"Record it! Get it on audio! If I renege, sue me! The signals are dead, I can't call daddy for a rescue. You help me live through this, you get paid. You think I value a few coppers over my own skin?" Yao's voice was a shrill, desperate bark, perfectly pitched to cut through the fog of terror clouding the farmers' minds.
She watched as a sea of hesitant, frightened faces slowly, reluctantly, began to nod. A grim, transactional acceptance. They believed the "Young Master" was motivated by pure, unadulterated self-preservation. The promise of wages, the threat of legal action (laughable, but a concrete concept), these were levers they understood. The abstract horror of man-sized locusts was secondary to the immediate calculus of survival and compensation.
Nods. Of course they'd nod,Yao thought, the performance leaving a faintly sour aftertaste. She wasgoing to pay them. This whole "vile wretch" persona was a shield, a carefully constructed facade of mediocrity and moral bankruptcy designed to be non-threatening. In the cutthroat world of noble houses, a suddenly appearing bastard was a problem. But a bastard who was howhe appeared—useless, irritating, transparently greedy, and just clever enough to be a nuisance but not a threat—was a manageable one. He was a self-limiting problem. A gaudy, noisy cockroach one could choose to ignore or squash at leisure, not a silent, venomous spider waiting in the shadows.
Her parents, career bureaucrats, had schooled her in the unspoken languages of power and presentation. The truly dangerous people weren't the obvious villains or the blatant sycophants; they were the ones whose motives you couldn't decipher, whose depths you couldn't plumb. By playing the petty, predictable tyrant, she was effectively disarming herself in the eyes of the Xie family. She was announcing her limitations, her flawed character. It was a pre-emptive surrender of any claim to real power within the family structure. For now, with the Xie name as a necessary key to a larger future, it was the safest play. Once this dungeon was cleared and she had what she needed… well, she could always vanish. The thought was a small, warm coal of future freedom in her chest.
With the farmers grudgingly mobilized, she issued orders in sharp, rapid-fire succession. "First group! Empty the storage barns! Every scrap of food, every sack of grain, into the main house and kitchen annex! That's our fortress! Board up every window, brace every door! Use anything that can block a hole! Second group! The wool, the hides, the feathers—bring it all out, now! You guards," she jabbed a finger at the Captain and his men, "you're on pest control. The rest of you, you hold these two buildings. Old ones, women, children—you stay inside, you stay quiet, and you stay the hell out of sight! You get eaten and make a mess, I'm docking your family's pay for the cleaning!"
Her commands were still hanging in the air when the first distant, ominous drone reached a crescendo. Through hastily boarded windows, the workers saw it—a living, seething storm front of mottled green and brown, blotting out the twilight. A hundred thousand strong. Normal locusts were a plague; these were a ravenous, intelligent scourge.
Panic threatened to erupt anew, but fear of the wretch's wrath and the promise of gold spurred frantic action. The guards, seeing a sea of XP and potential loot, surged out towards the fields with grim determination, spells already flickering at their fingertips.
"Where's the young master?" someone shouted.
"Locked himself in his room with a sack of provisions! Made us reinforce the door! Said not to disturb him unless the roof was coming down. Oh, and he demanded a cast-iron stew pot. For 'self-defense.'"
A stunned silence, then a collective, mental eye-roll. The absolute, irredeemable bastard.
The absolute, irredeemable bastard was currently hauling herself up the interior of the chimney via a strand of Gossamer, as silent and fluid as smoke. On the roof, the cold night air bit at her exposed skin. She glanced towards the fields where the guards' spells now flashed like distant, violent fireflies against the dark swarm. Lifting a scavenged, high-power monocular to her eye, she scanned the distant, shimmering curve of the Calamity Field. No arrivals yet. But further out, in the hinterlands beyond the farm's borders, she could see the pinprick lights of other homesteads. Figures moved, some pointing, others frantically tapping at unresponsive communicators.
They weren't just panicking. They were commodity traders, and a fresh, unpicked dungeon was the hottest commodity of all. The disabled farm relay had bought her time, not secrecy. Soon, very soon, the vultures would arrive.
