Cataclysm: Undead Dragons and Zero Empire

Psychic power is the vanguard in Lin Zimo's hands, like a nail driven into a corrupted planet.

The entire planet, after being bombarded by orbit, revealed its morphed strata, which were displayed in exquisite detail before Lin Ziming's eyes through the penetration of psionic energy.

Just as a surface civilization launching a satellite chain to map its home planet is like a painter completing a static landscape painting, Lin Ziming's mapping of a planet is like an engineer using instruments to scan it into a model.

He completed modeling the celestial body before even reaching the planet's orbit. A massive stream of data surged through the psionic network, as if the planet had been packaged into a pure information entity that could be browsed.

Now, Lin Ziming manipulates a virtual sphere at will, as if the creator were looking down upon the human world he created, with the fate of every creation in sight.

Under the twilight sky, spore dust filled the air, and pieces of eyeball-shaped flesh from within the collapsed mountain were stretching out their muscles and hooking into the earth, attempting to stabilize their nest structure under the bombardment.

The low-lying hills on the planet's surface have been leveled, as if a wrinkled handkerchief had been neatly folded, and all the soil is of uniform density, appearing as smooth as a mirror when viewed from space.

The mountains are towering and the peaks are steep. These are the graceful curves that should belong to Mother Planet. Even with bare rocks and no lush forests, they are still a beautiful sight.

However, the swarm of killing bees transformed this home, turning all the plants into scorched, decaying earth, and exposing the planet's curves to the starlight, leaving it bare as if painted but unclothed during orbital bombardment.

The swarm of killer bees has terraformed the planet so thoroughly that the entire water cycle is utilized. Wherever rainwater and streams flow, various tiny vertical structures, like roof tiles, actively guide the water cycle into the earth's strata.

The ground is solidified, and the numerous honeycomb-like structures act as excellent fibrous conduits. Water enters the soil surface as if falling on a lotus leaf, some of it enters the earth and returns to the ocean through underground conduits and rock deposition, while the rest is received by flesh-and-blood-like evaporation towers, accelerating the evaporation process of water vapor returning to the atmosphere.

This highly efficient energy cycle relies on a network of tunnels that runs through the Earth's crust. It is an example of how the swarm of killer bees develops planets. All the daughter bodies can absorb nutrients from the outside world at any time and work day and night for long periods of time until their designed lifespan ends. Then they are quickly decomposed and digested, and the matter is put back into the cycle network.

The mountain was filled with writhing clumps of flesh and blood, with organic matter supplying energy within it. Thick blood vessels hung densely on the festering, decaying flesh, like aerial roots hanging down from a banyan tree.

Like the undulating waves, the fibrous structure is constantly deforming, just as in ancient times humans used logs to move boulders, transporting massive organic matter to the tunnel entrance in the abyss.

The marine quantum particles rapidly moved through these tunnels, appearing so small amidst the mass of flesh and blood, like animals running at the foot of a mountain peak, as they corrected the cancerous tumors caused by their massive proliferation.

Blood contaminated with high levels of radiation surged between the pipes, like concentrated acid flowing in an animal's veins. When it was blasted apart by artillery fire from the sky, the translucent liquid was exposed to the air and quickly charred and turned black, hissing as it did so.

These tunnels extend throughout the earth's strata, resembling spines crawling across the land. Each node is active with biological signal pulses, and a round, bullet-shaped brain-like central nervous system transmits the queen's commands within the nodes.

At the ribs extending from the "spines," tumor-like structures are densely distributed. These simply differentiated biological tissues are extracting minerals and organic matter from the soil and transporting them to the tunnel network.

Nests stood firm on the "spine," their sharp, radiating chitinous shells cracking in the gunfire, sheltering the offspring that kept pouring out of the tunnels.

The planetary mother is bleeding from her heart, and the orbital bombardment continues without pause, like a judgment brought down by heavenly fire. The strata are blasted open, spewing out magma that falls to the ground, setting the earth ablaze.

It felt like stepping back into the early days after the planet's birth, when things had just stabilized. Volcanic ash and toxic gases obscured the sky, and the nests built by the swarming bees were like isolated islands floating on a sea of ​​lava, gradually sinking.

The network of tunnels leading to the depths of the planet extends to the Queen's hiding place, an underground hive that resembles a radiating starfish clinging to the seabed, waving its tentacles.

A vast amount of chemical information permeates the network like mist, stimulating the flesh and blood vessels to writhe faster, transporting massive swarms of insects underground. This reproduction seems endless, producing countless offspring in a short period of time.

No matter how devastating the orbital bombardment is to the Earth's surface, this swarm of killing bees always manages to produce more swarms that rush into space; clearly, this tug-of-war has been going on for a long time.

This planet has been transformed into a giant insect hive, teeming with countless swarms. The selfless mother, whose womb flows with the blood of her offspring belonging to the swarms of predatory bees, nurtures the insect swarms, making them thrive with extremely tenacious vitality.

As the foundation's ambassador stated, the civilizations in this region are struggling against the swarming bees. Even if they manage to contain the swarms on planets instead of directly destroying celestial bodies, they still lack a way to completely resolve the problem of these tenacious enemies who are constantly reprocessing their swarms.

Evolution and reproduction are like an intertwined tree. The concept of swarming is the core of integrating the will of all offspring in the swarm of killing bees. It is a powerful weapon, but also a fatal weakness.

Lin Zimo reduced his speed to zero in planetary orbit. The fleet carrying out orbital bombardment around him sent communication signals to this uninvited guest, but without using psionic reverse engineering, Lin Zimo could not understand the languages ​​of these civilizations.

He ignored the fleet. The swarm of insects fighting in space had already sensed Lin Zimo's presence and even broke free from the control commands of the Hive Mind, rushing towards him recklessly before being strangled by the crossfire of carrier-based aircraft and ships.

Lin Ziming had finished observing the results of the Devouring Bees' transformation of this corrupted planet. Comparing them with the Zerg in his memory, he discovered that these bee swarms did indeed show traces of an intelligent civilization, even if it was an extinct one.

The Zerg, who once roamed the universe, were absolute natural disasters and ultimate predators. They would devour one vibrant planet after another before moving on to the next star system to continue plundering organic matter and biological genes.

Their devouring, reproduction, and evolution are endless; they never bother to transform planets into insect hives. This behavior is more like a civilization colonizing other star systems.

Lin Zimo channeled his psionic energy into the corrupted planet, powerfully penetrating the strata and devouring the insect hive network built by the swarm of bees, which had no resistance to this psionic energy.

The countless swarms of insects fell silent. The psionic wave was like a gust of wind blowing across a wheat field. They disconnected from the hive mind, so that the swarms on the surface died silently under the orbital bombardment, without any attempt to escape.

They awaited Lin Ziming's command, but this psionic energy did not carry instructions to the swarm; instead, it went straight to the deepest abyss, seizing the core of the insect hive network.

Lin Ziming dragged the beating planetary heart toward the surface, and the giant insect nest that was originally rooted in the strata was like a tree that had been uprooted.

Countless blood vessels and magma conduits shattered together, mixing into a pot of primordial hot soup. The strata surged like liquid, and the erupting strata material shot up like pillars carrying insect nests towards the sky.

Planetary hives that disregarded orbital bombardment were no more resilient than a weed uprooted from a field under this immense force.