Chapter 113 - 113 Stealing Black Crystals
113 Stealing Black Crystals
After a while, the ground began to shake. The huge insect commander appeared on the main battlefield with a group of generals and lieutenants.
Looking at the corpses all over the ground, its eyes remained cold.
Ning Shi did not hide and flew into the air.
With that, the insect commander and all the insect generals focused their eyes on Ning Shi.
Seeing that Ning Shi was just a puny captain, the insect commander simply have him a glance and no longer paid attention to him.
Only Lieutenant No.74, who had also been lucky enough to survive, sent a message to Ning Shi, “3514, how did you survive when all your men died? Come over quickly and stand by my side.”
Ning Shi followed its orders and immediately flew over.
As soon as he left, the insect commander began to move. On its five-meter-long spike, a glimmer of light lit up. Then, the light grew brighter and brighter, illuminating the ground full of insect corpses.
The war insect corpses on the ground melted under the light and turned into a black liquid that gathered toward the insect commander’s spike and integrated into its body.
With that, the insect commander’s body began to expand, and its size increased. In a short while, its body length had reached more than 300 meters!
“Yi!” The insect commander let out a long cry, and the weather changed while a strong wind blew.
A cloud of mist shrouded the body of the insect commander. Ning Shi’s vision was extremely strong, so he could see the situation in the cloud of mist clearly.
On the insect’s 300-meter-long body, its muscles began to wriggle and contract.
Creaking sounds came from its body.
A pained look appeared in the insect commander’s cold eyes. Then, its body slowly shrank from more than 300 meters to about 30 meters!
In just 15 minutes, the insect commander’s body had shrunk by 10 times!
Although it had become smaller, the aura on its body had become stronger.
The generals surrounded the insect commander and seemed to be saying something to it.
They were communicating with brainwaves, so Ning Shi couldn’t hear the content of their conversation. They were probably congratulating the insect commander for becoming stronger.
The insect commander’s eyes rolled. It felt that the energy from the insect corpses it devoured this time seemed to be a little less, but it thought its feelings were wrong, so it did not pay much attention to it.
It simply said to all the insects, “Collect the corpses of the azure insects and throw them into the Life Pool. Then, use up all the black crystals in the azure insects’ base to produce enough soldiers and captains.”
“After that, send the soldiers and captains to occupy the entire Black Crystal Forest. The azure insects are only left with a few defeated survivors. They will voluntarily withdraw from the Black Crystal Forest. From now on, our tribe will occupy the entire Black Crystal Mountains.”
After this battle, the war insect tribe seemed to have suffered a great loss. After all, all the war insect soldiers and captains were dead, and more than 50 million war insects were sacrificed. But in fact, they had gained a huge profit.
First of all, the insect commander had devoured the war insect corpses, and the energy was not wasted.
Second of all, the war insects had taken over the azure insect’s territory and obtained more black crystal resources.
With the Life Pools, as long as there were enough black crystals, the tribe would be able to grow again in no time.
The scariest thing was that the war insects could recycle the corpses of the azure insects and use the bodies of their enemies to reproduce their own.
This was the complete recycling of resources. No wonder the insect world was so powerful.
The insect tribes’ ecosystem made full use of all resources.
After giving its instructions, the insect commander flapped its wings and flew away.
Ning Shi obediently followed Lieutenant No.74 to deal with the mess.
The corpses of all the war insects, including the corpses of the war insect generals and lieutenants who had attacked the nest with the insect commander, had all been devoured by the insect commander.
As such, Ning Shi’s idea of picking up a war insect lieutenant’s body fell through.
Some of the generals and lieutenants returned to the base and began to use the black crystals to reproduce.
The speed of reproducing soldiers was much faster than that of the reproduction of captains. As such, the number of captains was relatively small for the time being. As a surviving captain, Ning Shi’s subordinates had increased to 3000 war insects.
His first mission was to follow Lieutenant No.74 and clear out the Black Crystal Forest.
Although the main force of the azure insects was defeated, their nest had been destroyed, and their commanders were killed, there were still some azure insect generals and lieutenants who managed to escape.
To ensure the smooth takeover of the Black Crystal Forest’s resources, these deserters had to be killed.
“Sir, I request to be the vanguard to scout the path ahead!”
The most dangerous part of such clean-up work was the vanguard, who may be easily killed by the enemy’s ambush.
Seeing that Ning Shi had taken the initiative to volunteer, Lieutenant No.74 naturally agreed.
Ning Shi’s goal was simple. He wanted to lead Lieutenant No.74 to the ambush of the remaining azure insect troops and make the latter die in the hands of the enemy. After all, he needed the genes of a lieutenant.
The war insects had extremely strong physical and elemental defense and good endurance, but they also had flaws. One was that they were not very intelligent, and the other was that they had low spiritual power, including perception.
With his super-strong perception, Ning Shi could often discover the enemy one step ahead.
