Chapter 27

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation  Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

The night was over, and light visited the sky.

The plastic rabbit was unable to give Shen Cong a lot of the Activity, and its meat could not even compare to that of the mutated ant. But he was incredibly aloof to this, so the results did not affect his mood in the slightest.

*****

Shen Cong did his morning exercises, repaired Titan, collected ant legs, and started investigating the queen ant.

Its head was still in perfect condition. Its thorax and abdomen were smashed to mince meat by Titan’s bulldozer blade, but Shen Cong could still somewhat see how it originally looked.

The queen ant was not that different from a normal ant, but its thorax was not formed by three tergums. Instead, it was formed by plate armor created from sclerotin. One of them was the size of a washbasin. It released a thick wave of Activity radiation, making it clear that this was the queen ant’s Activity core.

Crack.

Shen Cong removed the plate armor with the crescent moon-shaped scimitar, and after a closer inspection, he found that the Activity over there was thicker than in the crescent moon-shaped scimitar he got from the tumor pig.

If he polished the plate armor a little, it could turn into a shield. Even though Shen Cong thought that it was too small, he could still fix it to Sky Lifting Pillar 1.0 and treat it as the armor to protect his heart. He believed that his defense would increase a lot because of it.

Aside from the Activity plate armor, Shen Cong also removed the queen ant’s antennae and some of its legs for food. But it only had three and a half legs left out of the original six. The rest were all eaten by the mutated ants.

Once Shen Cong finished checking the head and thorax, he cast his gaze on the smashed abdomen.

He had seen the mutated ants bringing out a few ant eggs from the queen ant’s abdomen. He did not know what was the use of those things, but he knew that they were definitely valuable, or else, the mutated ants would not have split up into small armies to take each one away before they left.

‘Could it be that they want to hatch a new queen ant?’

Shen Cong removed the exoskeleton from the abdomen and pushed away the sticky white liquid. He had read up on it the night before and found out that it was ant blood. It contained more white pigments, which was why it appeared white.

There were a lot of intestines in the queen ant’s abdomen, and in those intestines were damaged ant eggs.

The power of the bulldozer blade when it came down was extremely great. Almost all the ant eggs were destroyed, and what few remained undamaged were taken away by the mutated ants.

But Shen Cong was still able to find three undamaged ant eggs under the exoskeleton he flipped over. Once, he wiped off the sticky liquid off them, he found that while the egg had a normal shape, it was crystalline and translucent. The surface was a little rough, and it was rather heavy, which made sense since it was not that much smaller compared to a brachyponera worker ant. There was a black dot at one end of the egg, which meant that it should be a fertilized egg.

Shen Cong looked through the carcass again, but found that there really were only three ant eggs still in perfect shape.

He did not manage to find a crop or a stinger.

Soon, Shen Cong uploaded the queen ant’s picture and the information he obtained after dissecting and researching it into his laptop.

[Brachyponera queen ant, a mutated insect resembling an ant. Temporarily classified as an ant from the brachyponera genus. Assumed to be the mutated form of a brachyponera luteipes queen ant. It is incredibly huge, moves slowly, and possesses practically no combat strength. Its intelligence is unknown. It can see through the disguise formed with Activity frequency, and it has the power to command an ant colony.]

Shen Cong added two other sentences after that. [The brachyponera ant colony should have retained the living habits of an ant colony. The queen ant was treated as a reproductive tool and commanded the entire ant colony.]

But after some thought, Shen Cong marked these two sentences in red and added one word behind them—Ambiguous.

He had just read through the information regarding ants last night, and there were clear differences between the habits he read about compared to the living habits of the ant colony after it had mutated.

Based on the information provided by the encyclopedia, ant colonies were communities that shared a tight bond with each other for benefits. Instead of saying that the queen ant was the leader of the ant colony, it would be better to say that the entire colony used each other.

The queen ant was just the creator of the ant colony and a machine that produced eggs. Sometimes, it even needed to hunt for food by itself.

2It did not command the entire ant colony, and the ant colony sometimes would even choose to kill them and choose a new one. Some queens might even end up as food for the larvae.

The mutated ant colony Shen Cong ran into showed signs of possessing the concept of ranks as well, but the queen ant had controlled the other mutated ants.

This was unlike the behavior of ants; it was more similar to the behavior of termites.

