Zhao Chen could feel the feeling Hive Princess made not the least attempt to hide.
He knew she had indeed been beside herself with worry over the half year in which his whereabouts were unknown.
He had heard from Lilith that Hive Princess had gone times past counting to that region of the cosmos which had become two-dimensional space, and tried every means there was to search out some trace of him, sacrificing no small number of Hive Motherships in the attempt.
Over it, Lilith had given Hive Princess several courses of counseling, and only so kept her from doing anything too extreme.
Happily, Zhao Chen had come back in time.
Had he not come back in time…
Lilith owned frankly that sooner or later Hive Princess would have done something mad.
For though she was quite rational now and could be reasoned with, her genes were still those of the hive-race, after all.
"I've come to you this time because there's something I must trouble you and your hive-race fleet with," Zhao Chen said directly.
"What is it?" Hive Princess went on hanging from the top of his head, without the least intention of coming down.
"Just now we detected a power from outside our universe trying to make its way into it. Spatial fluctuations of this abnormal kind have been found at five points. The Owl Dragon Empire's military fleet strength at present is enough to deploy at only four of them. So I'm hoping your hive-race fleet can take charge of one." Zhao Chen put the idea to her; it was also the suggestion he had given Charlotte earlier.
Though the Owl Dragon hive-race fleet now belonged to the Owl Dragon Empire,
this special force could be moved only by the Emperor.
Even Charlotte, when she wished to give the Owl Dragon hive-race fleet a task, could only settle it with Hive Princess by consultation.
"Is it Order?" Hive Princess's eyes lit at once.
"Most likely it is Order."
At once Hive Princess raised her right hand and gave a military salute. "The Owl Dragon hive-race fleet accepts the mission."
Only, hanging upside down from his head as she was, the salute was upside down too, and looked rather comical.
"How large is the Owl Dragon hive-race fleet under you now?" Zhao Chen asked.
At the rate the hive-race breeds, half a year of rest and recovery must surely have brought it to a truly frightening size.
According to Lilith,
Hive Princess had applied several times before to be granted more star systems to live in.
Happily, Zhao Chen had thought of this at the very start; the habitat he had assigned Hive Princess's Owl Dragon hive-race was one great barren star region, with a great many star systems round about that were poor in resources and seldom visited by anyone.
As for the backward natives on the few planets there, given a generous enough resettlement package they were naturally willing to move to better, habitable planets.
Some natives were naturally unwilling, but once they learned the hive-race was about to appear on the planets where they lived,
between threats and inducements they all agreed as well.
After all, that part came to no more than a few million people; with the larger picture in view, a small sacrifice of their feeling for their homes could not be helped.
At present the Owl Dragon hive-race's star systems had gradually spread to fill a whole Owl Dragon hive-race star region,
which was enough for the Owl Dragon hive-race within it to live and grow.
Hive Princess poked a finger at the corner of her mouth and put on a thinking face. "If you count the bottom-tier hive units, then it's in units of 'trillions,' and there's no saying."
"Just tell me the military combat units. T3 grade and above," Zhao Chen said.
A single hive-race planet now held several quadrillion hive units; counted all together, it was indeed an astronomical figure.
And the individuals came large and small, so there was no need to fuss over those.
"Then I'll go from the top down. Right now we of the Owl Dragon hive-race already have 3,000 T6 Taotie-class Hive Motherships."
Hive Princess spoke as though showing off her achievements. "And besides, for the advantage of many unit types on a battlefield, I've made genetic improvements to the Taotie-class Hive Mothership as well. To suit different battlefield needs, I've bred different T6 Taotie-class Hive Motherships. Like the biggest one, the T6 Leviathan-type Taotie-class Hive Mothership. The T6 Predator-type Taotie-class Hive Mothership, small but super fast. And the T6 Heavy-Artillery-type Taotie-class Hive Mothership, good at middle and long range, which uses dark-matter bio-plasma cannon. The T6 Guardian-type Taotie-class Hive Mothership, good at defending against enemy attack. And the T6 Infector-type Taotie-class Hive Mothership, fitted out specially with T5 bio-infection bugs, and more."
"As good as that?" Zhao Chen looked at Hive Princess in delighted surprise, and was not in the least sparing with his encouragement.
The tail behind Hive Princess swung like a little electric fan.
