Ling PingAn patted his round belly after dinner. “Well, that was awesome!”
He got up to his feet and made himself a cup of tea to cleanse his palate. Then, he fed his cat the leftover shrimp and fish. He drank his tea while Bastet ate the leftovers.
And for a moment, they were happy.
After resting in the chair for about half an hour, Ling PingAn stood up, walked upstairs, and picked up the wristwatch. He sat on the chair and attached the wristwatch to his phone. He navigated his smartphone to the Clan Tribe Command, followed by a notification popping out, saying “the virtual reality game equipment is connected”. He switched to the Blessed Land interface and hit enter.
The screen began to glow, and with a penetrating brightness, he found himself in the Blessed Land World. His figure remains somewhat of a ball of green smoke.
This time, Ling PingAn was more cautious. He started looking for his eyes in the game. But what he discovered was the countless eyeballs all over his green smoke-like figure. Each eyeball poked out as if they were looking for something.
What a strange feeling, he thought.
It was somewhat similar to looking through a kaleidoscope as a child, in which he would peer through the lenses and see the world in colorful patterns.
“Interesting…” Ling PingAn laughed, “No wonder I could observe everything from 360 degrees with no blind spots—it turns out there are eyeballs all over my body.”
Such character design was rare in video games. Yet, Ling PingAn did not read too much into it—who knew what the d*mned developers were thinking? They had never intended to provide a good gameplay experience for the players anyway.
As he floated in the air, Ling PingAn surveyed the entire Blessed Land—it was a mess everywhere. There were plowed mountains, grasslands, beaches, and swamps. He could see big and small potholes all over the place.
By coincidence, Ling PingAn’s focus shifted to something blurry on the ground—worker ants were swarming the entire Blessed Land World. They dug deep into the ground, rummaging everywhere they could, and dragged out any living thing they were able to find, even the microorganisms that the naked eyes could not see.
Most creatures on the Blessed Land World were just insects, while the most advanced species—the Golden Beetles—only numbered a few hundred.
Finally, the mighty worker ants devoured everything. They dug through the turf with their sharp teeth of their mandibles, and they plowed through the soil, working together until a pit was formed until every creature on the Blessed Land World fell prey to them.
At last, these terrible creatures flooded to the mountain—the core of the Blessed Land World. They seemed to have smelled something, which was why they went berserk and surged to the peak. As they arrived in front of a crevice, they crashed into the narrow opening, and their swollen, acid-filled bodies exploded. Corrosive liquid began to erode the fissure.
After hundreds of worker ants sacrificed themselves, they finally opened up a passage. Then, they dragged out a few flickering bones back to the queen ant. The queen bit through the bones and the foraged items brought back from the scavenging. After that, a faint halo appeared on the queen.
Ling PingAn took a minute to ponder before twisting his body, flying towards the crevice that the ant workers had been. With just his mind, his body slipped through the opening.
It had reached him that this was a sealed cave. It was somewhat similar to an ancient tomb. Two bright oil lamps illuminated the entire cave. Unfortunately, most of the remains of this tomb have reduced to ashes due to some terrifying force—he could see a pile of powder-like substance on the ground.
However, he noticed a strange, cone-shaped object under the two oil lamps—it seemed like some ceramic product. It was when Ling PingAn approached the lamps that this thing automatically rose.
Aha! So it was a coffin!
The ancient characters around the coffin began to light up one after another, but Ling PingAn could not make out this calligraphy. Did they look like inscriptions—perhaps from the Shang and Zhou Dynasties?
“This video game developer has so many tricks up their sleeves,” Ling PingAn smirked, “All just to set the atmosphere.”
As he was about to leave, he could not help but shift his gaze back at the ceramic coffin. There was a decomposed body lying in the coffin, and it got his interest. It held a torch in his left hand and a jade bi-disc in his right hand. It was part of the burial ceremony of the ancient nobilities.
Yet, the underlying problem remains. It was common for noblemen to be buried with jade bi-discs as it stood for the honorable status of an aristocrat, like a well-polished jade. But what did the torch stand for?
Ling PingAn looked up at the walls. As far as he knew, the ancient nobles had a habit of carving murals of their past lives in their chamber tombs. So far, he could not find any.
Not long after his search, he finally found a group of magnificent murals above him. They spanned from left to right, forming as a whole.
The first mural was a ball of fire. Among the flames, there was a shadowy figure.
The second mural was a faint figure looking at a woman.
