Although System had discovered that Aura was a female butterfly, Aura's personality hadn't changed much, so System would still treat him as a male.

  Aura woke up after being unconscious for a day and night. Just like before, he still provoked System, and seemed intent on getting System to kill him.

  Of course, System wouldn't kill Aura. Instead, he told him that there was a stream a few dozen meters away. Aura could go commit suicide by jumping into the water.

  Aura vowed to crawl out of the nest and die, but nearly an hour after he'd left the nest, he quietly crawled back inside.

  Because the ants were already familiar with the smell of Aura's chrysalis, the returning Aura wasn't given any trouble by the worker ants standing guard outside the nest.

  Aura crawled back to the chamber where he'd been staying, but before going inside, he deliberately found System and gave him an expnation.

  According to Aura, the weather outside was a bit hot, and he really didn't want to crawl so far under the scorching sun, so he pnned to die at night.

  However, when night time rolled around, Aura had already fallen asleep in his chamber again. He seemed to have no further intention of seeking death.

  The deformed butterfly had truly wanted to die, but when the moment of his death had arrived, he'd found that he couldn't go through with it.

  From then on, the tentacle monster and the deformed butterfly tacitly stopped talking about seeking death.

  System discovered that Aura didn't seem to need to eat. After his failed attempt to jump into the river, Aura just stayed in his chamber all day, surviving only by absorbing the energy floating in the air.

  Although it was obviously impossible to find the frost energy that was most suitable for Aura in the grassnd, he still managed to survive.

  Apart from sleeping, Aura only occasionally went to visit Bck's pupa. He stood and stared at it frequently for some unknown reason.

  Then, just when System thought that Aura would stay in his chamber like this for the rest of his life, Shava's three gold coins and favorite translucent stone went missing. Relying on her sense of smell, she managed to track down her favorite things, only to find the stolen goods buried beneath the soil in Aura's chamber.

  It turned out that Aura had used his frost energy to create an exquisite ice crystal box and stored the gold coins and translucent stone inside.

  Dragons were naturally inclined to like collecting treasures. Whether it was Shava's gold coins or her shiny stone, both were fatally attractive to them. Even if Aura had turned into a butterfly and lost most of his memories, some of his original dragon instincts hadn't changed.

  System thought that Aura's theft of Shava's things this time would cause a conflict between the two of them, but to his surprise, nothing happened.

  Aura acted indifferently when he was caught and simply returned the stolen goods to Shava. According to him, he didn't like these things at all. He'd just borrowed them to take a look, and he would never lower his status to compete with these garbage insects for some gold coins and a stone.

  Aura easily returned the treasures to Shava along with the treasure chest made of ice.

  However, not even a full day ter, Shava's treasures went missing again, and it was still Aura who had done it...

  ...

  In this way, stealing Shava's treasures became Aura's daily routine. No matter where Shava hid them, as long as she didn't carry them with her, her treasures would disappear.

  Each time Shava asked Aura to return them, he gave the treasures back to her like they were garbage.

  Aura's personality had also changed in recent days. Instead of exuding grief and anger all the time and actively seeking death, his current state was one where he was basically only eating and waiting to die.

  After the first two days, Aura had started eating food. He'd gone from eating nothing to drinking some of the dew that condensed on the grass each morning. Every time Aura came back in after going outside to drink dew, he would be sending out annoyed emotions. But as soon as he saw System, Aura would pretend to be indifferent.

  He really regretted not spreading his wings at that time.

  ...

  After System discovered that Aura wasn't doing anything to negatively affect his ant subjects, he didn't pay the butterfly any further attention.

  Because of Bck's pupation, System suddenly had a lot more work to do in the nest.

  He had to frequently inspect Excavator's progress at digging the tunnel and personally assign the foraging work of many worker ants and worker ant knights.

  Even the worker ant knights who had pupated a second time weren't very intelligent, and there would always be small things that deyed their foraging progress.

  For example, if the collected food wasn't one that the ants were already familiar with, and they didn't know how to cssify it or which chamber to pce it in, the ants would simply set the food aside and stop working.

  Also, if the ants couldn't remember the order they had lined up in when they'd gone outside, they wouldn't be able to travel smoothly.

  While System's ant subjects had developed slightly higher intelligence than ordinary ants, they also seemed to have developed obsessive-compulsive disorder. They frequently obsessed over inexplicable little details, resulting in even more work for System.

  Every day, he and Shava would check whether there were ratmen around, check the status of the queen and the other ant pupae, take his son Meatball out for a walk, and catch some insects for research and experiments...

  After counting his ant subjects the previous day, System had discovered that a common worker ant had gone missing.

  His [Intuition] had given him an inexplicable feeling at that time. He sensed that his ant subject had likely died in an accident while she'd been outside, and she had also been dead for more than one day.

  If Bck wasn't undergoing pupation, she would have informed him about this immediately.

  System really couldn't imagine how busy he would be if his right-hand ant Bck really died.

  ...

  However, no matter how busy System's life had been in recent days, both the size of the nest and the food stored by his ant subjects had been increasing little by little.

  Three days earlier, System had once again found his very good friend, a dark green slime, the scavenger from the wild that selflessly offered pieces of its own body without asking for anything in return.

  Today, System, who had finally made sufficient preparations, was officially going to activate his [Morph] talent. He had his tentacles wrapped around Meatball's body. Actually, he and Meatball had their tentacles wrapped around each other.

  After his growth in recent days, Meatball's body had increased in diameter to nearly thirty centimeters, and he wasn't very little anymore. His current size wasn't much different from System's.

  System used [Perception] to sense the [Morph] ability in Meatball's body and began using [Insect Ability Activation] to activate the ability in his own bloodline.

  It went almost exactly as he'd imagined. A few hours ter, when only twenty percent of System's level 15 experience bar was left, notification sounds from his [Tools Menu] began chiming one after another.

  ...

  Ding! You acquired the Special Talent [Morph]!

  Ding! You acquired the Derived Skill [Tentacle-Leg Transformation]!

  Ding! You acquired the Derived Skill [Limb Reattachment]!

  Ding! You have lost your Derived Skill [Color Camoufge].

  Ding! You acquired the Derived Skill [Morphological Camoufge]!

  ...

  The process hadn't gone perfectly, but it also couldn't be considered unsuccessful. After a few hours, the [Morph] Special Talent and three Derived Skills had appeared all at once.

  Although the [Slime-Body Transformation] ability that System had been hoping for hadn't appeared, that was within his expectations. After all, his [Morph] ability was still at a very low level.

  ...

  [Morph] (3/14): A Special Talent activated by [Insect Adaptability], [Digital Code], and [Insect Ability Activation] after being optimized by System. This unique Special Talent allows the body to transform.

  [Tentacle-Leg Conversion] (11/14): A Derived Skill obtained from [Insect Adaptability] and [Morph]. Tentacles can be converted into exoskeleton-covered legs and vice versa. System's unique Derived Skill.

  [Limb Reattachment] (13/20): A Derived Skill obtained from [Insect Adaptability], [Morph], and [Super-Speed Regeneration]. Severed legs, tentacles, and other body parts can be reattached and restored to their original state.

  [Morphological Camoufge] (11/19): A Derived Skill integrated from [Morph] and [Color Camoufge]. Provides the ability to make simple changes to the body's shape and color that mimic surrounding objects or the environment.