"It's all thanks to the blood plasma big brother left me; it made the hive-race genes more variable and more malleable," Hive Princess said happily.
Zhao Chen recalled how he had once found that his blood seemed to have some wonderful effect upon the hive-race,
and had left Hive Princess a great quantity of blood plasma.
"Is there still enough of that? How well does it work?" Zhao Chen asked.
Hive Princess said, "The effect has weakened a lot with each use. When I knew big brother's whereabouts were unknown, I used it sparingly. So there's still some left."
"Then I'll get some more ready for you later." Zhao Chen scratched Hive Princess's cheek.
Hive Princess liked it rather well.
In that she was very like Charlotte.
Hive Princess went on after that. "Besides the T6 Taotie-class Hive Motherships, there are 200,000 T5 Leviathan-Sovereign-class Hive Motherships, and a certain number of T5 Leviathan-Shaman-class Hive Motherships, T5 Starlight Fireflies and T5 Dimension Ghost-Bugs. And some hive units that can carry out stealth reconnaissance missions; I've bred all of those."
Hive Princess was very excited, speaking of these hive units she had bred herself.
By the look of it, she was very fond of breeding these new kinds of hive units.
"T4 Leviathan-class Hive Motherships, 100 million."
"How many?"
"100 million."
Zhao Chen looked in great astonishment at Hive Princess's innocent face.
"And T3 Hive Motherships number around 10 billion. T2 and T1 really can't be counted," Hive Princess added.
What was a sea of bugs?
This was the true sea of bugs!
10 billion T3 Hive Motherships.
Once upon a time, when Zhao Chen faced the great hive-race outbreak, there had been at the very most a billion and some hundreds of millions of Hive Motherships.
And that had included a great many T2 and T1 Hive Motherships.
And now the Owl Dragon hive-race fleet raised in his own house counted an astounding 10 billion T3 Hive Motherships alone.
200,000 T5 Hive Motherships.
100 million T4 Hive Motherships.
10 billion T3 Hive Motherships.
It was a quite terrifying force.
For mind, the Owl Dragon Empire at present had only 200,000 warships of T5 grade, and no more than 2 million-odd warships of T4 grade.
True, in single-ship combat power the Owl Dragon-line warships left these Hive Motherships several streets behind.
But on a great battlefield, this Owl Dragon hive-race fleet could not only work the bug-sea tactic, but now had combined-arms tactics as well, and on a battlefield it would be very thorny indeed.
Who would win and who would lose, there was truly no saying.
It had to be said the hive-race well deserved the name of a race made for interstellar war; give it enough time to develop, and it could grow at an exponential rate.
Of course, in all this a great share of the credit belonged to the blood plasma Zhao Chen had given.
"So many Hive Motherships. Won't there be trouble with the food supply?" Zhao Chen asked, somewhat worried.
All along, what everyone dreaded about the hive-race was its mad appetite for the hunt.
Hive Princess said frankly, "Big brother needn't worry about that. After the genetic improvements, the food an individual of our Owl Dragon hive-race needs is at least a hundred times less than with the original genes. And the appetite can be controlled, so that it doesn't set off violent aggression. That does affect combat power, but by far less than the genetic modification raised it. Besides, these Hive Motherships have all had a dormancy function added. In times of no combat they can lie in a low-energy dormant state, and need only one ten-thousandth of the food they need when not dormant. That's how I've been able to breed so vast a hive-race fleet."
Perfect!
It was simply too perfect.
When they were not in use, the upkeep cost was extremely low, and when they were wanted, wake them and they could fight.
It was simply the highest gift a war race could have, and it greatly raised the ceiling of the Owl Dragon hive-race's combat attributes.
No longer bound by the limits of food, it could pursue ever greater numbers of Hive Motherships.
"Only it's a pity I still haven't managed to breed a T7-grade Hive Mothership so far," Hive Princess said, somewhat downcast.
"Take your time. The T7 technology grade is a hurdle for a great many interstellar races. Even our Owl Dragon Empire hasn't broken through to T7 technology." Zhao Chen could see that Hive Princess was in such a hurry to breed a T7 Hive Mothership for the sake of being able to deal with Order.
Order was a T7 technological civilization.
To defeat Order, one must first make oneself a T7 technological civilization.
