Chapter 1: Created humanoid insect girls

The world was an endless expanse of azure.

There were no continents, no islands.
At least, in the understanding of the vast majority of players, this world known as the Abyssal Sea was governed by rules so cruel they bordered on absurdity.

You had a ship.
The ship was your home, your fortress, your everything.
You sailed into the deep blue, and whether the wind and waves would push you toward treasure or into the maw of some monster depended entirely on the dice cast by fate.

Every day, newcomers wailed on the forums about losing both ship and life.
Others boasted of ancient relics dredged up from bizarre waters.
Yet everyone accepted one thing by default.

Land did not exist.

And yet at this moment, the sun blazed high overhead.

Within that infinite blue where only the horizon should divide sky from sea, an island lay quietly upon the waters.

Its outline was irregular, carrying a strange beauty that seemed both carefully constructed and deliberately left primitive in form.
It was not something nature could have shaped.

It had been piled together bit by bit from solidified secretions of countless insects and reefs from the seabed.

It was a miracle.

At the center of the island, within a domed structure built from translucent insect shells, the light was filtered into a gentle gold.
The air carried a faint scent, like beeswax mixed with sea salt.

Ella stood before an experimental platform.

He looked around twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old.
His black hair had grown somewhat long, hanging casually over his shoulders.
He wore a white robe stained with patches of brilliant color from various unidentified liquids.

Ten years of life on a solitary island had not made him coarse or rugged.
After all, he scarcely needed to do any physical labor.
He had an entire swarm serving him.

His gaze rested on the figure before him.

It was a young girl.

Blue hair cascaded like a waterfall to her waist.
Her skin was pale enough to seem nearly transparent.
Her features were so exquisite it was as though they had been drawn stroke by stroke with the finest brush.
She stood there with her head slightly lowered, posture obedient and quiet.

But the most important thing was not her beauty.

It was her human form.

A complete human form.
Two arms, two legs, one head, a perfectly proportioned torso.
No excess arthropod limbs.
No compound eyes.
No exposed exoskeletal joints.

And the natural two points and one line were, of course, the most beautiful shape of all.

Ella had spent a full ten years crossing through countless failures.
From the earliest malformed individuals that still bore insect traits, to forms that gradually approached humanity, and finally to today.

He had succeeded.

With his own hands, he had created a humanoid Zerg.

An existence absolutely obedient to him, completely loyal, and perfect.

The girl’s lips parted slightly.
Her voice was soft as sea breeze brushing over harp strings.

“Master.”

Those two words struck Ella’s ears like an electric current shooting from his tailbone straight to the top of his head.

His nose stung.
A thin shimmer of moisture rose in the corners of his eyes.

He remembered the day ten years ago when he had transmigrated here.
The instant the system panel appeared, he saw two bold characters in his class slot: Insect Mother.
Beside them was an emoji he still could not forget to this day—a rather horrifying hive icon.

He was a man.

A man who had become an “Insect Mother.”

He had stared at the sea and contemplated life for about ten seconds.
After those ten seconds, he laughed.

Because he realized this was fortune.

Anyone who had read a few web novels or played a few games knew what a “swarm” meant in nearly every fictional work.
Absolute obedience.
Perfect coordination.
Tireless.
Fearless 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 become strong himself.
He only needed to make the swarm strong.

Ten years.

He had started from a small boat, using the few worker insects given at the start to gather resources from the seafloor.
Step by step, he expanded the swarm.
Bit by bit, he transformed this foothold beneath him from nothing into something.

Beneath the sea were monsters.
There were suspected ancient gods.
There were countless horrors that could swallow ordinary players together with their ships in a single bite.

But those things had never truly threatened him.

Because he had the swarm.

Now, this island was the best proof of that.

And today, he had completed another great undertaking.

Ella extended a hand.
His fingertips trembled slightly as he reached toward the cheek of the blue-haired girl before him.

He wanted to know her properly.
He wanted to give her a name.
He wanted to ask if she possessed self-awareness.
He wanted to know whether she could speak, whether she could think, whether she could—

“This life holds no regrets…”

He muttered hoarsely.
The moisture in his eyes finally gathered into a droplet and slid down his cheek.

“Yes, no regrets in this life.
You can die now.”

Hm?

Ella’s fingers froze three inches from the girl’s cheek.

That voice…?

It had not come from his insect maiden.
The girl still stood quietly with her head lowered.
Her lips had not moved.

The voice came from behind him.

Clean.
Cold.
Far too cold and hard.

Ella’s body tensed instantly.

Impossible.

No intelligent being other than himself should have been able to set foot on this island without his notice.

His swarm covered every inch of the island.
From the shoreline to the island’s center.
From the surface to underground.
Any foreign object landing would have been discovered immediately by patrolling soldier insects, and the information would have reached him through the hive mind network in fractions of a second.

He had not sensed any abnormal feedback from the swarm at all.

