A Great Soul Create Miracles

The workers were busy carrying out the Queen's new orders. These orders were to dismantle, separate, and distribute the corpse of their fallen comrade among the storage areas of the colonies. Some of the remains would be dropped off at the nursing grounds for the newcomers to the colonies. The workers were busy and needed all the help they could get.

The Queen had sent out a messenger to call members from the far branches of the colony towards the ancestral nest. She had also dispatched two teams of scouts: one to search for resources, including nearby colonies, and the other to search for and escort back the first-generation soldiers from their expansion.

At a certain corner of the ancestral nest, a hole was opened, and a unique yet strange ant walked out. This ant was a drone, but it looked slender and elegant. Unlike the other ants, it wasn't rushing; instead, it was moving leisurely. First, it walked towards a honeypot and drank to its heart's content. Then, it strolled casually to a certain corner.

"After using a few hours to rest and study my soul sphere, I had learned a few things about it," the ant thought. "Firstly, it seems my soul can only exist in this orb-like shape; I am not able to shape it in any other way. I am not able to expand it, and I am not able to decrease its size. Secondly, it is basically intangible; it can pass and phase through anything and everything. And lastly..."

With a single thought, five tentacles stretched out from the giant white light ball above the ant's head. These tentacles were massive compared to the feeler the ant could originally muster. The size of the ball of light was around the size of a basketball, and the tentacles were around the thickness of a pen. Their length could extend as far as two wooden rulers.

'I can make up to five tentacles, but that's not what's important. What's important now is if it would work or not,' he thought as he looked at a nearby passing ant. This ant wasn't carrying anything at all and was of the caste of a worker, not a soldier.

The next moment, the ant sent some of his soul tentacles towards the worker ant. In the next moment, the head of the worker ant exploded. This, in turn, startled the nearby workers and the overseeing soldier, who came over to check only to see the headless body of the dead worker. This puzzled them, yet it simply didn't mind much, as workers die every now and then in the nest.

Not long after, another worker came and took away its corpse. All this time, the ant who was responsible was at a corner, watching and pondering something in silence. After a minute of brief thinking, he sent out the same number of tentacles towards a passing ant, this time a soldier. It too exploded.

This time, he quickly reacted and flew there (forgetting he was a drone?). He started examining the corpse of the ant and was surprised to find out that its entire head was not simply exploded but was almost cleanly erased entirely, without much left behind.

Seeing the supervising soldier coming towards the scene, he flew away to another area. Upon reaching a good farming ground, he started experimenting. First, he started by sending four tentacles, yet the results came out good but not what he wanted. Although the subject exploded and became unusable, he gained a weapon against enemies.

Then he used three tentacles, which ended the same way as the four tentacles, but he had gained a little insight from the less reactive response compared to the four tentacles. The reason for the explosion was probably because of his soul force reacting and disturbing the mind of a lesser being.

After all, what he did was similar to giving an ant a human weight to carry, not expecting it to break down. Though it's more complicated than that, that's the general gist of it. Afterwards, he used two tentacles, which slowly solidified his thoughts on the explosive reaction.

As he could 'feel' and 'see' through his soul, he could also observe the miniscule changes happening to things and beings around him, which included things his soul manifestation was in direct contact with, like the mind of the lesser ant's.

Afterwards, he sent a single tentacle and immediately after it entered the mind fog of the ant, it started cleansing it, and it was cleansing it faster than it did his own. After all, he used a simple thread-like feeler while he used a tentacle as fat as a pen on this ant.

In less than four breaths, the ant was lying dead on the ground, and smoke was rising from its head. Suddenly, the queen sent out an alarm against an enemy, but they hadn't seen the enemy. This, in turn, made him smile in his mind warily, as he knew he had been mistaken for the enemy.

'I'll stop for now... Although I can kill most of them instantly, I don't want to get swarmed and dismantled,' he thought with alertness.

For the next two hours, he simply walked around aimlessly while eating, crawling, and having a good time. When the two hours were up, he quickly started experimenting again, but this time, he split a single tentacle into four separate parts. Each part was slightly bigger than the first feeler.

When a third-generation soldier was passing by, he sent out a single part, and it immediately made the ant freeze in its track. It didn't die, but its consciousness was slowly wiped away, leaving its body alive yet mindless.

'Good...' he thought as he continued. Sending another part out, he transformed one part into a restraining ball that covered the mind fog, while he transformed the other part into broom-like waves, which he used to crash into the mind fog.

The mind fog almost reacted violently, but the restraining soul barrier forced it to not explode, but instead, the fog started turning lighter.

'Very good...' he mind-smiled.

Five minutes later, he had managed to refine five droplets of liquified thoughts. During the process, he had also learned a new ability, something like puppeteering. He used his soul force tentacle to manipulate the remaining fragments of the ant's mind to control the ant. This, in turn, made it so the other ants didn't think of it as dead and dismantle it as food.

"Now that I'm sure this refinement method is usable, I can start refining from the weak and old, instead of leaving them to waste away in just food supply," he thought as he started formulating his plan on how to get more liquified thought droplets.

"But I still have a pending issue that weighs on my mind like a looming shadow, and that is... my lifespan," he thought. According to his estimations, he was around a week old and would probably live for another two weeks.

"But I'll never live such a short and pointless life... Especially after I've discovered every boy and man's fantasy, MAGIC. I've basically become Merlin, but in ant form," he thought as he compressed the sphere smaller and smaller until all the liquified thoughts merged into a single larger drop.

Retracting the tentacle part that had its end as a sphere, he emptied it in his mind, with the new large droplet floating separately from the two former water droplets.

These droplets could somehow repel the mind fog. Suddenly, he could feel himself free in his ant body. It seemed as though the ant body had become much more agile, but it was, in fact, still at its normal speed. It seemed it had only gotten smarter in its movement and responses.

"What an unexpected gain... Good, now what am I to do about my finite lifespan?" he thought. "Well, I'll think about it as I farm for more liquified thoughts... Where is the place for the old, weak, and injured again?" he thought as he walked slowly into the deeper levels of the nest.