Goddamn Ants

"Essence Crystals? but they are so many", Jacob fell through the ground into a hidden cave system. Inside the walls, they were large and gave off blue lighting, inside of them was a weird energy that made them evolve genes.

"Do the ants use these? That means super ants will be around, I need to be careful and find the good stuff first." He decided he should explore the cave system for anything that would benefit him, and harvest Essence crystals.

Progress...

Mission Explore the Abyss - Progress 31.8%

100 Pull-ups (Incomplete)

Run 10km (Incomplete)

Fight 3 Beasts (None)

He checked his progress and thought "This is below the Abyss. Jacob was worried why he had only 20% progress after walking around for a day but this made sense.

He walked toward the walls dragging his hand along the Essence crystals, but he felt no power from them. Is something wrong with me? Why can't I feel any energy?"

Jacob tried to pull the Crystal out of the wall and was able to pull one. He sat cross-legged and tried to directly absorb the energy to improve his body

The prompt flashed in front of Jacob's face and he was surprised. "What's wrong with me? If I can't absorb these, how will I get stronger? What is the system made for?" Jacob was confused, but his only answers were only going to come when he finished the missions.

"Maybe I'm doing something wrong". Jacob decided he would try to take another piece of Essence crystals. He started digging a larger crystal out the walls. The vibrations started travelling throughout the caves. Unknowing to Jacob he was waking up something scary.

He finally hacked a larger size essence crystal out of the wall, he was ready to find out why his body was rejecting Essence crystals when an ear-splitting shriek bellowed from the end of the tunnel he was in, his heart stopped when he heard the thunderous stomping getting louder toward him.

Out of an instinct of fear he ran, he looked behind him to see a 4 metre Super Ant furiously charging him. The Super Ant was giant and barely fit into the tunnel, and he was fast. Fast enough that it was gaining on Jacob with every step of its hairy legs.

It had bulging split eyes, his pincers snapped angrily with the occasional shriek. Jacob ran past many angry ants that would follow the super ant and snapped angrily at him. Not long afterwards he was being chased by hundreds of ants of different sizes.

He ran deeper into the caves, he was clueless to where he was going, He jumped through a complex arrangement of cave systems and now it had gotten to the point where he had no idea where he was going.

At this point, ants were crawling upside down in all parts of the cave swarming Jacob like a tsunami. Jacob had made half the ant colony upset.

"What the hell did I do?" Jacob couldn't help but wonder as he ran for fear of life. The swarm of ants lost their minds. At intersections, the ants started to surround him, they would flood other tunnels and try to block off his escape routes.

"Holy shit, This is bad, these guys are losing their shit" He was starting to get scared, they were not slowly gaining on him and he was losing energy.

Some smaller ants latched onto his legs and bit ferociously, they kept their way through his clothing. He was covered in bite marks from ants the size of fists. He let out an incomprehensible shrill of terror as he shook his body around.

He ran until he came toward another pitfall, the capital was surrounded by ants that were waiting on him in wait. "Goddamn shit-eating motherfucker", Jacob shouted any curse word he could think of. He burrowed through the army of ants and chucked off into the pitfall.

The ants stood above hissing like they were afraid of something down there. Jacob fell down and plunged through layers of sticky silk. Jacob made a weird grunt as the floor broke his fall.

"Ergh, my whole body, why did all those ants go berserk?" He said struggling to stand up."Where the hell am I?", there were a lot of creepy noises hidden by a dark background, so he took out his Essence crystal and used it as lighting.

He only took a few steps when he found his first red flag. He came across fine skin spun in front of him.

"Why does this place look so creepy? Is this spider net?" he touched the soft white silky net and went pale. "I would rather die than fight a human-sized spider, I'm too weak and spiders are scary". Everyone had something they were afraid of and for Jacob it was spiders, It would creep him out and their legs holding up their small body and their weird eyes that looked both creeped him out.

He would avoid them when he was stronger, but now he was weak and a large one in the wind could tear him apart.

"God, I need to get out of here" Jacob muttered, He went to summon his system when suddenly, it appeared.

Name: Jacob Shepherd

[Universal Rank: Infant Stage]

[Forgings: 1/10+]

[Damage: 19%+]

[Lifespan: 3 years]

<100 Pull-ups (Incomplete) >

"Wait….what?" Jacob was dumbfounded, "Can it read my thoughts? How did it know what I was about to say". He could only put these thoughts on the back burner.

"Those bastards really chased me for 3 and a half kilometres, my skin feels like a furnace". He continued looking at the system and observing it, the missions actually showed what he had done, It was instantly updated. "I don't think I can fight anything in my state, I don't even know how I ran this far" he looked at the mission and he actually wanted to complete them, forward was the only way to go for him