Two weeks passed.

  As a Bullet Ant Soldier trained to fight without an appetite, Sparrow couldn’t exactly claim to know good food from bad, but at least he knew when there was too food to go around that he had to start shovelling snow to preserve them for later.

  Each household in Immanu had a tiny kitchen, but Ninmah had told him they never really used them; there were four ‘big’ communal kitchens in every corner of the village that also doubled as the community food storages. They’d always have at least ten full buckets of reserve snow vegetables in each kitchen just in case the daily harvesters in the Barrows didn’t meet their quota, but they had little more reserves than that. For decades, the Children of Immanu mostly lived off a ‘want it, get it later’ mindset. Without the threat of locusts and diseases and unnatural disasters to affect their harvests that they didn’t even really need to survive—because of their inorganic bodies—they’d never felt a pressing need to store more than they wanted for the next day or two.

  As a result, the big kitchens were woefully unprepared for the massive influx of Boreus carcasses they were hauling in day by day.

  One or two Boreus would be fine. Three to four Boreus would be manageable if they kept one in each kitchen. More than that and they’d have to start hacking the giants to pieces for easier storage before hauling them in. more than that and a new group of fifteen children had to be formed, whose chores for the day consisted of digging deep holes in the snow outside the kitchens, wrapping the raw chunks of bug meat in reed fabric, and then tossing the meat in before filling up the hole with freezing quartz crystals. It was just as much of a workout for the designated chefs of the day, who had to dig up the meat and turn them into tasty meals daily; the elders had started work on expanding the kitchens so there’d be more space, but with everyone being as busy as they already were, Sparrow felt he still had at least another month to get acquainted with his shovel.

  It was nearing midnight. He’d spent his entire afternoon and evening digging holes right outside the northernmost kitchen, and he still wasn’t done yet. The fourteen younger children who were supposed to be helping him today were too bored and tired, so he sent them back to their houses for early rest while he continued dumping wrapped meat into whichever hole wasn’t completely filled to the brim yet.

  If he were to be frank, he’d much rather exclude himself from the random designations for the day and put himself permanently in the hunting group of twenty—though there were always at least ten elders in the hunting group to keep watch of the younger children tagging along, they still facing off against the Boreus. The giant bugs weren’t to be underestimated. If they accidentally attracted more than three Boreus at a time with a wrong lure, they might be in trouble, but so far their quest for a consistent source of points was smooth sailing; the only injuries he’d heard about were a few kids tripping on pebbles and bruising their skin. No deaths.

  Not on their side, at least.

  The day after he’d brought down the first Boreus on the ice, the hunting group of twenty managed to kill two Boreus on their own. Pelted the giant bugs with a hundred arrows without a shred of honour. There was no need to fight fair against the Swarm, and the Worm Mages had quickly realised that when they truly, realised the glacier was completely infested with the bugs.

  By the third day, they could kill three Boreus. By the eighth, they could kill four. By the end of the first week, they were able to kill eight Boreus a day by being careful with how loud their luring songs were—they didn’t want to attract more at once than they could handle—and it was just a few hours ago that they left today’s haul in his hands. He counted fifteen heads and forty-five pairs of legs in total; that was fifteen Boreus they’d killed his help, and without his guidance.

  Honestly, with their attribute levels and mutations, he wanted them to be able to kill at least thirty Boreus a day, but knowing what he knew about their original competency when it came to hunting and slaying giant bugs?

  Kicking the last wrapped leg into a hole and kicking a bucket of quartz crystals over, he tossed his shovel to the side and patted his hands down. It wasn’t gruelling work if he had a team of fourteen other children helping him out, but tonight, even with his current toughness level, he felt his skin chafing when he rubbed his palms together. Blisters. Calluses. He couldn’t remember the last time he did anything physically intensive for long enough that the skin on his palms were cracked; maybe when he’d still been in training camp as a grunt soldier of the empire, learning how to melee with his bayonet rifle?

  Back then, after training, he’d wanted nothing more than to just collapse and shirk away in his bunk—it wasn’t any different now.

  Cracking his neck, he warped ten metres off with a single step, and then again, and then again, intending on returning to his cabin at the edge of the village for a relatively early bed as well… but then he stopped right around the bell tower, turning his head to stare directly at the building at the easternmost edge of the village.

  He decided to make a little detour and warped over, standing before the front door. The village library, being a significantly larger three-story building than the rest of the houses clumped up around the bell tower, was very difficult to miss. Not only was it built atop an elevated snow mound that made it visible from nearly everywhere in the village, it also had a glass dome ceiling reminiscent of Deepwater Legion Front architecture, far west of the Attini Empire Front. The whole rest of the thing on the outside was all crystal wood and windows, like most buildings in the village, but now that he was thinking about it, he’d never actually seen any of the children warping in or out of the library; he wouldn’t even have known it was a library had one of the elders not mentioned it in passing a few days ago, now that he was capable of understanding bits and pieces of their tongue.

