Ackster, drenched in blood and gore of colors he couldn’t understand how they could be inside a living being, crawled out of the ant queen’s mouth, fully prepared to engage in a final tussle with the worker ants and their superiors. However, as he exited the ant queen, he slowly lowered his arm as he realized he had nothing to worry about.

The ants of various versions were still in the room, and Ackster could hear more moving about in the tunnels. But it seemed that killing the ant queen had had unexpected consequences for her subordinates.

Some worker ants lay on the ground, lifeless, like puppets with their strings cut. Some were repeatedly running straight into walls. Others were spinning in circles or doing eights on the floor together. All of the ants were a jumbled mess, regardless of their version.

Worker ants, soldier ants, and lieutenant ants were all the same mindless drones with their controller dead. There was not a single sign of intelligence in any of the ants, and none of them paid any heed to Ackster, whom they had been trying to kill with mind-numbing fervor just minutes ago.

Ackster got a hunch he knew what it was about. Ordinary ants, not ones doped up and under the control of what had to be an A-rank queen, didn’t lose their minds like this should their queen die. They would go about their business, and a new queen would rise. These ants didn’t even look like they knew what a queen was.

He held up his hand to his hair. Mio didn’t even need to be told to hand over the hard object Ackster had tried to chew.

With the light of the stones in the ceiling, Ackster could finally identify the object. Well, he could see it more clearly. He used his thumb to rub off some of the blood and brain juice that had somehow remained despite being inside Mio.

‘I guess Mio is pretty obedient, then.’

Since Ackster had asked Mio not to eat it, Mio hadn’t touched anything of what had gone inside the slime. That Mio had such control over his inside’s digesting ability and that the slime listened to him so perfectly were both admirable.

“Thanks, Mio. You’ve done a good job.”

Mio patted Ackster’s head in a way that made Ackster feel like Mio was saying it was nothing. He was also pretty sure that Mio encouraged him to get a move on and to give it some food now that the threat of the ants was out of the way.

Ackster was about to give Mio an affirmative answer when he was caught up in studying the purple shine of the object in his hands. He managed to scrub off what had covered it with relative ease and, in doing so, revealed a round marble of what looked like purple glass too opaque to see through.

However, three things told Ackster it wasn’t just ordinary purple-colored glass that had managed to find its way inside the ant queen’s brain. One, it was too hard. He could bite through glass of that size as long as it wasn’t extraordinarily tough.

Two, it wasn’t still. When Ackster looked closely and held the eyeball-sized marble up to the lights in the ceiling, he could see the purple color move around slightly like ink.

Three, he knew what it was.

It was a Stone of Wisdom.

“Here, hold onto this for me.”

It wasn’t what Ackster had expected. The original story had only mentioned an item called a Stone of Wisdom once, and it hadn’t gone into detail about what such a stone was or what it could do. The short description the auctioneer had provided before selling the stone was that it was a condensed marble of mana that coincided with the magic properties of a stat that one could unlock with the right tools, materials, or circumstances.

The Stone of Wisdom supposedly had pretty beneficial effects for mages or people who relied on the complex uses of mana, such as magic, healing, alchemy, or anything along those lines. Since it was a lone Stone of Wisdom that appeared, that auctioneer recommended getting an accomplished craftsman or jeweler to turn it into a staff.

The Stone had sold for a decent price in the original story, so Ackster figured that he could sell it for some spare cash if he couldn’t find a use for it. While it wouldn’t do him any harm to get an item that enhanced his wisdom, the strategy he was planning to rely on was basically on the opposite end of the spectrum. He was using a brawn-over-brain type of method to fight. Where was the wisdom in that?

But Ackster then looked at the stump that remained of his right arm.

“Maybe I do need a little wisdom in my life.”

Mio gave Ackster a reassuring and comforting pat as Ackster stayed silent and mulled on the reality that he had lost his limb. And while there were ways to get it back, it would probably take a while until then. He would have to live without an arm for the foreseeable future.

Ackster comforted himself with the fact that it was temporary, and if he hadn’t lost his arm, he would have died. But he didn’t forget the fact that if he had been stronger, faster, and better, he wouldn’t have lost it. He had no one to blame but himself.

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So, Ackster pushed aside his feelings of loss and regret and got up.

He had killed the queen and the general, which had solved one of his problems. But he was still inside the ant nest. Thankfully, since the tunnels were littered with uncountable disconnected ants, Ackster wouldn’t starve for the foreseeable future.

But if he couldn’t find his way out, Ackster would be stuck underground, buried alive but not trapped. He would starve to death. After losing an arm in a fight for his survival, it definitely wasn’t the way he wanted to go.

Ackster looked around the queen’s chamber.

It was just that he had no idea which of the dozens of tunnels connected to the chamber led to the surface. It was even possible that none of them did since they split up the further they went.

