I Became an Ant Lord, So I Built a Hive Full of Beauties

---

They weren’t light; they were void motes, tiny wounds in space that inhaled every stray photon. Kai could see only a few steps ahead.

"Forward now, ten, no more," the voice instructed.

He counted exactly ten strides. On the ninth, something huge brushed his aura field— the outline of a jagged column rising from unseen depths. He halted, toes balanced on the edge of that invisible cliff, heart beating with feral calm. One more step and he would have slammed into stone so dense the system flagged it as exotic ore, hazard rank: indestructible.

"The voice really is guiding me," he admitted. "Or guiding me to something worse." The doubt flickered; the discipline smothered it.

Minutes blurred. Or hours. Time deformed in the mist. Kai relied on the system’s chronometer: two hours elapsed, then three. Always the same rhythm: "Step, pause, right. Two forward ducks." Each command narrowly avoided a blade-thin rift, a shell of anti aura, a pool of living lightning that skittered across the black surface like silver spiders.

ᴛhis chapter is ᴜpdated by NovᴇlFirᴇ.ɴet

At last the gloom thinned to a gun.metal glow. 21:03 by the earth time.

Ahead, the mist wall brightened, suffused with colorless radiance. It was neither dawn nor flame, a light that seemed carved from memory itself. Silhouetted within that glow stood an impossible figure: statuesque, feminine, swathed in layered veils of vapor that rose and fell like tides around her curves. He couldn’t see the real body. But her hair —if hair it was— billowed in silent spirals of starlight. No eyes, no mouth seen, yet her presence felt... like a beautiful woman. Maybe more beautiful than Mia, Luna, and Akayoroi.

The voice, gentler now, resonated from the luminous woman. "You have crossed the first threshold, Kai. It is a great achievement."