Location: Sphere of Crystal Wastelands. Valley of Trembling Antennae, colony of Crystal-Bearing Ants.
The air of the Sphere of Crystal Wastelands always vibrated with a barely perceptible hum—the song of the magnetic field that served this weak world as a mighty barrier for other races. Dias, a young Crystal-Bearing soldier ant, felt these vibrations through the chitinous plates on his back. His world was simple and clear: guard the workers mining the shimmering fragments of nutrient crystals from the roots of giant geodes; protect the colony tunnels; serve the Queen. He was a sturdy ant, his chitin gleaming with a steely blue hue, his mandibles strong enough to bite through a steel bar.
Suddenly, the familiar hum distorted. The ground didn't just tremble; it screamed. A roar, unlike a crystal cave-in or a geothermal vent eruption, pierced the valley. It was the sound of reality's flesh being torn—dull, wet, and final. Then came the shockwave, knocking even the soldiers off their feet. Clouds of ash and crystal dust billowed towards the crimson sky.
Dias was the first to rise, clearing the debris from his antennae. Instinct screamed of danger, unfamiliar and alien. As the dust began to settle, figures emerged from the veil.
Humans.
Dias had never seen them, but the knowledge, cast into the genetic memory of the insect race, gripped him with icy pincers. Bipeds. Dressed not in chitin or crystal, but in coarse fabrics and hides. Their aura... it wasn't like the calm radiance of an elf or the focused fury of a beastman. It was a voracious aura, cold and tenacious, like corrosion. It devoured the space around them, and from it emanated the silent shriek of murderous intent.
"To the colony!" Dias signaled with alarm pheromones, roughly pushing the nearest worker towards the tunnel entrance. "Everyone inside! This isn't a beast scout! This is an invasion!"
But he didn't even have time to take a step. The air was torn apart by flashes of concentrated Qi—an energy his people couldn't generate, only vaguely sense. One by one, the soldiers around him fell, not struck down in an honorable fight, but erased. Their chitin didn't crack—it crumbled to dust like dried clay. The humans moved methodically, without anger, without excitement. Cold-blooded butchers.
And then Dias understood the horrifying truth: they weren't touching the workers. Their nimble hands grabbed the terrified crystal-carriers and stuffed them into bags made of thick fabric. Spoils. Resources.
Then he saw Him. A human whose aura was denser and darker than the rest. Ignoring the chaos, he headed straight for the main entrance to the colony—the Queen's sanctum.
Rage, pure and primal, flooded Dias's mind. Forgetting all caution, he charged to intercept, mandibles snapping, ready to sever the defiler's head.
"STOP!"
The human didn't even glance at him. He merely waved his hand, as if shooing away a bothersome gnat.
An invisible weight crashed down on Dias, pinning him to the ground. The chitin on his chest crackled under the unbearable pressure. A shadow loomed over him—a foot in a rough boot, stepping onto his back. He couldn't move. He could only watch.
He watched the human disappear into the tunnel. He watched as, a moment later, a single, piercing click of pheromones conveying pain and terror emanated from the depths—the Queen's final cry. Then, silence. A resonant, all-consuming silence of death.
The aura of the man emerging from the tunnel was now burdened with something... radiant and terrible. He had taken something.
The foot on Dias's back pressed harder. Crunch. Agony. Darkness began to creep over the edges of his consciousness. He heard a voice above him, hollow and indifferent:
"This one's still twitching. Finish it."
Another strike. This time—a flash of crimson light and a feeling as if his core, his very 'self', was being torn to shreds. Dias's consciousness faded.
But not the spark of life. Somewhere deep within, in the tenacious survival instinct that had made his kind the most resilient in the lowest of spheres, a final point of light smoldered. He wasn't alive. He wasn't dead. He existed in oblivion.
Footsteps. Vibrations, both familiar and alien. Voices, transmitted not by pheromones but by air vibrations—harsh, yet recognizable.
"...a complete massacre. Why did they specifically need the Crystal-Bearing workers?"
"They say the humans have a new ruler—a Gokuo. An alchemist. Experimenting with alien lives is their favored path to power."
"Quiet. We're looking for survivors. Ants are a resilient people."
The Mantis Clan. Allies. Friends.
Dias didn't know where he found the strength. His body was torn apart, the connection to his nervous system almost lost. But he concentrated everything left of his will on a single organ—his vocal plates. And he produced a sound. Not a cry, not a moan. A piercing, high-frequency squeak of despair and warning, audible only to a kin or a mantis.
Everything was swallowed by darkness.
Three months passed.
