Beastmaster of the Ages

Every single egg could turn into ten thousand bonegnaw ants. While they were rather weak individually, and could be vaporized by astralforce, Ye Buzhiqiu was completely suppressed by the Azuresoul Tower and covered in injuries, both external and internal. A lot of his albi had been crushed, along with his will, so he had really low resistance to anything. Even so, it would still be much more difficult for Tianming to let the ants conquer his body than to kill him. Even the astralforce from his teeth and throat alone had eradicated almost all of the ants.

Tianming was only testing them out. When he was more or less certain of how strong the ants were, he cut open a piece of Ye Buzhiqiu’s skull and let the ants directly invade from the opening of the bone. They began gnawing their way inside, causing Ye Buzhiqiu to howl in utter agony. His eyes were so wide that his eyeballs were about to pop out. Veins surfaced all over his body from the fierce, involuntary twitches.

“No! No!” However, his cries proved useless. Tianming coldly guided the tens of thousands of ants to enter his body. Even though Ye Buzhiqiu could vaporize many of them, they numbered far too many. Tianming had close to a hundred million of them, and if even one percent successfully made a nest in his bones, they could survive and multiply from the inside. Fortunately, the Divine Worldeater Cauldron kept the cries isolated.

“Please, I beg you, just kill me! Kill me!” He was yelling so hard that he began retching. The army of ants burrowed their way through his bones and spread to his chest, spine, and finally the bones in his limbs. Tianming mentioned one hour to be an optimistic estimate, but with how hard Ye Buzhiqiu was resisting, it took a whole two hours for a hundred thousand bonegnaw ants to infest his body. Then, just to be safe, he let the ants continue infesting him until they reached a million in number, taking up a whole day. He didn’t look any different on the surface, but every single bone of his body was now filled with parasitic ants, though they only seemed to reinforce his skeleton rather than weakening it.

“It’s over!” The ants stopped moving and laid dormant within. As long as Ye Buzhiqiu was obedient, he wouldn’t even be able to feel them. However, the pain from the parasitization process was something he would never forget even after a few lifetimes. A million ants was equivalent to a hundred silver eggs, but quite a few of them had been eradicated in the process, so Tianming had actually used up to ten thousand eggs.

“Release the Azuresoul Tower now,” Tianming said, stepping back to join Long Wanying and the rest. They all looked at their unconscious victim. “There’s nothing too special about the infestation. We’ll see how terrified of it he is when he wakes up.” Would he really do their bidding?

“I think it should be fine,” Long Wanying said, still feeling a little pensive. The thought of how it felt when the ants had infested her, and seeing the horrible experience Ye Buzhiqiu had gone through, was making her shudder. Even Jiang Qingliu and Yan Nuxia couldn’t help but nod and closely look at Tianming time and again. They found that they really couldn’t consider him a junior in his twenties anymore. While they had no doubt contributed much to do this, Tianming had been the core of their plan.

……

Ye Buzhiqiu’s fingers twitched, a sign that he was waking up. He gagged and snapped his eyes open as if he’d just had a terrifying nightmare. Soon, he recalled what had happened and glared at Tianming. “What did you put in my bones?!”

“Some of my lifebound beast’s brood. They’re bonegnaw ants and there are a million of them lying dormant in your bones. You won’t be able to kill them, but they can kill you at any time. They can also let you experience the sensation you experienced just now over and over again, as many times as they want,” Tianming said.

Being reminded of that alone was enough to make him shiver in terror, and all the while, Tianming explained what the ants could do in great detail. Ye Buzhiqiu knew from personal experience that he wasn’t joking around.

“But the good news is that, as long as you serve me obediently, you’ll never have to experience that kind of pain. What you had a taste of just now was the bare minimum I needed to make it work. I can make it a hundred times more painful right now. Do you want to know what that feels like?” Tianming held a silver egg in his hand, which split into ten thousand ants that crawled all over his body and face. Their little black eyes looked incredibly sinister, making Tianming look like an otherworldly demon.

“You animal!” Ye Buzhiqiu snapped. He’d thought that it had all just been a dream. How could his perfect plan of luring Jiang Qingliu into the Singularity Atlas have been foiled just like that? He had instantly fallen to rock bottom, which caused him to be in a bit of denial.

“I ask again. Want to give it a try?”

“Your foolish actions will earn you nothing short of death! Jiang Qingliu, you betrayed your sect and allied with the enemy. You deserve to die—aAAHHH!” He suddenly cried out and every inch of his body, even his fingers, shook, causing him to involuntarily contort. His shrill cries caused the others to feel a tingle in their scalp.

“Stop…” he weakly said, completely despairing. Even after Tianming had the ants stop, he remained slumped on the ground, sobbing.”Did that feel good? After all that pain, you should know that this is no dream. This is reality, your reality for the rest of your life. You only have one choice: accept it.” Tianming’s voice resounded throughout the cauldron. Within it, Ye Buzhiqiu couldn’t even send out a transmission stone.

Crying, he looked up at the white-haired youth, easily the most terrifying of all of them there. That gaze of his made Ye Buzhiqiu understand that it was no coincidence that he had become a Sky Palace disciple. “Are you going to make me serve you with this method?”

“If you’re optimistic, you can even call it cooperation. I’m not someone who mistreats my pets, you see,” Tianming said.

“Dream on! I can kill myself and foil your plans!” he roared.

Tianming looked at Long Wanying and couldn’t help but laugh. “Alright, if you’re going to do it, you’d better be quick about it. We’ll just find someone else. I’m sure we can lure your father in with the Singularity Atlas. I doubt he’ll be as stubborn as you are.” Tianming’s nonchalance about the entire thing only made Ye Buzhiqiu despair even more. “Ye Buzhiqiu, the fact that you threatened us with killing yourself convinced us that you won’t actually do it. If you actually wanted to kill yourself, you would’ve pretended to serve us and gone back to the Azuresoul Sword Mountain to tell Gujian Qingshuang about the bonegnaw ants before you made your heroic sacrifice. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be a point, right?”

Ye Buzhiqiu blanked out. He was no fool himself, but the circumstances and his panicking had caused him to mess up. Tianming was right that if he really wanted to end his own life, he wouldn’t have boasted about it.

Tianming continued, “If you choose to tell on us, I’d like to see whether you can do it before you die. I promise that the bonegnaw ants can kill you before you even finish three words or write them down. Do you know why? The ants in your body are part of my lifebound beast. Aside from your thoughts, I know everything you see, hear, and even do. I can even spot your secret signals. You can keep no secrets from me and you’ll never be able to get rid of the ants that now live in your bones!” That was a terrifying prospect indeed. Not only had Ye Buzhiqiu been parasitized, but he also had to live knowing full well that he was being constantly monitored, even down to the most private of moments.