In truth this was a threshold for Zhao Chen too, as things stood now.
He had lost the System.
And the civilization of the System's original makers had not broken through to T7 technological civilization either.
Though that might have been who knew how many years ago,
yet since Order still existed, it followed that those cosmic civilizations had still not broken through to T7 technological civilization.
Still, Zhao Chen already had in mind his own direction of research toward T7 technological civilization.
It needed only the research and trials to come.
This brought to Zhao Chen's mind Zhao Chengcheng, who might be counted, after a fashion, his 'sister.'
She had been raised on all the System's knowledge, and knowledge from the 'past' of Zhao Chen's own point in time at that.
He wondered how things stood with technology in her civilization now.
But since Order still existed, it could not be going very smoothly.
It was true that, by the arrangement of the hand behind the System, Zhao Chen's existence had become a stepping-stone for someone else.
But Zhao Chen did not much mind, for Zhao Chengcheng was no enemy.
And they all had one enemy in common: Order!
If Order could be overthrown, playing the assist was not out of the question.
What followed was Hive Princess setting about sending the Owl Dragon hive-race fleet to the appointed battlefield, to meet an armed fleet that might well come from Order.
Zhao Chen saw those dormant Hive Motherships.
Their bodies lay shriveled, shrunk to a hundredth and more of their normal size,
drifting in a certain asteroid belt.
And once they were woken, they began to swell like balloons being blown up, and began without pause to breed eggs or spores of their own, replenishing the hive units they carried.
Of course, at such times other hive units would also enter the body of the Hive Mothership to speed the process along.
Waking a Hive Mothership took a certain time.
Happily, Hive Princess had herself kept one Owl Dragon hive-race fleet in a state of combat readiness all along.
Though its size was only 300 million,
it was more than enough to meet this war.
"Then, big brother, I'm off." Hive Princess waved to Zhao Chen, loath to part.
Zhao Chen waved as well.
Then Hive Princess went to the 'emergency escape hatch' at one side of the bridge, and was flung out of it just like an escape pod.
And then Hive Princess was seen to spread a pair of brown bone wings in open space.
Straight after, a huge bug-dragon flew past; Hive Princess leaped and stood upon its head, and flew off toward the immense T6 Leviathan-type Taotie-class Hive Mothership in the distance.
The whole of it was dashing past describing.
Hive Princess's body structure and strength were now enough for her to move freely in open space, and even fly, only not as fast as large hive creatures of that kind.
Zhao Chen's body, which had undergone super-soldier modification, could survive in open space only for a time, and was still affected by it.
That was the ceiling of the individual.
The ceiling of human genes stopped there.
Unless one took hardware modification of the body; but that kind Zhao Chen found repugnant. Could a person still be called a person after such modification?
And the advantage of the creature called man lay not in his body but in his brain.
Zhao Chen had found that out early.
The Super-Soldier Serum seemed to make its user a super soldier,
but in fact it was also a development of the brain's domain.
For mind, in the planetary age,
mankind had developed only 10% of the brain's domain.
Later, by the interstellar age, mankind's development of it had reached 20%.
After that the degree of such development rose by degrees.
But even in the civilization of the designers behind the System Zhao Chen had held, it had only been developed as far as 50%.
Yet only think: with 50% of the brain's domain they could develop a technology for crossing time and space, and one could feel how terrifyingly strong it was.
But to return to the matter.
So Zhao Chen had always firmly believed that the direction of human development lay not in the body but in the brain's domain.
To research and build ever stronger technology through the development of the brain's domain,
that was the true direction of development.
For the human body, after all, could be said to be all but the lowest of the great majority of interstellar races.
Too weak.
A life so short, and needing the aid of outside equipment even to enter the environment of space.
But all that was for Zhao Chen to research later.
What mattered most for now was to meet this war, the first war Zhao Chen must face on his return to this universe.
"Your Majesty, where are we going next?" Lilith asked beside him.
Zhao Chen thought a moment. "Let's go to the battlefield over by the Holy Radiance Kingdom. It's close to densely populated areas; if I appear there, it can steady people's hearts."
"Yes."
After that, the T6 Dragon Emperor Interstellar Command Ship and the Emperor's Guard Fleet set off for the Holy Radiance Kingdom.
The Owl Dragon Empire, after half a year,
faced a trial once again!