Theo left the training and immediately headed to the carriage, where Warren drove them to the section of the slime forest inhabited by the ants.

"Here we are," Theo said, jumping out of the carriage.

Without saying another word, he briskly moved forward. Before he knew it, he stood in front of the ant colony.

A grin spread across his face as he saw a large anthill rising from the ground.

He crouched and touched the anthill’s surface. It had a rough exterior, like clay that had once been made wet and left to harden.

From one of the nearby holes, a pair of glowing antennae emerged, followed by the rest of an ant.

Theo didn’t move his hand, but the shock on his face was palpable. Even Clara and Elias, unable to see his expression clearly, could feel the pressure radiating from him.

The ant’s head and mandibles were enormous—twice the size of its body, which was already larger compared to a usual ant.

The ant quickly skittered toward Theo’s hand and climbed onto it.

Theo lifted his hand, observing closely. The ant wasn’t just as large as his whole palm, which had increased in size with his age, but also reached the start of the palm.

But that wasn’t the only shocking aspect about it. The creature was so broad that it looked like a literal miniature tank.

The greyish, ground colored carapace gave off a faint shine from the side, with a rocky structure through its center. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

The ant raised its mandibles. At that moment, Theo calmly moved his other hand and placed his index finger between the mandibles to see just how much force it could exert.

Clara and Elias glanced over at his hand at the worst possible moment—only to see Theo casually holding his finger between the massive mandibles of the giant ant.

Theo felt a prickling sensation as the mandibles shifted slightly, even though the ant queen was trying to tell him that it wasn’t applying any force.

He pulled his finger back and picked up a small dry twig from the ground.

Carefully, he placed it between the big ant’s mandibles. It almost felt like the ant queen was watching. The moment the twig came close, the mandibles snapped shut in a clean, precise motion, breaking the twig into two halves.

Theo’s eyes widened in even more shock.

"It’s not just the power that has increased... the cut was clean," he muttered out loud, staring at the broken twig that was left in his hand.

The most he had expected would happen was that mandibles would crush the twig, maybe crack it, leaving the fiber still connecting the two halves together, but it wouldn’t break completely.

But this... this was different. The mandibles had obliterated that stick. It had been completely snapped in two, as if sliced by a blade.

And it wasn’t just one.

He noticed many more heads began to emerge, each having the same terrifying mandibles. The attendants looked on, their faces turning pale in horror at the sight of the growing ant hill.

"If someone were to fall on this bump..." Elias began, but the thought alone sent a shiver down his spine before he could even finish the sentence.

"That would definitely do some serious damage. These guys have acid in their bites too," Theo muttered casually. He gave a light boop on the mandibles of the ant before setting it back on the anthill.

"Alright, give me some space for five minutes," Theo said, lowering himself to the ground to sit.

Closing his eyes, he commanded, ’Alright, let me see how the colony looks.’

The moment he said that, two camera-like visions formed in front of his eyes, but since his eyes were closed, they only appeared in his mind.

The first screen showed a vast chamber—its ceiling too high for Theo to even fully perceive through the ant’s vision. Below, the heart of the colony thrived.

The brood numbered in the hundreds, perhaps thousands. They were arranged in rows, some even stacked atop one another.

At first, Theo couldn’t tell if the brood had grown any larger since the ants which were tending to it seemed the same size.

But when he spotted one of the large mandible ants near the brood, nearly the same size, Theo realized the brood had indeed grown significantly.

The next vision revealed another chamber, lined with dozens of spherical objects placed at equal distances all around the chamber.

There were around fifty of them, and given the chamber’s size, he could tell their size was staggering. Theo could swear the core looked eerily similar to a moss slime’s core.

As that thought crossed his mind, a faint emotion flowed through his bond with the ant queen.

’You want to show me something else... sure,’ Theo thought.

The two screens vanished, replaced by a single one.

This time, Theo could tell they were images from memories instead of a live ant’s vision.

In the vision, a gigantic moss slime loomed near the colony, gigantic from an ant’s perspective.

The next image showed it shifting its body and sealing the entrance the ants used to access the surface.

Then, Theo saw another image of the moss slime elongating its body downward into the tunnels.

It came across an ant and rapidly increased its slime output, engulfing the ant completely. The ant was trapped, drowning.

But before the slime could move out, several burrower ants with massive mandibles rushed in. They snapped at the slime from the multiple points, forcing it to move back. A portion of its slimy body was cut off and left behind as a single droplet.

Inside that single droplet... was the trapped ant.

The other ants swarmed in, trying their best to suck the slime away bit by bit until, eventually, the trapped nat was freed.

That day marked a first for them.

For the first time, the ants tasted the slime of the moss slime, not the cores Theo usually provided but the raw substance itself.

With the help of the worker ant’s secondary stomachs, the ant queen also sampled it.

That was when it realized something.

The slime was rich in nutrients, far more beneficial for the ants than expected, especially for the brood and the newborns.

And from that day on, their hunt for the slime became relentless... until the ant queen came up with a far more effective plan.