The world was an endless expanse of azure blue.
No continents.
No islands.
At least, in the understanding of the vast majority of players, this world known as the Abyssal Sea had rules that were brutally, almost absurdly cruel.
You possessed a ship.
That ship was your home, your fortress, your everything.
You sailed out into the deep blue, and whether the wind and waves would carry you toward treasure or the gaping maw of a monster depended entirely on the dice fate rolled.
Every day on the forums, newcomers wept about their ships being destroyed and their deaths, while others bragged about ancient relics hauled up from some eerie stretch of sea.
Yet everyone accepted one truth without question.
Land did not exist.
Yet right now, under a blazing sun, that infinite blue—where the horizon should have been nothing but wave lines dividing sky and sea—held an island resting quietly on the water.
Its outline was irregular, possessing a strange beauty that looked carefully piled yet deliberately left in its primitive state.
This was no work of natural forces.
It had been built bit by bit from the secretions of countless insects and the reefs of the seabed.
It was a miracle.
In the center of the island, inside a domed building constructed from translucent insect shells, the light filtered into a soft golden hue.
The air carried a faint scent, something like beeswax blended with sea salt.
Ella stood before the experimental table.
He looked twenty-seven or twenty-eight, his black hair grown a little long and hanging casually over one shoulder.
He wore a white lab coat stained with colorful patches from various unidentified liquids.
Ten years of isolated island life had not roughened him. After all, he barely needed to lift a finger.
An entire insect swarm served him.
His gaze settled on the figure in front of him.
It was a girl.
Her blue hair cascaded like a waterfall to her waist.
Her skin was so fair it seemed almost translucent.
Her features were exquisitely refined, as if drawn stroke by stroke with the finest brush.
She stood there with her head slightly bowed, posture obedient and still.
But the most important detail was not her looks.
It was her humanoid form.
A complete, flawless humanoid form—two arms, two legs, one head, with perfect proportions.
No extra limbs, no compound eyes, no exposed exoskeleton joints.
Two points and one line were, naturally, the most beautiful shape.
Ella had spent a full ten years and endured countless failures.
From the earliest deformed specimens that still carried insect traits, to ones that gradually drew closer to humanoid, and now, today…
He had succeeded.
He had personally created a humanoid insect race.
An existence that would obey him absolutely, remain utterly loyal, and be perfect in every way.
The girl’s lips parted slightly. Her voice came out soft, like sea breeze brushing across harp strings.
“Master.”
Those two words hit Ella’s ears like an electric current racing from the base of his spine to the crown of his head.
His nose stung. A thin layer of moisture rose in the corners of his eyes.
He remembered the day ten years ago when he had crossed over.
The moment the system panel appeared, he saw his class slot boldly displaying the two large characters Insect Mother, accompanied by an emoji he still could not forget—a rather creepy insect-nest icon.
He was a man.
A man who had become an “Insect Mother.”
He had stared at the sea and contemplated his life for roughly ten seconds.
After those ten seconds, he smiled.
Because he had realized it was luck.
Anyone who had read a few webnovels or played a few games knew exactly what “insect swarm” meant in nearly every story: absolute obedience, perfect coordination, tirelessness, fearlessness of death.
Numbers were everything.
And he was the Insect Mother.
He was the will. The swarm was his limbs. He did not need to be strong himself; he only needed the swarm to grow strong.
Ten years.
He had started with a small skiff and the few worker insects that came with his initial kit.
He gathered resources from the seabed, expanded the swarm step by step, and slowly transformed this foothold from nothing into what lay beneath him now.
Monsters lurked under the sea. Suspected ancient gods existed.
Countless horrors could swallow ordinary players and their ships in a single bite.
None of them had ever truly threatened him.
Because he had the swarm.
This island was the best proof.
And today, he had completed another great achievement.
Ella reached out. His fingertips trembled slightly as he moved to touch the blue-haired girl’s cheek.
He wanted to know her properly, to give her a name, to ask whether she possessed self-awareness, whether she could speak, whether she could think, whether she could—
This life has no regrets…
He murmured the words, voice hoarse.
The moisture in his eyes finally gathered into a single tear that slid down his cheek.
“Yeah, this life has no regrets. I can die now.”
Hmm?
Ella’s fingers froze three inches from the girl’s cheek.
That voice?
It had not come from his insect maiden. She remained perfectly still, head bowed, lips unmoving.
The voice came from behind him.
Clear. Cool. Far too cold and hard.
Ella’s body tensed instantly.
Impossible.
No other intelligent being should have stepped onto this island without him noticing.
His swarm covered every inch of the island—from the shoreline to the heart, from the surface to underground.
Any foreign object landing would be detected immediately by patrolling soldier insects, and the information would flash through the swarm’s consciousness network to him in a fraction of a second.
He had felt no abnormal feedback at all.
It was like staring straight at the door with your eyes wide open while someone suddenly appeared inside the room, your eyes still faithfully reporting that no one had entered.