It was like staring wide-eyed at the doorway, only for someone to suddenly appear in your room while your eyes faithfully reported, ‘No one entered through the door.’

Ella whipped his head around.

Sunlight poured through gaps in the dome, cutting columns of brightness and shadow through the air.
And between those columns, at the entrance to his laboratory—

Stood a group of girls.

They were dressed differently.
Some wore fitted outfits suited for movement.
Some wore light armor that seemed pieced together from the exoskeletons of strange creatures.
One was wrapped in a splendid coat that looked as though it had been tailored from enormous butterfly wings.

They all appeared to be between sixteen or seventeen and their early twenties.
Yet every one of them radiated an aura that made Ella’s swarm instinctively feel extreme discomfort.

The one in front stood directly facing him.

Long pink hair fell to her waist.
At the edges of her strands, fine scales seemed to drift slowly through the air, refracting fragments of rainbow light beneath the sun.

Behind her—around her entire body—was a faint halo.
It was as if the scales on butterfly wings had been magnified ten thousand times and wrapped around her whole form.

She was beautiful beyond anything human.

Like a masterpiece an artist had spent an entire lifetime carving, only to have life breathed into it.

But the expression on her face made Ella’s heart sink.

Hatred.

Disgust.

Revulsion.

It was the expression one might wear upon seeing maggots writhing in a sewer.
No, worse than that.
It was the loathing of having one’s very soul offended by the mere existence of something.

The way she looked at Ella was as if she were staring at some filth that ought to be crushed underfoot.

Ella’s throat bobbed.

He was certain he did not know her.

In these ten years, he had barely left the island.
His food was provided by the swarm.
His research materials were gathered by the swarm.
He did not even need to trade with other players, because the swarm itself was the most perfect self-sustaining system.

Within this Abyssal Sea, he was a hermit through and through.

He could not possibly have offended anyone.

“Who… are you?” he finally asked, unable to hold back.

The pink-haired girl tilted her head.

In any other setting, the gesture would probably have seemed cute.
Now, paired with her expression, it only made Ella feel as though he were being watched by a snake.

“You don’t recognize me, do you?”

Her tone was casual.
If one ignored the content of her words, it would not even seem like she was speaking to him.

The corners of her lips curved slightly upward.
The smile was beautiful, but all it brought to his mind was a deeper sense of dread.

“That’s good.
We’ll have plenty of time from here on to get acquainted slowly.”

She raised a hand casually.
There seemed to be no hostility in the motion.

But at the very instant she lifted it, a black-haired girl beside her moved.

That girl had stood silently behind and to the side of the pink-haired one, her presence so faint that Ella had barely noticed her while scanning the group.
But now that she moved, he saw clearly.

Spider legs extended from her back.

They had grown directly from her body, gleaming with the sheen unique to carapace, with the supple textures of joints belonging to arthropods.

Four long, sharp limbs spread outward from her shoulder blades like the twisted wings of some angel.

One of them, before Ella could react in any way—

Pierced into his body.

Left side of the abdomen.
Around the stomach or spleen.
Precise.
Clean.

Pain erupted less than a second later.

It felt as though something inside him were dissolving in burning acid.
That limb clearly carried something—toxin, or some paralytic secretion.

Strength vanished from both his legs instantly.

He dropped to his knees, hands braced against the cold insect-shell floor, gasping for breath in great heaves.

A thread of blood spilled from the corner of his mouth and dripped onto the translucent white floor, blooming like a flower where it struck.

“Y-You… who exactly are you people?!”

He raised his head, eyes full of shock.

Why had his swarm not reacted?!

He frantically tried to connect to the hive mind network, that airtight spiritual web he had spent ten years weaving.
Normally, with a single thought, the tens of thousands of insects on the island would obey like fingers on his hand.

But now…

Nothing.

Every node seemed to have fallen into some bizarre dormant state.
The worker insects stood motionless.
The soldier insects maintained patrol postures without advancing.
Even the blue-haired insect maiden he had just created…

He turned his head with difficulty and saw that she still stood where she was, head lowered, unmoving.

As if someone had pressed pause.

All the insects were there.
But none of the insects moved.

An uninvited guest had landed on his island, and he had not noticed.

A group of intruders had entered 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 side spoke.

What did that mean?

Cold sweat broke across Ella’s back.

It meant their power—or some method they possessed—was completely beyond the scope of his understanding.
In the Abyssal Sea, silently severing the connection between an Insect Mother and the swarm was something he had never even imagined possible.

The pink-haired girl walked forward slowly.

Her heels made delicate tapping sounds against the insect-shell floor, like scales fluttering down from butterfly wings.

She stopped before Ella and looked down at him from above.

Sunlight shone from behind her, gilding her outline in gold while casting her face into shadow.
Only those crimson eyes burned brightly within the darkness, surging with an emotion close to madness.

“My dear creator…”

“I have been looking forward to this so very much.”

“How beautiful can that face of yours become…”

“And what delicious expressions can it make?”

“Hehehe…”