asked, "Did his potential increase, or is the increase in strength due to his prolonged gestation?"

"We don't know." The Surbodinate said in reply.

His father threw aside the report and said, "You can leave."

"As you wish."

The powerful Origin god was left alone with his thoughts. He was silent for a while then he chuckled.

He thought to himself, "I don't know if I want him to survive the blood crucible or not."

He wants Legion-5's body. That can only happen if Legion-5 dies and he gets clearance to examine the corpse. But if Legion-5 dies in the blood crucible then he won't get his intact corpse. He certainly won't get the part that he needs the most for his research. On the other hand, he doesn't want Legion-5 to survive the blood crucible.