When the protagonist is worrying about how to catch a lone parasitic worker ant, a turning point appears.
A shadow suddenly appeared under the protagonist's feet. He hurriedly looked up and saw a ladybug just flying over his head.
The ladybug landed next to the scale insect, quickly grabbed a defenseless scale insect, stuffed it into her mouth and started chewing.
The body of this ladybug is like a half ball, with a black head and an orange-red shell on the back. The antennae are very short and not very obvious. The short legs are hidden under the big wings. It is easy to miss it if you don't look carefully.
one two three four five six seven.
The protagonist counts carefully and finds that there are seven black spots on the back of this red ladybug. This is a seven-star ladybug.
The seven-spotted ladybug is a predatory insect of the order Coccinellidae. It is a beneficial insect. Its adults can prey on wheat aphids, cotton aphids, sophora aphids, peach aphids, scale insects, ticks and other pests.
Now, this seven-spotted ladybug is hunting scale insects, which is good news for the shrub underfoot. The large number of scale insects has almost overwhelmed it.
But this is bad news for the parasitic worker ants that are grazing. These scale insects are the only source of honeydew for their nests and cannot afford the loss.
The grazing parasitic worker ants immediately came closer and tried to attack the ladybug with their large pincers. But the hemispherical carapace on the back of the ladybug makes it difficult for these parasitic workers to eat.
The parasitic worker ants immediately changed their tactics. They tried to flip the ladybug from underneath and attack its soft abdomen.
This seven-star ladybug has a special trick to save its life. Its six arthropods suddenly secreted some yellow viscous liquid, and a stench spread instantly.
The protagonist was far away and felt nauseated by the smell, not to mention the parasitic worker ants surrounding the seven-star ladybug.
These parasitic worker ants all retreated from the ladybug, but unwillingly circled around it, watching the scale insects disappear into its mouth one after another.
Upon seeing this, a parasitic worker ant hurriedly crawled to the ground, seeing that reinforcements were being brought in.
When the protagonist saw it, he thought he couldn't wait any longer. Soon the army of parasitic ants would come and he would be unable to catch his tongue.
At this time, God also helped the protagonist. A parasitic worker ant actually bypassed the ladybug and crawled towards the protagonist. She might just want to get behind the seven-star ladybug and attack it, but this plays into the protagonist's plan.
The protagonist stands still so that even if the ant is very close, it will not notice him as long as its tentacles do not touch him.
When the parasitic worker ant crawled to his side, the protagonist suddenly rushed out and knocked the unlucky parasitic worker ant unconscious with one punch.
This action of the protagonist attracted the attention of other parasitic worker ants not far away. They all turned their heads this way and their tentacles pointed here, not even paying attention to the seven-star ladybug on the side.
However, due to the distance and the lack of alarm pheromones, the attention of these parasitic worker ants was quickly attracted to the seven-spotted ladybug in front of them.
The protagonist knocks out a parasitic worker ant queen and drags her back to A Xiang's location. This place is already some distance away from the place where the parasitic worker ants were knocked unconscious before, and unexpectedly the enemy discovered them.
The protagonist saw Axiang wanting to come over and immediately approached him to ask him to stop. Now there was another source of danger that needed to be eliminated. He didn't want Axiang to be accidentally injured here.
The protagonist returned to the unconscious parasitic worker ant. Three silk threads stood upright on her back, but did not leave the host to attack the protagonist.
The protagonist recalled the experience a week ago, and it seemed that these threads needed to touch a new potential host, or be affected by the discharge of light green smoke before they would move.
The protagonist calmed down, took a few deep breaths, and then lightly touched the middle of a silk thread.
These threads come to life the moment the protagonist touches them. Although the protagonist only encountered one, the three threads broke away from the body of the parasitic worker ant almost at the same time and crawled towards the protagonist.
The protagonist is already prepared. These threads crawl slowly anyway, so you only need to pay attention to their sudden ejection.
Soon, the protagonist crushed the heads of the three threads without any danger. Then, dragging his captured captive, he returned to the foliage.
The protagonist tied the prisoner to Xiaoqing's back and quickly returned to "Dongyang City" with A Fei and A Xiang.
————
The captive did not wake up until the afternoon. The protagonist discovered that after losing the parasitic thread, the worker ant was slightly confused for a while, and then still wanted to attack him, but the degree of madness and power were not as good as when he was parasitized.
The protagonist had already arranged six worker ants aside to firmly control the six limbs of the parasitic worker ant. Another soldier ant used a pair of forceps to hold down the head of the parasitic worker ant and pin her to the ground.
The protagonist steps forward, intersects his antennae with those of the parasitic worker ant, and begins to work hard to read the information he wants.
This worker ant's mind is filled with chaotic and manic emotions, but it does not stop the protagonist from exploring his consciousness.
As long as an ant refuses, other ants will not be able to read the information in her mind through their tentacles.
To this end, the protagonist also conceived many cliché plans. Ants can’t lie anyway, so it’s easy to come up with clichés.
But the brain of this parasitic worker ant seems to have opened its door, allowing the protagonist to read it at will, but it does not respond to the protagonist's questions.
There are pros and cons to this. The advantage is that the protagonist can look for the information he wants at will, but the disadvantage is that he cannot conduct precise searches and can only find needles in a haystack.
Fortunately, the protagonist discovers that this parasitic worker ant is very young, and it does not take more than a month to break out of the pupa. Before breaking out of the pupa, the ants have no memory, and one month's memory information can still be read through.
The experience of this parasitic worker ant was just one month long. It took the protagonist half a day to complete the search by fast forwarding and dragging the progress bar.
As a worker ant at the bottom of the ant nest, this parasitic worker ant does not have access to particularly confidential information, but from her experience, the protagonist still discovered a lot of valuable content.
First, the protagonist determines that these ants live in an underground nest not far from the tongue-catching bush, and this nest is obviously new.
Newly born captives do not have parasitic threads on their bodies, but most of the adult ants in the nest have silk threads on their bodies and will soon pass them on to their unparasitized mates.
However, the ants in the ant nest are not dissatisfied with being parasitized. Maybe they cannot understand the hidden dangers of being parasitized.
But the protagonist can intuitively feel the lethality of parasitic threads: there are often dead adult ants in this nest, and the number is far more than a normal nest of the same size.
The protagonist sees from the prisoner's perspective that the prisoner once threw the body of a dead parasitic ant into a fixed garbage dump outside the nest.
The garbage dump in front of me was so shocking. Thousands of ant corpses were piled up so densely that they almost formed a small pyramid.
All of these corpses had threads growing on them. No, this is no longer silk thread.
On the corpse, the silk threads sucked out the remaining nutrients inside the corpse, and quickly grew into small mushrooms with umbrella caps, similar to the enoki mushrooms.
The pile of corpses at the foot of the mushroom was tightly bound together by mycelium, as if the pyramid was covered with a layer of white frost, which also ensured that the pyramid would not collapse.
The protagonist realizes: this parasitic thread is a fungus. What he didn't know was that the parasite parasitic on the zombie ants was also a fungus.
