Chapter 165 Chapter 511 The Tao Is in the Ants
Chapter 165 Chapter 5.11 The Tao lies in the ants
Under the escort of three mechanical beasts, Wei Keng headed westward along the Huaihe River system. Along the way, he passed through Beng, Xinyang and other ancient cities in northern Anhui, and interspersed with the northern part of the Dabie Mountains.
Finally, when entering southern Henan, or to be precise, entering the northern section of the Dabie Mountains where Huoqiu was originally located, the number of people became sparse.
The radiating influence of the city-states centered on Jianye ended here.
The maintained gravel road ends at a checkpoint into the mountains of northern Anhui.
The roads beyond this end point are marked by trainers with mechanical beasts. These trails can be overrun by vegetation at any time, so some eye-catching markers will be placed along the way.
Field marking is also a science.
For example, on a fork in the road: a round stone means that the placer has completed a round trip.
The flat-topped stone means that the activity period of the genetic community in front is during the day.
The tip of the stone points upward, which means that the genetic community in front is nocturnal.
As for rocks with pits on the top, that means a high level of danger. ——The deeper the dent is, the more obvious the danger message is.
As for the specific information, there will be some complicated situations, such as leaving stone powder of different colors, which also means the level of the genetic community ahead.
Such knowledge has a complex system. In fact, it is also used in Guangdong where Ji'an City was originally located.
But now, no one in the Tongfa District is using it. ——The grass in the unified cutting area is the grass of the Emperor. The trees in the unified felling area are the building materials of the Human Emperor.
~
In addition to carrying tents, water filtration and other equipment for this trip, Wei Keng also carried five days' worth of dry food.
However, according to the data, there is high-energy food that can be collected in the target area, and the actual situation can last for ten days.
Entering the ecological zone with individual strength, I remember that the last time I was exploring the northern part of Guangdong Province as multiple individuals, I was surprised. As a result, I was attacked by multiple node creatures, causing heavy casualties (major under Wei Keng's standards).
As for now, the combat mechanical cat raised its huge ax and struck with its sharp claws. The leaves and branches in front were chopped down, and the green leaves and leaves fell to the ground. A road was opened where there was no road before, and the arboreal insects that had no time to escape tumbled among the fallen leaves.
Wei Keng tightened his grip on the large-caliber firearm in his hand, and the rapid-fire firearm on his waist was ready to be activated at any time. At the same time, he commanded his swift mechanical cat to investigate the surrounding area.
Ten minutes later,
Wei Keng set up the tent and stroked the head of the giant cat that came back.
Wei Keng has somewhat realized the culture of mechanical beasts in this era. In this strange mountain forest, surrounded by unknowns, there are only war beasts that absolutely obey their orders at this time, so human emotions will indeed regard the mechanical beasts as partners who depend on each other for life.
However, the goal of adventure is for oneself, and the emotional needs generated during the adventure are nothing worthy of the world's understanding.
Wei Keng: "My adventure goal is not for myself. So~" Wei Keng patted the cat's head and comforted it: "This operation is for the human civilization system. So as one of the participants, you will get humanitarian support If treated, your bloodline will also get breeding priority.”
~
After passing the final level, after three days of advancement, we finally arrived at the target area, which was marked as a red area on the map.
After passing through the jungle, Wei Keng held his breath when he saw this bare and rocky hill.
The entire area forms an irregular but full of lines structure.
From the mountain to the bottom, it is full of uneven ravines like chocolate lines. There are one centimeter-sized openings in the raised areas. The openings do not face the sky directly, but are blocked like cat ears, while the concave ravines are very smooth. Because this is a drainage channel.
This is the territory of ants. When all the large plants are eaten away, the mountains, rivers, water and soil lose the protection of trees. In order to protect their mountain nests, the ants carried out such engineering construction!
Wei Keng couldn't help but sigh with emotion at such infrastructure: "As expected of a Chinese ant!"
…
Ants are a species widely distributed around the world. Before the arrival of Pandora Field, ants have evolved eusocial attributes, that is, they rely on the transmission of various pheromones for social communication.
Of course, in the era of human civilization, no scholar believed that the true social evolution of such species was promising.
Because each type of ant may have unique skills, it can weave leaf nests, build complex caves, and some can breed, but each type of ant has become a new species before evolving its unique abilities. In the case of reproductive isolation, the skills they evolved cannot intersect with each other.
Ants, a species that existed 100 million years ago, have only one skill slot no matter how they change!
But with the advent of Pandora's era, termites, red ants, army ants, and other types of true social creatures began to exchange genes with each other.
If conditions permit, ants in a region may continuously intersect with each other's genes in a certain battle and become new genetic species.
Due to similar genetic structures, gene exchange is easier within ants than between higher species.
