"By then, you will be the truly perfect Dao Body."

  "Fine. Senior, teach me the art of Transfiguration."

  The Insect Demon smiled with satisfaction—a grin that appeared wickedly predatory in the dim twilight of the mountain crevice.

  "However, when I said 'destroy' her, I did not mean for you to kill her."

  Gensheng froze. "Then it means..."

  "I want you to seduce her."

  The Insect Demon spoke those words as if discussing a trivial errand. "Make her fall in love with you. Make her Dao Heart crumble for you, her cultivation scatter because of you. Turn her from an aloof, heaven-sent genius into a worthless wreck who cannot draw a single breath without you."

  "That is what true destruction looks like."

  Gensheng understood murder. But the destruction of a soul through the heart? This was a realm he had never touched.

  "She is in permanent seclusion," Gensheng pointed out the most glaring obstacle. "How could I even meet her?"

  "Through ordinary means, you wouldn't." The Insect Demon produced a small jade box from his sleeve. Inside lay a snow-white cocoon, still pulsing with a faint, rhythmic movement.

  "This is the Dream-Weaver Silkworm. You need only feed it a single drop of your essence blood. It will use your life-force to spin a Grand Dream. This dream can ignore all seals and formations, invading the Saintess’s sea of consciousness directly."

  Gensheng looked at the cocoon, a sense of absurdity rising within him. The Path of Immortality was truly a sequence of one bizarre marvel after another.

  "She is a genius of the heavens; her mind must be as firm as iron. A single dream likely won't shake her."

  "If one dream isn't enough, then ten. A hundred." The Insect Demon handed the box to Gensheng. "But before you begin weaving dreams, you must first change your skin."

  With a flick of his storage artifact, the Demon tossed out a body. It was a headless corpse—strapping, muscular, and with skin still flushed with the warmth of life. It wasn't fully dead yet.

  The Demon snapped his fingers, and a dozen pitch-black wasps radiating an ominous aura flew from his sleeve.

  "This technique is called the Flesh-and-Bone Nest. It will melt your insect frame and this human body into a single furnace, refining a brand-new skin for you."

  He spoke no more, simply pointing at the circling Corpse-Barrier Wasps. Like death-sworn soldiers receiving a command, they swarmed the headless corpse.

  They weren't eating. They were performing a grotesque sculpture. Their mandibles snapped with surgical precision, slicing through muscle and sinew. Strips of crimson tissue were plucked away and tossed aside. The air in the crevice grew thick with the scent of fresh copper and the cloying sweetness of rot.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Gensheng watched, his six hands gripping the earth. He saw the torso of the corpse being hollowed out, leaving a massive cavity that mirrored his own half-insect shape.

  Without hesitation, Gensheng crawled forward and wedged his insectoid half into the bloody hollow of the human chest. The cold, slick flesh pressed against his warm carapace. It felt as though he had been destined to fit there.

  The Insect Demon raised his hand toward Gensheng, his five fingers slowly closing into a fist. An irresistible, crushing force slammed into Gensheng from all directions.

  CRACK!

  The carapace on Gensheng’s back, harder than refined iron, splintered instantly. Agony seared through every nerve.

  CRACK! CRACK-CRACK!

  The sounds of shattering intensified. His armor was pulverized inch by inch. Those six hands he had just grown—the vessels of all his hope—were twisted and deformed, their bones snapped like dry twigs. His flesh, his organs, his very skeleton were kneaded into an indistinguishable mass of gore.

  His consciousness began to fray under the extreme pain. He felt as though he were back in the alchemy hall—a mere mortal insect scavenging for scraps. Senseless. Oblivious.

  That mass of gore was all that remained of Chen Gensheng. Yet, it felt like nothing at all.

  An instant before his mind drowned in darkness, a different kind of life-force surged in from the flesh-nest surrounding him. His crushed insect frame, nourished by this energy, dissolved into countless crimson threads. These threads burrowed frantically into the meridians, bones, and organs of the human body.

  Under the Demon’s will, the Corpse-Wasps became master craftsmen. They reattached his six broken hands, reinforcing them with human sinew and filling the gaps with fresh marrow. They even carved segments from the corpse’s spine and grafted them onto Gensheng’s back, creating new fulcrums for his extra limbs.

  Silence returned to the crevice. Only the chest of the reconstructed body rose and fell in a shallow rhythm.

  After an eternity, the fingers of the body twitched.

  Gensheng’s consciousness clawed back from the void. The first thing he felt wasn't his senses, but a profound feeling of restriction. Gone was the blurred, wide-angle perspective of a cockroach's compound eyes.

  He sat up slowly and looked at his chest. No black carapace. Instead, there was the well-defined musculature of a human male. Six arms grew from his torso in a strangely harmonious arrangement—they could retract into his back or extend at will.

  Human meridians and insect divine abilities had reached a perfect synthesis.

  His brows were like sharp swords, his nose bridge high, his lips thin and cold. A mane of jet-black hair fell loosely over his shoulders. It was a face handsome enough to make any female cultivator lose her breath.

  "You have seen the power of these little things before," the Insect Demon’s voice broke the silence. "They can sculpt flesh, and they can devour souls. I found these variants on an ancient battlefield years ago and have nursed them with secret methods until they gained spirituality."

  The Demon flicked his finger, and the dozen wasps hovered before Gensheng. "Today, I gift them to you. Consider it a greeting gift for our master-disciple bond."

  Gensheng stared at the ominous wasps. "How do I bind them?"

  "Prick your finger. Feed them your blood—the blood that now fuses both insect and man."

  Gensheng raised one of his middle hands. Using the nail of his index finger, he made a sharp cut on another finger. A drop of blood—looking human but shimmering with a dark, obsidian luster—oozed out.

  He pushed the drop toward the swarm. The lead wasp buzzed forward, cautiously swallowing the bead whole. It let out a high-pitched drone, and the others swarmed forward, circling Gensheng’s six hands. They didn't attack; they gently licked his skin with their slender mouthparts.

  A sensation of blood-bound connection flooded Gensheng’s mind. He could perceive the position of every wasp, their hunger, their joy, and their absolute submission.

  With a single thought, the swarm transformed into a streak of black light and vanished into his mouth, silent and hidden.

  "Good." The Insect Demon nodded. He handed the jade box containing the Dream-Weaver Silkworm to Gensheng and vanished into thin air.