And if they failed?
The thought was a cold pebble dropped into the murky well of her mind as she finished winding the clean bandage around her shoulder. The sting of the antiseptic salve was a sharp, clarifying counterpoint to the deeper, throbbing ache of the wound itself. Her movements were economical, practiced. As she tied off the bandage, her gaze drifted to the pile of discarded, blood-soaked clothes in the corner. The dark, rust-brown stains seemed to pulse in the dim candlelight of the room. She deliberately looked away, pushing down the memory that rose with them—the clean, brutal snickof the Gossamer wire, the head toppling, the stunned silence that followed.
There was no overwhelming guilt, no crisis of conscience. Just a strange, hollow dissonance. How quickly I adapt,she mused, the thought clinical. How efficiently I shed one skin for another.
She pulled on a simple undershirt, the clean fabric whispering over her bandages. As she moved to the small, tarnished mirror propped on the crude dresser, her reflection gave her pause.
The face that looked back was both familiar and alien. Her own face, from that other life, had been shaped by a certain fundamental security. Even through the struggles of building a company from scratch, there had been a bedrock of confidence, a face that spoke of someone who expected the world to make a certain kind of sense. This face… this was Yao's face. The girl from the margins. It was narrower, the bones more pronounced. The eyes, which she remembered as observant but calm, here held a watchful, simmering tension, a residue of old hungers and newer, sharper despairs. A faint, bitter twist to the mouth that had never been there before.
Since arriving in this world, she'd been a whirlwind of action—surviving, calculating, fighting. She'd noticed the old scars mapping this body in fleeting glances, marks of a life lived hard and cheap. The recent genetic metamorphoses had smoothed some of the newer ones, fading them to silver threads, but the older ones remained, pale ridges against her skin, a topography of past pain.
"This was her reality," she whispered to the ghost in the glass. "A reminder. Weakness leaves a permanent record."
The brief, unwelcome complexity of emotion evaporated, burned away by that simple, brutal truth. She finished dressing in loose, dark trousers and a tunic, then methodically gathered the bloodied rags. A small Emberburst, contained in a metal washbasin, reduced them to flakes of acrid, black ash, which she sluiced away with a pitcher of water. The room smelled of smoke and cheap soap.
Then, she turned to the night's harvest.
It lay in two distinct piles. The first was the loot from the ambushed parties—over a dozen satchels of holding, their contents spilled out like the guts of strange, metallic beetles. A rapid inventory revealed no S1 Keys, as expected. Those were kept on the person, the ultimate currency. But the rest was a small fortune in spare parts: duplicate skill tomes, backup equipment, vials of common and uncommon potions, raw crafting materials, and stacks of credit chips and copper notes. She sorted with the ruthless efficiency of a pawnbroker.
Verdant Locust Wing tomes—five of them. Emberburst and Forest Thorns scrolls enough to push both skills to their ninth tier. "Local Arcanists hoard common resources," she noted, a flicker of satisfaction cutting through her fatigue. "Fortunately, I chose common paths. For now." She imagined trying to find a Corrosive Miasma tome on the open market; the cost would be astronomical, the sellers shrouded in shadow.
The gear was a disappointment—mostly Bronze-tier replacements or mismatched Green pieces that didn't complete her set. The truly valuable equipment had been on their persons, now lost or destroyed. The collective wealth, however, was staggering. A quick mental tally put it well over fifty million copper. A king's ransom, scooped from the pockets of the dead and the defeated.
It was the second pile, the one from the Brood-Prime, that held her silent attention. It glittered with a more potent, concentrated promise. Three S1 Keys, their inner light a soft, seductive pulse. A single, palm-sized Universal Energy Core, thrumming with raw, stable power. Four pieces of Green-tier armor. A dozen basic attribute gems. Three skill tomes. And two items that made her breath catch: an egg-sized orb the color of clotted blood, and a scroll of aged vellum bound with a silvery thread.
She started with the armor. Three of the four pieces were exactly what she needed—the final greaves, a second vambrace, and a reinforced gorget. As she equipped them, a profound, resonant humpassed through the entire set. The individual pieces, once separate, seemed to fuse on a conceptual level. Light, a deep, forest-green edged in venomous yellow, raced along the seams before subsiding into the material itself.
[Scorpid-Tail Hunter's Garb – Full Green Set Unlocked.]
