Beneath the supreme Swarm King Tayzzyronth reigned six core branches of the Swarm, known as the Six Vermin-Thrall Branches:
Star-Shatter, Afterglow, Calamity-Bearer, Phantom Moth, World-Deluder, and Merciful Sin.
Each Vermin-Thrall branch was led by a mighty King Bug, and these six King Bugs were the six Emanators serving beneath the Swarm King.
The abilities and specialties of the Vermin-Thralls were as blunt and terrifying as their names.
The Star-Shatter Vermin-Thralls inherited the power of the Swarm King's jaws that tore stars apart. Their monstrous mouthparts could concentrate death-rays of Destruction, easily crushing a planet's crust and draining the essence of its core.
Every mature Star-Shatter bug was a living planet-buster cannon, and the Star-Shatter King Bug that ruled over them wielded might enough to rip a sun apart!
They were the Swarm's undisputed vanguard, tasked with demolishing celestial barriers and carving a road for the sea of bugs.
The Phantom-Moth Vermin-Thralls stemmed from the mystery of the Swarm King's wings that could blot out the Galaxy. The scale-powder they scattered, dense and dazzling as clustered blossoms, could trap countless living things in an inescapable, lethal illusion.
At the same time, they themselves formed the nodes of a vast biological neural network, transmitting information and will across the Swarm in an instant—the central nervous system of the bug-sea.
Then there were the Calamity-Bearer Vermin-Thralls, specialized in the toughness of the Swarm King's shell that bore all things. They were walking hatcheries and matter-conversion furnaces.
Clinging to glaciers, devouring everything—grain, ore, energy, even the life-essence of other species—they converted it all into nutrients to breed new bug-spawn.
Their creed was singular:
Propagate! Propagate! And more damn Propagation!
The Calamity-Bearers were the cornerstone of the Swarm's explosive population growth.
The remaining Vermin-Thralls each had their own capabilities. All six branches possessed their own signature arts, and the purity of the Path of Propagation granted them unmatched individual power and racial traits.
And yet—purity was both their making and their undoing.
This power of the Path, focused to the extreme on Propagation, was like an invisible shackle, heavily suppressing any chance for an individual bug to develop complex thought beyond breeding.
Against an enemy, the Swarm could certainly crush them with sheer numbers and brute force, but the casualties it paid were often ghastly to behold.
To the Swarm King, He felt no grief over the deaths of His own kind. He only wanted more offspring to survive, to continue, to spread.
To improve the Swarm's war efficiency and survival rate, Tayzzyronth created the World-Deluder Vermin-Thralls.
They were endowed with relatively prominent intelligence and served as the Swarm's commanders, attempting to make up for the losses of raw power with strategy.
But as bugs, once they set foot on the Path of Propagation, they could hardly escape that influence.
Even with the World-Deluder King Bug commanding, the Swarm's expansion efficiency and casualty ratio improved somewhat, yet fell far short of Tayzzyronth's expectations.
The Swarm King longed for a better commander.
So He undertook an unprecedented experiment.
He would bestow the might of a Propagation Emanator upon a being skilled in thought, cunning in schemes, adept at strategy—a human!
Of course, the prerequisite was that this human had to possess the qualification and the resonance to bear such power.
He spent an entire Amber Era searching and screening through the long river of the Path.
No—more accurately, He had long since noticed those few unique 'ripples' in the echoes of the Path, ripples that kept following His movements.
Those few humans persistently and fanatically practiced the concept of 'Propagation'—from an initial faint echo to a resonance strong enough to draw His attention.
Though a bit lopsided, that resonance, that dedication to the 'breed' side of things, finally led Tayzzyronth to render His verdict:
That gray-haired human—was the most fitting candidate!
And so, He conferred the authority of a Propagation Emanator.
Later, Caelus came to work of his own accord, which pleased the Swarm King greatly.
But the first time Caelus asked Tayzzyronth to hand over military authority, He actually refused.
Because He figured, you can't just make Me hand it over the instant you ask.
The first time, I want to test it out.
It's not like I want to give you a whole organized army of My children only for them to get slaughtered by humans.
Duang~
Blown to bits, severed limbs strewn across the whole star system, casualty ratio maxed out.
So the Swarm King first granted this alien Emanator—who had tirelessly practiced the way of Propagation for a century—command over a portion of the Swarm, planning to see how he'd develop things before discussing anything further.
