Ella was awakened by a strange sensation.
It was a kind of bone-deep weakness that left her entire body limp and powerless.
Like the heavy, leaden feeling in one’s limbs when running a high fever of 104 degrees, her consciousness drifted between half-dream and half-wakefulness.
Every attempt to break free felt as though an invisible hand was pushing her back underwater.
It took her several seconds to realize one thing: she was kneeling on the ground.
The floor was cold and smooth, made of some kind of material—not the warm, slightly moist texture of the insect-shell flooring in her laboratory, but more like metal or finely polished stone.
The air no longer carried the scent of beeswax and sea salt.
The complete absence of any smell was a smell in itself.
Ella did not open her eyes.
Ten years of isolated island life and ten years of survival instincts as an Insect Mother all condensed at this moment into one clear command: Do not move. Do not make a sound. Figure out the situation first.
She maintained her prone position, her breathing steady and prolonged, as if still deeply unconscious.
At the same time, her consciousness shot forward like a spring compressed to its limit, reaching for the connection she knew best—
The swarm consciousness network.
It was still there.
The discovery brought a flash of joy to her heart, but before that joy could spread, the next wave of perception doused it with cold water.
The network was still present, but its state… was wrong. It felt as if every node had been tightly wrapped in extremely fine, transparent silk threads.
Information could still pass through, but every frame was sluggish, distorted, and blurry, as though submerged in thick, viscous liquid.
She gritted her teeth and issued a command deep within her consciousness.
Return.
All combat units that could still move, immediately converge on my location.
This was the most fundamental authority of her position as Insect Mother, overriding every other command.
She poured all her mental strength into that order, making it explode like a bomb within the consciousness network.
Then, she received a response.
It was a Nest Tyrant.
One of her proudest creations.
These were beings she had carefully selected, adjusted, and finalized from countless failures, designed purely for combat.
Each one stood over five meters tall, their bodies covered in chitinous armor capable of withstanding the crushing pressures of the deep sea.
None of their six limbs were wasted.
The forelimbs were scythe blades capable of tearing apart small ships.
The middle limbs were gland ducts that could spray corrosive acid.
The hind limbs provided explosive bursts of speed through powerful muscle bundles.
They did not even possess a digestive system.
When designing them, Ella had abandoned the function of “eating” entirely. Nest Tyrants did not need to consume food.
They only needed to replenish nutrients at specially designated energy nodes within the nest.
They were pure fighting machines, undiluted by any unnecessary functions.
A single Nest Tyrant could dismantle a standard exploration vessel into pieces within one minute, and she had cultivated dozens of them on this island.
A fuzzy response came through the consciousness network—they had moved.
The heavy footsteps that made the ground tremble slightly came from the distance.
Not just one, but four, five… They were converging on her position.
Ella sneered inwardly.
These intruders might have some method to temporarily interfere with her swarm.
Perhaps that pink-haired leader truly possessed some strange ability.
But they had made one fatal mistake: they had not killed her.
As long as she was still alive, the swarm remained her limbs.
And on this island, within the insect nest she had spent ten years meticulously building, nothing could stand against her will.
Even if she suffered a fatal wound, as long as she wasn’t completely dead, she could have the swarm replace her damaged organs with healthy ones.
This was her greatest trump card when fighting within the nest.
She was not fighting alone.
Behind her stood an entire swarm that would willingly offer every drop of its bodily fluids for her.
The footsteps grew closer.
She could hear that the girls were still inside the room, seemingly whispering about something.
Their voices sounded muffled and distant, as if separated by a thick layer of water.
But Ella did not try to make out the content of those voices.
All her attention remained focused on the increasingly clear terrain mapping within the consciousness network.
The Nest Tyrants had already entered the outer area of this room.
In three more seconds—
“If you’re awake, open your eyes.”
Huh?!
That voice exploded directly inside her skull with no warning and no buffer.
Clean. Ice-cold. Carrying a bone-chilling certainty that seemed capable of seeing through any disguise.
It was exactly like how your mother could tell you were faking sleep with just one glance at the doorway.
But what truly made Ella’s heart feel as if gripped tightly by an invisible hand was not the voice itself.
