Chapter 19 Attacking the Ant Nest
There was a light rain last night, making the nearby land slightly moist.
Ma Yi led ten of his carefully selected elite soldier ants and fifty worker ants, marching majestically on the slightly humid land.
His goal is clear.
So there is no detour.
Not long after, he came to the entrance of a slightly raised small hole.
This is the closest new ant nest to theirs.
Just when Ma Yi led his troops over, there happened to be a few worker ants belonging to this group crawling out of the ant nest.
It looked like he was about to start working.
Ma Yi did not hesitate, gave the order, and rushed forward with ten elite soldier ants.
The battle was a one-sided massacre.
Worker ants are smaller than soldier ants, and these elite soldier ants are larger than ordinary soldier ants.
What resulted was a unilateral crushing.
What's more, the gap in quantity has also widened.
Ma Yi poked his head in, pinched off the head of a worker ant with his mouthparts, and threw it aside.
"Dig the hole!" He waved his tentacles and issued the command.
The worker ants behind him swarmed up and started to get busy.
With the efforts of many worker ants, it didn't take long for the ant nest to be completely dug up.
This ant nest has just developed not long ago, and it is estimated that there are less than a few dozen ants in total, and most of them have been sent out to find food. Only single digits remain in the ant nest.
These are probably those who have just brought back the food and haven’t set out yet.
After sweeping away the ants in the ant nest, Ma Yi quickly came to the queen of the ant colony.
This queen ant was skinny, and her carapace didn't look shiny at all, not as beautiful as Ma Yi's own one.
At the same time, he also had another idea.
When he was an ant these days, he also gradually understood some of the established rules among ants.
For example, their species can actually have two social forms.
One is the "single queen" form, and the other is the "multi-queen" form.
This is regulated according to the complex structure of more than 600 "super gene locks" in their genes.
The specific manifestation is: an ant colony with a single queen form will kill the queens of other groups, while an ant colony with a multiple queen form will accept other groups of queens who also have multiple queen form genes.
However, although Ma Yi is physically an ant, at his core he is a human being.
With the integration with this body, he can now overcome some of the genetic shortcomings in his body.
He didn't know whether he had a single gene or multiple genes, but he knew that if he only relied on one queen ant, it would take who knows how long it would take for the group to grow and develop.
But if a few more ant queens are brought together, the group will grow faster and faster!
A single mature queen ant can produce approximately 800 to 1,500 eggs per day, and the entire ant nest can accommodate approximately 50,000 to 240,000 eggs.
But that's after maturity.
Generally speaking, the egg-laying ability of the queen increases in a step-like manner.
From more than a dozen coins at the beginning, to nearly a hundred coins, then hundreds, and finally thousands.
This will take about six months to a year.
But if you can catch a few more queen ants, you can shorten this process significantly.
Of course, even if he recruits these queen ants, he cannot go up to sow the seeds himself.
The queen can control the type of ants that hatch anyway.
If the recruitment is successful, then these recruited queens will produce worker ants, while their own queens will produce soldier ants.
With his constantly evolving genes, the soldier ants he produces will definitely be stronger than the current ones!
As a pursuing ant, Ma Yi decided to start by persuading the queen.
"Don't come here!" The queen ant looked at the big ant that broke into her home in horror, waving her tentacles wildly, and her thin body kept moving back.
But it is already in the deepest part of the cave, where can it retreat to?
"Do you want to come home with me?" Ma Yi waved his tentacles and released pheromones.
But the queen obviously didn't want to give in: "Don't come here, get out! Intruder, get out!"
Ma Yi tried several times and found that the other party had been repeatedly releasing this signal.
He probably understood that this queen should have "single queen genes" and was incompatible with other queens.
In desperation, he had no choice but to swing his butcher knife and kill the queen ant cleanly.
"Take away!"
Ma Yi turned around and left the cave with some melancholy.
Behind them, the worker ants began to get busy, moving the corpses of the queen and ants in the ant nest, as well as some unhatched ant eggs, back to their nests.
After that, Ma Yi followed the same pattern and brought four new ant nests.
I don't know if it was bad luck or something, but including the one at the beginning, there was a total of five ant nests, but not a single queen expressed her surrender.
Fortunately, the huge harvest made Ma Yi feel much better.
Five ant nests, five ant queens, hundreds of ant corpses, hundreds of ant eggs, and a certain amount of food in each ant nest, this is the harvest of a morning!
Ma Yi suddenly discovered that robbing neighbors was much more efficient than searching for food by himself.
What he gained this morning was almost worth all the hard work he had put in until he became an ant!
Ma Yi was in a good mood and had a great appetite.
But he is not the ants under his command. As a former human being, he still has a lot of psychological burden about eating his own kind.
So what he eats is the food reserves of other ant nests.
In this way, coupled with the accumulation over the previous period, his evolution points finally reached 0.05. The speed of accumulation of evolution points is really touching.
Ma Yi sometimes thinks that if he had obtained this strange plug-in when he was still an individual, he would have become very strong by now, right?
Not like now.
As an ant at the bottom of the food chain, it takes a lot of energy just to find food every day.
In order to provide the queen with enough nutrients so that she can hatch more ants.
Newly hatched ants also need food.
He usually doesn't dare to let go and eat.
Now, the ant colony began to grow gradually, allowing him to relax a little.
"In a few days, maybe we can evolve for the second time!" Ma Yi was looking forward to it.
It was already afternoon, and he was on his way out again to the remaining ant nests.
Not long after, there was another big victory.
After a morning of "troop training", even the soldiers and worker ants under Ma Yi were accustomed to this way of fighting.
The speed of breaking through the ant nest is getting faster and faster.
Ma Yi held a piece of dried small insect in his hand and ate it while walking.
Several elite soldier ants dispersed and stood guard on both sides to prevent Lao Liu from sneaking in to steal food.
The worker ants walked forward holding the food captured from the ant nest.
At this moment, with a whoosh, a worker ant was dragged underground together with the ant eggs it was holding!
There is the sixth child!
Ma Yi was shocked.