Superorganism.
In simple terms, it means a tightly unified collective.
Take a herd of deer, for example. At first glance, it might seem like a group, but in truth, it's just a gathering of individuals—each acting independently. They find their own food, raise their own offspring, and make their own decisions. There's no true division of labor or cohesive social structure.
A true superorganism, a genuinely social species, meets three key criteria:
1. Division of reproductive labor
2. Overlapping generations
3. Cooperative care of the young
So why aim for hyper-individuation? Why build a superorganism at all?
The answer is simple: resources—and more specifically, sustainable development.
The problem lies with the current insect colony—Maki's parasites. They don't function as a true swarm. They're not social in the natural sense. Their unity is artificial, enforced by external control. In fact, calling them "insects" is misleading. These highly specialized organisms are unlike any naturally occurring species.
They have no future.
You'll never find them in the wild. Their survival is entirely dependent on a host. When the host dies, the swarm perishes with it.
In the Aburame Clan, every child receives a set of parasite eggs. The moment the child learns to produce chakra, the eggs hatch. From those eggs emerge fully formed adults—no larval stage, no development.
And that's where the problem begins.
Who plays the role of nurturer?
The parasites? No. They lay eggs and move on. They're too specialized. They've co-evolved with humans to such a degree that they've lost the ability to function independently.
Instead, the host—the human—becomes the caretaker. The chakra they provide acts as the vital nourishment that allows the parasite to grow and survive.
Which means this:
Without a host, the parasites cannot reproduce.
No host, no future.
They're like professional warriors with no kingdom—powerful, but purposeless. Outside of battle, all they do is feed and breed. And when they work—when they fight—they die.
They would never survive in the wild.
And worse:
The size of a swarm is directly tied to the host's chakra capacity. The larger the swarm, the more chakra it consumes.
Power has a cost.
This is a critical weakness of the Aburame clan. It creates a hard limit on how large—or how strong—a swarm can grow.
Maki understood this early. She knew that without solving this problem, she had no future.
To sustain her unnaturally large swarm, she issued a radical order: The insects would learn to hunt on their own.
They would gather energy independently, reducing their reliance on her chakra.
And when even that wasn't enough—when the burden on the environment or her body grew too great—Maki did something ruthless:
She ordered part of the swarm to commit suicide. The dead would be recycled as emergency food stores for the rest.
But she knew this was only a temporary fix.
She needed a better solution.
One that would ensure stability.
One that would allow her swarm to grow without limit.
That's why resources—and how to sustain them—had become the defining challenge of her evolution.
When I was a little over four years old, I received my parasitic insects. After more than a year of working with them, their flaws have become increasingly obvious.
To put it bluntly, parasitic bugs are the laziest beetles Maki has ever encountered. If left unsupervised, they'll happily lie around, constantly draining her chakra. They're parasites in every sense of the word—and then some.
But the biggest problem isn't laziness.
It's execution.
Yes, they'll follow Maki's commands faithfully—but only to a point. If the task is too complex, they simplify it, often missing the finer details.
Take nest-building, for example.
The bugs understand the general idea, but without precise, moment-to-moment direction, they can't carry out intricate plans. This isn't just a problem with Maki's swarm—it's the same across all insects of their kind. Their intelligence simply isn't built for nuance.
What sets Maki apart from others is her ability to perform real-time micromanagement. She can guide the swarm like an extension of her own body, issuing commands with the same precision she'd use to move her hands.
This makes complicated tasks possible. But it also creates a dangerous dependency.
When Maki first had her swarm dig out an underground crypt, she didn't consider ventilation. Without her direct oversight, a large number of insects suffocated and died. It was a harsh lesson: without guidance, the swarm is mindless.
Once a task is completed, the bugs don't know what to do next. They enter a kind of idle standby mode—lying down, doing nothing unless hunger pushes them to instinctively search for food. Even then, it's unreliable. Whether they succeed often seems like luck.
Forget about group hunting.
Even basic survival behaviors—like mating and egg-laying—only happen under the Aburame clan's guidance.
In short, these parasites are incredibly obedient biological weapons.
But their obedience comes at the cost of independence.
Without constant guidance, they're useless. You have to spell everything out. Feed them. Direct them. Manage every detail.
And Maki simply doesn't have the time—or patience—to babysit bugs all day.