With that, he led Lieutenant No.74’s troops to eliminate three groups of deserters in a row and was thus praised by the lieutenant.
“3514, good job. Continue to lead the way!”
This time, Ning Shi deliberately flew toward the north of the Black Crystal Forest. The escape direction of the azure insects’ main force had been towards the north, so it would be easy to encounter the ambush of their rear troops.
Sure enough, after flying about 10 kilometers north, Ning Shi sensed that more than 100000 azure insects were hiding in the tree hole of a big tree ahead.
“Reporting! 30000 units of azure insects have been discovered ahead. They are controlling a few banana leaves and are fleeing in a frenzy. We have to chase them quickly. If we are slow, we will not be able to catch up!”
Although there was no merit system for the war insects, the battle attribute in their genes had been maxed out. Hearing Ning Shi’s words, Lieutenant No.74 took the lead and rushed out.
The lieutenant was the fastest. Although the insect army behind it tried its best to catch up, the lieutenant still managed to distance itself from the army.
When the lieutenant passed by a big tree, the azure insects, who had been lying in ambush for a long time, directly detonated their spiritual power bomb.
To the azure insects, killing a lieutenant was worth more than killing tens of thousands of war insects.
Boom!
The meter-long lieutenant fell heavily to the ground and died immediately!
This scene was seen by the war insect army rushing over. The war insect army made a sharp hiss and rushed toward the azure insects in the tree hole.
It was another brutal war of attrition. Because the azure insect had no reinforcements, the rear troops were eventually worn down and wiped out.
Ning Shi took advantage of the war insect swarm’s inattentiveness and pierced his spike into the lieutenant’s body.
[You have devoured the corpse of a war insect lieutenant. Body size +1 cm, physical strength increased. The war insect lieutenant gene has been collected. You have been upgraded to a war insect lieutenant.]
From then on, Captain No.3514 died in battle, and Ning Shi became Lieutenant No.74.
From the insects’ point of view, they only saw that Lieutenant No.74 had stood up again. They took it that he had fainted just now and wasn’t dead as they had thought.
More than 50000 insects died in this battle. According to the rules of the insect society, if the lower-level war insects died in battle, the generals and lieutenants could devour the corpses if the upper-level insects did not issue specific orders.
Just like now, as long as Ning Shi’s superior, General No.11, didn’t issue an order, Ning Shi could devour the bodies of 50000 war insects by himself.
This was also the reason why the sizes of the war insects were different although they were the same rank of captains, lieutenants, or generals.
The more the war insects under one’s command died, the faster the strength of the leader could be improved. This was the abnormal ecology of the insects.
In their genetic information, they were not allowed to kill each other, but they could devour the bodies of their own kind.
With this, the war insects’ battle nature was ensured, and they could make full use of the resources.
From then on, they reproduced in the cruel Insect Continent.
After replacing Lieutenant No.74, Ning Shi led the remaining war insects and continued to sweep through the remnants of the azure insect in the Black Crystal Forest.
Two days later, the clearing of the Black Crystal Forest was complete. The azure insects were either dead or had escaped, and the Black Crystal Forest was completely controlled by the war insect tribe.
Ning Shi received an order from General No.11, “Lieutenant No.74, lead the troops to mine the black crystals from the black crystal mine No.18 in the Black Crystal Forest and transport them to the base.”
The location of black crystal mine No.18 was also sent along with the order.
The work intensity of the war insects was outrageous. Ning Shi had been clearing the Black Crystal Forest without sleep or rest for the past two days, and he didn’t even have time to devour the corpses of the war insects in his backpack.
Now that he had just finished clearing out the forest, he was being sent to mine the black crystals.
After arriving at the black crystal mine No.18, Ning Shi realized that it was a good job with a lot of money.
The intelligence of the war insects was low, so they did not know how to count the specific number of black crystals, nor did they know the specific output of black crystal mine No.18 that the azure insect had.
This gave Ning Shi a great deal of room to maneuver.
In the war insect tribe, the first insect that abused its power for personal gain had appeared!
The war insects used their sharp and tough spikes to dig out the black crystals piece by piece. Because the war insects’ bodies were small, the black crystal chunks they dug out were not big, generally 2 to 3 cm in size.
Ning Shi ordered them to pile the black crystals in a cave.
The pile would be transported together.
The black crystals in the cave gradually piled up into a small mountain. Not a single insect realized that the small mountain was sometimes tall and sometimes low.
Ning Shi lay next to the pile of black crystals and put some into his system backpack now and then.
By the time the war insects began to transport the black crystals to the base, Ning Shi had already had a huge harvest.
Looking at the 320000 black crystals in the system, Ning Shi was overjoyed.
This was because of the black crystal’s definition given by the system.
[Black crystal: Advanced energy. It can be used to update or recharge the system and to reproduce living beings.]