[Set Bonus: All Attributes +1500. Activates 'Chain-Carapace' – upon receiving damage exceeding 30% of the set's base defense in a single hit, triggers damage reduction (25%) and a burst of kinetic energy, increasing Agility by 20% for 3 seconds.]
[Aesthetic Meld: Enabled/Disabled?]
A wave of pure, visceral power flooded her limbs, so intense it was almost dizzying. The memory was sudden and vivid: her younger self, years and realities away, finally assembling her first full Green set in the game. The studio had been new, every copper scrap mattered. Selling that set could have funded months of operation. But she'd equipped it herself, a statement, a badge. It wasn't just stats; it was the feeling of clawing her way out of the anonymous mass, of becoming someone. The thrill of superiority, of hard-won legitimacy.
Now, awash in power that dwarfed that long-ago moment, the old thrill was a distant echo. The satisfaction was colder, sharper, a tool assessed, not a trophy admired. She selected 'Disabled'. The subtle green luminescence winked out, the armor appearing as plain, well-made leather and treated chitin under her tunic. Surprise is a better defense than intimidation.
Next, the gems. A dozen of them, glowing with potential. She pressed them into the armor, one by one, feeling each one melt away and boost the underlying matrix. Her attributes, already grotesque, climbed further into the realm of the absurd.
The three S1 Keys she set aside. The fourth Gene-Sequence branch was a mountain that required a landslide of resources to scale. Twenty keys, maybe more. Not now.
The skill tomes were two more Locust's Daze scrolls, pushing it to Level 2. The third was different. Its cover was a nondescript, matte grey, devoid of title or embellishment. She opened it. Knowledge, clean and surgical, flowed into her mind.
Interrupt. One of the three legendary low-tier disruption techniques. Not as comprehensive as Nullify, not as brutal as Sunder. But Interrupt was a scalpel. A precisely timed spike of anti-magical resonance that could shatter a foe's concentration, break a chant, stall a transformation. In the hands of someone with her Agility, the ability to perceive and react in the gaps between heartbeats, it was a weapon of devastating potential. A true advantage. The kind of thing you couldn't just buy. She learned it instantly, the pattern etching itself into her neural pathways.
Finally, her hands closed around the blood-red orb. It was warm, almost feverish, and had a faint, rhythmic pulse, like a dormant heart. As she focused on it, a prompt appeared in her vision, not from the system, but seeming to emanate from the orb itself.
[Rare Biological Artefact detected. A shell of potent vital energies obscures its nature. Significant Spiritual expenditure required for appraisal. Proceed?]
She willed a yes.
It was like a drain had been unplugged at the core of her being. Her Spirit, already low from the night's exertions, was suckedout, a torrent pouring into the orb. She gasped, her vision graying at the edges, her knees threatening to buckle. The meter in her mind's eye plummeted: 1000… 500… 100… 1.
It stopped. She swayed, clutching the dresser, breathing raggedly. The orb in her palm was now alive with light, a deep, internal crimson glow that illuminated the bones of her hand. Information cascaded into her awareness.
[Scorpid-Tail Brood-Prime's Aborted Gene-Core.]
[Status: Unstable. Prime mid-metamorphosis termination has preserved the condensed genetic essence in a pre-evolutionary state. Without a viable host or stabilization matrix, complete genetic degradation will occur within 24 solar cycles.]
[Primary Uses: 1. Companion Gene-Therapy: Dramatically elevates companion beast's genetic ceiling, with high probability of mutation. 2. Catalyst for Latent Racial Traits: Can be consumed to forcefully awaken or enhance dormant species-specific abilities within a compatible host. WARNING: Unstable core carries risk of genetic backlash, corruption, or spontaneous somatic rejection.]
She didn't need to read the warnings twice. The applications were clear. Feed it to a pet and create a monster. Or… use it on herself. To force her nascent Swarm's Sting to the next level, or awaken something else buried in the chaotic helix of her chimera genetics. The risk was palpable, a taste of metal on her tongue. But the potential…
She set it down carefully, as if it were a primed explosive. Next, the Energy Core. It hummed with a pure, steady frequency. It could be slotted into the Tri-Spire Focus, amplifying its meditation-boosting effects. A tool for later.