Worse yet, they don't retain anything. You can't teach them. They don't learn.
So what's the solution?
Superorganism behavior.
Take ants, for example. Their actions aren't learned—they're coded into their genes. Every ant is born knowing what to do, guided by inherited behavioral algorithms.
Maki's goal is to do the same: copy that genetic programming from ants and engrave it into her parasites.
This is behavioral transcription—a biological algorithm.
In ants, this algorithm ensures every individual plays a role from the moment it hatches. No leader, no orders, no meetings. Just action. Their instincts—honed by hundreds of millions of years of evolution—guide them perfectly.
So, after careful observation, Maki selected a specific local ant species.
Cool-looking, resilient, and efficient.
She named it: the Giant-Headed Leafcutter Ant.
They are the undisputed overlord of the ant colonies within Konoha.
These ants are known for their unusually large heads. Despite being called "leafcutter ants," they don't actually cut leaves. Instead, they cultivate mushrooms within their nests. While not technically classified as army ants, they still operate in a militarized fashion—using the nest entrance as a stronghold and marching into surrounding areas in organized expeditions.
The size disparity among individuals in the colony is extreme—the largest can be more than 500 times bigger than the smallest. Because of this, they are referred to as "completely different," reflecting the sheer variety among them.
When traveling, the giant ants ride on the backs of the smaller ones, resembling a team of mounted warriors. This not only looks impressive but also conserves energy during long marches.
Their combat abilities are exceptional in every regard. But even more remarkable is their temperament—despite their strength, these ants are highly cautious and not naturally aggressive.
In contrast, Maki's previous attempt at breeding honeypot worms was largely a failure—though not a total loss.
The original goal had been to create a bug capable of independently producing and storing chakra. Unfortunately, the worms lacked the mental capacity for chakra synthesis. However, they could store small amounts of chakra, which makes them useful as chakra supplements in limited situations.
Still, this only partially solves the problem of swarm sustainability. The real answer lies in superorganism behavior—sustainable, autonomous development.
That means cultivating a new kind of queen—one that abandons the low-efficiency reproductive method of current parasitic insects. Instead, this new queen would follow a more efficient model: a single fertilization that lasts a lifetime, enabling her to lay thousands of eggs per day.
Of course, this is no simple task. It's a massive, long-term undertaking.
But it has already begun.
Maki believes that genes can be harvested and copied, just like anything else in the shinobi world. Even bloodline limits, the rare Kekkei Genkai, could be considered harvestable resources.
She carefully took down several experimental vials, each filled with genetically modified insect eggs.
Most of them were already dead—killed during the early stages of gene recombination due to instability and collapse.
Luckily, as the master of her swarm, Maki can sense the life, death, and health of every insect under her control. This spares her the trouble of manually observing every subject.
This isn't the first batch—and it certainly won't be the last.
Failures were expected.
Maki lacks the proper tools for precision genetic manipulation—she doesn't even have a microscope. Her only method is crude gene transcription through chakra, and the rest is left to natural selection.
In other words, she leaves it up to fate.
Even if some eggs survive the initial collapse, that doesn't mean they're successful. Most are deformed. A few show promise, but they still fall short of Maki's standards.
There's only one path forward: continuous cultivation.
Try. Fail. Try again.
And once she gets even a single promising result, she can preserve that genetic expression as a template and begin replicating it.
From there, she can refine and evolve her designs further, selectively breeding toward the ideal result.
It's a slow, time-consuming process—but a necessary one.
"They really are all different," she muttered, studying the results. Each specimen was unique in some way.
The process is simple in theory:
First, perform cross-species gene transplants.
Then, apply gene aggregation and molecular breeding.
Finally, use group selection to filter the best.
Some of the modified eggs failed to develop at all, losing their ability to function as parasites due to faulty recombination. Others matured rapidly into malformed adults. Maki immediately destroyed those with severe deformities—missing limbs, twisted bodies.
The remaining viable ones were kept under observation. As they developed, Maki would evaluate whether they were worth keeping. Meanwhile, she prepared a new batch of eggs.
Over and over, the process repeated.
And when she found a suitable subject, she introduced it into the insect nest's ecosystem to observe how it adapted and functioned.
Because in the end, it's the genes that drive their behavior.
And Maki is determined to shape that destiny with her own hands.
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