Location: Ruins of the Valley of Trembling Antennae, on the border of a magnetic anomaly.
The sand here wasn't golden, but gray, as if soaked in the ash of ancient sorrow. Wei Lin had called this place ideal: the geomagnetic surges distorted spiritual sense and masked the low-frequency communications of antennae.
Dias wasn't breathing. Or rather, he breathed so slowly and shallowly that his thoracic plates barely moved. He was buried in the sand up to his compound eyes, which, unblinking, watched a group of five figures half a kilometer away.
Humans.
They didn't walk—they glided over the dunes, their feet barely touching the sand. They exuded that same feeling of an alien, voracious aura, but now it was muted, compressed into dense cocoons around their bodies. The 'First Leaves' stage, just as Wei Lin had predicted. Each of them was qualitatively above him. A direct fight meant death.
'Don't look at the strength, look at the pattern,' his mentor's voice sounded in his head. Dias watched.
The first—in front, a scout. His eyes darted, he frequently stopped, touching the sand with his hands. Searching for traces, residual energy.
The second and third—walked ten paces behind on the flanks. Warriors. Their posture was relaxed, but Dias saw the energy in their hands pulsing, ready to burst forth.
The fourth—in the center, holding a jade tablet. He didn't look around; his gaze was fixed on flickering symbols. The target. The brain of the operation.
The fifth—bringing up the rear. Young. His gaze wasn't sharp; he looked at the colony ruins with disgust and... curiosity. The weak link.
The signal wasn't a sound. It was a barely perceptible vibration, transmitted through the finest web of silk threads the mantises had stretched between crystals. One long pulse. Wait.
The humans approached the site of the old crater. The scout halted, pointing at something at his feet—likely a hardened drop of hemolymph that the storms hadn't washed away. At that moment, he took his eyes off the flanks.
Two short pulses. Attack the flankers.
From the sand, fifteen meters to the right and left of the group, two emerald lightning bolts shot out. These were senior mantis kamikazes. They weren't aiming for bodies—they were aiming for the space between the warriors and the others. Their scythe-like forelegs, charged not with their own Qi (which they barely had) but with the kinetic energy of a monstrous leap, whistled through the air.
The humans' reaction was instantaneous but predictable. Both warriors, without thinking, released devastating waves of fire and ice Qi towards the attackers. Explosions of sand and steam blinded everything for an instant.
Three pulses. Jamming.
From cracks in the ground, dozens of small sapper mantises emerged. They carried not weapons, but tiny bags made of the thinnest membrane, filled with pulverized phosphorescent moss. With a series of pops, they hurled them into the epicenter of the chaos. The bags burst, releasing a cloud of blindingly bright, sticky dust. It wasn't poisonous. It was an obstruction—for eyes, for spiritual sense, for concentration.
Dias heard a cry—that same young rearguard, choking on the dust.
Four pulses. Primary target.
This was his signal.
The sand in front of the man with the tablet erupted like a fountain. From it, like a demon of vengeance, Dias shot out. He didn't attack with force—he wouldn't have had enough to pierce a 4th-stage defense. He attacked with precision and surprise.
His stony fist, all his weight and speed, was aimed not at the chest or head, but at the wrist of the hand holding the jade tablet.
The human cultivator, blinded by the flash and disoriented, reacted to the movement too late. He instinctively threw up a Qi shield in front of him, but Dias was already inside his perimeter. The strike landed squarely on the joint.
A dry, satisfying crunch. The jade tablet flew into the air.
"MINE!" the man roared, his face contorted with rage. With his free hand, he point-blank released a compressed ball of force, capable of flattening an entire hill.
But Dias was no longer there. After striking, he didn't wait to see the result. He curled up, presenting his back, and was hurled away by the shockwave like an empty shell. Pain shot through his entire body, the chitin on his back cracked, but his skeleton, strengthened to the 'Sturdy Trunk' stage, held. He tumbled across the sand, immediately trying to get back to his feet.
Chaos reached its peak. The two kamikaze mantises were dead—one left only a smoldering carapace, the other an ice statue crumbling to pieces. But they had fulfilled their role.
From the dust clouds, three figures of Wei Lin emerged. Not three mantises—three illusions, indistinguishable from the real ones. They darted in three different directions, drawing the attention of the remaining humans.
And at that moment, when attention was divided, the youngest trapping mantis, hidden in the shadow of a broken capsule, shot. Not an arrow, but a sticky, incredibly strong thread. It wrapped around the legs of the young human rearguard, that same 'weak link' who was coughing out the dust. He cried out and collapsed.
"Retreat! Cover Lin Feng!" commanded the man with the broken hand, grabbing the falling tablet with his other hand. But it was too late.