"No problem, Boss!"
"You can rest completely easy and just watch~ Boss!"
Caelus grinned wide, baring a mouthful of white teeth, and thumped his chest until it drummed:
"Painting the map with my color is my specialty!"
Under the spooked stares of Herta and Ruan Mei, Caelus began his performance.
Off to the side, Stelle rubbed her little hands together in excitement, itching to join in.
Only Asta was still a little dazed and at a loss.
The pink little rich lady had never dreamed that one day she'd not only get up close to the Aeon of Propagation—long since fallen in reality—but also stand at the very heart of the Swarm's home base, playing the magistrate's wi… oh, I mean, the commander's wife.
Just absurd!
Then Caelus got to work.
Never mind Herta and Ruan Mei—even Screwllum, ever steady as a mountain, fell into a silence like bearings grinding to a halt at his mechanical core.
"Star-Shatter Vermin-Thralls, Chibaku Tensei! Blow up that junk planet blocking the way up ahead! It's an eyesore!"
Caelus's commands transmitted instantly through the biological consciousness network built by his mount-bug—a colossal Swarm unit custom-made for the new king, evolved with an ornate saddle and crown-like antennae.
"You dumbass Calamity-Bearers, all you damn know how to do is eat, eat, eat!"
Caelus roared at another swath of the Swarm frantically devouring an ore vein:
"Quit eating everything! You gnaw through those people and scrap metal and only squeeze out a handful of soldiers?"
"The conversion rate is outrageously low! Waste! Such a damn waste!"
"Where are the Phantom Moths? Where the hell did my Phantom-Moth Vermin-Thrall units go?"
Caelus sat on the throne atop his mount-bug's broad carapace, Stelle seated beside him, Asta leaning against the armrest.
The three of them were like passengers aboard a living starship.
"Phantom Moths, wrap that planet up in scale-powder, seal it in, got it? Make every last thing breathing on that planet fall into hallucination."
"Then get them all—every single one—to work: mining, smelting, assembling. Crank the resource conversion efficiency to the max for me!"
The Swarm had evolved mouthparts to gnaw through anything for the sake of Propagation, but matter, resources, and energy all came down to conversion rate.
Could the organ tissue inside one tiny bug's body ever match the conversion rate of an automated factory designed by thousands of top scholars and built by precision industry?
"And the World-Deluder bugs? Get out here and work!"
Caelus's thinking was crystal clear.
"First send a small squad of World-Deluders to slip into the locals' brains and learn every operating manual and resource-refining process cold for me! Then, through your biological neural network, pass it to every World-Deluder bug!"
"Then have the Phantom Moths cooperate and pump the job skill-packs straight into the brains of those hallucinating locals—work alongside the humans and boost efficiency."
The World-Deluder Vermin-Thralls were among the few intelligent units in the Swarm, capable of carrying out some complex operations—not to be wasted.
Once one World-Deluder bug learned something, through the biological neural network and pheromones it could rapidly light up the corresponding skill in all the other World-Deluder bugs, then pass the skill to the humans trapped in the scale-powder illusion.
Even a five-year-old brat who was playing in the mud yesterday could clock in today as a senior engineer, a level-eight technician!
"There, see that?"
Smug and satisfied, Caelus lounged on his Swarm throne, one leg crossed over the other, a chocolate-flavored cigar clamped in his teeth—one he'd made his bug underlings fetch just for the aesthetic.
He blew out a ring of nonexistent smoke and pointed at the planet now completely wrapped in gorgeous, dreamlike scale-powder, like an enormous Cocoon, and said to the Phantom-Moth King Bug:
"This here is called Euthanasia Angel · Phantom Moth. Take notes."
Stelle swept her gaze over the Swarm commanders around them—listening in through the consciousness network, limited in IQ but off-the-charts in execution—pointing here and there, her tone brooking no argument.
"From now on, any planet with intelligent life gets handled exactly like this. Understood?"
Granted, limited by the bugs' own intelligence ceiling and the IQ-lowering Buff of the Propagation aura, not every trade could be run this way, and they couldn't unlock any game-changing high-tech tree.
But simply replacing the primitive bug-gnawing efficiency with an assembly-line operation of 'illusion brainwashing + skill injection' sent the entire planet's resource conversion and utilization rate skyrocketing several times over in an instant!
