Finally, after simulating an intrusion at the entrance for quite some time, she sensed the nest's alarm system lowering its alert level layer by layer.
Realizing she had obtained "permission to enter," Wen Jing finally went all the way into the nest.
She was now roughly twice the size of an ordinary ant, so a hollow in the tree wide enough for several ants to pass through was hardly cramped.
The hollow was pitch-black. With no light from outside, her compound eyes automatically switched to night vision, casting a cool blue-violet glow over the world before her.
The passages inside the nest all looked as though ants had chewed them out. Their routes were intricate and tangled. From a human perspective, this was a hopelessly convoluted 3D maze made entirely of branching paths-the sort that would have players cursing out the developers if it appeared in a game.
Here, Wen Jing had to stop at every fork and probe with her antennae before she could continue.
The different chemical signals left by ants traveling through the passages served as her signposts.
Without upgrading to level-two antennae, exploring the nest would definitely have been an enormously time-consuming undertaking.
Fortunately, all Wen Jing had to do was follow the passages where the ants' signals were strongest and most active.
Walking along an ant passage, Wen Jing suddenly stopped and waited where she was.
Before long, worker ants appeared in a branching passage diagonally above her, each holding something in its forelegs.
As she ventured deeper, she had already encountered several such groups of workers.
Compared with the soldier ants fighting outside, these workers were somewhat smaller, and their mouthparts were structured differently, looking better suited to carrying and digging.
And that was indeed their job: they were either carrying things or on their way to carry things.
When she encountered this group, Wen Jing's antennae waved, and her entire little body suddenly perked up with excitement.
Each worker held a translucent, jade-like "grain of rice" as large as its head in its forelegs, and waves of enticing energy emanated from them.
Good stuff!
The worker groups she had encountered on the outskirts of the nest had either been heading somewhere to collect things or carrying ordinary resources such as grass, leaves, and insect corpses, none of which held much appeal for her now.
These grains of rice were completely different. They looked like the nest's real treasures.
Upon encountering Wen Jing, the workers' antennae moved noticeably faster. But soon, after sensing that this strange big fellow before them was "one of their own," they ignored her and continued toward their destination.
Gravity Silk, poised between reality and illusion, shot out and adhered to the Emerald Crystal Rice Grain held aloft by one of the workers.
The next moment, as the worker moved, the Emerald Crystal Rice Grain slipped from its grasp and landed in Wen Jing's hands.
The worker, its forelegs suddenly empty, continued for several steps before pausing and realizing that the item it had been carrying was gone.
But it was surrounded by companions carrying the same things, and it seemed entirely unable to distinguish which one had belonged to it.
And because this worker had stopped, the workers behind it were blocked as well.
Wen Jing, the culprit, hung like a spider above the passage, watching the scene with interest.
Two workers faced each other and communicated for a while. The robbed worker seemed to update its understanding, abruptly turned around, and headed back the way it had come. The workers behind it, still holding their grains, slowed one by one and squeezed past it like vehicles passing each other on a single-lane road.
So, in the ant civilization of this nest, individual workers serving as cogs in its machinery had no concept of "items being stolen" at all.
Thank you, nature... big ants, for your bounty!
Wen Jing looked at the emerald-green grain in her hands, leaned her head close, and gently nibbled off a small bite.
She knew about ants' resistance to poison. The chances of this grain being poisonous were extremely low, and even if it were, her trait should grant her immunity.
Although the grain looked translucent as jade, it was not actually hard to eat. If she had to compare it to something, its hardness was somewhat like wax.
After one bite, Wen Jing's eyes lit up, and she quickly stuffed the entire grain into her mouth.
Rich in nutrients and completely nonpoisonous!
She checked the panel in her consciousness again-
Life: 20.03, 20.06... Strength: 20.03, 20.06... Speed: 0.53, 0.56... Spirit: 9.61, 9.64...
Every single attribute had actually increased! The last time she had eaten a treasure like this was that blue-violet fruit guarded by the scorpion, and it still had not borne another fruit. Nectar and lizards might be plentiful, but they only increased some attributes.
No wonder the ants could become a dominant power on the giant tree's trunk!
Wen Jing immediately followed the worker happily as it headed back after having its supplies stolen.
After following it for a while, she decided it crawled too slowly and simply lifted it with Gravity Silk, carrying it forward and only putting it down at forks to choose the direction.
Continuing this way, she soon rounded a passage, and the space before her opened up.
She had actually arrived at a "mine."
Judging by gravity and the growth rings, this area was very close to the heart of the giant tree's trunk.