  Walking around and peeking through the windows, he glanced around to see if anyone might be looking at him before warping in.

  The temperature immediately shot up. He was standing in light snowfall no longer. It was always freezing at midnight and the bluish-white moonlight never helped, but beneath the giant glass dome here, moonlight was strangely… comforting. There were no candles lit on the railings, no lanterns dangling on frayed knots—just a large rectangular atrium, three full levels of bookshelves barred by musty wooden railings, no stairs anywhere in sight, and a single square table with four docked chairs directly under the dome. The four walls themselves were the shelves, at least twenty books on each row and five rows on each wall. Four hundred books per level. A thousand and two hundred books in the whole library, in one place; it was far more than he’d ever seen in his entire life.

  [Name: ‘Sparrow’]

  [Grade: C-Rank Giant-Class]

  [Class: Whiteworm]

  [Swarmblood Art: Worm Maw]

  [Aura: 1,150]

  [Points: 17]

  [Strength: 5, Speed: 5, Toughness: 4, Dexterity: 4, Perception: 4]

  [T1 Mutation | Inorganic Heart Lvl. 10

  [T2 Mutations | Vibrational Senses Lvl. 3 Wormic Bones Lvl. 3

  [T3 Mutations | Segmented Setae | Rigid Annuli | Sclerite Jaw] 150P

  His attribute and mutation levels were a bit higher after two weeks of fairly distributing Boreus meat to all hundred and eleven children in Immanu, but he felt he was about to hit a soft limit very soon. More specifically, he shouldn’t hold off on unlocking his tier three mutations for much longer so he could get to the conventionally ‘powerful’ tier four mutations, but the obstacle to doing so was the same as the first day he’d gotten his Whiteworm Class: he couldn’t exactly read written letters, so unlocking mutations was like taking blind shots in the dark, hoping they weren’t going to be so fundamentally altering that he’d be risking himself in the mutation process.

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  , the benefits of mutations largely outweighed the negatives, but he also knew there were certain Ant Classes with extremely specific mutations that could severely change a person’s biology to the point of death—they didn’t have the prerequisite attribute levels to survive the mutation, of course.

  Looking around the walls, he warped left and right and up and even further up as he searched the shelves with his fingertips, careful to tread lightly across the wooden floorboards. He wasn’t a Silver Ant Scout specifically trained to be fleet-footed, but the village outside was quiet; he wanted to protect that tranquillity.

  And, while he may not know how to read, he generally knew the shapes of the letters he was looking for. A slightly curly, aesthetic font was the empire’s letters of choice—it took him a while before he found a particular section of the wall, on the second floor, where all the letters on the rugged leather spines were ones he recognised.

  Tentatively, he plucked ten, twenty, thirty of them out of the shelves and warped them down to the square table underneath the dome, in the centre of the atrium. Moonlight was brightest there, and there were already chairs around it. Once he had six stacks of five books all sprawled out across the table, he drew a chair back and plopped himself down, picking out one at random from the top of the stack.

  He threw the cover open.

  He turned to the first page.

  And he stared at the tiny black inkblots, scribbled line after line in densely packed blocks and sections.

  He flipped to the second page.

  He flipped to the third page.

  He flipped through the hundred or so pages, scanning each one only very briefly, and then reached the end of the book.

  It didn’t happen very often, but whenever the General held mission briefings for his small Bullet Ant Battalion, he’d lay down charcoal drawings onto a table for ease of visualisation. Those drawings would range from the rough shape of their enemies and the layout of their underground brood nest—being able to perfectly memorise those drawings was partly how he’d trained his eyes to be the best in his battalion—but one thing he’d found interesting was how the General would always write small numbers under every picture. Numbers like ‘two hundred’ under ‘Boreus’ meant there’d be two hundred Boreus, ‘five’ under ‘fork’ meant they had to travel down the fifth tunnel in a fork, so on and so forth.

  All of his fellow Bullet Ant Soldiers had learned how to read numbers that way, and it beyond simple to grasp, so he’d assumed all books would have lots of pictures to accompany the difficult words.

  He plucked seven more books off the stacks and flipped through them, lips curling when he realised most—if not all of them—didn’t have a single picture or drawing behind the cover. there were crests and insignias on the cover itself, but then those ones wouldn’t have a title at all.

  Rubbing his eyes and tilting his head back, he pushed the books away and slumped against his chair.

  Was this already the end of his reading journey?

  Was he just going to have to shoot blindly in the dark whenever it came to unlocking a mutation?

