(I offer my most sincere thank to any- and everyone who supported me)
The ants did not vanish right away.
They came back.
Small waves.
Probing strikes.
Fifty.
A hundred.
Two hundred at most.
Not enough to break through.
Not enough to siege.
Just enough to test.
Like a hand pressing on a door to see if it still held.
The chilies fired.
The carrots blew up.
The enoki rattled.
The bonktatoes swung.
The ants pulled back.
They returned the next day.
Different angle.
Different pressure point.
The moletato tunnels were reinforced.
The oyster edges grew sharper.
The ants withdrew again.
Selena watched the pattern.
"They're weighing cost against reward."
Dominic snorted.
"Tell them the cost is pain."
The ants gave no answer.
But after the fourth probing attack, they stopped.
No more skittering at the edge.
No more black waves at dusk.
Just absence.
Then one morning, the bamboo forest moved.
Not violently.
Not swallowed by another Shifting.
It simply moved.
Slowly.
Trees leaning.
Roots pulling free.
Dog-sized ants marched in neat columns, carrying bamboo stalks on their backs like moving siege towers.
Above them was the queen.
No longer hidden in the foliage.
She rose fully into view.
The size of a cow.
Wings translucent and thick-veined.
Antennae long as spears, twitching with cold thought.
Level 61.
That number alone silenced the camp.
Sixty-one.
If level 30 was the first wall, this was already beyond the second.
No one said it out loud.
No one needed to.
Every diver there knew the same thing.
They did not want to find out what a creature past the second threshold could really do.
The queen hovered for a moment.
Her eyes swept across the camp.
Measuring.
Watching.
Not hostile.
Not aggressive.
Just aware.
Then she turned.
Gave some silent order.
And the bamboo forest kept migrating away from Camp Stymphalian.
Toward some other horizon.
Toward some other part of Floor One.
Following an order no human there had heard.
No one except Little Fireball.
She watched from Alex's shoulder.
Chirped once.
Soft.
Almost pleased.
Then tucked her head under her wing.
Camp Stymphalian let out one long breath.
Not loud.
Just quiet tension slipping out of tired bodies.
The defense lines eased.
The chili rows no longer stayed primed every hour of the day.
The carrots went back to silent watch.
The enoki guns relaxed to their normal posture.
The scars of the siege remained.
But the war had moved on.
Life resumed.
And strangely, nothing dramatic changed.
Phong and Alex did not suddenly act different.
No glowing engagement haze.
No shift in tone.
They cooked.
They cleaned.
They argued lightly over seasoning.
They cuddled at night.
If anything, Phong looked worse.
Dried-up prune mode.
The kind of food only an old British person would willingly eat.
Dark circles sat under his eyes.
Sometimes he stared into space for no reason.
Dominic took one look at him and burst out laughing.
"Brother, you look like you survived another siege."
Janet smirked.
"Different battlefield."
Alex did not deny it.
Love Day had unlocked something.
Level 30 had not helped.
Her stats were absurd now.
Her lowest sat near ninety-seven.
Strength.
Dexterity.
Constitution.
Everything else pushing into triple digits.
And her Intelligence...
Phong looked at that number once.
Then twice.
Then closed the interface very fast.
He swallowed.
"Even with Stoic Garlic, I can't keep up."
She laughed.
"You're not supposed to."
"I feel like I need buffs just to survive cuddling."
"Exaggeration."
"Not really."
One evening over dinner, while slowly stirring broth, he half-joked,
"If I take Olen's route and farm a hundred monsters per species, maybe I can get enough stats to endure your affection."
Alex nearly choked on her drink.
"You would farm slimes for romance?"
"If needed."
Selena almost fell out of her chair laughing.
Dominic slapped him on the back hard enough to nearly tip him over.
"Dedication!"
Janet shook her head.
"You two are ridiculous."
But she was smiling.
Later that night, Alex proved he did not need to catch up.
She adjusted.
Slowed down.
Softened.
Pampered him.
No teasing.
No hunting look in her eyes.
Just care.
She brushed his hair the way he had once said his uncle used to brush his aunt's.
She let him lead sometimes.
Even when she could clearly overpower him without trying.
She kissed him slowly.
Not urgent.
Not competitive.
Just easy.
And that was when he understood.
