Very far away from the battlefield on the Western Front, at the core of the territory north of Qinghe of the Ant Alliance, this ant nest is showing a scene that is completely different from the battlefield but equally intense.
The flying knight flying in the air can best detect the abnormality here.
On the ground, roughly with a certain point as the center, there is an approximately circular area with a radius of about 3 meters. There is almost no grass growing, and it looks dry and lacks vitality, which is in sharp contrast with the surrounding spring green. Even a large tree with lush branches nearby, in this bright spring of red flowers and green willows, can barely pull out a few yellow-green new leaves, and is dying. Even if this tree dies in the next new moon, it will not be affected at all. Makes the ants wonder.
From the water vapor constantly evaporating from the ground here, as well as the special visual effects of distorted air near the surface in summer that are unique to spring, as well as the self-explanatory heat blowing towards your face, and even the smoke columns that emerge from time to time, it is not difficult to understand this place. The reason why the place is scorched.
There is obviously a heat source underground here, and if you follow your body senses to find the center of the heat source, you can easily find that it is near the ground part of the ant nest.
It turns out that this is [Hematite City]!
Although now, in order to avoid the danger of placing ant eggs in one nest, Zhu Jue has spread out a lot of steel production capacity and built multiple metallurgical bases on the north and south banks of Qinghe River. However, as the first iron smelting base of the Ant Alliance, the territory also has a huge location advantage of high-grade hematite. [Hematite City], located on the north bank of the Qinghe River, is still the most important in the metallurgical and military industries of the entire Ant Alliance. Occupying a pivotal position!
The ant colonies here have long been in the hundreds of thousands, and food even needs to be supplied by nearby nests. If the degree of industrial division of labor represents the degree of civilization development, this is undoubtedly one of the most developed nests in the Ant Alliance!
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At this time, six leaf-cutting ants were returning to the nest, and they were working together to carry some kind of long object. Don't get me wrong, what was being transported was not a dead insect, but some kind of inedible wood.
They were returning from a place ten meters away from the nest, and the journey on the ground alone would take endless time. In the direction they came from, there was a dense forest over there.
If it were other leafcutter ants, they would probably go to this forest to collect leaves, cut them into pieces, and then transport them back to use as a bacterial bed. However, these leafcutter ants hold neatly cut dry wood in their jaws. Obviously, they cannot grow fungi, but they are too small to grow fungus.
It turns out that smelting iron requires a large amount of fuel, and smelting the best iron requires high-quality charcoal. These leafcutter ants are responsible for collecting raw materials for burning charcoal.
There are many old elm trees in the woods with a high density, which are suitable for burning charcoal. The ants have already exhausted the resources of the dead branches that fell on the ground. Now the ants can only climb the trees to collect resources. Fresh branches are tough and difficult to harvest, and they need to be dried in the sun before they can burn charcoal, so ants generally choose branches that are dry but have not fallen off as their first choice.
This job is usually left to leaf-cutting ants or ants. Their large jaws are equipped with serrated jaws, which are different from the sickle-shaped fighting jaws and are very suitable for slowly sawing branches.
After the branches are sawed, there are ants on the ground equipped with chisel-like jaws and axe-like jaws that are responsible for cutting them into similar sizes and shapes. In the end, the wood is about the thickness of a toothpick in the human world and the length of a sunflower seed, and is then cut by worker ants. Move back to the lair.
Even the entrance and exit of [Hematite City] has been redesigned and constructed specifically for transporting materials. There is a special opening for transporting wood. The opening is spacious, and the internal passage is also very spacious and straight up and down with a suitable slope, which is most suitable for carrying large items.
Such a cave entrance is obviously not suitable for defense. Fortunately, ants are the overlords of the ecosystem. There are city walls and strongholds on the outside of [Hematite City]. Even this cave entrance is protected by a watchtower, and there are guards hidden inside the cave entrance. The guarded Tibetan Soldier Cave is more than enough to deal with ordinary enemy attacks.
The wood was carried by six leaf-cutting ants from the ground to the ground, and then gradually went deeper into the ground. As they go lower and lower, the surrounding temperature also rises, as if they are approaching the scorching center of the earth and are about to stage an adventure to the center of the earth.
If you take a closer look, you will see that the ants that come in and out here all have yellowish carapace and slender limbs, like dried firewood - this is an inevitable occupational disease. Their work is no less harmful to their lifespan than experiencing an adventure.
What they were going to was the charcoal kiln. The charcoal kiln that had been emptied just three days ago was refilled with the busy coming and going of the ants. Countless high-density long logs were piled into reasonable shapes to serve as fuel. Miscellaneous trees are interspersed among them.
It only takes one day to burn a kiln of charcoal. After all, the kiln built by ants is only about the size of a football. However, it takes 3 days to wait for the kiln to cool down, and a week to unload and reinstall the kiln. This has been optimized many times. Productivity.
Nowadays, many metallurgical bases on the south bank of Qinghe River have begun to use coal to make iron, and the production efficiency will be higher. At least the iron ore does not need to wait for a long time for fuel. Although the finished product of coal iron is harder and more brittle than carbon iron, it can be used for general purposes.
[Hematecheng] still insists on charcoal iron-making. In addition to being far away from the coal mines, it is also because the high-quality iron here is used to cast the most sophisticated weapons such as large-caliber artillery and rocket launchers. These weapons are generally resistant to iron. There are higher requirements for toughness, which determines that the finished iron cannot be mixed with too much sulfur in coal. Charcoal fuel has a huge advantage in this regard.
The charcoal being prepared for firing in this kiln, as well as the iron being prepared for smelting in several other kilns, will be used to make a new type of weapon. For this reason, the officials of the main nest of the Ant Alliance who took over the administration in Zhu Jue's place immediately ordered [Chitie City] to take on this task, and also specially sent an "imperial envoy" Shenxiong Ant to supervise the work.
Now, the supervisor has inspected the last charcoal kiln before agreeing to light the fire and seal the kiln. The technicians are all big worker ants and magic worker ants of big-headed ants, and they personally operate the most critical steps.
Slowly, in the sealed charcoal kiln invisible to the sight of the overseer, the charcoal kiln began to burn fiercely. Black smoke billowed from the chimney at the top and rose out of the ground, carrying frantic heat until it merged into the atmosphere. . The scene of billowing black smoke will disappear only after half a day, when the mouth of the chimney is blocked by wet mud.
The overseer male ant's mind was not on this, and even the rising temperature did not wake him up. At this time, he was still admiring the information package on the new weapon in his mind.
Such new weapons are full of industrial beauty and rough and primitive killing intent.
gorgeous!
