A few months later.
The Swarm fleet had completely withdrawn from Black Forest territory.
The armistice treaty was in full effect. The Zerg had kept their word, allowing many Black Forest people to breathe a sigh of relief.
In truth, everyone understood that the treaty's effectiveness wasn't due to the Black Forest people themselves, but the entire Starsea Alliance standing behind them.
Xia Jin's side merely maintained a relatively steady pace in increasing the number of main combat bugs.
A rate of roughly 100 million per day was considered quite slow for the current Zerg.
She still preferred to stockpile resources and build starships.
Upgrades to the Small Leviathans were being completed gradually, and several more standard Hive Carriers were constructed, all upgraded from initial Hives.
Aside from the initial Hive upgrade, the only subsequent cost was high energy crystals. Thus, increasing the number of Hive Carriers became a natural progression for Xia Jin.
...
Capital Star of the Kawi Civilization.
A tiny bug crawled through a restaurant.
Many human customers sat inside.
Tourists from other civilizations passed by from time to time, including a few Black Forest people.
Those Black Forest people sat down, ordered some organic food, and began to talk privately.
“It's unbelievable. The war just ended, and that Zerg representative has already become a celebrity. So many people are confessing their love to her online.”
“You haven't seen the fan comic scene. It's flooded with her; she even hit number one at one point. I've seen a few animated ones, too. They're absolutely amazing.”
“Brother, share some with me!”
...
“???”
On the other end of the bug's link, Xia Jin's face was a mask of confusion.
“Pfft, what the hell... fan comics?”
She felt that her understanding of this universe might still be insufficient.
What even is this?
She looked seriously at her hands. After transforming them back into Zerg arms, they were just ordinary, extendable limbs. Nothing special about them.
“Next time, I'll find a way to log into the Black Forest internet and see what it's like.”
It was too strange.
Why was she so curious?
...
In the following period, Xia Jin used Dulu System 2—the planet closest to the Starsea Alliance front—as a channel for communication with other civilizations.
However, anyone visiting the planet would find that it essentially retained the characteristics of the Dulu people.
Bugs were present, of course, but the monotonous life of the Swarm consisted of nothing but staring blankly. It was boring to the extreme.
The elf bugs were more interesting. They would occasionally log onto the network to play games, chat, and so on.
A year later, several civilizations in the Starsea Alliance that were geographically close to the Zerg were considering strengthening their exchanges with them.
In fact, they wanted to increase their understanding of the Swarm.
Specifically, the Swarm had felt very mysterious to them so far. Although the war against the Black Forest people a year ago mostly provided footage of ground combat, many civilizations were genuinely curious about the Zerg's performance in space.
Unfortunately, even the Black Forest people didn't know how their own fleet had been annihilated. Because no news had reached the ground platforms before all the hulls were destroyed. The outcome of that war was like a nightmare to them, to the point where the Black Forest people felt it was meaningless to try and build a new fleet as they had in the past.
The development of technology had not been as optimistic as they initially thought; it didn't just keep getting faster.
In times like these, encountering a civilization one cannot surpass brings an unimaginable sense of despair.
...
Xia Jin continued to slowly accumulate Small Leviathans and various transport ships.
With large quantities of those cheap, specialized hulls in use, production of standard transport ships that could be maintained long term was also gradually increasing.
Considering that higher level large transport ships would be available in the future, Xia Jin didn't plan to design new ones now.
She began to implement more profound modifications to the current Swarm.
Biological chainsaw zerglings, drill zerglings, and laser zerglings.
Different models of hydralisks began to appear. For instance, one type had its bone spines removed and replaced with electromagnetic cannons that had greater destructive power but no residual toxicity.
After prolonged research, the application of magic had advanced further.
Roaches capable of spitting magical flames were born.
Though they looked like flamethrowers, the flames from these roaches were almost impossible to extinguish by physical means.
Even if cut off from air or thrown into a vacuum, these magical flames would continue to burn.
To understand it, magical fire was simply a concept of existence. While not as high level as psionic power, its energy efficiency allowed the Zerg to deploy these weapons on a large scale.
Besides these improvements to basic bugs, modifications were also underway for Brood Lords, especially the broodlings.
The primary goal was to allow these rapidly produced creatures to be deployed quickly into space warfare.
Indeed, Brood Lords needed to fight in space.
Equipped with small fusion propulsion and weak curvature flight capabilities, Brood Lords could fly freely after detaching from a ship.
The modification for ordinary broodlings was simple: the drop pods—which were useless once launched—were reinforced and turned into units with built in small fusion reactors.
The produced broodlings would connect directly to these units at the rear, much like a person riding a space motorcycle, allowing them to maneuver and fly directly into melee combat with the enemy.
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