The stat gap did not matter here.
Not in this tent.
Not under the lime-oak.
They were not showing power.
They were choosing closeness.
Janet noticed too.
"It's good," she said one afternoon while chopping vegetables beside him.
"What is?"
"That nothing changed."
He paused.
"Should it have?"
She shrugged.
"If titles can change you, then they mattered too much in the first place."
She glanced over at Alex, who was hanging upside down from the monkey bars with Nyx while Bruno timed her.
"You two act the same as before."
She smiled faintly.
"That means it's real."
Phong looked at Alex.
At how easily she laughed.
At how she reached for him without thinking whenever she passed by.
At how she stole bites from his bowl without asking.
Natural.
He let out a quiet breath.
The ants were gone.
The bamboo forest had moved away.
The level 61 queen existed somewhere else now.
The Sky Emperor watched from some unseen layer.
Floor bosses moved like pieces on a cosmic board.
Production-class farmers were industrializing slaughter.
Josh and Olen polished their public image.
Emma held the gate.
Yue Ting walked deeper into unknown floors.
And here at Camp Stymphalian, a level one farmer stirred broth.
A level 30 Mindblade leaned on him like it was the most normal thing in the world.
A chick who was not only a chick demanded to be fed first.
Life went on.
Not because the danger was gone.
But because they chose to keep living.
Phong handed Alex a bowl.
She took it and brushed her fingers against his.
"Still think you need more stats?"
He smiled faintly.
"Maybe just more stamina."
She leaned closer.
"I can work with that."
For now, that was enough.
After the ants withdrew and the bamboo forest moved away, the urge to rush back into diving still hung in the air.
But Phong shook his head.
"Stay," he said.
Not an order.
A request.
"Until things settle down on the surface."
He did not explain right away.
He just looked at the half-rebuilt perimeter.
At the shiitake shields still growing back.
At the new rows of strawberries and peas sprouting in neat, hopeful lines near the pond.
"I planted strawberries and peas before the Shifting," he added. "They'll be ready soon."
Jake blinked.
"That's your strategy?"
"Yes."
Dominic laughed.
"Man wants fresh fruit before he risks death again."
But no one argued.
Because under the joke, they all understood.
Floor One was no longer stable.
Floor Two was not safer.
And the surface was loud.
Phones still buzzed every day.
Contracts.
Media spin.
The Farmer Guild growing fast.
Rent still got paid into Phong's account.
Regular.
On time.
He barely checked it.
Money had faded into background noise.
What mattered was simple.
Everyone comes back.
No casualties.
No new names added to memory.
To Dominic's team, though, the value was obvious.
The chilies had burned swarms.
The garlic mines had saved flanks.
The enoki had shredded advancing lines.
The Snow Limes had given speed when retreat mattered.
The Sympathy Enoki had stopped wounds from turning into death.
Without the crops, the siege would have ended very differently.
One evening by the pond, over tea, Élise said quietly,
"We could formalize this. A private supply contract. Fair rate."
Alex did not even let her finish.
"No."
Élise raised a brow.
"It would be fair."
Alex shook her head.
"He doesn't want it to become that."
Phong pretended not to hear.
But he did.
He always did.
"He hates profitism," Alex went on softly. "The idea that everything has to be cut down into debt and price."
Élise smirked.
"You make it sound like an ideology."
"It is," Alex said simply.
"He doesn't want to become Josh 2.0."
No ledgers were kept in camp.
No itemized billing.
No percentage cuts.
No strategic leverage.
If someone needed crops, they took what they needed.
If someone earned money, they paid what felt right.
No one sat around calculating advantage.
It was naïve.
It was also deliberate.
And fragile.
On the surface, calm never came.
Things got worse.
The Farmer Guild pushed harder.
New ads flooded social feeds.
[Unlock your dormant potential.]
[Production classes no longer left behind.]
[Level safely with professional escorts.]
Olen's empire printed money.
High-level divers hired as escorts got paid very well.
Farmers slaughtered monsters in clean quotas.
One hundred.
Two hundred.
Three hundred.
Efficiency maximized.
Skills harvested.
Experience extracted.
But no one connected the dots.
No one on the surface knew what had really triggered the Bamboo Black Ant siege.
They thought it was random Shifting fallout.