It was fear.
A deep, marrow-piercing, primal, instinctive fear surged up from the base of her spine.
Like prey locked in the gaze of its natural predator, like a frog stared down by a snake.
This fear was not even controlled by her consciousness.
It acted directly on her body—muscles contracting, pupils dilating, breathing suddenly rapid.
She opened her eyes.
Her crimson pupils contracted violently the moment light flooded in, then darted around wildly and uncontrollably.
This was the body’s instinctive reaction under extreme terror, the brain’s stress response as it tried to rapidly assess the environment.
The first thing she saw was a mirror.
No, not a mirror—it was a carefully polished black panel that perfectly reflected images, roughly as tall as a person, fixed to the wall directly in front of her.
And in the reflection of that panel, she saw a person.
It was a young girl.
Shoulder-length silver hair hung smoothly beside her cheeks, gleaming with a cold light in the dim illumination.
Her skin was so fair it appeared nearly translucent, with faint networks of fine blood vessels visible beneath her cheekbones.
Her features were delicate yet sharp, the curve of her brows and eyes carrying an inhuman coldness.
The most striking feature was her eyes.
Crimson pupils.
As red as blood.
They stared back at her—with pure terror.
No.
Impossible.
Ella’s mind went completely blank in that instant.
She stared at the face in the mirror, at those crimson eyes, at every detail of that face, feeling every emotion being expressed upon it.
That was not someone else. That was herself.
That was her face.
In the reflection, that face was filled with terror—eyebrows slightly raised, lips parted slightly in shock, pupils dilated until they nearly filled the entire iris.
The fear was so real, so vivid, that for a moment Ella had the absurd illusion that the person in the mirror was not her, but another being trapped behind the glass who shared the same face.
But it was her.
It was her face.
It was the face of a young girl.
She raised her hand. It was a slender, well-defined hand with neatly trimmed nails and a wrist so thin it looked like it would snap with a gentle twist.
That hand trembled as it touched her own cheek. The sensation from her fingertips was soft, warm, and alive.
The person in the mirror performed the exact same motion.
“Ah~ How is it, Ella~ Miss~?”
The voice came from behind her, the end of each word drawn out as if savoring a delicious dessert.
Ella’s mouth twitched.
It was an extreme disbelief that threatened to tear her sanity apart.
She had become female.
She… a man… had become a woman.
When she had crossed over, she had already become an “Insect Mother.”
The class label had been placed on her, but her body had never changed. She had remained male every single day for ten years.
Until now.
The exquisite, cold, terrified face of the girl in the mirror cut into her nerves like a dull knife, over and over.
“You—!”
Her voice had changed. It was no longer that low, steady male voice, but a clear, metallic, cool female voice.
Hearing this voice emerge from her own throat made her feel as though she were speaking with a stranger’s vocal cords.
Crack—
In the next moment, the mirror surface shattered from the center.
Cracks spread outward like a spider web, slicing the reflected face into countless fragments.
The silver-haired girl, the crimson pupils, the expression of terror—all shattered into pieces and fell clattering from the wall.
And behind those fragments, standing behind the broken mirror, was a person.
Pink hair that reached her waist.
A coat made of butterfly-wing-like scale powder.
On that face that was too beautiful to be real hung a brilliant, almost radiant smile. Her pupils—
Ella saw them.
They were the exact same crimson red as her own.
“What did you do to me?!”
Ella’s voice forced its way out of her throat, hoarse and sharp.
Her chest heaved violently, and her silver hair scattered across the sides of her face from the abrupt movement.
But what truly froze her heart was not the change in her voice, nor the change in her body—
It was those words.
“Why can you speak inside my swarm network?!”
The moment the words left her mouth, she already knew the answer.
Because that voice—the command “If you’re awake, open your eyes”—had not come through her ears.
It had sounded directly within the consciousness network, piercing straight into her mental link and bypassing her absolute control as the Insect Mother.
The only ones capable of doing that were…
“Of course I can, Miss Ella.”
The pink-haired girl tilted her head.
The motion was identical to the first time she had appeared in the laboratory—cute yet dangerous.
“Because I am your creation too.”
“My… creation?”