Ackster also hadn’t seen any tunnels in the ground when he and Karandiel first entered the minefield of ants hidden by the tall grass. So, the entrances to the nest were most likely temporary and only opened when the ants hunted their prey.

Ackster yet again found himself in a sticky situation.

“Be honest with me, Mio. Do you think this tunnel is also sloping downward?”

Ackster stopped and stared down the tunnel with a contemplative and frustrated expression. After killing the ant queen and eating his fill, Ackster had started exploring the tunnels. He had started in the direction he remembered entering from. He even found a tunnel that looked familiar. But it didn’t lead to the surface.

Like the other tunnels, it split up into innumerable pathways that Ackster didn’t have enough bodies to explore in one lifetime.

So, instead of going down a tunnel that he couldn’t be sure would lead him back to the surface, Ackster returned to the queen’s room and started looking for tunnels that led upward. The surface was up. Thus, tunnels sloping upward would lead him to it. There was no need to look for the tunnel that brought him to the queen.

Besides, that tunnel appeared after the ants dug a trap for him and Karandiel, so there wasn’t even any guarantee it would bring him to the land above ground again.

However, for some reason, regardless of what tunnel he entered, it always began with a downward slope.

It was like the ant nest of labyrinthine, winding, endlessly dividing tunnels was designed to keep him trapped for the rest of time. Ackster was beginning to feel hopeless.

He was stuck in an ant nest too expansive for him to explore by himself. It was darker than night everywhere except for the queen’s chamber, where the stones in the ceiling gave Ackster enough light not to lose his mind. But since they were etched into the ceiling, Ackster couldn’t pry any of the luminescent stones off and use them as hand-held lights.

His only sources of comfort were Mio and the unnerving sounds of the braindead ants, which had started growing on him—the sounds, not the ants. The sounds told him that he wasn’t alone, which Mio also did. But they also reminded him that he had come too far to go back. There was no giving up now.

The corpses also helped him keep track of where he had been and how to find his way back to the queen’s chamber. He could find his way around if he simply kept his left hand on the wall the entire time since he would just have to rub his stump against the wall on the way back.

But that became a lot more work when the tunnels split up since he could only follow the left-most tunnel. If he wanted to go to the next tunnel over, he would either have to remember where he diverged or go to the end of the first tunnel. And so far, despite resolving to do so several times, Ackster had yet to see a tunnel stop.

Usually, Ackster gave up on following a single tunnel for too long since all of them just went deeper and deeper into the ground, which he couldn’t understand. Why were none of them maintaining a level altitude or leading upward?

It didn’t make sense. Ackster refused to entertain the thought of the ants rebuilding the nest each and every time they went out for a hunt. The ant queen was too smart to undertake such momentous extra work each time she needed to feed.

But Ackster had no answer as to why there weren’t any tunnels leading to the surface, even if he got his hands on the Stone of Wisdom, the apparent source of the ant queen’s intelligence and her control over her ants. He had even checked the general’s corpse to see if it had anything as well since it was clearly intelligent.

Maybe two Stones, as unlikely as it was that there would be two of them, would help Ackster figure out a solution or answer. But it seemed that the only thing the stone did, even when he was carrying it, was to make him more aware of his shortcomings.

However, that could have also been his sinking self-esteem.

And the ant general didn’t have any Stones of Wisdom anywhere in its body. So, its source of intelligence was most likely inherited either from the queen or the nutrients she used to create the general.

That attempt left Ackster back at square one, and he continued exploring the tunnels with heavy steps.

But he didn’t find anything or any clues that could lead him to the surface. Ready to give up, Ackster decided that he might as well just brute force his way to the surface by punching and digging through the walls with his hand and the ants’ body parts. He used their mandibles and legs as pickaxes and shovels to try and dig through the hard stone.

But maybe too much time had passed, and the existential power dwelling in the ants and giving them the strength they needed to build their tunnels had faded. It didn’t work well, especially when Ackster only had one hand to hold his makeshift tools with. It took ages just to get through a meter of stone.

After deciding he probably didn’t have the time, patience, or food for that, Ackster packed his things. He used some sinewy things he found within the ant queen’s legs that he used to make a bag after drying them.

Aclster put the box with Nold’s secret technique and his Nominus card there, along with the Stone of Wisdom, and he carried the sword on his hip.

Since he couldn’t go up, Ackster was going to see what was at the bottom of the nest. There had to be something there that would explain why the entire nest and all the tunnels pointed there.

Maybe if he could find it, Ackster could also find a way out. It was unlikely, but it was Ackster’s best bet at the moment.

Once again resolved to follow the tunnel to the end, Ackster picked the tunnel with the sharpest downward slope and entered it, Mio still perched on his head, occasionally giving him reassuring and comforting scalp massages.