Dias stood before a cliff face that served as a wall for the Mantis Clan camp. His body, restored by the skilled mantis healers, was whole. But inside was a void, filled only with the cold, razor-sharp memory. Of the boot's pressure on his back. Of the click of the Queen's death. Of the indifferent eyes of the humans.
His kin, the finest soldiers, had been turned to dust. The workers taken into slavery, into a world beyond the barrier, for which insects had no key. To avenge. To bring his people back. These two thoughts beat within him like a pulse.
But how? The humans' power was monstrous. Their Qi crushed flesh and spirit. Insects had no Qi. They only had their bodies, their will, and their cunning.
"Then my body will become my weapon," Dias whispered, raising a forelimb.
And he began to strike. Not using the techniques he'd been taught for fighting wasteland beasts. He simply struck the rock with maximum force, pouring all his rage, all his despair, all his hatred into each blow. Strike. Strike. Strike. The chitin on his 'fist' became a web of cracks, oozing clear hemolymph. The pain was sharp, alive, real. It dulled the pain in his soul.
"You'll go mad, ant," said a voice from behind. It was an old mantis guard, watching him. "This is not how you gain strength. You'll only become a cripple."
Dias didn't answer. He kept striking. Until a bone snapped with a crunch, and the limb hung limp. He looked at it dispassionately. An obstacle broken. He could continue.
And he did. Now using his other limb. Food was not nourishment for him, but fuel for revenge. Sleep he considered a betrayal of those who slept the eternal sleep in the valley's dust. His world narrowed to the cliff, the pain, and the rhythm of the blows.
Once, during another cycle of agony, he felt a strange warmth in his broken limb. Not the warmth of healing—that was slow and familiar. It was the warmth of rebirth. Something inside the broken chitin tubes and muscles had restructured, becoming denser, harder. When, days later, he struck again with that supposedly crippled limb, the rock broke off a larger chunk, and there was almost no pain.
He didn't know the terms 'bone tempering', 'meridian strengthening', or the 'first stage of Flesh cultivation'. He was discovering for himself the path of power that the higher races had traversed millennia ago—the path through pain and the ultimate strain of spirit and body.
A pair of compound eyes watched this from a high branch of a crystal tree. The eyes of Wei Lin, Head of the Mantis Clan, one of the shrewdest strategists in the Sphere of Crystal Wastelands. He saw not just a soldier driven mad by revenge. He saw unformed steel, ready for forging. Steel that could be broken if its rage was directed only towards destruction.
Wei Lin descended, his body, like a living emerald blade, moving silently.
"Dias," his voice was quiet but cut through the pounding rhythm. "You can strike this rock until you grind it to sand. You can make your limbs stronger than adamantite. But what will you do when you face not one rock, but ten? Or when the rock learns to think, dodge, and strike back?"
Dias stopped, his chest heaving. He turned, his eyes two burning coals in the darkness.
"What do you suggest, elder?"
"I suggest you stop being a hammer," said Wei Lin, clicking his sickle-like forelegs. "A hammer breaks what's in front of it. I will teach you to be a blade. A blade must know where to strike to cut through resistance with a single motion. To defeat an enemy stronger than you, you need not just a fist, but cold calculation. You need strategy. You need to see the battlefield, not just the target in front of your nose. You want to bring your people back? For that, you need to wage a war. And war is an art. Your madness gave you the foundation of strength. Now allow me to give you the mind to use that strength."
He stepped closer, his voice dropping even lower, almost intimate.
"You will listen to your heart; it will burn with revenge. But the final decision rests with your head. Do you understand me, soldier?"
Dias looked at the old mantis, then back at his battered, but no longer broken limbs. The mad rage in his eyes faded. It was replaced by a cold, steady flame of resolve.
"I understand. Teach me. Teach me the art of war. I must become the blade that pierces the very heart of the Sphere of Steel and Ash."
Location: Mantis Clan Camp, Sphere of Crystal Wastelands.
Six months passed. Dias's ritual hadn't changed: dawn met with strikes against the relentless cliff. But now these strikes were different. Not blind rage, but cold, measured calculation. He didn't just strike a point—he struck at a micro-crack identified the evening before. He didn't waste strength—he accumulated it in his body like a spring, releasing it in a single devastating impulse. His limbs, broken and fused back together a thousand times, now gleamed with a dull, matte-black luster, like basalt. He had intuitively passed the 'Sprouting Root' stage, learning to concentrate the meager internal energy his resilient body provided into a semblance of a dantian.
One day, a strike didn't just chip the rock—the entire cliff, three times his height, collapsed into a pile of rubble with a dull groan.
