After about a month of incubation, the first Needle Tailed Swift egg finally hatched.
Bai Yue had been worried, fearing he might have accidentally killed the egg, so it was a relief that the first one hatched.
It seems the incubation period for these Needle Tailed Swifts is similar to those in his previous life. Of course, it's also probably because the parents of these Needle Tailed Swifts didn't have high cultivation levels.
During incubation, both male and female Needle Tailed Swifts share the tasks of incubating eggs and raising chicks. Regardless of which one goes out to forage, one always stays to incubate the eggs.
The fact that Tai Meng could get her hands on these Needle Tailed Swift eggs indicates that the Needle Tailed Swifts' parents were weaker than Tai Meng.
Although Needle Tailed Swifts are considered the fastest birds on Douluo Continent, they aren't a particularly rare Spirit Beast, given their pure speed attribute.
In other words, they don't possess special attributes. In the attribute classification of Pokémon, they would just be normal/flying types.
On Douluo Continent, they are on par with Datura Snakes, or perhaps even inferior to them. Don't let the Datura Snake's early appearance fool you; she is still one of the most terrifying presences among poison-attribute Spirit Beasts.
While the Datura Snake is one of the most terrifying poison-attribute Spirit Beasts, the Needle Tailed Swift is the fastest flying bird.
However, compared to the speed track, the poison attribute track has stronger competition.
Bai Yue naturally took good care of the first Needle Tailed Swift to hatch. He also checked her cloaca and determined she was female.
His books weren't read in vain; one book introducing Spirit Beasts covered Needle Tailed Swifts.
He knew that gender could be determined through the cloaca, as well as feathers and body size.
However, since the Needle Tailed Swift was still young, this was the only method he could use.
The other nine eggs also hatched successively afterward. Although placed in the same nest, these eggs were clearly not from the same parents.
Generally, Needle Tailed Swifts lay only two to four eggs. These ten eggs, originally twelve (Tai Meng ate two dead ones), meant they were from three to six different nests combined.
Therefore, the chicks did not hatch on the same day; some had intervals of several days between them.
But as the Needle Tailed Swifts gradually hatched, Bai Yue noticed something amiss.
Goodness, they were all female!
While he didn't dislike female Needle Tailed Swifts, it was strange that there wasn't a single male.
Bai Yue speculated it might be due to the temperature, perhaps his own temperature wasn't quite enough.
The human body temperature is slightly lower than the incubation temperature required by birds, and he certainly couldn't maintain that body surface temperature throughout the incubation.
This led to a somewhat low incubation temperature.
In his previous life, there were rumors that incubation temperature could affect the gender of chickens. He had checked some literature and found that it indeed had an impact.
In lower vertebrates like reptiles and fish, sex differentiation is influenced by various environmental factors in addition to sex chromosomes.
For example, in turtles and crocodiles, sex is determined by environmental temperature, a mode of sex determination called "Temperature-Dependent Sex Determination."
Although chickens are higher vertebrates, their sex is determined at the time of fertilization and by sex chromosomal genetic material.
However, chickens can also exhibit sex reversal during their growth.
The precise mechanisms of sex determination and differentiation in chickens are still unclear, but incubation temperature does affect the sex differentiation of chicken embryos.
An increase in incubation temperature can lead to an increase in male numbers and a decrease in female numbers, while a decrease in incubation temperature can increase female numbers and decrease male numbers.
Bai Yue guessed that Needle Tailed Swifts were similar, as they are all birds and share some commonalities.
Of course, it might also be because the birds on Douluo Continent are different.
After all, the Spirit Beasts on Douluo Continent are influenced by the bloodline aura of divine beasts that died in the God Realm, and among these Spirit Beasts, dragons are the most numerous.
These large lizard-like dragons on Douluo, according to the classification of his previous life, would probably be categorized as reptiles. Don't assume that just because they have wings, they aren't reptiles; flying lizards in his previous life were classified that way.
