Darius was pleased by the thoughtfulness of his two Branded Servants. It was true that he could likely achieve his task without the presence of a Queen Bug or even use his own Queen Bug as the mold, but having this would definitely make things smoother.

Darius then placed one of his fingers on the head of the bug in his hands and used one of his most nefarious Spirit element spell that he had personally designed, Soul Extraction. Immediately, an ethereal version of the Queen Bug was slowly pulled out from its head, the body it was coming from thrashing even greater as it screeched in primal agony, but it changed nothing.

Soon, the entire soul was dragged out, whereby Darius stored it in a special container for such existences. He then had his helpers, who were Guard Androids, prepare a set of equipment for him that he had long Transmuted for such purposes.

Darius then began to study and dissect the soul of the Queen bug as best as he could while Miranda recorded all the details and changes. There was the constant sound of agony-filled screeching in the entire city that would send chills down the back of even the most stoic man.

Nothing alive should ever have to make such a sound.

Eventually, the soul became a dead one and evaporated into ash, permanently eliminating the Queen Bug from existence. Darius was sure that not even true Lords could bring it back to life, but maybe Vena could.

Whatever the case, he was pleased by his findings, as he had discovered a unique soulwave that the bug seemed to possess. Miranda had analyzed this wave and even used it to tap into the bugcloud of Darius' own bugs.

However, he could only tap in and not decode the data there or upload data as well, but Darius figured that would be easy to solve once he got more samples. In the next two days, another Queen Bug was sent back by his two hardworking Branded Servants, pleasing Darius greatly for their initiative.

This time, he specifically had the Queen Bug lay some eggs after feeding it a little, and then monitored the communication between the queen and the bugs beneath her to decode their datastream.

It took quite a while because Darius had to continually change the kind of stimuli given to the entire group to see how they interacted within the bugcloud due to different things happening to them on a daily.

By the end of the week, Miranda had been able to decode the unique language of the bugs, so Darius could 'hear' what they were saying. Apparently, the Queen Bug was pushing her descendants to grow stronger so they could kill him and feast on his flesh.

Darius expected no less from such a race. He then moved onto stage 3, which was understanding how information was stored and received. Stage one was understanding how to access the bugcloud basically, while stage 2 was understanding the two-way communication between the queen bug and her descendants or descendants to descendants.

Successfully completing stage 3 would allow Darius to directly upload information to the bugcloud, like fighting techniques, general knowledge, and spells. It was an important milestone in hopefully expanding the power of his own bugs so they would not have to be foolishly genocide like before.

For this, it took Miranda almost 2 weeks, in which Darius received three more Queen Bugs. Whatever Gunner and Xela were doing down there, it sure as hell was efficient.

Darius and Miranda eventually cracked the code and were able to understand the unique method of storage that the bugcloud had. In truth, the bugcloud was more of a spiritual thing than metaphysical, and existed within each bug but separately of them too.

After this, Darius moved onto stage 4, which was understanding inter-bug communication. Essentially, he was checking how different bigs from different hives communicated across different bugclouds.

Since he had about 4 different queens of different classes, he was able to complete this sooner than before as Miranda already understood their 'language', just not how they managed to turn their 'intranet' to an 'internet'.

It might not seem necessary for the spell Darius was going to create, and that was true, but he felt like it might have some use in the future if things went awry.

After all of this was completed, he then put these bugs aside as he began forming the spell. The goal of the spell was to have all bugs within a 100-meter range develop an infectious illness that weakened through the spread of spiritual or soul contact.

It wouldn't kill, but weaken them by a large margin. Darius could upgrade the spell with Skill Points to make it more potent, but that was for later. Right now, he kept things simple and concise so it would not become a problem later on.

Because he and Miranda were able to decode so much about the souls of bugs, they had an easy time in both the Design and Experimentation stages. When it was time to test using the Verification stage, they were pleased to see that it immediately took hold of one of the Queen Bugs they possessed.

The curse immediately spread throughout its own hive, but did not harm any of the other queens. However, the moment they were forced to communicate with each other, it instantly spread to the other hives at once.

Even when it was done by a lower bug to a lower bug, it still infected the entire hive instantly, meaning that they didn't have to superficially target queens, but any bug could implicate its entire 'family'.

Pleased with its potency, Darius completed the Spell and named it Insect Soul Curse, then penned it down. After doing so, he naturally statically transmuted it to perfection before learning it using the Supreme System.

[Insect Soul Curse - Level 1 Spell

Grade: Intermediate

Cost: 20 MP

Description: Plant a curse of weakening on any member of the Insect Race that afflicts them through the soul. This weakens them by 25% for 3 days and it extremely contagious.]

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Author's Note: I'm sure you've all noticed the fluctuating release schedule of Darius Supreme in recent days. It became worse after I got sick a while back too.

Well, the reason is because writing 5k words a day isn't easy for me in particular. It not even just the quality, but the fact that it's spread across two different stories.

It seriously throws me on a loop, especially when one of them became intense while the other is still building up, or when one requires technical details like levels, stats, and skills and the other is focused on dialogue and the like.

Because I have to do this every day, it's like writing two different exams on the same day, separate by mere hours of each other... every single day.

I'll try my best to maintain a schedule, but somedays, I just end up behind my computer, just unsure of what to do next and which to write first.