Wei Lin materialized right in front of him. Not to attack. For one precise movement. His claw, fast as thought, flicked at the cultivator's neck, injecting a microscopic needle with a neuroparalytic toxin, refined over millennia of evolution for hunting wasteland monsters. The toxin, harmless to flesh, but capable of blocking the flow of Qi for a second.
The man froze, his eyes widening in shock and terror—terror not of power, but of the unknown. His invulnerable energy armor had failed.
That instant was enough.
Dias, overcoming the pain, was already there. His mandibles, capable of biting through steel, closed on the carotid artery, not piercing it, but only clamping down. Simultaneously, he drove two sharpened needles of crystalline moss into the prisoner's back muscles.
The man's body went limp. Not from unconsciousness—from shock, pain, and the rapid absorption of his precious Qi by the alien parasite.
Silence, ringing and heavy, fell over the valley. The two remaining conscious humans—the scout and one warrior—hesitated, but they were surrounded. Not by force, but by threat. Six mantises, including Wei Lin, stood motionless, their bodies like blades poised to strike.
"Give back our brother, you vermin!" the warrior snarled, flames already swirling around his fists.
Wei Lin slowly raised a claw, pointing at the young prisoner who was already being dragged into cover.
"Leave. Tell your Alchemist that his secrets now belong to the wastelands. Stay—and we will squeeze everything out of him, including the location of your camp. And then we'll release him, so he can tell how his comrades betrayed him and left him to die."
It wasn't force. It was strategy, striking at pride, fear, and logic.
The warrior and scout exchanged a glance. Rage burned in their eyes, but beneath it crawled a cold, rational horror of failure and disgrace. They retreated a step. Another step.
A moment later, they became two swift silhouettes, disappearing into the crimson twilight.
The battle was won. Not by force, but by intellect. The cost: two fallen mantises. The spoils: a jade tablet, equipment... and a live prisoner.
Dias stood over Lin Feng's body, watching as the crystalline moss began to envelop him. He felt no triumph. Only the icy satisfaction that the plan had worked. And a burning, unquenchable thirst to know everything hidden behind the arrogance of those eyes.
Location: Deep Crystal Grotto. The air smells of ozone and the sweetish rot of parasitic moss.
The prisoner, Lin Feng, was chained to the grotto wall not with iron, but with a living net of the same crystalline moss. He hung like a trophy, his body covered in a shimmering web that pulsed, drawing thin streams of golden light—his Qi—from him. He was conscious. His eyes, full of rage and humiliation, followed Dias's every movement.
On a stone altar lay the trophies: the jade tablet, a bag of spirit rice granules, several healing pills, and a simple iron sword, on whose blade fading runes still faintly glimmered.
Wei Lin sat in the shadows, motionless as the rock itself. His role was to observe and intervene if necessary. Dias stood before the prisoner. He was in no hurry. He studied him, just as he had once studied the habits of the sandworm.
"Your name and clan," Dias said. His voice was low, vibrating, devoid of human intonation.
Lin Feng spat. The saliva, saturated with residual Qi, hissed as it burned a smoking pit into the grotto floor.
"Lin Feng. Disciple of the Adamant Heavenly Path. And you, creature, will remember this name when they come for you and erase your pathetic race from the face of this wasteland!"
"Perhaps," Dias replied indifferently. "But first, they will find you. Or what's left of you." He poked a claw towards the moss. "It feeds not on flesh. It feeds on this. Your power. Without it, you're just a bag of bones. Fragile. Weak."
The threat wasn't in pain, but in deprivation. For a cultivator, losing Qi is worse than death. Lin Feng flinched, but immediately scowled again.
"You understand nothing! You don't even know how to breathe properly to absorb the spiritual energy of heaven and earth! Your very existence is a mistake!"
"A mistake your people considered a valuable 'ingredient'," Dias parried, repeating his own word. "The Crystal-Bearing worker ants. Why them specifically? What does your Alchemist Wang do with them?"
Lin Feng bit his lip, realizing his mistake. His eyes darted to the jade tablet.
"That's... none of your business."
"Maybe so," Dias said, approaching the altar. He picked up the tablet. His mind, sharpened on Wei Lin's tactical diagrams, sought not magic, but structure, a pattern. The patterns resembled not writing, but... a map. A map with concentric circles and points of tension. "But this thing... it calculates. Points where it's thin. Where you can 'pierce' the sky. Where a 'Distortion' occurs."
The prisoner's face went white. Dias had hit the mark.
"You're not afraid of us," Dias continued, turning to him. "You're afraid of him. Your Alchemist. Afraid that he'll find out his tool and his secrets fell into the hands of 'insects.' That you, Lin Feng, turned out to be the weak link that broke."
