After making his way deep into the Ant Nest's Hatching Room with practiced ease, Rowan ate his fill, then found a secluded corner that few ants passed and began digging.
Once he had dug a small hole, he turned around and sealed the opening connecting it to the Hatching Room, then continued digging outward.
Pheromones really were useful. After learning how to use them in basic ways, Rowan had discovered several more advanced applications.
For instance, he could use marking pheromones as coordinates. This wasn't a new invention; the Black Ants had long been able to use this method.
But they could only receive the information by touching it with their antennae at close range. Rowan, on the other hand, could sense the pheromone coordinates he had left from a distance.
Now, he was digging toward one of the coordinates he had marked. It led to the underground passage he had dug with the Transport Team over the previous two days.
Since the passage had already come very close to the Ant Nest, it didn't take Rowan long to connect his new tunnel to it.
He crawled into the passage and called over the Transport Team, which had been waiting there. First, they carried the soil out of the newly dug tunnel. Then Rowan reinforced the new passage with his saliva.
Next, he dug a temporary Storage Room near the passage's entrance to the Ant Nest and told the Transport Team to wait in the tunnel. Then he sealed the opening between the Storage Room and the passage, and cleared away the pheromones the Transport Team had left behind.
Once he was done, Rowan returned to the Hatching Room and began carrying food from there to the temporary Storage Room.
Although ants passed by from time to time, Rowan had legitimate identity pheromones, so they paid him no attention.
After moving enough food, Rowan sealed the opening between the passage and the Hatching Room and spread some pheromones warning others to stay away.
Then he opened the connection between the Storage Room and the underground passage, called over the Transport Team, and had them carry the food in the Storage Room back to the Insect Nest.
The plan went smoothly. The Insect Nest was like a parasite living on the Ant Nest, and it began enjoying a life of leisure.
Rowan was suddenly free from the busy work of hunting. He no longer needed to look for isolated Scout Worker Ants or put on a display of Rowan's Combat Technique. All he had to do was carry some food to the Storage Room every so often.
Unfortunately, this arrangement couldn't last.
The neighbors had more than a thousand mouths to feed, and their daily food consumption was staggering. In truth, they couldn't store much at all. The number of Soldier Ants made that clear: even an Ant Nest with over a thousand ants could support only around ten of these special soldiers, which did no work besides fighting.
But as the number of insects in Rowan's Insect Nest gradually increased over the past few days, the food in the neighbors' Hatching Room had dwindled noticeably. The Black Ants had grown visibly restless, unable to understand why their food supply kept shrinking.
Rowan was anxious, too. The past few days had been incredibly comfortable, but the number of ants in his own Insect Nest was growing by the day. He had already stopped having the Mother Nest hatch two Mature Form ants directly each day. Apart from hatching ten Insect Eggs daily, he was saving the rest of the resources for its own development.
Even so, in a few days, when the larvae in their cocoons emerged, Rowan's Insect Nest would gain around ten mature ants each day, in addition to another ten or so hatching from eggs.
Those hungry mouths would quickly increase the burden on the Ant Nest. It wouldn't be long before they dragged it down. He had to come up with a solution.
Before he could think of one, though, a Yellow Worm in the Hatching Room caught Rowan's attention. By now, he regarded the Ant Nest as his own food production base, so those few parasites were especially irritating to him.
After a moment's thought, he came up with an idea. He had no idea whether it would work, but he could test it first.
He slowly crawled up beside a Yellow Worm. It was busy gorging itself and didn't notice Rowan approaching at all.
Rowan secretly spat on the Yellow Worm, then quickly moved away. His saliva contained a mixture of pheromones that amounted to a forged identity, one that didn't belong to the Ant Nest.
The Hatching Room was one of the Ant Nest's vital facilities. It continuously provided the nest with new labor, so its importance was self-evident.
A strange identity scent had suddenly appeared in such an important place. The danger was quickly noticed by the Worker Ants feeding the larvae nearby. They began to surround the Yellow Worm, while several of them hurried off toward the Soldier Ants on patrol.
The Yellow Worm, still enjoying its meal, had no idea danger was approaching. Long years in a safe environment had dulled its vigilance, and it could never have imagined the existence of a treacherous little creature like Rowan, hiding beneath an insect's exterior.
The Soldier Ants in the distance began moving toward them. It was Rowan's first time witnessing the formidable fighting power of these living weapons.
A pair of mandibles clamped down on the defenseless Yellow Worm. With a jerk of its head, the Soldier Ant split it in two. The Yellow Worm was tough enough to stay alive even after that; its upper half could still move.
But it had no chance to escape. In the blink of an eye, it was engulfed by the Worker Ants that had been watching hungrily.
Watching from the side, Rowan couldn't help feeling a little shaken. Relying on just one sense to distinguish friend from foe had a serious flaw. Fortunately, his Insect Nest had two systems for identifying friend and foe. If it relied on pheromones alone, there would be a huge loophole: a single insect capable of altering its pheromones and possessing a little intelligence could sabotage the entire Ant Nest from within.
Fortunately, he was currently the only insect who was both capable and clever. But the world was vast. Who knew whether some other insect with similarly strange abilities had evolved?
After thinking it over, Rowan realized that even two identification systems weren't enough to be safe. Once his abilities grew stronger, he would have to develop several more.
It was like the television dramas he had watched before. When human technology was still underdeveloped, people could only tell friend from foe with their eyes. Anyone skilled at disguise could easily infiltrate enemy ranks. Things only improved later, when technology advanced and fingerprint, iris, facial, and DNA recognition became available.
He would have to learn from those lessons.
But it was too soon to worry about that. He already had two identification systems, which were enough for now, and this wasn't a priority. The most important thing was to get rid of the other Yellow Worms before they continued wasting the Ant Nest's food.
The other Yellow Worms showed no reaction to their companion's death. They carried on eating and drinking, as if it had nothing to do with them.
Rowan spat his counterfeit scent onto them one by one, then watched as they were swallowed up by the Soldier Ants and Worker Ants.
Getting rid of all the Yellow Worms not only reduced food consumption considerably, but also let their bodies contribute to the Ant Nest's food stores.
Still, it was only a drop in the bucket. With the Mother Nest about to face an explosion in its insect population, no one knew how much longer the Ant Nest could shoulder the burden.
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