After the protagonist returns to "Dongyang City", Lan Bofei rushes over as soon as possible.

According to him, there was an important matter that needed to be reported to the protagonist just now, but the protagonist rushed to check the beehive, and Rambo Fei didn't take the chance.

It seems that Lan Bofei has been waiting for him at the entrance and exit of the lair for a long time, and the protagonist can't help it, so he hurries to listen to his report.

After listening to the report, the protagonist's tentacles shook a few times a little anxiously.

It turned out that the stock of salt in "Dongyang Castle" was insufficient, and it could even be said that it had bottomed out.

There is a small amount of salt in Dongyang Castle, and the protagonist knows that when he barbecues meat or cooks soup, he will also ask the worker ants to bring some salt. These are coarse salt particles of varying sizes, and in addition to the salty taste, they also have a rather heavy bitter taste. However, even if it is bitter, dishes with coarse salt are much more delicious than light food, especially if the protagonist is accustomed to the human high-salt diet, and he can't lack salt in a meal.

The protagonist didn't think about where the salt came from before, thinking that it was collected by "Dongyang City" itself, after all, some rock salt mines or saline-alkali lands are still very common, and some plants also secrete salt, which are all natural sources of salt.

Like large animals such as humans, insects also have a need for salt.

It seems that people have a more sweet tooth than ants. However, many scientific experiments have shown that if salt and sugar are put in front of ants at the same time, many ants choose salt.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the Amazon Conservancy, found that some ants actually prefer salty foods to sugar, at least when they live in less salty areas away from the ocean.

All animals, from ants to humans, need salt to maintain the mobility of their body's nerves and muscles, as well as their water balance.

Ants are particularly fond of "grabbing" sugar because they need energy. But the researchers speculated that ants' tastes would vary depending on where they were located, and for this reason, ants at different distances from the ocean were tested to prefer salt or sugar, and found that ants far from the ocean preferred salt.

"This buffet experiment" provided ants with a delicacy of cotton balls soaked in salt or sugar solution for the ants to choose to eat. Scientists have found that ants living more than 100 kilometers inland prefer salt-soaked cotton ball delicacies.

This preference is even more pronounced in herbivorous ants, which are able to obtain a certain amount of salt from their prey. Similarly, herbivorous mammals such as cows and deer get salt by licking salted ground, while wolves and other carnivores get salt from bloody meat.

Many insects will look for sources of salt, such as the use of halogenous plants, the root cells of such plants are very permeable to salt, but the salt they inhale does not accumulate in the body, but through the secretory glands on the stems and leaves to excrete the absorbed excess salt.

There is a kind of wood salt tree in the northeast of China, the scientific name is salt skin wood. Wood salt trees are generally two feet tall, with thick trunks and strong branches. In the summer, the trunk of the wood salt tree sweats like heat. After the "sweat" evaporates, what is left behind is a layer of salt as white as snowflakes. When people discover this secret, they gently scrape off the salt with a knife and use it for stir-frying at home.

Similar plants also have salt horn grass, which grows in the saline soil of northwest and north China, if its water is removed and burned to ashes, 45% of it is all kinds of salt, while ordinary plants only have no more than 15% of the salt of dry weight. These plants concentrate the absorbed salt in the salt vacuoles in their cells and prevent them from escaping, so that too much salt does not harm the plants themselves, and they absorb water as if nothing happened. Suaeda is also one such polysalt plant.

And in the barren and arid saline lands of northwestern Argentina, there are many plants of the genus Chenopodaceae, which absorb large amounts of salt from the soil. 1 hectare of quinoa can absorb 1 ton of salt per year.

Although there are many such halogenous plants, most inland areas still do not get salt from plants. At this time, most organisms can only use natural salt mines.

Almost all of the salt in the big-headed ant kingdom comes from a secondary nest in the middle of the kingdom, which is called "Salt City".

Legend has it that there is a saline-alkali swamp near "Yancheng", and there will be natural sun-dried coarse salt particles at the edge of the swamp, and the worker ants of "Yancheng" will collect these coarse salt and send them to various secondary nests.

Some of the nearby secondary nests provide food for Yancheng to make up for the shortage of food for the worker ants in Yancheng due to the delay in foraging time.

This division of labor bears the shadow of the distribution model under a certain planned economy, but it has always been effective.

However, recently, Lan Bofei found that the coarse salt sent from "Yancheng" is getting less and less, and finally, the salt inventory in "Dongyang City" is about to bottom out.

Without table salt, it may not have much impact on the surface, but Lan Bofei said that if you don't eat salt for a long time, the king and the king will no longer be full of wisdom, the queen ant will reduce the laying of eggs, the soldier ants will lose their strength, and the worker ants will become lazy.

The ants have always believed that this is God's punishment for everyone, because eating salt is praying to God, and without eating salt, you cannot get God's protection.

But the protagonist knows that this is actually the result of electrolyte imbalances in the body caused by chronic insufficient salt intake. The solution is simple, just keep eating salt.

But how did a steady supply of salt suddenly become a problem?

Lan Bofei said that he had sent a messenger to "Yancheng" and had been rewarded.

The protagonist receives these packets of information, and then synthesizes them with what he knows, and finally understands the cause and effect.

The causes of salt shortages are complex, but in general, they are as follows:

The first is that the weather is not in time, the spring rains were frequent a while ago, and the water level of the saline-alkali swamp rose, covering the saline-alkali land that was originally a tidal flat, and there were fewer places for ants to collect salt.

Secondly, due to the reconquest war launched by the main nest, but the battle on the front line was unfavorable, a large number of troops from each secondary nest began to be recruited, and a large number of worker ants and soldier ants were also transferred from "Yancheng", which further weakened the salt production capacity.

Finally, due to the recent impact of the cold spring, the year is not good, and the competition for survival is fierce, and the activities of fierce insects in various places are more frequent.

The teams sent by "Yancheng" to transport salt often become the target of these fierce beasts, seriously affecting the supply of salt in the entire Big-headed Ant Kingdom.

The crux of the problem was found, Lan Bofei looked at the protagonist expectantly, in his opinion, the god makes the king omnipotent, and the matter of eating salt is related to the joy and anger of the god in the eyes of the ants, and it should be solved by the god king of course.

As a result, the protagonist can only rack his brains to solve the problem.