White Spot Disease

Aside from those that accidentally kicked the bucket, so many new insects were born every day.

Moreover, the territory was vast now, and the insects were busy working day and night. It was no longer like before, when there were only a few hundred insects huddled together every night. When Rowan was idle, he could count exactly how many insects there were in a moment.

He felt a bit sentimental that those days were gone forever; now, he could only roughly estimate that the number of insects was at least fifty thousand or more.

As time passed, Rowan had a bit of a headache over the last two days because many insects had fallen ill.

He didn't know when it started, but small white spots had appeared on the insects' originally shiny exoskeleton armor.

At first, there were only a few, scattered like stars on the back armor and other parts of several insects. But within a very short time, these white spots spread rapidly, densely covering the insects' entire bodies, and shortly thereafter, these insects died inexplicably.

After the insects died, they would be recycled for protein by the Worker Ants according to protocol, and thus, these white spots were transmitted to other insects during the processing.

These white spots spread among the insects like a plague.

By the time Rowan finally discovered and paid attention to it, hundreds of insects had already died because of these white spots.

Rowan felt a bit self-reproachful; this was his negligence in management.

He had been busy lying on tree trunks watching the scenery by himself lately, and ever since his body size grew larger, he hadn't lived with the insects for a long time.

Because with his size, digging a huge tunnel to the underground would bring some unknown dangers to the Insect Nest, such as rain.

The entrance to the Insect Nest was a mound higher than the surrounding area. With the later construction by the Worker Ants, the entrance position kept rising, like a small volcanic crater.

In this way, when it rained, the Worker Ants would quickly block the entrance, so the rain would not pour directly into the cave, and the accumulated water would not overflow the entrance.

But if a tunnel capable of accommodating Rowan were built, it would be difficult for the Worker Ants to block the entrance in a very short time given their size. If the rain was too heavy, it would cause unnecessary trouble for the Insect Nest.

With Rowan's limited experience as an insect, he naturally wouldn't have thought of these things in advance.

Dozens of days ago, a heavy rainstorm covered this area. Fortunately, his body size wasn't as large as it was now, and the tunnel entrance wasn't too big.

Even so, quite a few Worker Ants were still drowned by the incoming rainwater.

Since then, Rowan had dug a new bedroom next to the Insect Nest and lived alone.

And this was the main reason why he didn't discover the White Spot Disease in time.

After noticing the White Spot Disease, Rowan carefully observed a sick Worker Ant and found that these white spots were not a disease at all, but a very, very small type of insect.

These insects clung tightly to the host, bit the host with their mouthparts, lived by sucking the host's body fluids, and reproduced rapidly. Once their numbers reached a certain level, it was enough to cause the host to die.

Although the cause of the insects' illness was identified, Rowan had no good solution for it.

The insects' weapons tended to be broad and sweeping, posing no threat to such tiny White Worms. The adhesive hairs on Rowan's walking legs could stick to these little white worms, but facing tens of thousands of infected insects, relying on him alone would kill him from exhaustion before he could treat even a few.

Hatch new insects with adhesive hairs? It took a long time from egg to adult; by the time they grew up, the infected insects would probably all be dead. And having the Mother Nest produce adults directly was too inefficient; the small quantity wouldn't be of much use.

Rowan could only isolate the infected insects first and then think of a solution.

Just as he was thinking until his head felt like it would explode, a turning point suddenly appeared.

He remembered that the Worker Ants' formic acid solution was very powerful and had great lethality when facing opponents without acid-resistant genes. So, he gave it a try.

The test results were surprisingly good; these White Worms had no acid-resistant attributes and were easily killed by the formic acid solution.

Thus, after a "rain" of acid, the insects returned to health.

But the root cause of this matter had not been solved, which was how these little White Worms appeared.

Given that life was very monotonous nowadays, Rowan sorted out his thoughts a little and had some guesses.

He had wiped out more than twenty ant nests and had never seen such little White Worms on ants. Previously, these things had not appeared in the Insect Nest either.

This meant that some recent changes in the Insect Nest had led to the infestation of the little White Worms.

Rowan thought of the wood shavings in the ant nest used to prevent the cave from being damp. These shavings were specifically bitten off from vegetation and tree roots by the ants to create dead wood, from which they were extracted.

These things used to be in the Insect Nest, but since Rowan moved out, the moisture-proofing work in the Insect Nest had become a bit negligent. This was the only change in the Insect Nest he could think of recently.

As for whether this was the reason, it would require a period of observation.

Soon, some orders were conveyed.

After the Worker Ants washed the entire Insect Nest with formic acid, they collected many dry wood shavings from dead wood and transported them back to the nest. After some arrangement, the Insect Nest was as dry and comfortable as before.

Several days passed, and the "White Spot Disease" did not appear again. It seemed the problem was indeed due to the dampness of the cave.

With the problem solved, life returned to a calm state.

Months later, the sphere of influence of the Insect Nest pushed forward by another hundred meters or so.

At the same time, Rowan faced a new problem.

This problem was actually an old one.

The reason Rowan decided to walk out of the underground, wipe out the ant nests, and land on the surface was that the Smuggling Tunnel was too long, and the harvest from the Worker Ants' round trips was not proportional to the consumption.

Therefore, forced by circumstances, the survival mode of the Insect Nest shifted from a supply-based model to a self-sufficient model.

But that initial problem had not been fundamentally solved, and now, it had appeared again.

With the expansion of the territory, the edge of the domain was already nearly five hundred meters away from the Insect Nest.

The time it took for the Worker Ants to make a round trip was too long, and it also consumed a lot of energy.

This distance was already the limit of their working range.

If the Insect Nest were to continue expanding outward in the future, this problem had to be resolved.

Consequently, the original plan to relocate the Insect Nest was dug up once again.

However, unlike before, the Insect Nest had previously been buried deep underground and surrounded by ant colonies, making the difficulty and risk of migration prohibitively high.

But now, the Insect Nest was the hegemon of this region; it could migrate across the surface in broad daylight with virtually no risk and minimal difficulty.

With the plan finalized, Rowan, who had nothing better to do, immediately began the work of selecting a new site.

In the end, after weighing all factors, the location for the new Insect Nest was chosen at a distance of approximately fifty meters from the border line.

This provided a safe buffer zone, and it could serve as a foundation for further outward expansion in the future.

Even so, this issue was only being temporarily resolved; once they pushed outward another four or five hundred meters, Rowan would have to face this problem all over again.

By then, the issue would no longer be something that could be solved simply by relocating the nest.

He had to use this time to devise a practical and feasible method to resolve this problem once and for all.