"Time. I need to move faster."
Shedding the "Oaks" skin with that now-familiar, visceral wrench, Yao melted into the deeper shadows cloaking the farmhouse. The true hunt began now. She avoided the fields, a river of chittering death, and angled towards the woods. The harvested crops would only delay the swarm momentarily; their hunger would soon drive them towards the richer, concentrated biomass of the farmstead—herfarmstead, her assets. She needed to thin the herd.
Her destination was the hollow where the 'Flying Fish' was concealed. In the pitch black beneath the trees, she opened her pack. Her fingers closed around three cool, crystalline orbs. The S1 Keys. In Xie An's study, she'd known her surface stats had been scanned. His indifference confirmed it. Her victory over Xie Lin had been written off as luck, cheap tricks, and opponent incompetence. The foundational truth—her pathetic, Level 3 attributes—was established and dismissed. Perfect.
Now, she would rewrite that truth.
One by one, she swallowed the keys. The process was no less agonizing. It was a volcanic, cellular rewriting, a sensation of bones being tempered in star-fire, of nerves being replaced with liquid lightning. She endured, jaw clenched, body shuddering against the forest floor, as power—raw, untamed, and magnificent—flooded her being. Around her, the ambient mana of the forest reacted, swirling into a visible vortex of shimmering elemental motes, drawn to the miniature supernova of her evolution.
When the world finally stopped screaming and settled into a new, terrifyingly sharp clarity, she checked her status.
[Level: 3]
[Spirit: 900]
[Strength: 291]
[Constitution: 373]
[Agility: 2232]
[Skills: Arcane Missile Lv.3, Emberburst Lv.2, Forest Thorns Lv.1]
The numbers were a shock, even to her. The Agility stat alone was ludicrous, a blatant middle finger to the laws of mundane physics. Her Spirit had swelled to a deep, powerful well. The Gene-Sequence tree in her mind's eye now glowed with two illuminated branches. Two Keys had failed, consumed by the chaotic process, but the third had succeeded. Not perfect, but acceptable. The first sequence was the crucible, the foundation upon which empires of personal power were built. She'd just laid a cornerstone of solid gold.
"The cradle of kings," she whispered, the old gamer's axiom feeling profoundly different when lived. She'd never had a start this good, even in the game.
A glance at the skimmer's scanner confirmed her hope. A large crimson blob was detaching from the main swarm and moving towards her location. The energy signature of her breakthrough was a lighthouse in the night.
"Good. Come to dinner."
Working with a speed and precision her new attributes granted, she became a weaver of death. From the skimmer's fuel line, she siphoned a viscous, pungent accelerant into a flask. Dozens of strands of Gossamer shot from the Arachnid Ascension Ring, each thinner than a hair, stronger than steel. She guided them into the flask, letting them soak. Then, with a thought, she spun them out into the air around her clearing, creating a vast, intricate, three-dimensional web. The strands hummed with tension, a lethal latticework invisible in the darkness. Her left hand controlled the web, fingers subtly adjusting tension. Her right hand was already moving through the somatic gestures for Emberburst.
A tiny spark leapt from her fingertip, touching the fuel-drenched strands. Fire raced along the lattice, a brief, beautiful chrysanthemum bloom of light that instantly burned away the fuel, leaving behind a network of superheated, razor-wire filaments. The heat haze above them was the only tell.
Then they came. A thousand strong, a thundercloud of gnashing mandibles and beating wings, drawn by the fading energy pulse and the scent of a potent, living battery. They poured from the trees, a living avalanche of hunger.
Yao stood still in the center of her invisible killing field. She could see the individual facets of their eyes, the gleam on their serrated mouthparts. The drone was a physical pressure.
They hit the web.
It was not a battle; it was a harvest. The superheated, monofilament strands parted chitin, muscle, and viscera with contemptuous ease. There was a series of wet, popping sounds, like a million grapes being crushed simultaneously. The air filled with the nauseating smell of burnt insect and boiling hemolymph. Carcasses and disjointed body parts rained down, piling up in grisly mounds around the clearing. Among the carnage, small objects glinted in the moonlight—loot, forced from segmented bodies by violent disassembly.