Mana turbulence.
Bad luck.
They did not know the pattern.
The jade dragon had seen it.
The Sky Emperor had seen it.
The slaughter of monster populations by the Farmer Guild had tipped something ancient.
Floor Four ants had been pushed upward.
Targeted aggression.
Farmer-specific hostility.
That was why Camp Stymphalian had been tested so hard on that first night.
The ants had not been curious.
They had been checking whether this farm was part of the slaughter machine.
And Phong was not.
The jade dragon had seen that.
Watched.
Measured.
Little Fireball's presence alone would not have guaranteed mercy.
Not if Phong had used his crops to industrialize extinction.
But he had built an ecosystem.
Not a factory.
He planted.
He defended.
He negotiated.
He adapted.
He did not exploit.
That difference had spared him.
The ants pulled back because the cost was too high.
And because something above them had decided these test subjects were not guilty in the same way.
Now Olen's empire kept expanding.
But quietly, something had changed.
Reports began to spread.
Farmer Guild escort teams were getting ambushed far too often.
High-tier monsters showed strange aggression toward production-class groups.
Third-floor fauna began showing up in odd places near industrial farming zones.
The public story framed it as increased risk from "rapid progression."
But under that, it was retaliation.
The dungeon was not a passive resource.
It was reacting.
Blood answered blood.
And Olen's money machine had started to bleed.
Camp Stymphalian, with no idea of the dragon's judgment, kept preparing for strawberries.
Pea shoots climbed thin wooden supports.
Alex helped tie twine between the stakes.
Dominic repaired the outer stonework.
Janet adjusted spacing.
Selena mapped mana changes.
Rico loudly supervised obstacle course expansion.
Little Fireball chirped demands from Alex's shoulder.
Life felt almost normal.
Too normal.
But outside, the world was tilting.
Production classes were being weaponized.
Ecosystems were destabilizing.
Ancient beings had started to stir.
And somewhere beyond sight, the jade dragon watched.
Not hostile.
Not kind.
Just judging.
Phong did not know he had passed a test.
He only knew he never wanted to become the kind of person who farmed lives for numbers.
He looked at the strawberry leaves.
Small.
Green.
Hopeful.
"We'll need trellises soon," he murmured.
Alex glanced at him.
"You think strawberries will mutate?"
"They always do."
She smiled faintly.
"Whatever they become, I'm glad you planted them."
He nodded.
Strawberries.
Peas.
Simple crops.
A quiet rebellion.
Elsewhere, empires built on slaughter were learning that the dungeon kept score.
And it did not care about profit.
August came in quietly.
Heat clung to the air around Camp Stymphalian, thick and heavy. Cicadas screamed somewhere beyond the treant line. The pond reflected lazy clouds. The lime-oak cast a broad, patient shadow over the swing Alex had insisted on building.
Preparations were underway.
Selena's birthday.
Dominic and Janet's wedding anniversary.
Two reasons to celebrate being alive.
After the ants, being alive felt like an achievement.
Nyx and Bruno were no longer tiny.
Nine months old.
Nyx's sorcerer instincts had sharpened. Sometimes sparks flickered around her when she got excited.
Bruno had bulked up, his barbarian class living up to its name. His shoulders were broader, his paws heavier, and his tail wagged hard enough to knock over a stool.
Their baby privileges had officially expired.
"Big kids now," Dominic declared dramatically.
All pampering was redirected to Little Fireball.
Who still did not grow.
Not even a little.
Her feathers still glowed in the same red-gold gradient.
Her eyes stayed bright.
Her tiny body was still light enough to sit on Alex's shoulder for hours.
"She's just mana-dense," Selena said.
"Like a compressed star," Vanessa joked.
No one realized that was dangerously close to the truth.
Little Fireball chirped and demanded peeled corn by hand.
Ancient phoenix.
Calamity.
Guild-breaker.
Now begging for snacks.
The projector hummed every night.
They kept up with the news.
The tone had changed.
Fear had replaced ambition.
Farmers were dying.
Production-class escorts were getting hit with terrifying precision.
The death rate was no longer random.
It was selective.
The Monstrous Phoenix had been wildfire.
Indiscriminate.
Overwhelming.
Destructive.
This new pattern was different.
Calculated.
Exact.
