Shadow

System quickly sprang into action, ordering the soldier ant Big Fool to command the ordinary worker ants in building him a nest for the winter.

Big Fool had a fairly easy time commanding the ordinary worker ants. By spraying special acidic fluid and communicating through antennae collisions, it soon led more than a hundred worker ants out from near the ant nest and headed several meters away to begin digging.

As a mid-level leader within the ant colony, Big Fool had the authority to dispatch ordinary worker ants.

Ordinary soldier ants could usually command several dozen worker ants. Big Fool, being somewhat smarter, could command more—roughly a hundred worker ants.

It was not that Big Fool could not command even more worker ants. In theory, there was no upper limit to the number of worker ants soldier ants could control using their Ant Acid.

But making a soldier ant command too many worker ants would undoubtedly leave it unable to attend to everything at once. The worker-ant force it controlled would descend into confusion, and efficiency would plummet.

The methods for commanding worker ants seemed to flow in soldier ants' blood from birth. They were born knowing how to control ordinary worker ants, and how many worker ants were suitable for them to command.

However, as fine as the idea of digging a winter nest was, System spotted plenty of unsatisfactory points after watching Big Fool lead the worker ants in excavation for a while.

Though he had already had Big Fool order the ants to dig the cave wider, he had no idea whether Big Fool had conveyed the wrong message through its acidic fluid or whether the ordinary ants' intelligence was simply too low. In any case, the tunnel the ants dug was far too narrow.

After nearly an hour of communication, the worker ants finally began to widen the soil around the entrance a little under Big Fool's command.

But that was only the entrance. System had no idea how wide or narrow the inside of the tunnel was.

Whenever System tried to approach the cave to inspect it, these ordinary worker ants would attack him without mercy.

In the end, System still relied on Big Fool as a relay station to command these ants.

The result was the tragedy of the low-intelligence soldier ant Big Fool commanding worker ants with even lower intelligence—one plus one somehow becoming greater than two.

Only after System ordered Big Fool to move all the worker ants away did he discover that, aside from the widened entrance, the internal passage was almost exactly the same as that of an ant nest: extremely narrow. He could not squeeze inside at all.

The entire afternoon, apart from the first two hours, System and the worker-ant construction team led by Big Fool had basically been marching in place.

There had been progress, technically. As long as he kept ordering Big Fool to command them according to his methods, the worker ants would heed some of the commands.

But the efficiency was obviously far too low. It could not even reach the passing line System had envisioned.

"Can't there be more ants like Big Fool?"

System watched Big Fool affectionately rub against his leg. If he had several hundred obedient worker ants like Big Fool at his disposal, then forget building one winter burrow—building five would not be a problem.

After telling Big Fool to continue leading the worker ants in digging, System headed back near the ant nest once more, unwilling to accept defeat, and tried using Mind Transfer to find ants as obedient as Big Fool.

After using lies to make nearly a hundred ants rage into madness in succession, System finally had no choice but to confirm that Big Fool was an exception among ants.

Even when ordinary ants were deceived by his lies, they would generally notice something was wrong within a few dozen seconds, then attack him without hesitation.

"A few dozen seconds?"

System suddenly realized something, but he could not grasp the crucial point for the moment.

After thinking it over, System replayed the images recorded by his derived ability [Information Input] in his mind. Then, through the light-screen menu of [Self-Information Generation], he entered the detailed information of the hundred-plus ants he had just deceived and conducted a statistical analysis.

The time between these ants being deceived and flying into an enraged frenzy was basically between thirty and sixty seconds. For the first twenty seconds, the ants usually trusted him completely. At around twenty-five seconds, they would enter a dazed state and become mentally confused.

After entering that confused state, the time it took them to regain their senses varied greatly according to individual differences. Some took only five seconds, while others remained that way for nearly thirty.

"Could there have been differences in the lies I told them?"

System shook his head. The messages he transmitted to these ants through Mind Transfer were basically the same, and even the tone differed very little.

As he replayed the images from [Information Input] once more, System suddenly thought of something.

Rewinding the [Information Input] images by several hours, System finally found the crucial point he had considered earlier.

A few hours ago, he had once had Big Fool capture an ant larva from the ant nest.

Before eating that ant larva, he had also used Mind Transfer to tell it a lie.

Though the ant larva ultimately saw through his lie, it had been deceived for nearly five whole minutes—far longer than the adult ants.

What if he had Big Fool capture some ant larvae from the nest for testing...

No!

The success rate with ant larvae might still be very low, but what about the eggs before they became larvae?

If he began brainwashing ant eggs from the moment they were young, would those ants become as obedient as Big Fool?

If this idea worked, he could have Big Fool carry over some eggs for him to brainwash. Once the eggs hatched after a time, and the larvae grew into adults, he would have many ants working for him.

The only drawback was that he could not determine how much time the process would require. System did not know the exact growth cycle of these dark brown ants.

And Big Fool had absolutely no concept of time. When System asked how long it had taken from birth to maturity, it merely wore a blank, bewildered expression, wholly unable to answer.

If it took too long for an egg to become an adult ant, then he could only give up and seek another way out...

And just as System was making preparations for winter—

An insect beast crossed the void from Lierte Forest and returned to the Abyss...

Lierte Forest was covered in ice and snow all year round. Since the Lord of the Glacier in the Lierte Mountains vanished without a trace three hundred years ago, the ice and snow here had begun to melt, giving the region a climate with four distinct seasons.

Shadow had been traveling back and forth between the Abyss and Lierte Forest for thirty years.

At the end of every summer, her master—an Abyssal Druid—would use a special secret art to send her to the main world, where she would search for insects that had surpassed their racial limits and bring them back to the Abyss.

Shadow loved the sunlight of the main world, but she could not remain there for too long...

Abyssal Druids had once been called Swarm Druids. They specialized in commanding the insect swarms of nature and were a branch of the Druids.

After the Swarm Druids submitted to the Demon Lord Organ, those traitorous Druids came to be known as Abyssal Druids.

They used insect flesh and blood to create demonic nests, greatly improving the hatching efficiency of newborn demons, and thus developed many new types of demons.

Shadow had not known any of this before. Only over the past decade or so had she gradually come to understand it.

She regretted it deeply. She regretted killing two of her kind who had rebelled against their master long ago...

Back then, she had understood nothing.

Shadow knew that, like those two of her kind who had rebelled against their master, she now possessed intelligence.

After handing an insect that had reached the limits of its race to her master, Shadow vanished into the shadows...

She had concealed the existence of a special insect in Lierte Forest—Kun.

Shadow looked forward to meeting Kun again next year. Though Kun was far weaker than she was, Kun possessed something she lacked...