Chapter 300: Chapter 300. How did this ant get so big???!

After that, Theo did his best to jump as well as he could.

He had reached level 7, and now came the time to catch up to this level’s stats with training. One could level up as fast as they wanted, but seeing how a level 9 beast could die by the hand of the mantis with skill, not utter strength, showed how skill mattered more than just levels.

A few hours passed with Theo now being able to reach five times the baron’s height. It was a significant upgrade in strength.

But according to the baron, he was still missing something.

The mantis was bored and went to the same spot where they had been fighting for the last two days to fight again. It was as if its very being wasn’t fulfilled when it was not fighting.

In those five hours, both Clara and Elias came back with heavy breathing but invigorated faces. They were finally level 7 too.

Theo was happy his people were the same.

But he also felt bad for them as the baron started the same training for them too. Only, they were very determined as getting a baron to teach some commoner attendants was a really big thing.

The ant queen had already made two big chambers and a lot more underground ’roads’ for the colony to use for more chambers.

When Theo looked at the evolution option, he smiled.

In place of 0 for the three underground zones, there was one out of three now.

One of the chambers was big and good enough for the system to recognize it as a chamber.

And Theo could understand it. When he was able to look through the ant’s perspective, he found many, many ants in one room. There was no way so many of them could be in the same place when there wasn’t enough space.

Theo started training his body as the thing, according to the baron, that was stopping Theo from going further was the limitations he had instinctively in his mind.

And also the lack of good muscles in his body.

The whole day went by in rest and training.

Clara and Elias went to skin the big behemoth after halftime in the training session.

Unlike Theo, they were there to fulfill their duties too.

The behemoth’s meat was a lot better than the crawler’s in Theo’s eyes.

It was tender enough but crunchy from the outside, just the way it was made to eat.

But soon enough, something happened that stopped Theo from training any further.

’The chamber cavitated? How many ants died, ant queen?’ Theo asked with a headache.

The ant queen showed the image of many ants being buried alive inside as the ceiling came down on them.

Some of the bigger ants were still coming up after tearing through the land as if there was no problem, but most of the newer sharjaw ants died after a minute of being in there.

Theo delved deeper into the bond between them to know what the ant queen was really thinking right now.

When he was close enough to its mind, he started feeling overwhelming emotions.

And what surprised him was that it was not fearing the loss of its children at all.

There was another fear in its mind that took Theo a moment to understand, and when he did, he knew what kind of burden the ant queen had on its shoulders.

It feared stagnation in their journey and development more than loss. Theo had a hard time understanding this concept.

He tended to wait and then act when things were better.

But according to the ant queen’s mind, what was really happening was stagnation in progress.

’It seems I am stopping them from getting better because of my "human" way of thinking, huh... There doesn’t seem to be a need to keep every ant safe when the whole colony has to grow...’ Theo thought.

He tried engraving that into his mind.

The colony did not take the losses as the end, but as a price that was already accounted for.

With the ceiling falling down, the chamber became a lot more spacious when the ants brought all the soil up to throw away.

"Theo, where did you run away? Come train again!" the baron screamed, and Theo nodded before going back to his training.

The next few days were just like this. They were protected with the help of the baron’s aura and were able to focus on their individual growths, except the baron, who seemed already too strong for this gate.

The ant queen had already completed all the chambers.

Theo could see ’5’ in the chambers instead of the three that were needed, making him chuckle. The saying was right, they were a lot more hardworking than the lazy humans.

As for keeping the hive mind nexus activated for 24 hours, 17 hours were already complete.

The ant queen was also able to eat a quarter of the crawler’s body.

This was the biggest problem in the whole evolution.

The ant queen’s size was small in comparison to the crawler, and eating two whole ones was a lot more difficult than making chambers and keeping the hive mind nexus active.

For the next few days, the ant queen did its best to eat, and it came to eating half of the crawler in a whole day of constant feeding.

Meanwhile, the laying of eggs was still being done, and unbeknownst to Theo, something inside the colony was happening.

Only after another few days of Theo’s training did the ant queen send a curious and happy signal to him.

To look at the new ants that were born and coming outside the colony right now.

Theo went and looked, and it took some time but nothing happened.

Until a lot of ants started making the hole a lot bigger, and Theo finally saw a big head bobbling out of the hole.

The size of the head was bigger than two of the new reinforced ants standing together, making Theo feel like dancing here and there without even knowing why it got so big.