  His vibrational senses and perception level were both lacking. He bolted upright in his chair, feeling like he’d just had his ear torn off from how Ninmah had whispered into his ear. She let out something halfway between a yawn and a laugh as she rubbed her eyes, pushing a braided lock of hair out of her face. It was only when she stepped back and he turned around that he noticed she was wearing a white nightgown fit for bed, under the moonlight; there was no way she’d warped in from outside wearing something as thin as that, even if her inorganic body meant she probably felt little to no cold.

  Smiling, she patted his head in a conciliatory manner.

  While she sat on the table and kicked her legs back and forth, humming to show her surprise at seeing him at this hour of the night, he looked slowly around and felt he understood a about what she meant. He didn’t need to be close to the shelves to tell. The library smelled like earth and mildew, fresh with a small, small undercurrent of salt in the air. It wasn’t exactly warm here, but it wasn’t cold, either.

  It felt lived-in, and it felt just right—a grand little library that belonged only to one child, looking over the rest of the village from atop a mound of snow.

  she said, keeping her voice cool and controlled as he kept on looking around.

  “...”

  He’d half a mind to ask if that was how only she learned how to speak his Attini tongue, but before he could do so, she noticed the stacks of books she was sitting in front of. Her eyes glazed over the covers with a look of knowing, with an air of effortlessness from doing something she'd spent her entire life doing; she spared no time at all picking up the first book he'd attempted to read, looking back and forth between him and the first page.

  she said, warping away and tossing a few snack worms down from the third floor railings as she did.

  He shook his head as she warped back down, taking a seat on the chair opposite of him. A mischievous, teasing glint shone in her eyes as she must've considered making fun of him—she'd been doing that a lot more recently—but she decided against it as she opened her mouth, opting instead to pull his book closer while pushing her snowboard into the centre of the table.

  For a while, neither of them said anything as both their hands worked their own tasks. He was busy chewing up the snack worms on the table, and she was busy twirling her fingers around on her snowboard. It wasn't the first time he'd seen the writing tool; the empire’s far northeastern regions had something similar called a ‘sandboard’, where it was one rectangular wooden frame filled with sand that children could practise their handwriting on. He'd never touched one himself, but he imagined writing or drawing in the snow would be considerably colder.

  She made it look so easy, though. With growing enthusiasm, she licked her lips as she looked back and forth between the page and her snowboard, putting as much detail as she could down on… the landscape. She was drawing some sort of landscape. He recognized what seemed to be a dense wall of trees, swamps filled with lumps of moss beneath the trees, and a giant rectangular pyramid with the tip lopped off at the centre of it all—by the time she pushed her snowboard forward and beamed at him, he'd already figured out what she was drawing minutes ago.

  she asked.

  He nodded curtly, and it was about the most apt response he could give to someone asking if the Attini Empire Capital was real. While Ninmah’s eyes sparkled and she wiped her snowboard clean, twirling another landscape into existence, he wondered if all of the pages were just descriptions upon descriptions of places in the empire—if that was the case, maybe he learn how to read after all.

  While she kept shoving her snowboard forward to show off her drawings, grinning from ear to ear, he stole glances at the words she was getting her descriptions from.

  Maybe it was a mistake to give her so much information about himself, but he'd been in Immanu for two months now, and apart from Ninmah, nobody else seemed even half as curious about the surface world as she was. Even if she knew he was from the empire, she probably wouldn't tell anyone… nor would anyone care. Besides, he was the one who'd handpicked the books she was reading from right now; he'd all but admitted he could speak and read the letters from this particular tongue himself.

  If he ever had a ‘cover’ to begin with, it was now completely blown.

  So he nodded slowly, watching her lean forward and place her elbows on the table, propping up her cheeks as she did. Her eyelids drooped as she resumed her sad, almost sleepy expression at the very start—was she disinterested in his basic replies, or was she actually angry he'd basically broken into her house in the middle of the night?

  Maybe he could salvage this by giving her snack worms. He could probably find a few wriggling out in the snow right now–

  she asked.

  He sensed it was a request he could turn down as she pushed her snowboard forward, tapping idly on the wooden frame.

  Then she stole a peek at him, eyes twinkling with amusement.

  … He didn't know how to read, he didn’t know how to write, and he most certainly didn’t know how to draw.

  Still, he pulled her board close and poked the snow with his finger, finding it a lot less cold than he'd thought.

  He supposed… he have something he wanted to draw about himself.

  follow/rating/review! Every little bit of feedback helps me and this story grow, and if it reaches top seven, I'll upload an extra chapter to celebrate it reaching front page!

  Discord server with over three hundred members! I'll see you all tomorrow for chapter eighteen~