Ella whipped his head around.
Sunlight poured through the gaps in the dome, slicing the air into columns of light and shadow. And between those beams, at the entrance to his laboratory…
A group of girls stood waiting.
Their outfits varied.
Some wore short, practical clothes suited for movement.
Others wore light armor pieced together from what looked like biological exoskeletons.
One was wrapped in a gorgeous coat that appeared tailored from enormous butterfly wings.
They all looked between sixteen or seventeen and their early twenties, yet each one radiated an aura that made Ella’s swarm instinctively recoil in extreme discomfort.
The one at the front stood directly facing him.
Pink hair fell to her waist.
Fine scale powder drifted slowly from the edges of the strands, refracting tiny rainbows in the sunlight.
Behind her—no, not merely behind her, but surrounding her entire body—hung a faint, hazy glow, as if the scales on a butterfly’s wings had been magnified ten thousand times to envelop her completely.
She was beautiful in a way that did not seem real.
Like a masterpiece an artist had poured a lifetime into carving, then granted life.
But right now, the expression on her face made Ella’s heart sink.
Hatred.
Disgust.
Revulsion.
It was the look one gave to maggots wriggling in a sewer drain, only deeper—an offense taken at the very existence of something, a loathing that rose from the depths of the soul.
She stared at Ella as if he were something that deserved to be crushed underfoot.
Ella’s Adam’s apple bobbed.
He was certain he did not know her.
In these ten years he had barely left the island. His food came from the swarm.
His research materials came from the swarm.
He did not even need to trade with other players—the swarm itself was the most perfect self-sufficient system.
In the Abyssal Sea, he was a complete hermit.
He could not have offended anyone.
“You are…?” he asked. His voice came out steadier than he expected.
The pink-haired girl tilted her head.
In any other situation the motion would have looked cute.
Paired with the expression on her face, it only made Ella feel as if a snake had fixed its eyes on him.
“Don’t recognize me, do you?”
Her voice was soft, almost as if she were speaking to herself.
Then she smiled.
The smile was lovely, yet the coldness inside it ran deeper than the darkest undercurrents of the Abyssal Sea.
“That’s perfect. We have plenty of time ahead to get to know each other slowly.”
She raised her hand.
The gesture was casual, like brushing a speck of dust from a table.
But in the exact same instant, the black-haired girl standing just behind her and to the side moved.
The girl had been silent the whole time, presence so low that Ella had barely registered her during his first glance.
Now that she moved, he saw clearly.
Spider legs extended from her back.
They grew straight out of her body, gleaming with the sheen of chitin and the flexible texture of arthropod joints.
Four long, sharp legs unfurled from her shoulder blades like some twisted set of angelic wings.
One of them—
Pierced into him before Ella could react.
Not the heart.
The left side of his abdomen, near the stomach or spleen—precise and clean.
Pain exploded a fraction of a second later.
It was a more insidious burning, as though something were dissolving inside him.
The leg clearly carried venom or some paralyzing secretion.
Ella’s legs lost strength instantly.
He dropped to his knees, hands braced against the cold insect-shell floor, gasping for air in heavy gulps.
A thin line of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth and dripped onto the translucent white ground, blooming into a dark red flower.
“You… who exactly are you people?!”
He lifted his head, eyes full of shock.
Why had his swarm given no reaction?!
He frantically tried to connect to the swarm’s consciousness network—the spiritual web he had spent ten years weaving into an impenetrable whole.
Normally a single thought would make the tens of thousands of insects on the island obey like extensions of his own fingers.
But now—
Nothing.
Every node had fallen into a bizarre dormant state. Worker insects stood frozen in place.
Soldier insects held their patrol postures yet did not advance.
Even the blue-haired insect maiden he had just created—
He strained to turn his head and saw her still standing exactly where she had been, head bowed, motionless.
As if someone had pressed pause.
All the insects were still there.
None of them were moving.
An uninvited guest had landed on his island and he had not noticed.
A group of uninvited guests had walked into the core of his laboratory and he had not noticed.
His entire swarm had crashed and he still had not noticed.
Not until the other party spoke.
What did that mean?
A layer of cold sweat broke across Ella’s back.
It meant the opponent’s strength—or whatever method they possessed—lay completely beyond his understanding.
In the Abyssal Sea, to sever the link between an Insect Mother and her swarm without a sound… he had never even imagined such a thing was possible.
The pink-haired girl stepped closer.
Her footsteps were light, producing faint sounds on the insect-shell floor like the rustle of scale powder falling as butterfly wings fluttered.
She stopped in front of Ella and looked down at him.
Sunlight streamed from behind her, gilding her silhouette with a golden edge and sinking her face into shadow.
Only those red eyes shone startlingly bright within the darkness, swirling with an emotion that bordered on madness.
“My dear creator, I’ve been looking forward to this so much. Just how beautifully can that face of yours twist, and what kind of delicious expressions will it show? Hehehe…”