402: Chapter 402 A cauldron and an insect, a fleeting dream!

Everyone looked at the notification panel that appeared simultaneously in their field of vision, revealing excited expressions.

Many people opened their backpacks and looked at the high-level supply crates, which emitted a golden halo, that had been distributed to their inventory slots.

Lin Xiao glanced at the [Remembrance Stone] in his backpack slot, but chose not to check it immediately, intending to make arrangements after returning to his territory.

Just at this moment, Little Red's call came from his mind.

He subconsciously turned his head. As his gaze touched a certain direction in the depths of the Imperial Palace ruins, the surrounding scene was suddenly, without him knowing when, replaced by that familiar Royal Court ruins.

The octagonal wishing well was still embedded in the ground, but there was no sign of the red Scarab Beetle around it.

Little Red was crawling on the stone pillar next to the wishing well.

It had undergone tremendous changes at this moment.

Its mountain-like, massive body had shrunk to only the size of a palm.

In this war, it had sacrificed all its red offspring and actively Dispelled the energy within its body, cutting off the final energy supply for the Black Scarab swarm.

It flew onto Lin Xiao's shoulder, its six tiny insect limbs gently gripping the edge of his armor, its antennae drooping, and its golden-red elytra covered in fine cracks.

"Are you okay?" Lin Xiao asked.

"I feel so sleepy, I want to sleep..."

Little Red wiped its face with its forelimbs, its voice sounding somewhat weak.

Lin Xiao turned his head, looking at the small creature curled up on his shoulder, and softened his voice, "Why did Sikong Lie mutate into the Insect Race?"

Little Red's antennae flickered slightly, as if sorting through an extremely long and chaotic Remembrance, and then it waved its two small forelimbs, and the images that had originally been frozen in the depths of the Royal Court ruins began to flow.

At first, there was some strange noise and screen jitter, before it returned to normal.

Heze was initially just an ignored, desolate wilderness on the plains.

The ancestors of the Sikong clan came to this barren land and established the first village.

Later, someone discovered an object shaped like a bronze tripod in some underground ruins, along with a creature that looked like a beetle.

That strange bronze tripod was very magical; as long as you made a wish to it and put items into it, you could obtain more supplies.

The beetle was also no ordinary creature; its hard elytra could be crafted into a material called magic element stone, which could intensify the power of all magical creations.

From then on, the one tripod and one insect became the foundation for the village's development.

From village to town, and then to a small city, the settlement gradually expanded, and more and more refugees were attracted to it.

The Sikong clan began to constantly make wishes to the bronze tripod, obtaining astonishing supplies, and used these supplies to establish a powerful Heze Kingdom on the Heze plains.

But shortly after the founding of the Heze Kingdom, the bronze tripod stopped working.

This matter caused the Sikong clan extreme panic, and they tried for decades but failed to restore its effectiveness.

But it didn't matter; Heze still had the Scarab Beetle.

The royal family began hiring commoners to raise Scarab Beetle in large quantities, exporting the magic element stone made from their elytra to other countries.

magic element stone was already a hot commodity on this continent, so Heze's prosperity continued for another few thousand years.

During this period, empires constantly invaded, but the Heze Royal Family learned Rune Array power from somewhere, using it to resist foreign enemies and even turn around to attack those surrounding countries that did not submit.

Through constant conquest, the territory of the Heze Kingdom grew larger and larger, and the population grew explosively.

But with the continuous expansion of the scale of Scarab Beetle farming, anomalies began to appear.

The Scarab Beetle began to run rampant, eroding most of the resources on the ground, and eventually went extinct due to food shortages.

The commoners also suffered as a result, and the farmland and pastures on the ground were devoured by the Insect Swarm.

As the Heze Royal Family, the descendants of the Sikong clan naturally would not let the Scarab Beetle truly go extinct.

Coincidentally, Yimu appeared.

A commoner girl born with special sensing abilities was selected to enter the Imperial Palace and became a Magic User, and later led the forbidden area theft incident many years later.

The subsequent events became familiar.

The Scarab Beetle obtained through wishing ate everything on the ground, including the people of Heze.

