A soft buzz echoed through the dream world as Leon Ford slowly opened his eyes. The strange, hazy environment around him felt both familiar and surreal. As he lowered his gaze, he realized his body had changed completely. This time, he was not human at all. Instead, he looked like a tall shadowy stick-figure shaped much like an upright ant.
His body was pitch black, almost made of smooth ink, and two long, delicate antennae poked out from the top of his head. When he moved, his limbs felt oddly light, as if they were not entirely solid.
Leon scratched the side of his shadowy head and muttered, both amused and speechless, "So this is how my body appears inside Ant Vita's dream? A stick-figure ant? Really?"
Unlike the previous time he entered someone's dream, this dream belonged to Ant Vita, one of the most intelligent ants from the colony he had been observing. As a dream-thief, Leon could slip into the dream world shaped by the mind of another creature. Because Ant Vita saw him as a mysterious being from the sky, her subconscious had shaped his appearance into this strange simplified form.
Below him, he stood upon a wide circular platform—an enormous glowing ring suspended in complete darkness. Around the circle was pure emptiness, a void with no ground or sky.
And in the very center of this giant circular pattern lay a small white glowing ant, curled like a tiny dot of light.
That was Ant Sage, the ant he was trying to communicate with.
The moment Leon arrived, he could sense everything in this dream world clearly. Dream-communication worked differently here. Ants communicated using pheromones, not sound. These pheromones felt like invisible signals constantly flowing from one mind to another.
As soon as Leon entered, he could feel long strings of chemical signals hitting him from every direction. The dream system inside his mind instantly decoded them, converting the scents into understandable meaning.
Leon was startled.
"The pheromone system ants use… It's unbelievably fast. Faster than human speech by countless times."
Just as he was marveling at it, a stream of concentrated pheromones rushed toward him from the center of the platform.
"Lord, you finally received my message."
The chemical scent carried a tone of relief.
Ant Sage—the glowing ant in the middle—lifted its head. The signals it sent flowed through Leon's shadowy body, turning instantly into meaning inside his mind.
Leon sensed a special word encoded inside the pheromones. After decoding it, he realized:
The word "Lord" referred to him.
"So that's what you call me in your world?" Leon asked with curiosity.
"Yes, Lord. The one from above the sky," Ant Sage replied, releasing more delicate streams of emotional scents.
As the tiny ant walked closer to him, the huge circular platform beneath them rippled like water, as though reacting to their presence.
"I've always wondered about this pattern," Leon said. "Why do you ants arrange yourselves in circles?"
He referred to the strange concentric circle formations he had seen in his room—patterns drawn by thousands of ants under Ant Sage's guidance.
When Leon asked, Ant Sage released a huge wave of pheromones—like a paragraph of text suddenly filling the air. His mind began translating the meaning.
Ant Sage explained:
She believed the circular pattern left on the teacup earlier was a kind of divine shape—a message sent by Leon from the sky. To her mind, the circular ring was a sacred signal. She felt convinced that maintaining a circular formation would allow her to receive instructions from the mysterious "Lord" above.
Leon blinked in surprise.
"So they actually thought the circle was a special message that could attract my attention… And then I really returned. Was it fate? Or just coincidence?"
But to the ants, that coincidence meant everything.
In Leon's eyes, this ant colony had already stepped away from simple instinctual behavior. They had begun to form the early signs of a true civilization.
Before Leon could continue thinking, Ant Sage suddenly sent a new set of pheromones. These were filled with pure confusion.
"Lord, I have many doubts…"
She paused.
Then three powerful messages struck Leon at once:
"What is the Lord?"
"What am I?"
"What is the world beneath my feet?"
Leon froze.
Those were philosophical questions.
This tiny ant was trying to understand the nature of existence. It wanted to understand its identity, its purpose, and the structure of its world. The thought alone filled Leon with awe.
This ant… was thinking like a being at the dawn of civilization.
Leon bent down, gently lifting Ant Sage onto his shoulder. "These questions… you must explore them on your own."
"Explore?" Ant Sage echoed the word, tasting the unfamiliar pheromone with wonder. Though she didn't know the meaning at first, her scent immediately shifted into a soft glow of emotion—yearning.
"When you begin exploring the world under your feet," Leon said softly, "you take the first step toward civilization."
"Civilization…" Ant Sage repeated. The word passed through her like a spark.
"Yes. Civilization. I hope you and your colony can one day create a magnificent civilization—just like the world I come from."
Leon no longer saw himself as superior. After witnessing their concentric symbols—an attempt at communication—his pride dissolved. He knew well from the Trisolaran universe that Earth's civilization, in the grand scheme of the cosmos, was only a young and fragile one.
Humans themselves were not much more advanced than insects on the universal scale.
Another pheromone drifted from Ant Sage.
"Lord, what is your world like?"
Leon gazed around at the dream landscape—a flat, two-dimensional projection created entirely by an ant's subconscious. Trying to describe a 3D world to a 2D creature suddenly reminded him of something.
Explaining a three-dimensional world to an ant was like asking a human to understand the fourth dimension.
It was impossible.
So he simply smiled and placed his shadowy hand on Ant Sage's antennae. "Today's communication ends here. I look forward to our next meeting."
Then he activated his dream-stealing ability.
"Inception."
His eyes hardened. Inside the dream thief technology he possessed, the most powerful feature wasn't just entering dreams—it was stealing from them. Opening the dream host's subconscious mind and taking whatever information he needed.
And at that moment, Leon stole something extraordinary:
the complete pheromone-generation and decoding system of ant civilization.
A deep buzz shook the dream world.
Suddenly, countless chemical signals burst inside his mind—scents, hormones, micro-molecules, pheromone patterns, and instinctive chemical codes. They blended together and rearranged themselves, forming a new complex model.
A complete pheromone system was now being constructed inside Leon's brain.
This was the moment he gained the ability to understand and create ant-level pheromones in the real world.
This event would change everything.
.