After arranging the pre-war preparations, the protagonist flew towards "Linshui City" on Xiaoqing II.
This is not the first time the protagonist has flown to "Linshui City", so he is familiar with the route.
If you are afraid of getting lost, just fly east from "Dongyang City" to the sky above the big lake, then go north to find the first small river, and follow the winding river in a direction roughly due north and west until you reach the place where it merges. Just across the river, you can see the dense and magnificent banyan tree in "Linshui City". There are landmarks along this route, so you don’t need to get lost, but the journey is a bit long.
For an experienced bird like the protagonist, he prefers to fly straight north to the river and then turn west to find the target, but the time on the road is saved by nearly half.
The eye-catching and rare banyan tree in "Linshui City" soon appeared at the feet of the protagonist.
The city is as its name suggests. The northernmost sub-nest of the Big-headed Ant Kingdom is located on the edge of the big river that the ants call it. To be precise, it is on the surface of the big river.
The big river is the boundary river between the Big-headed Ant Kingdom and the Pavement Ant Barbarian Kingdom. It is about fifteen or six meters wide. In the eyes of humans, it is just a small ditch. But for any type of ant, this is an insurmountable chasm. -Water, and running water, is the obstacle that ants fear most.
Due to the physiological structure of ants, most ants cannot float on the water for a long time. The water will dissolve their oils and let them sink to the bottom little by little. Before that, the suffocation caused by submerging the spiracles in the abdomen had killed most of the ants that fell into the water.
Even if they can survive in a short period of time, the ants cannot decide their own fate in the water. Even if they are not attacked and eaten by vicious aquatic creatures, the wind direction and current will determine where the drowned ants will eventually drift. If they drift to a place far away from the nest, the stray ants will not survive long.
Therefore, except in winter when the river freezes, neither big-headed ants nor pavement ants will try to cross the river. But from the perspective of the protagonist, this is not a difficult task. Only a simple pontoon bridge needs to be built to cross this original gap.
"Linshui City" is located on a small island in this river. The island is about half a meter away from the south bank where the Big-headed Ant Kingdom is located, and about fifteen meters away from the north bank where the Pavement Ant Kingdom is located.
The entire island is actually made up of a huge rock pan in the water. A huge banyan tree stubbornly grew out of the cracks in the rock pan. The roots of the banyan tree are firmly rooted in the cracks in the rock, and some thick roots are exposed on the surface. , entrenched on the rocks, and finally plunged into the mud under the water. The entire island is the sphere of influence of the banyan tree.
In addition, there was originally a dead willow tree over one meter long on Stone Island. Unable to resist the competition from the banyan tree, this small willow tree died long ago. After countless years of erosion, it was finally semi-decayed. The trunk of the willow tree suddenly fell down, forming a natural bridge between the island and the south shore.
There is very little soil on this stone island, with only sporadic soil distributed on the stone surface and around the tree trunks, and filling in the gaps between the stones and tree roots.
Due to the lack of soil on the island, "Linshui City" was not built underground. Instead, criss-crossing tunnels and nests were dug under the rough bark of the big banyan tree. Therefore, this is both a water city and a tree city.
This structure brings great trouble to the winter defense plan. In the cold winter, even if the ground is already covered with sub-zero ice and snow, it is still warm deep underground.
For example, when the ground temperature is zero, the temperature one meter underground can still be maintained at about four or five degrees. This temperature is barely enough for big-headed ants to move around without freezing. Therefore, in the plan, each sub-nest must be below one meter underground. Conduct defensive operations in depth. The temperature at the depth of three meters is already above ten degrees, so it can be used as a camp for the troops to take turns to rest and recuperate.
But the thin bark of the banyan tree obviously cannot withstand the cold. Since all the defenders here were killed in battle in the past years, the protagonist has no way of knowing what strategies the defenders used to resist in the past, but he knows that relying on the nests outside the tree trunks cannot house the Angel King's army and ensure the activities of the soldiers. Powerful.
Accompanied by the king of "Linshui City", the protagonist walked around the inside and outside of this sub-nest. He thought carefully and felt that there were two ways to try to expand the size of the secondary nest and maintain a certain temperature.
The first option is to try to dig down from the cracks in the rocks on the ground, trying to find a way to dig deep underground, and then build a nest.
The advantage of this is that ants are better at soil work. As long as they find a suitable location, the construction progress will be very fast. Moreover, the underground temperature is relatively constant, which is conducive to ensuring the combat effectiveness of the Divine Envoy King's army.
But this solution also has problems. For example, since the island is located in a river, will it be discovered after digging that the water table is too high, making it impossible to build a nest? For another example, the foundation of the island is entirely made of rock. What if there are no gaps to penetrate deep into the soil?
The second option is to expand the nest inside the trunk of the banyan tree. About four people can hug this banyan tree, and its trunk is more than two meters in diameter. If a secondary nest can be dug out in the center of the tree, the one-meter-thick trunk around it can also provide good insulation. If a combustion chamber is built inside the heart of the tree to provide heating, I believe it will be able to maintain a higher room temperature.
However, this project is very difficult. The ants' jaws can easily dig the soil, but it is difficult for them to work on solid wood. In the past, during the construction of "Linshui City", construction was carried out along the decayed wood to reduce the workload.
Moreover, when building a combustion chamber inside the heart of the tree, you also need to pay attention to how to ensure that the entire tree will not be burned from the inside out. Otherwise, the protagonist and the Angel King's army will be killed in the sea of fire, and it will be too late to escape.
In fact, the most suitable nest to build in a tree is that of arboreal ants, which uses ant silk to sew leaves together. This kind of nest is easy to build and makes full use of the resources and space in the tree. You can build several more as needed. It can also accommodate more ants. However, this kind of arboreal ant nest is also not insulated, so often only ants living in tropical areas don't have to worry about winter ants using this kind of nest.
The protagonist finally decided to use a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, he asked the worker ants of "Linshuicheng" to dig holes everywhere on the island where there was soil to test whether they could build underground nests; on the other hand, he asked the worker ants to try to drill holes into the trunk of the banyan tree. Through experiments, Calculate the project quantities and labor required.
Since "Linshui City" has received the order from the main nest, the kings here expressed their obedience to the protagonist, and they immediately started organizing the ants to start construction according to the protagonist's request.
