Insect King

Hot winds swept sand and gravel across the Iron Fir Hills, making a faint, mournful whine.

Garos slammed the Rock-Crushing Worm onto an open patch of ground, pinning the armor on its head with his dragon claw and forcing the massive worm, nearly twenty meters long, to coil itself into a ring.

If not for the insect-like shell covering its body, the Rock-Crushing Worm would have looked more like a giant snake than a worm at first glance, given its length and thickness.

"Rock-Crushing Worms live underground. Burrowing through earth is an instinctive talent of theirs, and they are skilled at hiding and lying in wait."

"If I can tame one, I can have it steal Black Oil for me."

"No, it cannot really be called stealing. Black Oil deposits are ownerless to begin with. This is simply taking what I can earn with my own abilities."

Garos thought to himself.

The Carmel Black Oil Field was heavily guarded. There might be defenses underground as well, but there was more than one oil field in the Ser Wilderness. Some of the smaller ones were not defended nearly as tightly, which gave him a better chance of obtaining Black Oil.

As for Samantha—

Her Alchemy was of no use to him for now. She had not yet learned how to refine and purify Black Oil.

And even if she could use Alchemy to extract Black Oil directly from magical creatures, the efficiency would still be too low.

Black Oil itself was formed through an extraordinarily long process, the result of magical creature remains undergoing special reactions and accumulating underground.

Unless one's Alchemy had reached an exceptionally high level, directly extracting it with Alchemy would require enormous quantities of magical creatures for only a small amount of Black Oil. The cost was not worth the return.

Natural deposits remained the main source of Black Oil.

Refining Black Oil, however, was possible.

Garos had never tasted higher-quality Black Oil, but he believed that, like the difference between ordinary metal and hundredfold-forged steel, refined Black Oil would certainly be more effective.

His gaze fell on the Rock-Crushing Worm.

Garos let out a long breath, pressing his claw firmly against the Rock-Crushing Worm's head and preventing it from breaking free.

Spell-like Ability—Mind Link.

A faint white gleam lit up in his dragon eyes. Garos immediately closed his eyes and focused, extending invisible mental energy to touch the Rock-Crushing Worm's mind and sense its consciousness.

Mind Link was a skill Garos had obtained earlier after digging through his bloodline for a long time.

Whether through luck or because his goal had been so clear, his Adaptive Evolution talent had activated.

Garos had not spent long before awakening this skill.

It allowed the caster to sense the target's emotions while allowing the target to understand the caster's thoughts, enabling a certain degree of communication through their mental worlds.

That gave Garos a chance to tame the Rock-Crushing Worm.

Ferocious beasts like Rock-Crushing Worms possessed little intelligence and were difficult to communicate with. Only a skill like Mind Link could bridge the gap.

Because of the difference in their mental strength, Garos successfully cast Mind Link on the Rock-Crushing Worm.

What first surged into Garos's senses were primal urges such as hunger and the desire to destroy. Then came fragmented flashes of memory: the salty, bloody taste of kobold corpses while gnawing through mineral veins, the excitement of mating with other Rock-Crushing Worms, and the terror of being lifted into the sky by a dragon and taken away from the underground.

The Rock-Crushing Worm's consciousness was muddled and dim.

A dragon-shaped glow representing Garos's spiritual will appeared in its mental world.

Garos looked around and found the Rock-Crushing Worm's mental world exceptionally dark, like the lightless depths underground. The worm's will was curled up inside a hollow.

"Submit to me. I can keep you alive and give you food."

Garos's voice sounded in its mental world in a manner it could sense and understand.

"Oh."

The Rock-Crushing Worm's reaction was lukewarm, as though neither life nor food mattered much to it.

Thinking of what had excited it earlier, Garos pondered for a moment before saying, "Submit to me, and I will grant you endless chances to mate with other Rock-Crushing Worms."

Sure enough.

The Rock-Crushing Worm's emotions immediately soared.

To it, this seemed to be the most important and sacred thing in a worm's life, even more important than survival.

"I... am... willing."

It replied in halting fragments.

Excellent. He had not expected it to be this easy.

Garos was secretly delighted.

Although communicating through Mind Link was not enslavement, a worm did not understand the concept of deception. As long as Garos could provide what it wanted, it would remain loyal to its instincts and serve him.

This was more like a mutually beneficial arrangement.

A transaction in which each took what they needed.

Just then—

Something Garos had not expected occurred.

Crack, crack, crack. The underground-like mental world suddenly trembled. The Rock-Crushing Worm's consciousness filled with awe, respect, and fear.

"What is happening?"

Garos asked.

"The King... has... come."

The Rock-Crushing Worm replied painfully.

At the same time, its will began to tremble. Cracks appeared one after another across its surface, then it shattered apart. A much smaller worm crawled out, but its form was more solid, vivid, and lifelike, almost as if it were real.

It had no eyes.

Yet Garos could sense that it was staring coldly at him.

At that moment, the Rock-Crushing Worm's entire mental world began to collapse. The little worm gradually became transparent and slowly vanished.

Garos opened his eyes again.

The Rock-Crushing Worm before him twitched a few times, then stopped moving. It was like an empty shell without a soul. Its body bore no fatal wounds, yet it was already dead.

"Trying to tame Rock-Crushing Worms does not seem so simple."

Garos sighed, but he was not discouraged. In the next moment, he regained his spirits.

The world did not revolve around him. It was perfectly normal to encounter setbacks. What mattered was how one overcame difficulties, made flowers bloom from thorns, and turned rough paths into smooth roads.

"The little worm that appeared at the end when it said the King had come must have been the Worm King."

"Can it directly decide the life and death of the worms under its command and destroy their minds?"

Garos remembered the Worm King he had seen before. Its shell glinted beneath the sunlight with a hard metallic sheen. Its body, roughly a hundred meters long, was terrifying. Its Life Level was at least above level 12.

At level 12, a Red Dragon would need to be around forty years old to reach such a Life Level, while an Iron Dragon would need to be over fifty.

In other words—

The Worm King's Life Level was at least equivalent to that of a Young Dragon. It was not something Garos could deal with right now.

"Strange. The inherited knowledge never mentioned the Rock-Crushing Worm King having such mental control methods."

"Perhaps it underwent some kind of mutation and gained an ability different from that of ordinary Worm Kings."

Garos considered this inwardly.

Afterward, he returned to the abandoned mines once more. Using beasts he had driven there as bait, he lured out ordinary Rock-Crushing Worms and captured them alive, then used Mind Link on them in the same way to try to tame them.

The result was the same. The Worm King interfered again.

This made Garos realize that unless he could deal with the Worm King, he had no way to make Rock-Crushing Worms work for him with his current methods.

"You ruined my plans. Just wait."

Garos remembered the troublesome Worm King.

Sooner or later, he would capture it and make it dig mines and oil every day until it dropped dead from exhaustion.

As the saying went, heaven never sealed off every path for a dragon. As long as one truly wanted to do something, there would always be another way. This group of Rock-Crushing Worms might be difficult to tame, but Garos still had other targets.