The million surviving commoners gathered together and, at any cost, attacked the Cloud Palace, wanting to overthrow the rule of the Sikong clan.

And the day the Royal Court fell was the time when the Scarab Beetle went completely out of control.

The last ruler of Heze, Sikong Lie, took the remaining insect eggs from the treasury before retreating, and also intended to take the bronze tripod to re-establish the kingdom elsewhere, allowing the glory of Heze to last forever.

As a result, he accidentally fell into the bronze tripod.

The bronze tripod received Sikong Lie's wish:

He did not want to die.

He wanted to make Heze great again.

He wanted the Scarab Beetle, which was the pillar industry of the country, to be immortal and bring him endless wealth.

Unexpectedly, the bronze tripod kneaded these wishes together.

Fusing Sikong Lie with the Scarab Beetle that possessed [Resurrection] and [Split].

When this greedy ruler crawled out of the tripod, his body had already undergone eerie changes.

He became the first individual of the second generation of Scarab Beetle.

But because of the lack of energy, he could only barely maintain his human form.

However, the will of the Insect Swarm began to influence him.

To embrace the Insect Swarm, to live immortally, one must hatch and metamorphose.

Sikong Lie intercepted all the royal family members who were preparing to evacuate, and used force to compel them to build a temple with multiple protective mechanisms in the center of the desert.

He used the name of a safe zone to persuade the rioters to surrender, tricking them into the Wind Wall.

On the surface, he told them that as long as they prayed, they could obtain everything needed to survive, but in reality, he was absorbing the life force of these people to provide nutrients for his own hatching.

At the same time, he established a barrier covering the entire desert through the Rune Array, making it impossible for anyone who entered the Heze territory to leave, becoming his endless food supply.

This is the story of the Heze King, Sikong Lie.

Little Red's antennae drooped.

Those scenes of Remembrance, which carried an old color and flowed slowly like faded film, dissipated into the air one by one.

Everything around returned to the familiar depths of the Royal Court ruins.

The human and the insect were silent for a while, with only the wailing sound of the cold wind blowing over the high ruins filling the void.

"It's just that, due to the different sources of absorbed energy, Sikong Lie was never able to enter a true state of metamorphosis."

Little Red's voice sounded intermittently, fading in and out as if the signal were being interfered with.

It lay on Lin Xiao's shoulder, its pair of dim antennae gently rubbing against the edge of his armor.

Lin Xiao turned his head to look at the small insect on his shoulder and asked the final question: "Since the Black Scarab has already broken free from your control, why do they still attack the temple?"

"This is all my fault."

Little Red's tone carried obvious annoyance, and it folded its elytra, shrinking itself even smaller.

"At that time, I sensed a threat from the temple, so I dispatched many small insects to clear this place.

But unexpectedly, under the influence of the temple's barrier, their thinking gradually became alienated; not only did they break free from my control, but they also spontaneously gave birth to a new will over these past hundred years.

Out of survival instinct, they even began to enthrone their own new emperor!"

Lin Xiao nodded slightly: "So, they want to enthrone Sikong Lie as the new emperor?"

"Of course not."

Little Red responded without any hesitation, "Even if Sikong Lie mutated into an insect, to our Insect Race, he is still a heretic.

No matter how rebellious the small insects are, they will never obey his will. They want to enthrone a new individual that mutated from the Insect Swarm itself, not a human monarch who was forcibly stitched into the Insect Race's genes by the bronze tripod."

It caught its breath and continued.

Its tone carried a hint of mockery belonging to a Superior Being: "This is perhaps also the thing Sikong Lie least expected. He spent over a hundred years trapped under the core of the temple, sacrificing tens of thousands of lives to accumulate energy, yet he was never able to truly control any Insect Swarm.

Otherwise, he would have already swept across the entire desert and built his so-called eternal empire.

The Black Scarab swarm was just using the temple's barrier as cover, secretly accumulating power in the depths of the underground, waiting for the moment the new emperor takes shape.

Sikong Lie thought he was nurturing the Insect Swarm, but in reality, the Insect Swarm was just borrowing his nest to hatch its own king!"