The experience prompts flooded her vision, a cascading waterfall of [+1]s. In seconds, the deluge reached a crescendo.
[Experience threshold reached. Level 3 -> Level 4. All attributes +20. Skill Point +1.]
She flexed her fingers, the tendons aching from the strain of maintaining the web under the assault. But the pain was good. It was real. Her Spirit pool, though vast, had dipped significantly. But she was Level 4. (300/3000 to next). Three thousand experience to Level 5. Three thousand locusts. A tall order without another S1 to use as bait.
"Should have spaced out the bait," she mused, already moving among the carnage. The bodies were worthless. The loot was meager but consistent: fifteen items from over a thousand kills. Eight blue vials of Lesser Spirit Tonic. Seven skill tomes. Five were Arcane Missile. Two were Wind Blade.
She examined a Wind Blade tome. A single, scything crescent of compressed air. Flashy. High initial damage. A Spirit hog with poor scaling. Inefficient. A dead-end skill. She dismissed it, using four of the Missile tomes to push the skill to Level 4, then downed three of the tonics, feeling the cool, clarifying rush of Spirit replenishment. The web was re-strung, re-soaked, ready.
The 'Flying Fish' whined to life. It was time for aerial fishing. This dungeon was a bonanza for someone with her tools and ruthlessness. A few more runs like this…
As the skimmer lifted off, she cast a wary glance at the Calamity Field. "Just a little more time," she whispered to the uncaring night.
Unseen, nestled in a gully five hundred meters away, a man with a long, rune-inscribed rifle lowered his telescopic sight. A slow, predatory smile spread across his face. "Well, well. A little hunter, already setting traps. And all alone." He chuckled, a dry, unpleasant sound. "Keep working, little bird. Gather the shiny things for me." He faded back into the gloom, attending to his own, smaller swarm, one eye always on the distant figure and her tell-tale skimmer lights. He was a patient man. The best time to rob a hunter was when her hands were full of game.
Meanwhile, in a small town on the flight path back to Jingyang proper, a sleek, private skimmer was powering up its thrusters. A young man with a stern, focused expression and a faint dusting of freckles across his nose suddenly held up a hand. "Belay that course, Lin. Set heading for the southern agro-sector."
The pilot glanced back. "Huh? Why? The job's done."
The young man was staring intently at a data-slate, his fingers flying over haptic interfaces. "Atmospheric particulate readings from the last 48 hours. Aberrant. Ph imbalance, trace metallic residues consistent with localized mana crystallization events." He looked up, his eyes sharp. "It's textbook pre-Calamity bio-shift. Insectoid focus, almost certainly."
"A dungeon? Where? We'd never make a distant one in time."
"Running the dispersion model now… The epicenter is close. A small holding, just outside the urban zone." He tapped the slate, bringing up a map with a glowing marker. "There. Maximum yield for a localized insect swarm. We might be the first."
A woman in the passenger seat grinned. "Hot dinner!"
Another, more pragmatic member of the team frowned. "Ifwe're first. Someone else might have the same idea."
The freckled youth didn't look up from his calculations. "Then we hope they have a weak stomach. We'll take the dinner, and the diner."
Yao, in her skimmer, banked hard, leading a fourth, smaller swarm of about six hundred Swarmers towards her woodland abattoir. This would be the one to push her firmly into Level 4. But as she made the final turn, she saw the trailing edge of the swarm break formation, diving erratically towards a patch of uncut maize below.
Frowning, she cut her speed, peering down. There, amidst the ravaged stalks, was a different shape. Larger. Much larger. The size of a juvenile bovine, its carapace a deep, venomous jade, thrumming with a palpable, malignant energy. It moved with a heavier, more deliberate motion, shredding plants not with a swarm's nibbling, but with voracious, single bites.
Her breath caught. Not a swarm. A Swarm Leader. A mini-boss.
A slow, fierce smile touched her lips. The goldmine had just unveiled a motherlode.