Large numbers of workers labored here, using their mouthparts, so well suited to excavation, to bite through the tree's tough fibers. They diligently dug out Emerald Crystal Rice Grains embedded within like ore, which the workers responsible for transport immediately carried away.
Emerald-green energy light illuminated the mine. Wen Jing's arrival elicited no additional response from the mining ants.
She floated up and hung from a half-exposed Emerald Crystal Rice Grain protruding from the ceiling.
The next moment, a layer of blade-shaped outer armor formed from energy covered each of the little bug's legs. All six legs became powerful pincers and pierced the fibers of the tree's heart.
Crack...
With a crisp snap, Wen Jing's six limbs, reinforced with Energy-Shaping Weapon, closed like powerful mechanical grippers and dug out the entire Emerald Crystal Rice Grain at once.
Her body might be small and her six limbs slender, but twenty points of strength were no joke.
Her efficiency was countless times greater than that of the workers slowly gnawing at the wood beside her. It was nothing short of an agricultural civilization facing an industrial one.
Ants, times have changed!
Wen Jing immediately became an automatic excavator and began furiously devouring every visible Emerald Crystal Rice Grain in the tree-heart mine.
Before long, all the dozens of Emerald Crystal Rice Grains being mined in this area had disappeared into her stomach.
The mining ants throughout the area were left waving their antennae where they stood, looking somewhat bewildered.
"Burp..."
Wen Jing burped and looked at her attribute panel with satisfaction.
Life: 26 Strength: 26 Speed: 7 Spirit: 16
Meanwhile, after a brief period of confusion, the workers continued digging deeper into the tree's heart. Judging by the energy she sensed, the closer they got to the heart, the more likely these treasures were to appear.
But Wen Jing did not stay. Perhaps thanks to Basic Rapid Digestion, or perhaps because these emerald crystals were easily absorbed to begin with, she still felt she had room for more despite having eaten a quantity of Emerald Crystal Rice Grains far larger than her body.
So she immediately thought of the transport group she had encountered earlier. They had very likely been taking the grains to a warehouse for storage.
Mining fresh grains was too slow. How could it compare to eating the ants' stockpile directly?
Wen Jing set off a second time, retracing her route.
With her speed now raised to seven points, she crawled swiftly on her six limbs. Combined with Gravity Silk to drift around turns and cross gaps, she soon returned to where she had first encountered the worker group.
Her spirits lifted, and she quickened her pace, tracking the signals the workers had left behind.
As she advanced, the chemical signals she received grew increasingly intense, mingled with the familiar energy fluctuations of the Emerald Crystal Rice Grains. Only then did Wen Jing unconsciously slow her steps.
She realized she had reached the place where the ant kingdom's network signals converged-the nest's most vital heart.
Finally, she passed through the end of a passage, and the emerald crystal warehouse was close at hand.
Yet the next moment, what appeared in her compound eyes was not delicious Emerald Crystal Rice Grains, but a blood-red, swollen mass of flesh with a body enormous compared to hers.
The shape and color of the mass should have made one's scalp crawl with discomfort, yet the texture of even the small portion she could see conveyed how juicy and plump its body was, like fine jade, like jelly, like a gemstone.
Amid the horror was a bizarre allure.
The queen?
The corresponding creature's appearance surfaced in Wen Jing's memories. She remembered that in the videos she had watched, ant queens were milky white. She had never expected the queen of the Ancient Wilderness nest to be blood-red...
Then all her thoughts stopped there.
Pheromones as terrifying as a tsunami-no, not just pheromones, but something more, something higher-level and more complex, an influence capable of acting directly on a creature's mind and consciousness-swept over her in that instant and submerged her.
Even Abnormal Status Immunity failed to work. Or rather, it had already taken effect, allowing Wen Jing that extra second of thought.
But only one second.
One second later, within Wen Jing's consciousness, the blood-red mass rose endlessly, becoming the sole will occupying and dominating her thoughts and memories.
The ruler constantly repeated its command to her:
"Devote everything to me devote everything to me devote everything to me devote everything to me..."
Chapter 40
An excessive flood of repetitive, intense information poured in.
Everything else in Wen Jing's mind was brutally shoved away, replaced entirely by the commands of the supreme being before her.
Devotion!
Devotion!
Devotion!
Step by step, she emerged from the passage and crawled before the enormous blood-red mass.
This was an "ant hall" that had clearly been excavated. At the center of the oval hall, the queen's fleshy body continually contracted and writhed, laying ant eggs one after another without pause.