Just do it!

After the rain had cleared, the ground was still full of mud, but the workers of the Divine Envoy King's Legion had already begun to work on the drainage ditch project.

At this juncture, when the enemy has not yet attacked, the mines have not resumed, and there is no shortage of food, it is better to start construction now than to leave thousands of worker ants idle in their nests.

Counting the regular army soldiers who helped, tens of thousands of ants were involved in the construction of the drainage ditch at the beginning of the project.

There is still a lot of scattered water on the ground of the woods, but it acts as a signpost for the direction of the drainage ditch, indicating where the ground is lower.

Although the final planned drainage location is dozens of meters away from the [Red Iron City] in a straight line, in fact, the ants do not need to dig all the way through, but only need to use the general terrain to dig out sections of passages and connect some of the depressions that are themselves waterlogged, so that the amount of work is reduced by more than half.

The drainage ditches dug by the ants are about one decimeter wide and half a decimeter deep, and the ditches around [the hematite city] and the hematite fields are wider and deeper, where the drainage requirements are higher, and these drainage ditches can also serve as military defenses.

The dead branches and fallen leaves on the ground are transported away first, and then the soil is excavated, and the construction speed of the ants is not slow, even if the soil is very muddy after the rain, but with iron tools, it is not a problem.

One of the more troublesome and dangerous engineering links is the last step when digging through the waterlogged area, which is particularly prone to accidents.

The construction ants generally dig from the low ground to the high ground, otherwise if it is the other way around, the water left at the high place will wash down before the drainage ditch is dug and scatter in all directions, sweeping away the construction ants. Although this method of construction is safe most of the time, once it enters the last link, it is dangerous when it is necessary to dig through the area where there is water.

Generally, if the water level of the pond in the upper reaches is relatively shallow, the ants will carefully dig the last section of the ditch little by little, and then withdraw immediately when the water starts to flow, so that the water will naturally break through a gap, and then continue to dig a little bit when the water is almost gone, and the cycle will start again, and when the water is exhausted, the ditch will be dug well.

If it encounters a pit with high water level and large water storage, the Divine Envoy King Legion will use a precious mysterious ball bomb to blow up the last ditch to prevent the water from being too turbulent and the ants will not have time to withdraw if the ants are too strong to build.

But in the actual construction, even if there is a perfect plan, it is still often encountered such an accident as a dam failure, and more than a dozen ants will be lost each time, and finally the protagonist strictly ordered the regular soldiers of the Wang Legion not to participate in the construction of the final link to avoid the loss of elite soldiers.

By the end of September, although there were two more thunderstorms in the middle, the drainage ditch of [Hemite City] and Hematite had been completed, and after the sacrifice of more than 300 ants, a slightly meandering river channel of several tens of meters long started from [Hemite City] and Hematite Mine in the northwest, and led all the way to the southeast depression.

Fortunately, during this time, the Leaf Cutting Ant Army has not come to harass, so that the Divine Envoy King Army has been single-mindedly constructed.

The Leaf Cutter Ant Army is still accumulating strength, and they are gathering more and more troops on the eastern border, and there are already 300,000 of them, and it seems that the ants who have newly broken the pupa in the rear have begun to gradually enter the army, gradually making up for the battle losses of some time ago.

And the Red Fire Ant Army, after some rest, also began to assemble on the border again, and seemed to be preparing to invade the mainland of the leaf-cutting ant country. Also thanks to the containment of the Red Fire Ant Army, the Leaf Cutting Ant Army is currently even less concerned about dealing with the Divine Envoy King Army.

After the drainage ditch was built, it went through several early autumn rain tests, which confirmed its effectiveness. After there was no threat of flooding, the Divine Legion gathered tens of thousands of worker ants such as big-headed ants, paving ants, and belly-raising ants in [Red Iron City] to mine.

As the amount of mining increases, the protagonist discovers that the current transportation capacity of the Divine Envoy King's legion begins to limit the export of mine output.

At this time, the blast furnace of [Xinyangcheng] was already running at full capacity, and a new blast furnace was built in a sub-nest [Februarylancheng] closer to the mine as a new iron-smelting center. Although the defense here is not as good as [Xinyang City], it is also in the hinterland of the territory, and after weighing, in order to produce more iron, the protagonist still decides to build this new iron-smelting center.

Whether the iron ore is transported to [Xinyangcheng] or [Februarylancheng], it requires the ant convoy to travel southeast for a day or two, a distance of more than a kilometer.

The ants transport iron ore, either by a large number of worker ants with large jaws, or by beetles carrying containers, such transportation capacity was enough to deal with a small amount of iron ore before, but with the hematite field being taken over by the Divine Envoy King Army, the amount of ore increased to dozens of times with the input of a large number of ant hands, and the transportation capacity is not enough.

Continuing to increase the number of ants in the convoy or increasing the number of beetles will seriously squeeze resources that could otherwise be used in other areas, which is very uneconomical in the long run.

After the drainage ditch was built, the protagonist had an idea when he watched the flood water pour down to the southeast, and after repeated calculations, the protagonist finally made up his mind:

He was to build a canal connecting the [Red Iron City] mine and the two iron-smelting centers of [Xinyangcheng] [Februarylang].

River transport and sea transport are the most economical and efficient modes of transportation for human civilization before the invention of railways, regardless of China and foreign countries, a large number of canals have been dug since ancient times, which has played a great role, and the most famous is the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal.

The canal to be excavated by the Divine Envoy King's legion, after the protagonist's field measurements, is estimated to be 1.4 kilometers long, and it needs to divert water from a stream in the northwest of [Red Iron City], one way from high to low, and naturally flow to the outside of [Xinyang City] to flow into the Qing River.

This distance, even if you can use the naturally formed depression to go forward, the amount of work is roughly equivalent to the amount of work excavated by human beings for more than 100 kilometers of canals, which is not small.

According to the amount of work estimated by the protagonist, it will take about 10,000 ants to complete the construction for more than a year, and if you take into account disturbance factors such as winter and rainy season, it is estimated that it will take more than two years for 10,000 ants to be completed.

However, once completed, a large amount of hematite can be quickly transported downstream to the smelting center, which will greatly save the ant power and animal power required for transportation. It can be described as a century-old project that will benefit the future!

Taking advantage of the fact that the Red Fire Ant Country and the Leaf-cutting Ant Country have no time to take care of anything else, and the external military threat faced by the Divine Envoy King Legion is not large, the protagonist decides to transfer 30,000 ants of various races, and strive to complete four or five percent of the project volume before the winter of this year, and then ensure that the canal is completed next summer!