I Became an Ant Lord, So I Built a Hive Full of Beauties-Chapter 219: Quite Fair well

---

A faint, appreciative curl touched Akayoroi’s lips. "Very well. I will handle him when rites are done."

"Don’t waste resources," Kai said. "If he’s useless to you, bury him with the muck."

She nodded once. "Today we mourn. Tonight, me and my sister will choose our road."

He dipped his head, dark eyes steady on hers. "Fair."

And with that single word, an unspoken pact settled between them. It was quiet as falling ash which resided as stone.

Before the burial rites began, Kai descended alone into the lower tunnels— a quiet, sloped passage that wound beneath the mourning caverns like the root of a forgotten vein. The air here was heavier. Thicker. Not just with moisture, but with the weight of suffering too fresh to name.

The torch flame moss on the walls gave off a pale gold glow, enough to see by but dim enough to respect the resting.

Inside the infirmary hollow, four makeshift cradles had been carved into the warm clay. The scent of resin and blood lingered faintly in the air. It was masked only slightly by crushed healing bark boiled earlier that day. Second Xxx sat near the center, slowly fanning the room with a leaf to circulate the heat and keep the air moving. She didn’t look up when Kai entered. She simply kept working.

Vel crouched over one of the injured—an assassin scout whose carapace bore deep claw gashes across her abdomen. Her breathing came in shallow hiccups, legs twitching as venom still surged weakly through her internal system. Kai’s eyes tracked the black veins pulsing along her thorax—slowly receding, but not gone.

"She was the one who first led the counter-flank," Vel murmured without turning. "She took a swipe which was aimed at Sha."

Kai knelt beside her, resting one palm lightly on the bed of moss she lay upon. The heat was steady—engineered through buried lava-fibers and natural insulation. Functional. But not comforting.

The other three survivors lay asleep, tucked under layered moss blankets woven with threads of inner chamber silk. One had lost an antenna. Another had a fractured limb bound in soft sap-bark. The third... just shivered beneath her wrap, though no fever took her. Sometimes the wounds weren’t always visible.

Kai rose and stepped toward the center of the chamber where a small cracked drone egg rested atop a clay pedestal. It glowed faintly—dull orange, with tiny pulses of warmth radiating from its core like the heartbeat of a sleeping ember. The egg was damaged, its shell splintered on one side as if life had almost pushed through, but retreated.

He laid his hand on it gently. The warmth greeted him. Still alive. Fragile. Waiting.

His breath steadied. He whispered, as much to the egg as to himself, "You don’t belong in a grave."

Then louder, he said, "Keep it stable."

Vel straightened immediately, her antennae stiffening. Her expression flickered from exhaustion to purpose.

"If you all decide to join my mountain," Kai added, "I will help you all to hatch it, all the eggs that survived. Let it grow near these four. Its pheromones might soothe them... maybe remind them why they survived."

Vel bowed—not ceremonially, but with sharp, instinctual respect. Her voice was quiet but sure. "Thank you for your concern. Our queen will give you an answer soon."

She didn’t question the logic. Didn’t ask if a half-cracked egg could survive without a queen’s warmth or male ant essence. She only listened. Grief had hollowed out her doubt, leaving only obedience and something near to reverence.

Kai turned his gaze to the sleeping scouts once more. A faint frown tugged at his mouth. "If the queen asks for me..." he began, then stopped himself. "I am going outside, sent Azhara to look for me when the funeral begins."

"Okay!" Vel said, "I will also tell them (the four injured ants). You came. You remembered them. When they wake up."

He nodded once and turned to leave.

Behind him, the rhythmic click of fanning resumed. The heat beat on. And four warriors dreamed in silence beneath the mountain’s heart. They were wounded, but not forgotten.

Outside, the canopy of the forest blushed gold beneath the sun. Shafts of filtered light poured between the leaves in slanted columns, catching on drifting motes of pollen and dust. The wind barely stirred, as if the world itself held its breath. Kai just checks the surrounding areas.

An hour later...

The tunnel walls glistened with faint green bioluminescence, casting mottled shadows over the solemn procession below. Kai stood at the edge of the burial hollow, chin lifted high, watching in silence as Akayoroi and her assassins completed the rites for the forty-one sisters who would never live again.

He didn’t interrupt. He couldn’t. It was his first time seeing an ant ritual. The air belonged only to the dead.

Below, the stone-floor had been carved with careful mandible-work into shallow grave niches. Moss and woven fungi mats had been laid gently underneath each body. One by one, the corpses were lowered with reverence. Each sister had her own space. Her own grave. Her own story.

Azhara’s hair tied back and sweat lining her temples from heat, as she helped Akayoroi lift a body wrapped in silk bindings. She moved differently today. No laughter. No teasing. No inappropriate comments. Just quiet movements. Deliberate service.

She knelt beside Sha and Vel, handing them obsidian stones. The two ant warriors hummed softly, a resonance that echoed in Kai’s chest. With each hum, a faint red glyph bloomed on the stone. Protective markers to ward off scavengers, diggers, or worse.

Naaro stood on a raised platform of bone, her mandibles twitching rhythmically as she struck a pair of carved amber rods together.

Clack. Clack. Clack.

The sound echoed slowly and mournfully like a heartbeat made of memory. The Farewell Knell.

Kai had never heard it before. Not truly. But something in the cadence—something buried in his Monarch soul—knew what it meant.

Each clack said a name. Each pause, a life lost. Each rhythm, a grief carried by the hive.

Follow current novels on (f)reew𝒆bnovel