Escort squads guarding Farmer Guild operations were being wiped out with surgical precision.
Regular divers were mostly left alone.
Independent teams were usually ignored unless they crossed the wrong path.
Escort missions tied to Olen's operations got hit far harder.
But no one could trace the cause.
No boss ever appeared on camera.
No visible threat declared war.
Just ambush.
Disappearance.
Swarms appearing at the weakest point in an escort formation.
Mid-tier monsters moving in ways no ecosystem should allow.
It felt like someone was pulling invisible strings.
The jade dragon.
The Sky Emperor.
The one holding the board.
But no human knew that.
No human saw the pattern.
Even Camp Stymphalian, which had heard the roar and seen the ants, still lacked the final piece.
To them, it was only one thing.
The dungeon was getting worse.
Recruitment numbers for the Farmer Guild dropped.
Forums filled with doubt.
Anonymous posts began to spread.
[My cousin signed up for escort duty. Didn't come back.]
[Why are escort teams getting hit and not regular dives?]
[Something is wrong.]
The media machine worked overtime.
Ads changed tone.
From ambition to reassurance.
[Enhanced safety protocols.]
[Adaptive escort models.]
[Strategic realignment.]
Words.
Only words.
The divers association quietly started flagging escort missions as high-risk.
Mercenaries began demanding more money.
Some refused the jobs outright.
Money could buy muscle.
But it could not shut down instinct.
The ant incident had shaken everything.
Séline and Camille's media-heavy return to France got delayed again.
The airlines needed their televised return.
Symbolism mattered.
The story had to stay clean.
International cooperation.
Safe extraction.
Global unity.
The optics were too useful.
Josh had already begun putting distance between himself and the collaboration.
He talked less about joint ventures.
More about risk assessment.
More about responsible pacing.
He was not stupid.
When danger turned real, he ducked behind polished PR.
Olen, though, stood at a crossroads.
Analysts argued about it on late-night panels.
[Will the Farmer Guild scale back?]
[Will Olen pivot?]
[He's made enough.]
[He can vanish for six months and rebrand.]
He had generational money.
He had insulation.
He could go quiet.
Let memory fade.
Come back later with a safer, smarter, more polished idea.
Or he could double down.
Prove himself.
Step into the dungeon in person.
Become the face of success.
Because in media ecosystems, winners erase history.
If he dove.
If he survived.
If he thrived.
Then the deaths would become "necessary growing pains."
The story would flip.
From recklessness to bravery.
From profiteer to pioneer.
Between safety and ego, Olen chose ego.
They watched the announcement together.
Olen stood at a press podium.
Freckles.
Perfect hair.
Immaculate high-collar sweater.
"I believe in leading from the front," he said.
"I will personally participate in a structured dive to demonstrate the safety of our methods."
Dominic snorted.
"Leading from the front with twelve hired A-class escorts."
Selena frowned.
"That's not bravery. That's optics."
Alex's jaw tightened.
Phong just watched.
Quiet.
He did not hate Olen the way he hated Josh.
Olen was different.
Not personal.
Not cruel in the same way.
But still a man building ladders out of other people's risk.
The floor boss did not care about branding.
The dungeon did not care about Forbes lists.
Even while the world tilted, Camp Stymphalian kept preparing to celebrate.
Selena's birthday would be loud.
Dominic's anniversary would be louder.
Mexican Coke was stockpiled.
Pepsi was chilled.
Carrots harvested.
Sunflower seeds dried.
Strawberries were starting to blush at the edges.
Pea vines climbed higher.
"Life goes on," Janet said simply.
That was the quiet rebellion.
Not diving for fame.
Not turning survival into money.
Just living.
Cooking.
Loving.
Building.
Little Fireball flapped up to the top beam of the new house and chirped sharply, as if amused by the mess humans made for themselves.
High above the now-distant bamboo forest, the jade dragon watched Olen's choice.
Ego had weight.
And weight had consequences.
The test subjects at Camp Stymphalian remained interesting.
Different.
But elsewhere, a lesson was about to be taught.
Not in public.
Not loudly.
But precisely.
August air hung thick with celebration plans and hidden tension.
Somewhere in the dungeon, strings pulled tight.
And Olen stepped forward into a stage he did not know had already been built for him.