For example, primates and ungulates have completely different feeding habits and locomotion patterns, so most of their genes are unavailable after gene exchange changes, but all ants do not have ecological difficulties.
~
Ants that have broken through the shackles of genes have an opportunity to take off!
This is the case in the South American plateau. When the Pandora era arrived, the ants in the upper Amazon basin became larger and larger, and there were more and more species in a single nest. Soon they completed the breakthrough and became a diversified insect true social civilization.
For example, termites are specialized in decomposing fibers to produce organic matter. The paint bucket is three meters long, crawling underground like a worm, and countless secretory tentacles are used to supply other functional ants.
Fighting ants are getting bigger and bigger. Breaking through the size of the hornet is nothing. The real fighting ants are advancing in the cave, as big as Teddy, and after leaving the cave, they unfold the keratin gland syringe and the large claws, and look as big as a husky with their teeth and claws.
And as a Hymenoptera, they can fly. Although the flying ability is only about ten meters, ants are group fighting animals. Dozens and hundreds of them pounce on them in a row. This flying distance of more than ten meters is by no means a shortcoming that can be laughed at.
Eventually, South America evolved into the Tallin Nest Master, an apostle-level existence.
Before the Pandora era, ants, no, it should be the entire insect class, had never reached the top of the food chain in the long ecological evolution, but after the Pandora era, it did it here.
~
Looking back to the Shanghuai area, the ants here are a little bit less lucky. Since the Pandora field first spread from the Americas, when it spread to Asia, the global human power had been compressed into the only remaining area. In the dying struggle, humans paid more attention to the races that were most likely to evolve into large communities around the settlements, and also killed many potential communities in advance. This includes the ant tribe in the Shanghuai area.
After the complete collapse of human civilization, there was a huge Yucheng community in the west, a violent Tianjilong community in the east, and human city-states in the north and south. Coupled with the fierce competition from the surrounding small and medium-sized communities, this group of ant communities in the upper reaches of the Huaihe River has always been confined to some original mountainous areas.
Although these native ants in East Asia cannot build towers like South America to absorb light energy with maximum efficiency, they still built complex tunnel systems in the mountains.
The former mining economic zone has now been transformed into nests. The buildings and machinery left by humans are no longer visible, and they have all disappeared under the corrosion of formic acid.
And the ants here have also begun a strange evolutionary path in response to other surrounding communities and even human interference, that is, fire breathing!
That is, after spraying chemical substances, they use their mandibles to quickly hit and complete the fire. This is a skill that they could not use in the past, because releasing flames is a skill point that wastes more energy for earth creatures than making venom!
Large predators have this point, but it is more efficient to put all the points on muscles. And the flame output? It can only turn the energy that penetrates the bones into burning a layer of skin. It does not have the killing efficiency advantage in open areas.
However, in the process of tunneling in the mountain, when the claws and muscles cannot be used, the digging ants can seize the nodes of an area with a fire, and consume the oxygen in an area, completely suffocating the invaders.
~
But it is precisely because the fire skill consumes too much energy and is not strong on the surface that the local ant colony cannot develop a solar energy collection mode that is beneficial to itself.
So compared with the apostle-level ecological group like the Tallin Nest Master, this small-scale, poorly-based ant ecological group is not a little bit worse, and cannot actively expand to the outside world.
In short, the skills are awesome, but it just lacks mana (not enough ecological energy)! If the Tallin Nest Master in South America is allowed to merge this community, it would be awesome. But across the Pacific Ocean, the Tallin Nest Master is a terrestrial gene community and can't rush over at all.
…
Wei Keng crouched in this ant mountain area. After a full day of recording and investigation, he had a clear idea in his mind. He arranged his mechanical beast in a camp on the next hill and began to investigate alone.
After confirming an ant hole, a large bottle of sulfur powder was sprinkled from head to toe.
Although after hundreds of years of barbaric evolution, the communication of ant gene colonies has been based on the effect of life radiation, but they still retain the ability to identify pheromones, so this detail must be prepared.
Wei Keng, codenamed Zhen Xinzheng, just went into the ant hole and mixed in.
~
The monitoring space is quite lively~ Before this, no traverser did this. The ladies in Bai Linglu's team have also seen Wei Keng's mission style.
~
In the cave, he encountered dozens of ants in a row. Wei Keng "greeted" them in the tunnel and passed by them.
When he rubbed his back against these black beetles, he could even feel the spikes on the ants on his spine. It was also thanks to the strong smell of sulfur that the smell secreted by himself as a mammal when he was nervous did not make these ants smell delicious.
~
As for how this "greeting" works?
After humans learned to use language, they have a very strong ability to imitate sounds. Some people imitate dogs barking "Wang~Ang", some people imitate cats meowing "Meow~Lao Wu", some people laugh like pigs, and some people can whistle to imitate goshawks.