In the third mural, the woman was lying on the bed. She seemed to be in extreme pain.
Then in the fourth mural, someone with a knife had cut open her chest, and six infants had sprung out of her left and right chest, three from the left, three from the right.
In the next few murals, the storyline began with the first child from the right chest of the woman. The power of fire had bestowed on him. As he grew up, people began to rely on him, and they worshipped him. He built cities and cast exquisite ironmongeries as he led the people. He even burned down an unoccupied land. With his power, he constructed a metropolis.
But then, the war came. Strange beasts, gigantic monsters, immortals who rode on clouds, and even the gods who controlled the laws of Heaven and Earth joined the bloodshed.
Heaven and Earth shattered, while mountains and rivers destroyed. The people died in pain. So did the hero of this mural, as he perished in this horrendous war, and his people carried his body back to their hometown.
At the end of this wall of murals, there lies a line of words. They were the official scripture from ancient times.
The hushed white water of the river,
Flowed as they moved down the heights of Mount White Water,
And here formed was the great White Abyss.
O the magnificent White Abyss,
This
Is where the teacher of Kun Wu
Cleansed.
Ling PingAn was bewildered. As he recalled, the Blessed Land World was called the White Abyss. It came with the reward from Nightmare World earlier. Coincidentally, the Nightmare World was also called Zhang Hong’s Country. If he was not mistaken, Zhang Hong’s Country was somewhere around the White Abyss in the “Classic of Mountains and Seas” from the old times.
“Could it be that the Blessed Land is part of a fragment of the Classic of Mountains and Seas World?” Ling PingAn thought, “How fascinating. This game adopted the settings from the Classic of Mountains and Seas. So does that mean this tomb belonged to Kun Wu?”
Ling PingAn was excited. He was more interested in games that would invoke connotation and showed different cultural aspects, rather than just killing mobs.
“Once my new book has launched,” he continued, “I’ll try this out again.” He levitated out of the tomb as he scanned the Blessed Land World. It was in devastation.
He considered for a moment before waving his hand. By doing that, he channelled the energy within the Blessed Land World to restore everything. In the blink of an eye, the bumpy and rough surface of the land had levelled out till it was smooth, and following that was the small, green plants emerging from the soil. The tomb behind him had sealed up again.
By restoring the Blessed Land World, its reserved energy reduced by 0.5%, while Ling PingAn’s current energy reserve reached around 25%. It was easy to accomplish this task.
But something else came to his mind. “The ants—where are my ants?” Ling PingAn searched around. He could not find his ants.
“Where’d they go?” Ling PingAn inspected the area. He finally managed to find the ant queen as it dragged its body strenuously on the Creation Base. It was only the size of a small rabbit.
Ling PingAn was stunned. It had almost lost all of its sensory organs, with no head, gaster or eyes. It looked like a gooey little monster that was wriggling and squirming at a slow speed from afar. It was still exerting that faint halo from before.
As it crawled forward sluggishly, Ling PingAn could sense the presence of a new ant queen inside its body. More precisely, the Mother Queen was pregnant. Ling PingAn could feel the pounding heart of the little fellow.
Then, a sudden realization hit him. Ling PingAn understood everything—the past and the present of the ant colony that he had created.
It was a prominent species that had continued for many generations. In their best attempt, each generation of the ant queen would pass on their best genes to the next generation. It had been the norm since then. They would abandon the useless genes and blend in the beneficial ones. As time passed, they became what they were now.
The era of this Mother Queen was about to come to an end, but not quite yet. Its mission seemed to have brought it here—it was waiting for the arrival of its creator.
Ling PingAn was a little touched. It was just a feature inside this game, but this scene was heartwarming.
“Ah, so this is also part of the selling point of this game.” Ling PingAn remarked. So he floated over, stretched out a part of his green smoke-like figure, and lifted the tiny Mother Queen. It looked like it had sensed him because the body of the Mother Queen began to shake vigorously. The little fellow inside its abdomen was even more stimulated.
Holding it, Ling PingAn muttered, “System, switch on the Training Path.”
A pop-up window appeared. “Do you wish to spend 5% of your Blessed Land energy to switch on the Training Path?” Ling PingAn pressed confirm.
In front of him, a metal door rose from the ground. Rings of light radiated from the door gradually. Ling PingAn moved towards the door. There were strings of words levitating from its surface.
