Bugglesley

I don't like this. Why is breeding a group of "domesticated" humans (whatever that means, given the massively increased complexity of genetics->behavioral expression in literal dogs vs human beings, with our evidence being a wikipedia page which specifies really clearly that the only theory here is that neoteny compared to Apes is what made modern humans in the first place, so your use of it in this context makes no sense on its face and is mostly relying on vague presumptions based on absolutely bogus evopsych) remotely necessary?? Get some Nalthians, and ensure through whatever ethically horrifying means that they are constantly having children. In the "more flies with honey" tradition, let's say it's an extremely nice village with normalized polygamy and amazingly fun activities to do every day and lots of people you like around, and there are big rewards every time you have another child who will be taken to the nursery to have the very best of care and wow some of them even come back when they're grown! How nice! Mostly women, though? Oh and when you're too old to have more kids you go to the old folks home that nobody ever sees for some reason but don't worry they're happy there . Then you have a very beautiful and comforting nursery run by people whose only job is to get those kids to know how to say the magic words and mean it, and as soon as they do they graduate, hooray! Everyone wants to graduate as soon as they can! Let's all try to sing the song with the words, kids! And then after they graduate you kill them and make them fertilizer or sell them to whoever has use for drabs. Some of them get to go back into the first habitat, sure, enough so your breeding stock is the size you can support and is young and healthy and relatively genetically diverse at all times. The limiting factor is how fast you can get new humans to a point where they can give their Breath, not how they behave. It's not exactly difficult to manipulate a child you have taken care of from birth to do what you want. Even the above scenario, a stomach-churning setting for a horror story of unimaginable cruelty of a "factory" that you put food into and get Breath out of, in no possible world requires a genetically distinct breed of manmade subhumans to accomplish. You're adding that detail because you want it there and that's a little weird tbh bro.

I think this is a broader misunderstanding of how Breath works--Lemex's breath might have been weaker, but the hundreds of others wouldn't be. Viv is getting hundreds of primo breaths and one slightly weaker one. It's pretty clear that, while Returned use breaths at a steady rate, whatever breaths they don't use don't decay over time. Susebron proves this pretty conclusively. Maybe the implication is that whatever Breath does for non-drabs also consumes the Breath, but at a very slow rate?