It upgraded from 'a plague of locusts sweeping through' to 'efficient harvesting,' and the cost-effectiveness of the Swarm's expansion reached unprecedented heights!
No one was more thrilled than Tayzzyronth.
666!
A Heavenly Hand!
A peerless lucky-cat streak!
The fam!
I pulled an SSR on a single draw!
At first He'd only meant to give it a try, handing part of the command to this lopsided Emanator.
And the result?
Under Caelus's brilliant command, the Swarm's rate of spread and reproduction actually multiplied seven- or eightfold, if not more!
This efficiency moved the simpleminded Swarm King, whose head held nothing but Propagation, so deeply that… uh, if He'd had tear ducts, He'd probably have wept for joy.
Tayzzyronth was so delighted He even wanted to practice the supreme Truth of Propagation together with His own Emanator!
Invest more!
He absolutely had to invest more!
Without the slightest hesitation, a will springing from the very source of His existence swept through the Swarm network in an instant: direct command over more than half the Swarm was transferred to the Emanator—Caelus!
And Caelus, naturally, did not let the Swarm King's high hopes down.
The moment he got greater authority, he worked things even more smoothly—or rather, let himself run even wilder.
A Stellaris game with the bug-race protagonist template, after all~
Under his strategizing, and Stelle's occasional flash of dark inspiration, the Swarm's rate of breeding and expansion leapt from mere doubling into an even more insane realm—Surging! Soaring! Skyrocketing!!
Like an ignited chain reaction, the reproduction efficiency exploded exponentially. Countless hives bloomed, and their spreading momentum made even Herta—watching the observation data—feel her scalp prickle.
"Having you around really is the Galaxy's Fortune."
Herta's dumpling recited flatly in an electronic voice mixed with shock, numbness, and absurdity.
"Dear."
Even Ruan Mei, whose sense of moral boundaries had always been exceedingly blurry and whose bottom line lay buried deep in the Mariana Trench, watched that madly spiking Swarm-reproduction curve now with a rare hint of speechless emotion in her voice:
"Don't you think doing this is maybe just a teeny tiny bit… mm…"
She seemed unable to find the right word for a moment to describe the maneuver.
"Logic calculation concludes: it is fortunate that Caelus was not born a hundred and thirty thousand years ago."
In reality a robot couldn't sweat, but this was inside the Simulated Universe, and Screwllum's dumpling already had condensation beading all over its smooth metal forehead.
If the Tayzzyronth of that era had had an Emanator like this, the scale and consequences of that Swarm Disaster would have been impossible to predict.
"I'll paint it, I'll paint it!"
Caelus was having an absolute blast playing his map-painting game.
Of course, the Swarm's spread wasn't without obstacles—but sometimes those obstacles inexplicably vanished.
Attempts Caelus never expected to succeed somehow succeeded anyway.
"████~"
The Swarm King's voice sounded in Caelus's mind. To converse with him, She had deliberately fabricated a voice—the vocal timbre of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old little l0li.
The childish voice was brimming with innocent, guileless, purely-wants-to-breed maternal instinct.
"If you actually turned into a white-haired, red-eyed, baby-faced, huge-○ little l0li, I wouldn't say no to that either."
"██~██~"
"Aha? Heh heh, I knew it."
According to Tayzzyronth, behind those attempts that shouldn't have succeeded but did was the assistance of Elation.
Caelus wasn't surprised in the least—he even felt a little like laughing.
How could a game this fun ever be missing Aha?
With Caelus fanning the flames, the Swarm Disaster grew fiercer and fiercer. The bug-tide that should have peaked in the fifth Amber Era reached an unprecedented scale by the second.
Until a certain moment.
Plugged into the Swarm's biological neural network as the Propagation Emanator, Caelus suddenly heard a multitude of voices.
Animals, plants, humans, bugs, infants, adults—all of them were weeping.
Caelus seemed to see a red ocean, a neck bristling with fangs and antennae like mountains of sliced flesh above a sea, and it opened a maw vast enough to swallow the sky and devour the sun.
That single bite swallowed not only countless Swarm but also countless worlds and stars.
"It's the Voracity! To think It would appear here!"
Herta was ecstatic. "Its mouth is so huge! I've got to go take a look right away."
"Damn it, how dare It eat my bugs!"
Caelus's face twisted with fury as he slammed the table and shot to his feet.
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