FREE USE in Primitive World

Chapter 254: Chapter 254: I Miss Modern Medicine

The sudden, agonizing death of their Hive Mother would instantly break the thousands of Layer 2 Commanders and soldier ants out of their docile trance and plunge them into an apocalyptic, vengeance-fueled frenzy.

They would strip the flesh from his bones and eat him alive before the Blood-Jade even finished glowing.

“Yeah, let’s not push my luck,” Sol muttered, his hand dropping away from his leather pouch. “I like having skin.”

He completely discarded the idea of anchoring her for now. He needed to address his critical HP first.

Sol gritted his teeth, forcing himself to sit halfway up. He looked down at his ruined torso. His dark leather armor was melted to his seared left shoulder, and his chest was a canvas of deep, ugly purple bruises. Every breath felt like jagged glass.

“Right. Can’t let the hyper-regeneration set the bones crooked,” Sol winced, his face pale and slick with cold sweat.

He took a deep, ragged breath, bracing himself. He placed his right hand against his side, feeling the unnatural, sickening shift of his fractured ribs beneath the skin.

With a guttural, muffled scream that he forced through his tightly clenched jaw, Sol pressed inward and upward.

CRACK-POP.

The bones violently snapped back into their proper alignment. Black spots danced aggressively across Sol’s vision, and he nearly vomited from the sheer, blinding shock of the pain. He collapsed flat onto his back again, his chest heaving, his entire body trembling uncontrollably as the agony slowly dialed down to a dull, throbbing ache.

“Fuck me,” Sol gasped to the empty ceiling. “I miss modern medicine.”

With his skeletal structure manually reset, he closed his eyes and turned his focus inward. He didn’t try to gather essence from the ambient air. Instead, he gathered the very last, lingering drops of his heavy Golden Liquid and the cool, ethereal Silver Liquid in his heart.

He pushed the dual-essences outward, flooding his ruined circulatory system, actively urging them to speed up his body’s already absurd, hyper-regeneration.

He felt a strange, itching warmth begin to spread across his cracked ribs and his seared shoulder. It was working. The cellular repair was kicking into overdrive.

The effort completely drained his remaining consciousness. The adrenaline crashed, leaving behind a bottomless, crushing exhaustion. The sounds of the subterranean cavern…. the distant clicking of the guards, the heavy breathing of the Queen, the dripping of condensation… faded into a dull hum.

Sol let the darkness take him, falling into a deep, dreamless sleep right there on the blood-stained dais.

….

Time in the subterranean depths of the Great Orrath was impossible to track. There was no sun to mark the days, no moons to track the nights. There was only the perpetual, sweltering heat and the dim, red glow of the royal eggs.

But eventually, the deep, exhausted slumber began to recede.

Sol’s consciousness slowly surfaced. The first thing he registered was the heat. It was still stifling, but the sharp, stabbing pain in his chest that had plagued him the night before was completely gone.

He took a deep, testing breath. His lungs expanded fully, smoothly. No grinding bones. No agony.

The regeneration worked, Sol thought groggily, his mind still fuzzy with sleep.

He slowly blinked his eyes open, expecting to see the high, cavernous ceiling and the bioluminescent mold.

Instead, his vision was entirely filled by a massive, jagged, obsidian-black wall of chitin.

Sol’s eyes widened, his heart instantly leaping into his throat.

Looming directly over him, so close he could feel the humid, acidic air puffing from its spiracles, was a face pulled straight from a sci-fi horror movie. It was the size of a minivan. Two colossal, multifaceted eyes stared blankly down at him. Massive, terrifying mandibles, thick enough to snap a tree trunk in half and dripping with thick saliva, hovered mere inches from his nose.

It was the Queen.

FUCK! Sol’s physical reflexes flared. He instinctively scrambled backward, his hands desperately searching the dirt for his Void-Oak spear, a jolt of pure, unadulterated panic flooding his veins. The boss was awake!

But as his back hit the raised edge of the dais, the Silver Liquid in his heart gently pulsed.

The mental link flared to life in his mind… a heavy, absolute tether connecting his soul directly to the colossal monstrosity staring at him. He didn’t feel aggression from her. He didn’t feel the suffocating, psychic malice that had nearly crushed his mind the day before.

He felt… a dull, subdued, almost dog-like waiting.

Sol froze, his hand hovering over the shaft of his spear. He let out a long, shaky breath, letting his head thump back against the dirt as the panic rapidly drained out of him.

“Right,” Sol muttered, wiping a hand down his face. “Right. I own you. You’re my giant, terrifying, incredibly ugly bug.”

The Queen didn’t react to the insult. Her massive, tree-trunk antennae simply twitched, gently brushing against Sol’s leg in a gesture of docile submission before she slowly lowered her massive head back onto the dais with a heavy thud.

Sol sat up, rolling his shoulders and taking a proper inventory of his body.

He pulled away the ruined, melted strips of his dark leather armor, exposing his torso. He was covered in dried blood and dirt, but the physical damage was miraculously gone. The severe, third-degree burns on his left shoulder had completely scabbed over and peeled away, leaving behind smooth, slightly pink, but incredibly dense new muscle. The shallow scythe-cut across his stomach was nothing more than a faint white line. His ribs were completely solid.

His evolved body, combined with the forced essence-healing, had practically rebuilt him overnight. His Golden Liquid core in his solar plexus was humming steadily, having naturally replenished a good portion of its reserves from the ambient energy of the cavern while he slept.

He felt fresh and dangerously powerful.

Sol grabbed his Void-Oak spear, using it to push himself up to his feet. He stretched, his joints popping satisfyingly in the humid air. He looked out over the massive cavern. The thousands of soldier ants and Layer 2 Commanders were still exactly where he had ordered them to be, forming a flawless, unmoving perimeter around the Royal Chamber.

He had survived the night. He was fully healed.

“Alright,” Sol said, gripping his spear. He turned his gaze toward the tunnel that led back to the surface. “Let’s go see what happened to the war of lords.”