The plague brought by the green fungus is spreading in [Xinyang City], and ants are dying every day.

The death of the male pupa was just the beginning, and since then, ants have shown the same symptoms every day.

That peculiar green fungus emerges from the surface of the body, and the mycorrhizae penetrate the body, causing the patient to suffer great pain and then die in agony.

Some ant patients have been exposed to the male ant pupa, and some have not been infected at all, and no one knows who will be next.

In just three days, hundreds of ants have been infected in the entire [Xinyang City], and about one percent of them have died of rapid illness.

The whole nest is full of rumors, and the male ants like frightened birds look at the protagonist, as if only the great god king can eliminate this calamity.

Although the number of infected ants is not very large at present, if it is allowed to develop, it will be a geometric exponential outbreak.

You know, on the first day after the male ant's pupae die, the protagonist gets a report of a single-digit number of infected people, the second day it is a double digit, and the third day it becomes a triple digit.

And at present, in the entire [Xinyang City], together with the batch of ants that have just reached adulthood, the total ant population has just passed five figures. Such a small group simply cannot withstand the onslaught of a deadly plague.

On the first day, the protagonist also pins his hopes on being able to cure the disease.

Although male ant pupae die without being cured, adult ants are clearly more resistant and vitalis than eggs or pupa.

These green fungi peek out of the cracks in the carapace, which is very much like a parasite.

The worker ant doctors assigned by the protagonist use their jaws to remove the mycelium from the surface, but they can't do anything about the mycorrhizae in their bodies. In this way, the disease will recur, and in less than a day, the green fungus can grow again, constantly eroding the patient's body and consuming the patient's vitality.

The ants also used the method that they discovered to inhibit the germination of parasitic bacteria, and used torches to close to the affected area, relying on high temperature to scald the fungus on the surface, and also inhibited the activity of mycorrhizae in the body.

This method has a certain effect, at least for a short period of time, the patient's condition is stabilized, but it is still not curable, but only delays the recurrence of the disease and the eventual death.

The most troublesome thing is that the route of transmission of this fungal plague is not yet known.

The next day, dozens more ants showed symptoms, many of whom had not been in direct contact with their previous patients.

The protagonist took decisive measures on the same day:

He ordered the sick to be isolated in remote nests, and the mild ones to care for the seriously ill and treat each other.

The quarantine area was cut off, leaving only a small opening, from which water and the torches needed for healing were passed.

The ants responsible for the transmission can only move in a small area and must not be close to other ants.

The ants have been able to complete this strict quarantine measure.

But the reality is very cruel, on the third day, hundreds of ants in the safety zone showed symptoms one after another and were also sent to the quarantine area.

On the fourth day, there were more than 200 patients in the safety zone. Even the space in the isolation area is not enough, so the mild patients can only be treated while construction, and a new nest room in the isolation area can be built. 168

After two days of quarantine measures, no ants violated the ban, but still unable to cut off the route of infection, the protagonist realizes that the plague may not only be infected by contact with a sick person, or may have an incubation period.

It's getting tricky!

The protagonist made the healthy, at least the ants who seem healthy at the moment, urgently carry out construction, and build a few small nests near [Xinyang City], which are not connected to the main nest, and store some food, so that the only queen ant who is still healthy, most of the male ants and the worker ants who are responsible for taking care of them, live in it.

If the outbreak gets unchecked, he keeps at least some seeds.

The protagonist also lives in it, and this strange fungal plague is also frightened by himself.

The male ants who remain in the large nest are responsible for following the protagonist's instructions while preventing the epidemic and looking for the source of infection. At present, in addition to quarantine, the ants can only bake the nest in the safe area with torches day after day, hoping to kill the invisible source of infection with the heat.

The first batch of ants to become sick are repeatedly questioned, and all the information is summarized and handed over to the protagonist for analysis.

Eventually, the protagonist discovers an important clue - most of the early patients lived or worked in the upper part of the easterly side of the [Xinyang City] underground lair.

Ants live a regular underground life, except for the nest where they live, they generally wake up and only go to the workplace, and do not run around.

The protagonist hurriedly analyzes the main occupations of the ants living and working in this area, and discovers that although the occupations of these patients are complex, more than half of them are breeders or related positions in the farm.

Digging deeper, the protagonist discovers that most of the patients also have direct or indirect contact with the farm or breeder.

The protagonist immediately asks some ants to light more torches, go to the farm to carefully check, and pass the packet of information to himself.

Sure enough, in the farm, the protagonist finds traces of the culprit.

These fungi infected some mealworms, and traces of the presence of hyphae were also found on the walls.

Considering that there were no outbreaks of the disease in any of the farms in the homeland, the protagonist speculates that the source of the fungal plague is endemic to the area, and that the humid underground environment provides the most suitable environment for the fungus.

The humidity on the farm is higher than elsewhere, and the entire [Xinyangcheng] underground is on the wet side, especially during the recent flood season, when the water table has risen significantly.

The ants live in relatively dry areas close to combustion chambers or flues, and these farms have little dehumidification at all.

The soil on the walls seems to be able to come out of the water with a handful, and many of the mealworms here have signs of infection, but they do not emerge from the body like the hyphae of ants, but the color of the carapace is slightly greenish. It seems that this fungus is not lethal to mealworms.

This is normal, and some viruses are not fatal to some domestic animals or pets, but they are dangerous once they are transmitted to humans.

Perhaps, the fungus also mutated from mealworms and then began to spread to ants.

Believing that the source has been found, the protagonist orders the killing of all the farmed mealworms, and then carefully roasts the farm with fire to ensure that the remaining mycorrhizae and spores are killed.

These mealworm carcasses also need to be disposed of, because of the fear that the corpses will be contagious after burial, and the fire in the combustion chamber obviously cannot cremate so many corpses in a short period of time, and it takes a lot of ant hands to find fuel to build a new one.

The protagonist simply ordered all the corpses to be thrown into the Qing River, and whether it would infect other ants along the river was no longer within his consideration.

He was not the Virgin, and he chose to save as many of his subordinates' lives as possible.