Of course, they were definitely not termites. The termite queen was a pure reproductive tool and could not even move, just like a maggot.

‘Could it be that the mutated ants listen to the commands from the queen because they were produced by it?’

Shen Cong shook his head.

He did not want to delve deep into assumptions that would not reach final conclusions for the time being.

It would be enough for him to just record the results of his investigation.

*****

Shen Cong drove his truck back to the field of wrecked cars. Along the way, he felt a little lamentful.

He needed to do many things, and it was clear that he did not have enough time. He had to conduct research on Activity, ingest Activity, create weapons, store food, and search for resources.

One of Titan’s wheels had been punctured by the mutated ants, and he still had not had the time to change it. Even if he did, he could not change it. He had yet to repair the wheel the prehistoric crocodile had managed to bite through some time ago.

The complications and dangers ensured that the distribution of Activity across Titan was never able to reach 100%, which was a major sense of disappointment for Shen Cong.

1Fortunately, each danger stimulated him, and his understanding as well as control over Activity increased each time because of it.

He could replenish the Activity he lost, but the knowledge he gained was priceless, and it was the difference between him and wild beasts. They could do their best to make their Activity grow in amount, but they did not know how to use it, so they would just end up as meat for his stomach.

‘It’d be good if I ran into mutated monsters like the plastic rabbit again.’

In just a few minutes, Shen Cong reached his destination.

The mutated ants who had died the day before were still lying where they had fallen. Shen Cong put on his Sky Lifting Pillar 1.0, equipped himself with all the weapons, and left the truck with a huge canvas bag in hand. He then started harvesting Activity cores, ant legs, and crops.

1This task took up full two hours.

In the end, Shen Cong made an inventory check of his harvest by checking the number of Activity cores, ant legs, and crops he had gathered in the two days.

There were 1,433 brachyponera worker ant legs, 221 undamaged crops, 206 maxillae serving as Activity cores, 18 pairs of antennae serving as Activity cores, 9 petrioles serving as Activity cores, and 4 stingers serving as Activity cores.

And from the brachyponera soldier ants, Shen Cong had gotten 357 ant legs, 53 undamaged crops, 52 maxillae serving as Activity cores, 6 pairs of antennae serving as Activity cores, 4 petrioles serving as Activity cores, and 3 stingers serving as Activity cores. Among them was a brachyponera soldier ant who had a pair of wings made of sclerotin, which served as its Activity core.

If Shen Cong added the number of carcasses from the two types of mutated ants, it would mean that around 320 of them had died.

To his disappointment, however, many of the mutated ants only had a small amount of formic acid in their crops. Perhaps they had already used it all when they surrounded Titan. The Activity cores from the mutated ants were also much more inferior to those of other mutated monsters like the unspayed poodle or earth-digging insect in terms of the intensity of the radiation and size.

Once Shen Cong sorted out the materials, he drove Titan away from possible dangers. The metal and carcasses in the field of wrecked cars might draw over even more mutated monsters, and Shen Cong did not want to be dragged into trouble again. Titan had already been damaged a few times, and he needed time to repair it.

Shen Cong drove the truck manually for an entire afternoon, but the path he took was not ideal. There were no smooth roads, which was torture for a heavy truck.

The conditions were unfavorable for travel, and they only got worse. The slopes were getting steeper, and the truck soon reached a hill.

When dusk arrived, ruins of a human settlement surrounded by barren mountains appeared within Shen Cong’s line of sight. He saw the remains of a row of houses, and buried among a pile of debris was a broken wall with a clean break. He could even vaguely see a sign written in metal—’Shijian Hotel.’

Shen Cong was immediately able to recognize the place. It was Shijianzhen of Wuwei.

‘I haven’t gotten out of Wuwei yet?’

Shen Cong frowned. Shijianzhen was more than 20 km away from Chaohu, and it was around 20 km away from Wuwei County Town. This meant that Shen Cong had only traveled 20 km over the past few days.’

Even though the distance he traveled was much shorter than what he imagined, once he learned that he was in Shijianzhen, Shen Cong could easily set up the correct path he had to take based on his map.

‘To the north of Shijianzhen are mountains, which I can’t traverse. Looks like I have to search for Provincial Highway 208, then continue forward based on it.’

When the night was about to arrive, Shen Cong parked Titan outside the entrance of Shijian Hotel and began his daily work at night.

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