“The Extraterrestrials have built a Deadly Pyramid as their training base on the grounds of the Southern Pole…”
“And every 100 years, they would sneak into the pyramid and begin their training…”
“How foolish of humans to have meddled in this matter.”
“This would be the greatest catalyst, all for the rise of the Insects.”
“Let the Insects show you so-called Aliens and your little pet monsters who is the real Hunter here!”
Ling PingAn gazed at the words as he scratched his head. He felt a little offended.
Foolish humans—did it not mean him? He thought.
Whatever. It was just a game.
He knew what he had to do. He held the Mother Queen and gently sent it into the door portal. The layers of halos began to rotate. As he studied, the halos consisted of symbols—strange symbols that he could not recognize, but they were familiar. Somehow, they resembled Arabic numerals, mathematical symbols, and symbols used in chemical and physical equations in reality.
As he stared at them, they gradually evolved from the basic nine-nine multiplication table and the Pythagorean theorem to something even more complicated. All kinds of presumptions and theorems began to materialize.
Ling PingAn thought it was such a headache that he had to close his eye. But what he had forgotten was that in his current state, his other eyeballs would still be open. They were examining those symbols in deep interest and excitement as they twisted and turned, wriggling indescribably on his figure. If Ling PingAn had known this was happening, he would have had a problem with it.
When he opened his eye again, the symbols were long gone. The surface of the metal door had turned mirror-like, reflecting the appearance of another world. It was an azure blue planet, followed by the view of ice-covered Antarctica. The howling wind and the raging snowstorm swept across the continent—the penguins were nowhere to seen in the blizzard.
An ancient pyramid stood deserted in the snowstorm. Somewhere, there was a heat source. It was warm—around 20 degrees. All alone on this ice-cold land, it was as if the pyramid had been expecting the arrival of someone.
A dim light suddenly illuminated the space behind the pyramid. The tiny Mother Queen squirmed as it crawled forward. The creature in its abdomen had already reached its adult formation. As the Mother Queen overtook the space, it had exerted its strength, and it fell to the ground. Its stomach instantly exploded.
A new Mother Queen about the size of a fist crawled out of the abdomen. The weak Mother Queen turned its deformed physique towards its offspring. Bit by bit, its muscles lost their tension, and there were no signs of life.
Pheromones had released. “There could only be one Insect species in this world!”
The newborn Mother Queen acknowledged the message. She crept up and started devouring the entire remains of its mother. Slowly, it curled up its body, secreting slimy liquid that would spread rapidly, corroding the surrounding moss and soil.
In the area covered by the liquid, eggs began to bulge one by one. It was not long after those fist-sized worker ants with protruding bellies hatched. There were only a few dozen of them, but as soon as they hatched, they were up and running.
They foraged for any food they could find around the land and brought it back to the moss field beside the Mother Queen, but it was not enough in nutritional value.
They shifted their focus to the pyramid. Pheromones had released once more. They had sensed the presence of edibles within the proximity of the pyramid, though it was risky.
The body of the Mother Queen continued to expand. As the previous Mother Queen had once consumed a large number of Dimension Stones, it had provided vast energy for the current Mother Queen.
Countless ant eggs were bulging up as their numbers expanded on the moss field. At that moment, hundreds of worker ants hatched.
Ling PingAn gawked at everything on the mirror-like screen with his eyes wide open.
“This is scary…” he gulped, “Such rapid reproductive ability—under the same set of conditions, I’m afraid no species can compete with these ant colonies.”
At the same time, he locked his eyes on the sky.
Soaring through the snow-ravaged Antarctica atmosphere among the harsh winds and below-freezing temperature was an odd-looking air fleet, which had begun its touch down on the fluffy snow.
As a long, metal tube pivoted from the bow of the spaceship, it shot out a powerful laser beam. Yikes! It had aimed towards the ice-covered pyramid—it had shot through the entire layer of snow with one hit.
Ling PingAn shook his head in dismay. That was cheating, he thought. How was his swarm of insects going to beat alien-piloted spaceships?
Fortunately, these Aliens seemed to have lacked intelligence—they had only utilized their highly advanced weapons to burn through the Antarctica surface. After that, they deployed a smaller aircraft that carried three strange-looking Aliens as they flew towards the burned area.
Ling PingAn chuckled. “Sure enough, the god-d*mned developers were out of their mind.” They had programmed the Aliens to forgo their powerful weapons. Instead, they made the Aliens assign weaker resources to fight their enemies. Could there have been such idiotic Aliens in reality?
