ebonymovies Chapter 34: Worker Ants Emerging from Their Cocoons
Chapter 34: Worker Ants Emerging from Their Cocoons
Ye Zhi, on the other side, was naturally unaware of what Wu Yuan was thinking. She simply cooperated with Zuo Wang Qing Yuan and continued to feed the remaining corpses of the giant toothed ants to the "Chimera".
In truth, he did realize his dream of retrieving corpses from wild pitcher plants. He could retrieve the digested remains from the insect traps as soon as he got up, and even the remains of Force-based life forms.
But now... Ye Zhi, who had just struggled to drag a piece of head remains out of the insect trap and felt utterly exhausted, had an urge to slap her past self across the face with her antennae...
The remaining exoskeleton fragments that the Chimera digested piled up into a small mountain once again, while the corpses of the giant toothed ants, which were gradually drying out and losing their Force, were becoming fewer and fewer, and soon they were almost gone.
At this moment, the primal force nutrients that "Chimera" had condensed yesterday had all been picked off by Ye Zhi and then placed into several small spider silk bags by Qing Yuan's command of the worker ants, awaiting the return of the Wu Yuan Ant King to make a decision.
After finishing all that, Qingyuan directed the worker ants to hunt down a few small animals, which were then torn apart and thrown into the "Chimera's" insect trap by Yezhi to digest, replenishing some of the nutrients that might be consumed after the condensation.
Then, it led a team of support worker ants to continue taking care of the other offspring of the citron queen and the wild citron seed bestowed by God. This was its fixed mission of guarding the territory.
Seeing this, Ye Zhi also briefly bid farewell to the "Chimera" and flew towards the nest chamber. In the past two days, he had been busy cooperating with Qing Yuan to feed the "Chimera" and then retrieving corpses. He was already exhausted and didn't even have time to continue his "failed ant" training plan.
He flew back to his "Spider Cave," rested briefly, and then lifted the ant silk curtain to take a routine look at the development of the larvae. What he discovered surprised him.
The larva that I had deliberately nurtured to resemble a worker ant had now turned from bright white to yellowish-brown. Underneath a thin layer of pupal skin, it already resembled a worker ant.
A faint pheromone fluctuation was emanating from beneath the ant pupa. It was a signal from the newly hatched worker ant, requesting help from its kind to break out of the pupa—this worker ant had already completed its development!
Ye Zhi, whose body was already five centimeters long, cautiously approached the "miniature" worker ant pupa, which was less than one centimeter in size, and stretched out her soft mandibles to slowly lick it.
Weaver ants do not use their silk to spin cocoons; their pupal skin is just a thin, tough membrane. Worker ants can emerge from the pupa by gently tearing it open from under their six limbs.
Compared to Ye Zhi, who was a rejected chimeric ant and broke free of her pupal skin on her own without the help of worker ants, this first worker ant is undoubtedly lucky.
After careful handling, the worker ant's antennae instinctively touched Ye Zhi's antennae affectionately, patting each other and emitting the first "greeting" of new life.
But at this moment, a special situation occurred - a wisp of almost imperceptible primal energy was transmitted from the intersecting antennae of the two, and from Ye Zhi's body, it was transmitted all the way to the nervous system of the newborn worker ant!
With a jolt, Ye Zhi suddenly felt as if he could directly perceive everything that the worker ant was sensing the moment the transmission was completed—sight, hearing, smell, touch... He could even see his own body through the worker ant's compound eyes.
"Holy crap!" Ye Zhi uttered another exclamation from the depths of her soul, feeling once again shaken by the Force.
Swarm intelligence, hive mind, two-way data link... a series of terms popped into Ye Zhi's mind. He really didn't expect that the worker ants he produced would have such amazing abilities.
Was this a joking remark he'd made in his past life—"Move the long-range position forward five meters"—coming true? He couldn't help but let his imagination run wild.
In this world, while the worker ants produced by other Force-based life forms such as ants, bees, or termites have been greatly enhanced compared to the original ant colony algorithm, this efficient method of intra-colony connection is completely unheard of in the inherited memory.
As Ye Zhi attempted to precisely control the worker ants to perform various actions, he discovered that he could now control them just like controlling his own limbs, truly giving them complete control.
Shaking her antennae to suppress the shock in her heart, Ye Zhi continued to test the worker ants' combat abilities, trying to use the fighting techniques taught by Hong Yuan - leaning forward, pouncing, biting, retreating, and striking and disengaging in one strike, as if she had practiced them on the worker ants a thousand times.
What surprised him most was that this worker ant also inherited the abdominal silk gland that should belong to the larva, and was able to spit out ant silk and perform various difficult movements with the ant silk.
It seems that her silk glands are not due to chimerism, but rather some kind of deliberately preserved benign genetic mutation. This made Ye Zhi even more delighted - in this way, wouldn't every future combat worker ant be able to become a "failed ant" capable of scaling walls and leaping across rooftops?
......
In her excitement, Ye Zhi also took a look at the larva that had hatched from the golden egg.
At this time, it still looked like a plump white larva, even fatter than before, but its body length had reached about three centimeters, exceeding the body length of the first instar of the leaf weaver.
Under normal circumstances, the worker ants of leaf ants will not exceed the size of the queen ant, and the same is true for leaf ants at the Force life level.
But Leafweaver is, after all, a chimera ant, and its size is not as good as that of a true queen ant. Even now, as a Force creature, it still does not meet the normal standard of a Leafweaver ant king. The worker ants are a size larger than itself, which seems reasonable.
But looking at the plump, white, fleshy golden egg larvae, and considering its development speed, Ye Zhi couldn't help but wonder if he had somehow created an ant-like Nezha, and something was about to jump out of the fleshy ball.
Thinking this way, Ye Zhi still fed some of the liquid food in the social stomach to the golden egg larvae, and then fed some to the newly born worker ants. She also controlled the worker ants to settle in the hatching chamber of the golden egg larvae, so that they could quickly perform their duties as "miniature" worker ants to take care of the larvae.
After pondering for a moment, since his worker ants could be completely controlled, the problem he had worried about—that the primary-stage worker ants could not live in the long, narrow ant nest because they instinctively rejected other species—was no longer a concern. So he could lay some more eggs.
Putting everything else aside, he now feels an urgent need to breed a pair of the largest worker ants, using the silk glands they inherited from him to help him complete the task of retrieving the corpses after feeding the "Chimeras"...
Recalling the feeling of being completely drained after the Life Sac "spit out" the eggs, Ye Zhi felt a headache coming on. She bit her jaw slightly, comforting herself that it should get much better after the second instar, and slowly climbed onto her ant silk cushion...