White Spot Disease

In addition to those that accidentally kicked the bucket, new bugs were being born every day.

And now, their territory was vast. The bugs busied themselves with work day and night, no longer huddling together every evening as they had when there were only a few hundred of them. Back then, Rowan could count them all in no time whenever he had nothing to do.

He couldn't help feeling wistful. Those days were gone, and now he could only make a rough estimate: there were at least fifty thousand bugs.

As time passed, Rowan had been troubled by a problem for the past couple of days: many of the bugs were getting sick.

At some point, tiny white spots had begun appearing on the bugs' once-shiny exoskeleton armor.

At first, there were only a few, scattered here and there across the backs and other parts of several bugs. But in a very short time, the spots spread rapidly, covering the bugs' bodies in dense clusters. Not long afterward, the affected bugs died for no apparent reason.

The worker ants processed the dead bugs for protein according to their usual routine. In the process, the white spots spread to other bugs.

Like a plague, the spots swept through the bugs.

By the time Rowan finally noticed and started paying attention, several hundred bugs had already died from the white spots.

Rowan blamed himself. This was a failure of his management.

Lately, he had been spending his time alone, perched on a tree trunk and looking at the scenery. And ever since he had grown larger, he hadn't lived with the other bugs for a long time.

Given his size, he would have needed a huge tunnel to reach the underground nest. That could expose the nest to unknown dangers, such as rain.

The entrance to the nest was a mound of earth raised above its surroundings. As the worker ants continued building it up, the opening grew higher and higher, until it resembled a little volcano crater.

That way, when it rained, the worker ants could quickly seal the entrance. Rain wouldn't pour straight into the tunnels, and rising water wouldn't overflow into the opening.

But if they built a tunnel large enough for Rowan, the worker ants would have trouble blocking it quickly. If the rain got too heavy, it could cause needless trouble for the nest.

With his limited experience as a bug, Rowan naturally hadn't thought of this in advance.

Several dozen days earlier, a torrential downpour had swept through the area. Fortunately, he hadn't yet grown as large as he was now, and the tunnel opening wasn't too wide.

Even so, the rainwater that poured in had drowned quite a few worker ants.

After that, Rowan dug himself a new bedroom beside the nest and lived there alone.

That was the main reason he hadn't discovered the white spot disease sooner.

Once he noticed it, Rowan carefully examined a sick worker ant. He discovered that the white spots weren't some kind of disease at all, but tiny, tiny bugs.

These bugs clung tightly to their hosts and bit into them with their mouthparts. They lived by sucking the hosts' bodily fluids and reproduced rapidly. Once their numbers reached a certain point, they could kill their host.

Although Rowan had figured out why the bugs were getting sick, he had no good way to deal with it.

The bugs' weapons were suited to broad, forceful attacks, making them useless against such tiny white bugs. The sticky hairs on Rowan's walking-leg claws could trap the little white bugs, but with thousands upon thousands of infected bugs, there was no way he could treat more than a few before exhausting himself.

Should he hatch more bugs with sticky hairs? It took a long time for an Insect Egg to grow into an adult. By the time they matured, the infected bugs would probably all be dead. And having the Mother Nest produce adults directly was far too inefficient; it wouldn't produce enough to make a difference.

All Rowan could do for now was isolate the infected bugs and look for a solution.

Just as he was thinking so hard his head felt ready to explode, things suddenly took a turn for the better.

He remembered how potent the worker ants' Formic Acid Solution was. Against opponents without the Acid-Resistant Gene, it was devastating. So he decided to give it a try.

The results were surprisingly good. The white bugs had no resistance to acid, and the Formic Acid Solution killed them with ease.

After a bout of acid rain, the bugs were healthy again.

But the root of the problem remained: how had the little white bugs appeared in the first place?

Since life had become so monotonous, Rowan only needed to sort through his thoughts a little before coming up with a few guesses.

He had already cleared out more than twenty Ant Nests, and had never seen little white bugs on the ants. The bugs in his own nest hadn't had them before, either.

That meant some recent change in the Insect Nest had caused the little white bugs to multiply.

Rowan thought of the wood shavings in the Ant Nest, which were used to keep the tunnels dry. The ants made them by biting through plant roots to create deadwood, then burrowing into it to gather the shavings.

The nest had used wood shavings before, too. But ever since Rowan had moved out, the ants had become somewhat lax about keeping the nest dry. It was the only recent change he could think of.

He would need to observe for a while to find out whether that was really the cause.

Soon, a series of orders were passed down.

The worker ants rinsed the entire Insect Nest with Formic Acid, then gathered plenty of dry wood shavings from deadwood and carried them back to the nest. After they finished laying them out, the nest was once again as dry and comfortable as before.

Over the following days, the "white spots" did not return. It seemed the problem really had been caused by damp tunnels.

With the problem solved, life returned to its usual calm.

Several months later, the Insect Nest's territory had expanded outward by another hundred meters or so.

At the same time, Rowan faced a new problem.

It was really an old problem.

Back when Rowan had decided to leave the underground, clear out the Ant Nests, and establish himself on the surface, it had been because the Smuggling Tunnel was too long. The worker ants' trips took so much time and energy that what they brought back barely made up for what they used.

So, with no other choice, the nest had changed its way of surviving from being supplied by others to fending for itself.

But that original problem had never been fundamentally solved, and now it had returned.

As their territory expanded, its edge was now nearly five hundred meters from the Insect Nest.

A round trip took the worker ants too long and consumed far too much energy.

That was the farthest distance they could work from the nest.

If the Insect Nest was going to keep expanding, they had to solve this problem.

So they brought out the plan to relocate the Insect Nest once again.

But things were different from before. Back then, the Insect Nest had been buried deep underground and surrounded by Ant Nests, so moving it had been extremely difficult and dangerous.

Now, the Insect Nest was the ruler of the area. They could move across the surface without fear. There was almost no risk, and the job wasn't all that difficult.

Once the plan was settled, Rowan, who had nothing else to do, immediately began looking for a suitable site.

After taking everything into consideration, they chose a site for the New Insect Nest about fifty meters from the border.

That would leave them a safe buffer, and they could use the new site as a base to push outward and expand even farther.

Even so, this was only a temporary fix. Once they expanded another four or five hundred meters, Rowan would have to face the same problem again.

By then, relocating the nest alone wouldn't be enough to solve it.

He had to use the time he had to come up with a practical solution that would settle the problem once and for all.