I Am the Swarm

This practice made Rowan complain again and again. He now needs to run a longer distance to hunt those lonely black ants and drag them back to the cave, which increases his workload a lot.

But these are all worth it. After these days of meat feeding, the brood has finally regained its vitality and can carry out another wave of hatching.

Rowan has also been thinking these days whether the last operation was correct.

It is not worth the loss to hatch adult bugs directly. A mature black beetle was hatched, although it took two days for it to go through the process from egg to larva to adult.

Rowan didn't know if there was a pupa stage in the growth process of the black beetle. If there was, it would have gone through four full stages.

Although it is possible to directly harvest the combat power of a mature body, the price is too high. Its huge body is completely completed by absorbing the flesh and blood of the brood.

According to this idea, Rowan speculates in reverse, if the brood directly produces eggs and let them hatch and grow by themselves, will the consumption be much smaller?

This guess is not unfounded. After feeding the roots non-stop these days, he found that the black beetle has also grown a bit.

At the beginning, because of the size of the brood, the hatched black beetle was far from its normal size.

Originally, Luo Wen thought that the black beetle was like a product that came off the assembly line. At the moment of leaving the factory, various parameters have been finalized. But he still underestimated the brood, and now this is no longer the mechanical technology he is familiar with, but a brand new biological technology, which contains many impossibilities.

It was through observing that the black beetle could still develop normally that he somewhat understood the correct use of the brood.

This time he was going to try to make the brood produce an egg. There were no gaudy gene fragments in the egg, and it was a complete copy of the black ant's gene.

He was going to hatch a black ant egg and test whether it carried an interactive system by the way.

Things went smoothly, and the brood easily produced a small worm egg, which seemed to have no effect on itself.

Rowan was very excited, which proved his previous guess that the correct use of the brood should be to produce eggs, and then let them mature slowly by themselves.

But the reality immediately poured cold water on Luo Wen.

Looking at the small pale yellow eggs in front of him, Luo Wen was worried. He didn't have any experience in taking care of eggs. Not sure how to make them hatch.

This made him feel sloppy, and before he could think of a remedy, the black beetle wandering around the room stepped on the eggs. The sharp claws directly cut through the eggs, and the liquid inside flowed all over the floor.

Luo Wen was a little dazed. The black beetle didn't have eyes like his that could see in the dark. Relying entirely on sound and vibration to perceive the surroundings, the eggs have been stationary since they were born, and the size of the black beetle is too small, and Rowan was thinking about the problem and didn't pay attention. Various factors led to this tragedy...

The black beetle didn't notice anything, it didn't know what it had crushed, and continued to walk. Luo Wen didn't move either, and nothing could be saved now, besides, it was just a bug, and he didn't have any feelings.

However, this incident also caused him to think a little bit.

Although the brood is an individual that evolved from him and broke away. But the worms produced by the brood were not Ife Ash. This is Rowan's conclusion from observing the black beetle and eggs.

If Ifie Ash could be conceived in this way, they would have already become a rotten street breed, and they would not be so rare at all.

The worms produced by the brood are more like some kind of machine, a living machine, mechanically performing certain tasks. Of course, whether they have other characteristics, because there are too few observation samples, no conclusion can be drawn yet.

Therefore, the eggs produced by the brood cannot be as indestructible as the eggs of Ife Ash. They are still fragile and need some care.

As for the people who take care of them, the black beetle is obviously not a good choice, Rowan can't command it, it will only patrol around the brood mechanically.

After thinking about it, Rowan had an idea.

Touching the brood, issued a production order.

Half a day later, two miniature black ants were spit out by the nest. This time the brood was only a little weaker, and it didn't seem to be leaking like last time.

This time, Rowan learned from experience and used his body to block the two ants when they were still in the weak stage of birth. In this way, after the black beetle encounters Rowan, it will change its patrol direction.

Although the black ants are a miniature version, they are also much larger than the eggs. After a little time to adapt, they got up from the ground one after another.

The two ants touch each other with their tentacles, and seem to be doing some communication.

Luo Wen was a little dazed watching from the sidelines, his head hurt a little, what's the matter? Did they bring an interactive system, but they didn't have one?

But soon, it seemed that he had received some stimulation, and a previously hidden ability was awakened.

This ability seems to have evolved along with the nest during the dormancy that evolved the nest. It seems to be secreting something, now I think it should be pheromone, but there has been no communication partner before, so this ability is hidden.

After awakening, Rowan immediately understood what the two ants meant. They were expressing a feeling of confusion, as if they didn't know what to do and were waiting for instructions.

They smear the pheromones that express this meaning on their bodies and antennae, and then other ants receive this information through the contact of the antennae.

But Luo Wen can directly "see" or "smell" or "perceive" the meaning of the information, omitting the touch of the tentacles. Presumably some gene fragments play a role, how to do it specifically He didn't know when he arrived, it seemed that it should be like this.

Rowan didn't continue to dwell on this issue, he had already attracted all his attention by this novel way of communication.

After a period of testing, he also learned this method of communicating with pheromones. He incorporated the meaning of "follow me" into the pheromones and breathed them out.

The two ants seemed to sense something, moved to Luo Wen's side, touched his body with their tentacles, and then stood obediently behind him.

"It's interesting." Luo Wen secretly said.

Then he crawled into a passage with two ants, and issued a new command, "Dig together."

Then, in the passage, three worms began to dig the soil.

"Go and dig over there." Rowan tried to issue a more complicated command.

After the two ants received the new command, they sent out pheromone with a confused meaning, not knowing what it meant.

"Damn, don't you understand? IQ is a bit worrying."

Rowan let one of them stay where it was, and then took the other one to a place a little farther away, and gave him the command to "call the one over there".

This time the ant understood and crawled to the side of another ant. The two ants entangled their tentacles and communicated for a while. The other ant didn't have the slightest doubt, and the two ants returned to Luo Wen together.

After some tests, Rowan has a certain understanding of the scope of the order.

There must be a clear goal for the ants to understand what it means.

For example, with the command "go over there", the ants will show confusion. Because they don't understand which side is which. But if it is the command "return to the nest", they can understand it and follow the command to complete the task perfectly.

Now, he needs to run some other tests.