After finishing this small but significant meeting, Zhu Jue and the two governors returned to their temporary palaces to spend the night. Naturally, they were in different moods.
The next day, Zhu Jue continued his good biological clock during the war and woke up when the sun just rose. The entourage around them ordered breakfast to be served, and after a while they took over the simple breakfast prepared by the local worker ants. After tasting each meal to test the poison, they handed it over to Zhu Jue.
Zhu Jue likes delicious food, but not luxury. The local nobles have already received orders. Therefore, the ingredients for this breakfast are all homegrown. There are no delicacies transported from thousands of miles away. They are just boiled sunflower seeds with spices, roasted mealworm fat, and brewed grass seeds with honey.
Eat half of it,
"Ramboser III" and
"Centiper Python III" also came and ate together in the palace where Zhu Jue lived. Their food was exactly the same as Zhu Jue's, except that in addition to honey, Caozi Lake also added some extra
"Milk". Zhu Jue is very concerned about this kind of
Thank you for the "milk" - it is the intestinal secretion used by a certain kind of cockroach to feed its offspring. It is quite nutritious, but its source really challenges Zhu Jue's own bottom line of tolerance.
Speaking of which, before
"Cockroach milk" is very cherished and can be regarded as a high-end food among high-end foods. However, cockroaches have been successfully bred in several livestock nests and have been mastered to prevent them from stopping.
After the introduction of "milk" technology, its production increased significantly and was gradually extended to almost all nests. Now even ordinary worker ants can occasionally eat a drop.
Don't let the cockroaches stop
"Milk" is easy to say. Anyway, this kind of insect has strong fecundity, so there are larvae that need to be nursed at any time, but it only consumes more feed.
Even because cockroaches breed too much, the famous dish of roasted milk cockroaches has appeared in China. Some excess cockroach larvae are even directly killed to make feed for the female cockroaches.
The three ants finished breakfast together, and Zhu Jue once again encouraged the two governors, urging them to continue to expand their territories, manage their territories well, and contribute their loyalty and talents to the ant alliance.
After the two governors flew away on their mounts, Zhu Jue also led the team out of this small lair. He did not return to the north, but continued southward along the Central Valley. There were large tracts of newly conquered land here that Zhu Jue had never been to before. It was worth spending two or three days inspecting it during a break from the war in the north. .
————The Central Valley is the most important transportation route in the new southern territory. After all, there are mountains everywhere here, which even flying insect beasts cannot easily overcome. Only flat valleys are convenient for air or ground transportation.
This central valley starts from the entrance near the mainland plain of the Ant United States and goes all the way south. After passing by, it turns to the south-west direction, makes a bend near the Matterhorn, and then turns south-east from the beginning to reach the new valley. The border basically bisects the southern territory vertically.
This valley is not only a north-south traffic artery, but the branch valleys extending along both sides can also undertake east-west branch traffic. Some gentle streams and lakes distributed in it can even serve as short-distance water transport channels.
In addition, although the valley area only accounts for less than one-tenth of the southern territory, it is home to 80% of the nests and 90% of the ant colonies. In those sparse mountains and high hills, basically only a small number of vassal ant tribes survive. .
Zhu Jue specially looked for those remote places to fly. After flying along the central valley for a while, he turned into a small valley in a rugged area and followed a stream with the sound of water flowing upstream. After a quarter of an hour, he came to a tree nest. forward.
This tree nest is located halfway up a low hill. Only this elm tree grows taller on the barren land. The other nearby land is filled with short shrubs and weeds.
The tree nest is built at the base of the elm tree. The ant mound of concrete covers half of the trunk and is about 1.5 meters high.
There is also a vertical pipe of ant concrete that extends from the top of the ant mound to the crown part of the tree, then divides into several strands and continues to spread along the tops of several main branches. At the end there is a small round ant mound the size of a baseball.
Moreover, these pipes are all covered with grass stems, leaves and bark and sawdust, as if deliberately camouflaged. It is difficult to distinguish them from vegetation without looking carefully.
Zhu Jue saw this style of tree nest for the first time, so he stopped on a whim. The flying knights guarded Zhu Jue and landed on the tree trunk. A guard found an ant nearby to negotiate.
The worker ant of this forest ant smelled the scent of the opponent who was from the same force as his but from a different nest. He was also informed that the divine envoy was coming to the throne and immediately returned to the nest to report.
After a while, three nobles arrived one after another. The leader was a male ant of Big-headed Ant, and the other two were forest ants and corn ants.
Zhu Jue had been observing the tree for a while and knew that the people outside the nest were forest ants and corn ants who were foraging and working.
Wood ants are on the ground repairing walls, blocked vents and drainage channels damaged by recent rains, and hunting everywhere; while corn ants mainly graze aphids nearby, collect some grass and bring it back to their nests, and also capture prey.
Zhu Jue asked briefly, and sure enough, there were only a few big-headed ants in this nest, and all the worker ants were deployed to suppress the majority of forest ants and corn ants, but the total ant population was only about 50,000.
The main source of income of the nest is mealworm breeding, aphid grazing and hunting and gathering, and it can pay a certain amount of tribute to the governor every year.
Zhu Jue also learned more about the operating mechanism of this nest and knew that there was no big-headed ant queen here. There was only one queen each for forest ants and corn ants. The queens were all concentrated in a large nest two days away. The ants in the gap are regularly mobilized from the large nest. This is mainly to prevent rebellions from some vassal indigenous tribes - small-scale rebellions occur one after another, and it also facilitates the distribution of controlled materials such as crow honey.
The client ants have no queen and the number of male ants is also controlled, so it is more difficult for them to rebel. Even if they rebel, they will not have the conditions to persist for a long time. Unless the rebels can knock down the large nest in one go, they must also ensure that the native ants inside The queen was not killed.
Zhu Jue nodded. This check and balance mechanism was not instructed by him, but designed by the governors themselves. It is indeed effective.
He was also curious about the strange design of the ant mounds and pipes here. The local big-headed ant noble said that this nest was originally composed of two nests: the corn ant nest on the tree and the wood ant ant mound under the tree. I wanted to connect two nearby nests into one, but the elm wood was too hard and it was difficult to construct from within the trunk, so I decided to adopt this style.
As for the grass blades outside the ants' concrete, they are not for camouflage. They are mainly for sun protection in summer and warmth in winter, because the environment of this nest is very harsh, with scorching sun in summer and bitter cold in winter.
Zhu Jue suddenly realized this and gained a new understanding of the unique creativity of ant civilization.