"Shut up!" the youth cried out, struggling against his bonds. The moss glowed brighter, drawing another portion of energy from him, and he groaned in pain and powerlessness.
"I will be silent," Dias said calmly, "when you tell me about Qi. About your power. Where does your path begin? What is the 'Seed of Sensation' for a human?"
Lin Feng stared at him in mute shock. The question was so primitive, so childish, that it laid bare the entire chasm between their worlds.
"You... are you serious?" he snorted, and in that sound was bitterness. "The 'Seed of Sensation'? That's for infants! For peasant children tested at five years old! It's basic breathing, meditation at dawn, feeling warmth in the belly! You want me, a disciple of the Adamant Path, to spoon-feed you the ABCs?!"
"Yes," Dias replied without a trace of shame. "Spoon-feed me. Because if you don't, I'll let this moss suck every last spark out of you. And then, when they come for you, they'll find only an empty shell. And your Alchemist will decide that you were too weak in spirit even to die with dignity. Your name will become synonymous with disgrace."
Silence. Heavy, oppressive. Water dripped somewhere deep in the grotto. Lin Feng struggled with himself. Pride, fear, despair. In the end, the fear of disgrace and the thirst for some semblance of control over the situation outweighed everything.
"Fine..." he exhaled, his voice hoarse. "Fine, creature. Listen and tremble, because you will never be able to comprehend this. The 'Seed of Sensation' is when you first feel the spiritual energy around and within you. You breathe in a special way, following the rhythm of the earth's heart... you imagine absorbing the light of the sun and moon into a point below your navel... that is the embryo of your future power..."
He spoke. At first grudgingly, through clenched teeth, then, carried away by his own knowledge and despair, in more and more detail. He described breathing techniques, meridians, methods of accumulating Qi in the 'lower dantian.' He spoke of the transition to the 'Sprouting Root,' when energy begins to circulate on its own. Of the painful transformation of the body at the 'Sturdy Trunk' stage.
Dias listened without interrupting. He filtered every word through himself, comparing it to his own experience. His path, forged by pain and the will to survive, was a crude, bestial analogue of these refined practices. But the essence... the essence was similar. Accumulation. Concentration. Transformation.
"And 'First Leaves'..." Lin Feng was speaking almost in a whisper now, his strength fading. "That's when Qi bursts outward. You feel it wants to be free. You direct it through your hands, through your weapon... you become more than just flesh..."
He fell silent, exhausted. Dias stood, processing the information. So this was the system. A clear, well-thought-out ladder his enemies had been climbing for centuries. And he had been scaling a sheer cliff with his bare hands.
"Now it's my turn," Dias said quietly. "You asked how we, the 'vermin,' can understand anything. We don't breathe like you. But we feel. Every stone, every vibration of this planet. We are part of it. And our strength lies not in taking from the heavens and the earth. Our strength lies in being this earth. Unbreakable. Relentless."
He raised his black, stony limb and effortlessly pressed a claw into the basalt wall of the grotto, leaving a deep groove.
"You speak of the 'Sturdy Trunk.' I achieved this by breaking my bones again and again until they became stronger than stone. Without your breathing. Without your meditations. Simply because I had to survive. Because I had a purpose."
Lin Feng looked at him, and in his gaze now, alongside hatred, appeared something new—bewilderment, an almost superstitious fear of this alien, inexplicable force of will.
"You... are a monster," he whispered.
"No," Dias corrected him, and for the first time, his voice held an icy, merciless conviction. "I am a student. And you are my first lesson about the power of humans. And you have been very useful."
With these words, Dias turned and left the grotto, leaving Lin Feng alone with the glowing moss and the encroaching horror of realizing a simple truth: these beings weren't just wild animals. They learned. And they learned fast.
Wei Lin silently followed him. Only upon reaching the surface, under the crimson sky, did the old mantis speak:
"You took not only information. You broke his spirit. That is more dangerous than a broken hand."
"He still has his pride," Dias replied, looking at the horizon. "He still despises us. But now he also fears our ignorance. Fear is the best teacher for his kind. He will think we know nothing, and he will make a mistake."
"And what do we know?" asked Wei Lin.
Dias looked at the jade tablet in his hands.
"We know they are seeking a way to open a 'Distortion' at will. We know the basics of their power. And we know they consider us merely a resource." He squeezed the tablet until cracks appeared on it. "That is enough for the first step. Now we know which mountain we have to climb. And we know that at its foot, they didn't even bother to post a guard."
In his eyes burned that same cold fire. The fire not of blind revenge, but of calculation. He had a map of enemy territory. And the first point on that map was the name 'Alchemist Wang' and his terrible experiments on his kidnapped kin.