Of course, these were just Bai Yue's speculations, merely boundless daydreams. He was unclear about the principle behind all these Needle Tailed Swift eggs hatching into females.
Ten Needle Tailed Swift eggs hatching into ten female chicks was just an interesting occurrence for Bai Yue.
It gave him something to pay a little attention to while recovering, but he had no intention of digging deeper into the cause.
At most, he named these Needle Tailed Swifts Zhaodi, Pandi, Yindi, Laidi, Yingdi, Niandi, Wangdi, Xiangdi, Mengdi, and Chouda.
Exactly ten names, fitting for them all being female.
Of course, this was also a joke. With so many 'Di's, Bai Yue couldn't tell them apart anyway. It was easier to just call them Eldest, Second, Third, and so on.
So, for now, the Needle Tailed Swifts have no names. Bai Yue doesn't plan to name them; he just refers to them by their birth order, from Eldest to Tenth.
About a month after hatching, as Bai Yue fed them, the Needle Tailed Swifts' feathers gradually grew in.
The pure white Needle Tailed Swifts were still very beautiful. Even the relatively less attractive females had high Appearance, and their chirping was pleasant to the ear.
They were very close to Bai Yue, who had hatched them. They didn't like staying in their birdcage but preferred to perch on Bai Yue's head and shoulders.
They also loved to stand on his hand.
As soon as Bai Yue extended his hand, several little ones would fly down from his head and shoulders to perch on his palm, the back of his hand, or even the web between his thumb and forefinger, which was also a good spot.
Where the little ones would perch primarily depended on Bai Yue's hand gesture: whether his palm was up, the back of his hand was up, or the web between his thumb and forefinger was up.
Seeing how intelligent the Needle Tailed Swifts were, Bai Yue had the idea of training them.
The first step was to awaken their intelligence.
Although Needle Tailed Swifts, as the fastest Spirit Beasts, were not unintelligent, they were still young.
Bai Yue wanted them to understand his words. To command them as if they were extensions of his arm, their current intelligence wasn't quite enough.
If he were to train them, it would probably take a long time, but fortunately, he had his cheat, the heart stealing system, which finally had a chance to be used again.
The first time he used it with Tang Yuehua, Bai Yue discovered that during a kiss, they could communicate through consciousness, which was very convenient.
And he had also absorbed some knowledge from Tang Yuehua.
Although Tang Yuehua didn't gain knowledge from him, Bai Yue could reverse the process and actively transmit knowledge to others through this conscious communication.
While not as fast as him stealing knowledge, it was still a viable method.
Bai Yue treated himself as a learning machine, transmitting knowledge to these ten Needle Tailed Swifts every day.
The Needle Tailed Swifts were still so young; they needed to undergo a baptism of knowledge. Otherwise, if they only learned to fight and fall in love, they would be a sorry sight.
Even if they became 100,000-year Spirit Beasts and transformed into humans later, they would probably be like Xiao Wu, the rogue rabbit, truly unbearable to look at.
"Attention, all! Assemble! Report!"
Bai Yue trained these ten Needle Tailed Swifts as if they were in military training, and within a few days, it was remarkably effective.
Of course, his conscious communication and transmission of knowledge also contributed to this success.
As soon as Bai Yue's words fell, he saw the Needle Tailed Swifts, who had been playfully flying around the room, gracefully fly towards him.
Like swallows returning to their nest, they perched on his raised left arm, lining up from largest to smallest.
"Chirp... Chirp... Chirp..."
They chirped like this, from the Eldest to the Tenth.
"Hmm, well done."
Bai Yue nodded in satisfaction, seeing the Needle Tailed Swifts standing on his arm, chests puffed out.
"Right dress!" "Eyes front!" "At ease!" "Attention!"
Even with the more complex commands that followed, the little ones performed them perfectly, which made Bai Yue even more pleased.