Two days later, the expeditionary force returned to the main nest.
Although the territory suffered a major disaster, the main nest still held a routine triumphal ceremony for the victorious expeditionary force.
The triumphal ceremony of the ants is simple but full of honor.
All the kings in the main nest, accompanied by the escort team, left the main nest and went out to welcome the return of the expeditionary force.
From the main nest to the welcoming location, there are lines of worker ants and soldier ants on both sides of the road dozens of meters away.
The expeditionary force disbanded on the spot amidst this welcome along the road, and the soldiers and workers merged into the teams on both sides of the road.
Only the kings and kings of the expeditionary force and the permanent escorts did not disband. They had brief exchanges with the kings who came to greet them. The triumphal ceremony was over, and then everyone returned to the main nest together.
The protagonist is in the welcoming team. He has been in this main nest full of decay and backwardness for two days.
During these two days, there is no need to deal with government affairs, and the idle protagonist often goes to the senior brother to communicate with him.
After the disappearance of the Lao Wang, the senior brother, as a disciple who had already left school, temporarily took over the responsibilities of the Lao Wang.
However, the King's Council has not yet decided to let him inherit the title of the Lao Wang, because the life or death of the Lao Wang is still uncertain, the reason for his disappearance is a mystery, and it cannot be classified as a defection. If the senior brother inherits the title of the oldest king, and the old oldest king returns, and he cannot be found guilty of a crime, then the entire kingdom will be in the awkward situation of having two oldest kings.
During this period of time, the senior brother did not receive any meaningful divine decree. His more important task was to track down the whereabouts of the oldest king and find the truth behind his disappearance in accordance with the entrustment of the king's meeting.
The protagonist is very interested in this topic, and he and his senior brother have been exchanging relevant information.
Before the protagonist set out to attack the parasitic ants in the southern hilly area, he learned about the sudden retreat of the oldest king. In the past, Lao Wang had never had such a retreat experience. However, at that time, everyone generally believed that as the person in charge of communicating with God, the most strange behavior of the most powerful king was not an exaggeration.
Further back, when the protagonist came to the main nest for the first time, he once lived opposite the eldest brother before and after participating in the military operation to regain the sub-nest occupied by the pavement ant barbarian army.
Now that I think about it, the protagonist lived above the Lao Wang's palace. When he slept in the room every night, he could often hear strange noises coming from behind the wall, like a broom sweeping the ground.
The reason for Lao Wang’s disappearance remains a mystery. The meeting of kings finally decided to freeze the title of the oldest king, but not to declare him a traitor. Once the oldest king is found, a meeting of kings must be convened immediately to question or even try him. In addition, the king's meeting decided at that time to upgrade the status of the senior brother from king to king, temporarily taking over the responsibilities of the oldest king.
Finally, the king's meeting also decided to announce the incident to all the ants in the main nest and all the deputy nests, and the senior brother was responsible for setting up an investigation team to continue to investigate the cause of the disappearance of the oldest king and search for his whereabouts.
After Big Brother's investigation, he discovered two pieces of valuable information.
The first piece of information was a report from the worker ants inside the main nest who supported the queen. At the same time that the oldest king disappeared, three queens from the main nest also disappeared.
In addition to some worker ants fixedly assigned to each queen, there are also some worker ants who are responsible for transporting food to all queens.
It was these worker ants that discovered the anomaly.
The palace of the three missing ant queens is very close to the palace of the oldest king. Is there a connection between the disappearance of the three ant queens and the disappearance of the oldest king?
The second piece of information solves the mystery of the first piece of information.
As the messenger from the main nest conveyed the news of the disappearance of the oldest king to each deputy nest, several southern deputy nests soon sent back information.
These secondary nests have foraging worker ants who once discovered a strange team from the main nest in the territory.
There are male ants in this team, a queen ant, and some accompanying worker ants. The pheromones on the team members showed that they came from the main nest, and they themselves said that they were out on a mission.
However, it is relatively rare to take the queen ant out. Generally, only after the beginning of spring, the queen ants from each secondary nest that originally returned to the main nest for the winter will return to their respective nests. At other times, the queen ants basically live underground. But at that time, it was late autumn.
Naturally, these foraging worker ants would not stop the actions of the team from the main nest, but would just routinely report the information to the local king.
After receiving the notification from the king's meeting, the local king realized that the situation of the strange team discovered before was very consistent with it, so he immediately reported it.
The senior brother immediately organized an investigation team to go south.
However, no new valuable information was found in the territories of several sub-nests where the suspected whereabouts of the Lao Lao Wang were discovered.
The elder brother could only roughly deduce that Lao Wang, the three missing queen ants and some worker ant followers, headed towards the south of the territory of the big-headed ant kingdom, and then there was no news from them again.
As winter approached, Big Brother suspended the search. It was not until the spring of the next year that the search was resumed. However, due to the gap of one winter, no new valuable information has been found.
The mysterious disappearance of the oldest king has become a mystery, but the protagonist didn't think much about it. This was more of an internal matter in the Big-headed Ant Kingdom, and it seems that it has not caused any substantial damage to the kingdom so far.
——I am the dividing line——
On the afternoon when the expeditionary force returned to the main nest, a meeting of all kings was held eagerly.
All five hundred kings attended the meeting. This was the most comprehensive meeting in recent times, which showed how much the entire kingdom attached importance to this matter, and also reflected the difficulty and complexity of the problems that the kingdom needed to solve.
The first topic is naturally the severe problem of disasters in an area that accounts for one-third of the country's territory.
According to comprehensive intelligence from various places, each sub-nest suffered heavy losses in the fire.
Since the expeditionary force was victorious at that time, the reinforcements from various sub-nests dispersed and returned to their original nests. Some troops on the march happened to catch up with the wildfire and had nowhere to escape, and almost all the troops were wiped out.
In addition to the loss of ants foraging outside, the most severe sub-nest lost almost 80% of its ant colonies, and all affected sub-nests also lost nearly half of their ant colonies on average.
What is more serious than the loss of ant colonies is that because the wildfire occurred during the harvest season, most of the secondary nests did not have time to harvest enough food.
These secondary nests are no better than "Linshui City" and "Dongyang City". The latter two have concentrated and contiguous farmland, and harvesting grass seeds is faster. Most of the secondary nests have to collect the seeds of sporadic growing weeds in the vast territory, which is inefficient.
Now, these secondary nests are about to face famine and are in urgent need of support from the main nest.
But the main nest is now also short of food.