These are all imitations at the sound level. As for snakes and insects, which have low or even no hearing ability, human beings' developed sound imitation ability is like playing the lute to a cow.
Now in the Pandora field, all gene communities are pulled to the communication method of life radiation frequency.
In such an environment, the Wei Keng cluster developed a mental language, which is a tool that can carry information at a density that is several orders of magnitude higher than that of animals.
On the same frequency band, the high end is compatible with the low end.
Wei Keng, who was on the surface, listened to the situation underground and, after systematic analysis, deduced eighty-seven main instructions and one thousand four hundred and eighty-five secondary instructions.
It must be noted that the life frequency band information of ants does not have a language system, that is, each of their instructions is single, and there is no possibility of combining to generate new information.
Wei Keng released the message "I carry important intelligence" all the way, and sneaked into the nest system along the path made by these ants.
~
After sneaking four hundred meters,
Wei Keng took a breath. Continuously emphasizing the instructions with mental language: "I am an awesome ant", "I have intelligence", "I have made a contribution", "I want to see the nest owner", so the brain consumption is very large.
And because the emphasis is too single, the protein consumption of several trace elements such as "silicon" and "manganese" is very large.
As for why it is necessary to emphasize it with high intensity all the way? It's not that I don't have pheromones on my body, so I have to use the language of the mind to confuse it.
[Current research can regard the mind wave as a kind of electromagnetic wave frequency band under the Pandora field. To emit electromagnetic waves, mobile phones consume the energy released by inorganic substances such as lithium batteries, while life consumes organic substances. ]
But fortunately, you can live by the mountain and by the water.
Master Wei found the ant egg-laying area, and did not directly take away the eggs to prevent the ants guarding the ant eggs from discovering that he was special.
Master Wei directly took out an iron straw and inserted it in, and took a sip.
"Hmm?"
"It tastes good."
It has a mixture of butter and nuts.
Wei Keng, who was a little weak due to the large consumption of brain power, suddenly replenished his energy source, just like a person who had been hungry for a whole day and ate hot chocolate.
Based on the principle of "you can't pull wool from a sheep", Wei Keng's straw also inserted seven or eight eggs in a row.
At first glance, this action of holding a straw and inserting seven or eight eggs in a row is nothing.
~
In the monitoring space, all the monitors are working quietly. Master Wei ignored the Tianjilong plot, while other supervisors continued to analyze it based on the observation points.
As for Wei Keng, Bai Linglu was in charge, which made her feel like drinking milk tea.
But later, a certain performance of Wei Keng made her lose her appetite, and she quickly mosaiced the screen.
~
Here in the ant hole, Master Wei felt that he had sucked the volleyball-sized egg flat, so he was embarrassed and blew a little. Later, he was a little full and a little anxious. Because he didn't know if the smell he left behind would expose himself, for the sake of preservation, he used a very deflated egg as a waste liquid storage bag and had a good time.
Then, in order to prevent himself from looking back and possibly finding the wrong one, he carved a "positive" word on the stone next to him!
~
In the space bubble, after confirming that Wei Keng had pulled up his pants, Bai Linglu continued to monitor and personally reported on Wei Keng's entire exploration behavior.
This report was extremely positive. Emphasis is placed on the many shining points of "bravery", "curiosity" and "determination". Well, as for some actions that spoil the view, they will not be recorded for the sake of "seeking the truth".
Bai Linglu: "Of course, I am the most suitable traverser. Only I know its shortcomings best, and others only need to know its advantages."
...
In fact, some characteristics are shortcomings in the eyes of those who don't understand, but they are characteristics in the eyes of those who understand.
For example: the current behavior of drilling ant holes and being covered in dirt.
In the eyes of most individuals who have mastered high-level war beasts and tend to communicate with the upper-level culture in the city-state, it may be a shortcoming, - lack of social skills, lack of emotional intelligence to influence key figures.
But this, in the eyes of Bai Linglu Supervisor, is the best advantage.
Almost everyone who falls from the clouds to the bottom will suffer mental damage, as if: the prince becomes a frog, and the princess becomes a monster that no one can approach. From then on, it is like being imprisoned in a deep well, unable to get out.
And Wei Keng can take root in even the lowest area in the eyes of others, full of vitality, and then grasp a potential to push back to the top!
After writing the report to the above again.
Bai Linglu whispered firmly: "The king feeds on clods of earth!" Then he raised his head and added: "The 'king' of my Dahe system has a unique civilization background."
Now is the middle of the second plane war, the king plan of the Dahe system and the Caesar plan of the Mediterranean system are both underway.
~
Zuo Zhuan: Chong'er came from Wulu and begged for food from the wild man. The wild man gave him clods, and the prince was angry and wanted to whip him. Zifan said: It is a gift from heaven. He bowed his head, accepted it and carried it.