And the scroll. The Scroll of the Sealed Epiphany. She knew its kind. It didn't teach, didn't grant power. It created a sanctuary. Tearing it open would fold space around her, creating a pocket dimension saturated with ambient mana—twenty times the density of the outside world. Combined with the Tri-Spire Focus… the potential for rapid Spiritual recovery and growth was immense.
Her plan solidified. She walked to the window, peering through a slit in the boarding. In the far distance, where the dry river gully cut through the land, the last embers of her firefight glowed like dying stars. She could picture Xie Guangyu there now, picking through the ashes, his cold, intelligent mind assembling the pieces she'd left for him.
"The butterfly has flapped its wings," she murmured. "The storm will come in two days, or three. I need to be ready."
She turned from the window, her decision made. Unrolling the vellum scroll, she focused on its intricate, silver-thread seal. A thought, a whisper of will, and the thread dissolved. The scroll didn't burn; it unfolded, the parchment expanding impossibly, swallowing the light in the room before resolving into a shimmering, vertical tear in reality—a doorway to a pocket of thickened, silvery mist.
She stepped through.
The space inside was small, no larger than a closet, the "walls" and "floor" composed of swirling, luminous fog. The air was so thick with mana it was hard to breathe, a heavy, sweet-ozone pressure on the skin and in the lungs. Every pore tingled. She sat cross-legged in the center, placing the Tri-Spire Focus on the floor before her. It activated with a soft chime, its three points emitting beams of light that triangulated around her, further condensing the mana in the space, making it almost viscous.
Then, she picked up the Aborted Gene-Core. Its pulsing red light beat in time with her own heart. Without ceremony, she took the washbasin, placed the core inside, and crushed it with the pommel of her dagger. It didn't shatter like glass, but dissolvedwith a sigh, releasing a thick, molten-looking blood that steamed in the cool air of the pocket dimension. The scent was overwhelming—hot copper, crushed herbs, and something deeply, primally animal.
She plunged her hands into the viscous fluid.
The effect was instantaneous and violent. It wasn't pain, but a profound, cellular shouting. The gene-essence sought entry, not through ingestion, but through absorption, rushing up her arms, a wildfire of foreign code screaming to be integrated, to express itself. At the same time, she plunged her consciousness into the meditation trance guided by the Tri-Spire. Her mind became a vast, still lake, seeking to expand its shores, while her body was a battlefield of scrambling genetics.
[Entering Deep Meditation. Mana Saturation: 3100%. Efficiency Multiplier Active.]
[Foreign Genetic Material Detected. Compatibility Assessment: Partial (Chimera Baseline). Integration Attempt: In Progress. Risk of Rejection: High.]
Her status, fixed for this desperate gamble, hung in her mind:
[Level: 10]
[Spirit: 2070/???]
[Strength: 8030]
[Constitution: 7400]
[Agility: 12230]
[Skills: Arcane Missile Lv.9, Emberburst Lv.9, Forest Thorns Lv.9, Verdant Locust Wing Lv.5, Locust's Daze Lv.2, Interrupt Lv.1]
The numbers were monstrous, laughable for her level. Yet the Spirit, the wellspring of it all, was the achingly fragile bottleneck. Without the Gossamer Ring's cheat-like utility, a single confrontation with a specialist like the corrosive mist-wielder would end her. She was a glass cannon of the highest caliber, and the glass was already cracked.
In the swirling silver mist, hands bathed in burning blood, mind straining against its limits, Yao Xie began the most dangerous hunt of all: the hunt for her own missing foundation.
Outside, in the real world's deep night, Xie Guangyu concluded his examination of the scorched gully. The clues were planted, the narrative set. He needed no more evidence.
"Their main force is at the hive core," he stated, his voice cutting through the nervous chatter of his men. "To assault it now, after this drain… would be to walk into their jaws." He looked towards the dark silhouette of the farm, a grim fortress against the starry sky. "We consolidate. We force a parley. The three factions must talk. If we continue to bleed each other, we will all die here, and they will simply… collect the pieces."
He snapped a charred branch he'd picked up from the edge of the pit. The dry crack was loud in the quiet. He tossed the pieces onto the smoldering remains of the trap. "We wait. Let them come to us."
And miles away, in the deep, fetid heart of the wind cave system, a scream that was not of this world echoed through the stone tunnels—a sound of ultimate pain and fury. The Mother-Queen was in her death throes.