Back in System’s nest, Bck’s mandibles were holding a tiny mushroom that was emitting a faint light, and her antennae were repeatedly tapping on the body of a fellow worker ant knight.

  When the king and queen weren’t around, the colony’s ants would use this primitive method of touching each other with their antennae to communicate.

  It had been two days since the king had disappeared.

  Bck had been watching from nearby when the king, Shava, and Aura had suddenly vanished in a fsh of gray light. Bck didn’t know where the king had gone, but the ant firmly believed that the king would come back.

  After Bck gently tapped the other worker knight with her antennae and told her not to worry, Bck went back to repcing the older mushrooms on the walls with newly cultivated luminescent mushrooms. These mushrooms only glowed for about seven days before they stopped giving off light, so they frequently had to be repced.

  Bck had always thought that the king pnted these mushrooms simply because he enjoyed having a little light inside the nest. Even though the king’s powerful eyes could see clearly even in complete darkness, he'd still arranged for some of these glowing mushrooms to be present all throughout the nest.

  However, Bck had recently learned that the king’s reason for arranging these luminescent mushrooms was so that the rest of the colony’s ants could use the light to see inside the nest.

  But for the ants, this light was completely unnecessary...

  ...

  After taking Meatball out for his daily flight and inspecting the nest’s surroundings for a while, Bck went back inside the nest and crawled over to Queen Linda’s chamber.

  During the king’s long pupation, some of Bck’s actions had led to the queen developing feelings of hostility toward her. However, after the king’s pupation had ended, he'd forced Bck to apologize. The queen no longer felt any hostility toward Bck these days.

  Despite that, Bck still disliked Queen Linda just as much as she always had. But no matter how much Bck disliked her, in order to stabilize the queen’s emotions so that she could keep ying eggs comfortably, Bck would go to the queen’s chamber to comfort her every few hours.

  Ever since the king disappeared a few days earlier, Queen Linda had been feeling very uneasy. Even though her body was extremely bloated and she could barely move, she still used all of her strength to search through Aura’s chamber in an effort to find clues about the king’s disappearance.

  Bck had originally thought that she was the one who was most worried about the king, but after seeing the queen’s actions, Bck had realized that the most concerned ant was actually Queen Linda.

  That was why Bck was now even more jealous of the queen than she had been in the past.

  After comforting Queen Linda and telling her that the king would definitely return safely, Bck inadvertently sent a mental message to the queen.

  “Why can’t you and I just exchange identities?”

  However, when the queen received Bck’s message, she couldn’t understand what the words meant at all. She asked in confusion, “Exchange...identities? What is that?”

  Bck slowly shook her head and didn’t expin the meaning of her words to the queen. The ant knew that Queen Linda might not understand even if she took the time to give a detailed expnation.

  Right when Bck was getting ready to leave the queen’s chamber, the worker knight Spikes, looking a little flustered, raced inside.

  Although Spikes had emerged from her second pupation at the same time as Hooks, who could control lightning, Spikes hadn’t known what type of ability she'd possessed at first. However, about six months earlier, Spikes’ agility had suddenly increased explosively. The ant’s speed and reaction time were two or three times higher than usual for a worker knight.

  After their antennae touched, Bck quickly learned what had caused Spikes to panic. An invader was trying to fight its way into the nest.

  While rats and slimes had occasionally strayed into the nest during System’s long pupation, the situation this time seemed different. The invader currently attacking the nest possessed exceptional strength and had the ability to threaten the colony’s ants.

  Bck made a prompt decision and hurried over to Meatball’s chamber to pick him up. The two of them then rushed to the nest’s entrance to attack the invading enemy.

  When Bck and Meatball reached the nest’s entrance, they saw the injured soldier knight Little Strong. One of the invader’s attacks had torn off half of one of Little Strong’s forelegs. There was fishy smelling clear blood scattered all over the ground.

  Bck could hear the unique sound of Excavator drilling through the ground. It seemed like the big worker was currently fighting against the invader.

  As Bck and Meatball continued moving forward, the invader soon came into sight, and they were finally able to see its appearance. The invader was some sort of strange-looking creature that Bck had never encountered before.

  It had insect-like mandibles and a carapace protecting its legs and body. Its centipede-like body was about one and a half meters long, and there were eight rat-like arms covered with gray fur extending from it.

  Before Bck could give an order, Meatball, whose body had already reached a diameter of nearly half a meter, jumped closer and fired a few of his green paralysis spikes at the strange creature.

  ...

  Although Meatball was far weaker than Shava, he still managed to kill the strange invading creature without any suspense.

  Although the centipede-like creature hadn’t been affected by Meatball’s initial paralysis and toxin attacks, it had inevitably died when its head was bitten off after Meatball transformed half of his body into a giant mouth full of ferocious-looking teeth.

  The creature’s blood was dark red. Bck put some of the blood into her mouth and discovered that it tasted very strange.

  It tasted like the demon corpse that the king had brought back to the nest more than a year earlier, back when the colony was still living in Lilt Forest.

  ...

  System, who was currently in a Temple of Shadows on another demipne, naturally had no idea what was happening back at the nest.

  At this time, System was full of anticipation as he and Shava repeatedly attacked one of the bones from the massive dragon skeleton. Although Shava’s ability was strong, it wasn’t omnipotent. After she continuously used her ability for an hour or two, her energy would be exhausted, and she would have to recover for a while before she was able to use it again.

  After several hours of attacks, many new cracks had appeared on the enormous dragon rib that the two of them were attacking. Unfortunately, even though damage was starting to accumute, the rib bone still hadn’t broken yet.

  Whenever Shava’s energy ran out and she moved aside to rest, System would begin attacking the dragon bone using the weapons that he'd brought over from the treasure room.

  System was in the middle of an attack when he noticed that Aura, who had been swimming in the pile of gold coins up until now, had suddenly appeared next to him. System could sense some slightly strange emotions from the butterfly. He guessed that the unusual emotions might be because Aura had seen the dragon skeleton and remembered his former self, an enormous and extremely powerful frost dragon, then became somewhat sad over the difference between his current and former selves.

  But System soon realized that he was overthinking things. If Aura had just emerged from his chrysalis, this dragon skeleton might have shocked him. The zy butterfly may have even been motivated to work hard and become stronger.

  But the current Aura, who had just acquired a massive pile of treasure, wouldn’t have those types of thoughts. When Aura had first seen the dragon skeleton, all he'd felt was a brief and inexplicable tinge of sadness, but he didn’t think too much about it.

  Aura’s purpose in coming here at this time was to ask System and Shava to return to the treasure room. After all, while he was happy to swim alone in the huge pile of gems and gold coins, he felt that he would be even happier if someone else was watching him.

  ...

  After Aura realized that System was completely ignoring him, he flew closer to the cracked bone and began gathering his frost energy. He wanted to prove to System that it would be easy for him to break open this bone that was giving the other two so much trouble.

  The facts soon proved that Aura truly was skilled at breaking open dragon bones.

  Aura kept repeating the process of injecting water into the cracks in the dragon rib, then freezing the water using his frost energy. Because water expanded after being turned into ice, the cracks in the bone were constantly being pushed further apart while the bone made creaking sounds.

  After Aura used his frost energy for about ten minutes, there was a violent snapping sound. Although the bone hadn’t broken into two pieces, a crack nearly half a centimeter wide had appeared on the dragon rib.

  As soon as the rge crack appeared, an enticing and exotic fragrance began wafting out of the cracked rib. It was the scent of dragon bone marrow.