Dias stood still, breathing heavily. Not from exhaustion, but from realization. He had crossed a threshold. His body, his will, had overcome a certain limit. He felt the energy inside him flow not like an intermittent stream, but like a dense, continuous river, strengthening every chitin plate, every muscle. This was the 'Sturdy Trunk'—the third stage of cultivation. A power that the human raiders would consider pathetic, but for the insect world, which knew no other paths, it was a miracle forged by pain and will.
"Not bad," came a voice from behind. Wei Lin was observing, sitting in a meditative pose on a crystal fragment. "You broke the cliff. Now tell me, how do you break an army?"
Dias turned. His eyes, once filled only with pain, now held a cold clarity.
"Strength alone is not enough. You need to find its weak link. The commander. Sever its communication. Divide and destroy."
"Close, but superficial," the mantis shook his head. He poked a sharp claw into the sand and began drawing complex diagrams. "An army is a system. It has logistics: supplies, routes, camps. It has morale: fear, greed, faith. It has an environment: terrain, weather, time of day. You can break not just the commander. You can poison their water. Lure a pack of crystal scorpions into their camp at night. Spread rumors of betrayal among their officers. Or..." Wei Lin looked at Dias, "make them want to leave on their own."
"How?" asked Dias, his antennae perking up.
"Imagine," the old strategist's voice became conspiratorial, "that you are not a soldier, but a shadow. You kidnap not their warriors, but their cooks, their healers, their jesters. You leave signs that the next night you will take someone from the commander's personal guard. You create not a threat of death, but an atmosphere of invisible, inevitable decay. Their strength remains untouched, but their will to fight crumbles, like this cliff of yours, from within."
Dias listened, and in his mind, accustomed to linear 'face-to-face' combat, a new fire ignited. It was the fire of understanding. The art of war was more terrifying and intricate than any fist.
The training wasn't just theoretical. Wei Lin made him play complex board games in the sand, where the pieces were types of warriors, and the moves were weather and supply deliveries. He sent him into the wastelands not to fight beasts, but to observe: track a sandworm's hunt, understand how it chooses its prey; predict the path of a dust storm; find the only water source within a radius of ten leagues.
Gradually, cold calculation became as natural to Dias as breathing. He learned to think like a mantis: patiently, from ambush, choosing the one perfect moment for an absolute, irresistible strike.
One night, when the two moons of the Sphere of Crystal Wastelands hung in the sky, Wei Lin said:
"You asked how to bring your people back. Now you know a thousand ways to start a war and win it. But there is one question you haven't asked."
"What?" Dias asked, looking up from studying a map of the planet's magnetic anomalies.
"How not to start a war," Wei Lin said quietly. "A war with humans is not a clan battle in the wastelands. It's a challenge to their entire race. To win, you'll need not just strategies against their armies. You'll need allies. Information. And access to their world."
"Their barrier..." Dias began.
"...is impenetrable for us," Wei Lin finished. "But not for a 'Distortion'. It happens rarely and unpredictably. But what if you could not wait for it, but control it?"
Dias froze. This thought was crazier than his daily training.
"Legends say the cause of a 'Distortion' is the dissonance between the barriers of neighboring spheres," the mantis continued. "Our planet's magnetic field is too weak to cause it on its own. But..." he looked intently at Dias, "what if you add a powerful, concentrated burst of pure force to the equation? A strike capable of 'piercing' space?"
Dias looked at his black, stony fists. He had reached the 'Sturdy Trunk'. It was enough to crush rocks. But to shake the foundations of reality? He was still insignificant.
"I need to become stronger," he said hoarsely. "Much stronger."
"Stronger, yes," Wei Lin nodded. "But not only that. You need to understand what the humans' power is. Their 'Qi'. How it works. Only by knowing the enemy's energy can you find its flaw. And for that..." the old mantis paused, as if hesitating to continue.
"For that, I need a teacher from their world," Dias finished the thought, his voice filled with icy resolve. "Or a prisoner."
That same night, mantis scouts brought news. On the border of the Valley of Trembling Antennae, not far from the site of the old attack, traces were found. Of a small group. Not an invasion, but a reconnaissance. And judging by the tracks, they were looking for something specific. Possibly survivors. Possibly artifacts.
Perhaps they were looking for the one who had seen their faces—Dias himself.
Wei Lin and Dias exchanged glances. In the strategist's eyes was a question and readiness for action. In the ant's eyes was a silent, cold answer.
The first move in their long game against the Sphere of the Burning Scroll had not been made by them. The enemies had again come to their doorstep.
And this time, Dias was ready not just to die. He was ready to teach. And the first lesson for the uninvited guests would be that even on the lowest planet, among the most despised people, a strategist could be born whose mind was sharper than any blade, and a warrior whose revenge knew no bounds.