Chapter 7: The Surface World
Although he only ate a small half of the sunflower seed kernel, the protagonist is satisfied, and the abdomen of his body is now obviously bulging, and the smooth eating like a storm just now makes it impossible to see that the protagonist is eating with the crow on his mouth for the first time in his life. And this ant body doesn't seem to have much need for water, if humans eat so many portions of dried fruits in one go, they must be in a hurry to find water to drink, but the protagonist doesn't feel thirsty.
After eating, the remaining sunflower seeds were too lazy to take away, so they threw them on the ground at will. Anyway, there will be other worker ants moving the food away soon.
What to do next, the protagonist thinks about it and decides not to go back to the silk bed cave for the time being, although there are many "companions" and nurses and nannies, as well as soft silk beds. But thinking about the fact that there are more and more winged ants in the cave now, and the silk bed has to be in close contact with several of the same kind head to head and foot to foot, the protagonist feels a tingling skull. Staying with these kinds, even if you have now adapted to their appearance and don't feel sick or uncomfortable, is by no means fun.
The protagonist looks up at the light at the entrance of the main passage overhead, and the human yearning for light prevails.
"I'll go to the ground and see it, in case this ant nest is in a man's house!" The protagonist cheers himself up like this, and if that's the case, it saves a lot of trouble and allows you to get a closer look at which human society this is, and whether there is enough way to turn yourself back into a human.
Along the main passage, which is becoming more and more sloping, the protagonist uses all six limbs together, squeezes through the crowded ant stream around him, and crawls towards the exit step by step. Ants are natural climbers, so on the last almost sixty-degree slope, the protagonist is still walking on the ground and is soon approaching the exit.
As the protagonist climbs higher and higher, the light becomes more and more abundant, and the protagonist feels as if he is about to be surrounded by light.
Near the end, there were a few more soldier ants on duty, and their tentacles swept the protagonist, and after confirming that it was a companion, they did not stop the protagonist's actions, and the message transmitted by the tentacles also contained a faint meaning of respect.
The protagonist couldn't care so much at this time, and hurriedly ran out of the hole, and then instantly felt that his eyes were stimulated by the bright light, and the yellow carapace was faintly hot in direct sunlight.
Because there are no eyelids, all the protagonists use their forelimbs to block the position of one eye in the middle of their heads, so that they can finally see the outside world clearly little by little. Ants use one eye to perceive light, while compound eyes perform other visual functions.
After getting used to the light of the surface unit and gradually recovering his eyesight, the protagonist looks up. The first thing you see is a giant tree above the ant nest. It may seem like an ordinary poplar tree to humans, but to the ants, the tree is as majestic as the "Uggdrasil" in Norse mythology, as if the whole world was held up by a giant tree.
The protagonist is able to recognize this as a poplar tree, a very common street tree in his past life, and the type of tree can be easily judged from the bark and leaves. But there is something different about this tree, it seems that the trunk is unusually thick, and the branches are a little pitiful, and the green leaves on the branches are even more scattered in clusters, and there is no feeling of a dense canopy at all, just like the half-bald man with distinct hairs on the top of his head, although there are, they seem to be pitiful.
If you look away and see the howling wind around the tree whipping up broken branches, broken leaves, and clods of earth, or whirling up into the dusky sky, or swiftly passing through the sky and being blown into the distance, you can understand why the tree grows like this. Perhaps it was only under the ravages of the incessant winds that the barely surviving tree became such a pitiful appearance with sparse leaves and thick trunks.
In the whole line of sight, except for the poplar tree at the entrance of the nest, there are a few trees in the sight, and the varieties are too far away to be seen, but they are all ordinary poor appearance with few branches and leaves.
The sky as a whole is dim and dark, maybe the wind is too strong, countless sand in the sky seems to never fall, through this layer of sand barrier, the sun looks dim, but the sun pierces the carapace, and the hot feeling makes the protagonist want to go back to the ground immediately.
Compared to the trees, all kinds of weeds on the ground seem to be very thriving, after all, the wind on the surface is not very strong, at least the protagonist will not be blown away by the wind when he sees his companions moving near the nest.
The weeds on the ground are like trees to the ants. The protagonist still doesn't want to go underground so early, so he cautiously walks down a dirt path outside the lair that his companions have walked sporadically on, to a bush of grass near the entrance. The protagonist is worried all the way, for fear that a gust of wind will blow away, in that case, with his current small size, even if he has wings, it will be difficult to find the current cave in this life. Unconsciously, the protagonist already has some identification with the identity of the ant and the sense of belonging to the nest.
The grass soon arrived, and looking up at a handful of slightly dry grass stalks and blades hanging overhead, it felt like a human walking into a dark forest. The protagonist watches as many worker ants search for it in the grass, and occasionally a lucky companion picks up a grass seed and happily carries the food back to the nest.
"Looks like this is the lair's gathering place!" The protagonist thinks to himself that these ants are indeed eyesight worrisome, and that the food that is clearly in front of them will not be perceptible if the antennae do not touch it directly. But it's not right to say that they are completely blind, they are more sensitive to moving objects, and the protagonist observes that if the worker ants are about a dozen years apart, they can see other ants, and then communicate with each other close to their antennae, which is supposed to be judging each other's identities.
At this time, the protagonist stands under this heavenly dome, and remembers that his eyesight seems to be no different from when he was a human, and it is definitely not comparable to these ant companions.
"What is this...... Others have abilities to cross, ......" The protagonist complained: "Even if I cross into an ant, I don't give me some cultivation books, just give me a normal person's eyesight!" Ants obviously have one eye and compound eyes, how do they manage to have the vision of two human eyeballs......"
The protagonist once again feels the malice of the whole world after crossing over!