Now is the time for the Divine Envoy King's Legion to start smelting steel and replacing stone, wood, and bronze tools with steel in large quantities, and the demand for iron ore is huge, and the existing import volume still feels insufficient, let alone reduce the amount of trade!

The practice of the Leaf Cutting Ant Country, like drawing wages from the bottom of the kettle, made the God King Legion extremely uncomfortable.

The protagonist can guess some of the reasons why the Leafcutter Ants are doing this, after all, they have been sending more troops to the front lines. However, the Leafcutter Ant Country did not reveal the reason for the "little flower" of the trade team, and it seemed very arrogant.

Maybe the queen and the female ants of the leaf-cutting ants don't feel the need to explain anything to the Divine Envoy King Legion, the two sides are just trading partners, if they are happy, they will trade more, and if they are unhappy, they will reduce the trade or even stop the trade, and it is already a great grace for the Leafcutter Ant Kingdom to be able to trade with the Divine Envoy King Legion.

This is very similar to the central dynasty in the history of the protagonist's previous life, which regarded trade with the surrounding small countries as a gift: the big countries have everything, but you only need to do some trade, and if you don't trade, you will suffer.

It was not until after being beaten that the great powers, which had been thinking hard for a long time, finally completely rejected the previous practice and rejoined the world trade as an equal.

The protagonist can't wake up this only partner now, so the iron ore supply will really be cut off. He could only send "Little Flower" to negotiate and see if he could think of a way to get the best of both worlds.

For example, you can send ant hands to mine iron ore for the leaf-cutting ant country, and even control iron ore farms by contracting and leasing.

The protagonist comes up with several solutions that he thinks can be a win-win situation, and as long as the Leaf Cutting Ant Nation agrees to any of them, the Divine Envoy King's army can guarantee its own iron ore supply, and even increase production.

But in mid-July, "Little Flower" came back, saying that the Leafcutter Ant Country rejected any plan proposed by the Divine Envoy King Legion, and their representative female ant said that the Leafcutter Ant Country could only trade as much as it wanted, and "Little Flower" thought of some solutions, but could not change the other party's determination.

Before the negotiations, the iron ore trading volume between the Leaf Cutting Ant Kingdom and the Divine Envoy King Legion had rapidly dropped to between one-third and one-half of its peak, and then stabilized at this volume.

After the negotiation broke down, the protagonist's perception of the Leaf Cutting Ant Country also declined rapidly along with the iron ore imports, and he used to think that the Leaf Cutting Ant Country was arrogant and cute, but now he only thinks that they are blindly arrogant, arrogant, and unreasonable.

After the decline in the volume of iron ore trade, the protagonist could only delay the progress of the full popularization of iron tools, and at the same time began to allocate a part of the already small share of iron ore imports not to be smelted for the time being, but to hoard it just in case.

This is also a reflection of the fact that he no longer trusts the Leaf Cutting Ant Country so much from the bottom of his heart.

In order to fundamentally remove the status quo of iron ore stuck, the protagonist sends a large number of scouts and flying knights to search for iron ore in and around the territory.

It stands to reason that an iron ore book belt may cover a large area, and the distance between the iron ore of the Leaf Cutting Ant Country and the territory of the Divine Envoy King's Legion is about two or three kilometers, maybe there are also iron ore deposits in their own territory?

A large number of ants search around, as long as they find red stones and gravel, they report it, and the protagonist goes to verify it himself.

After more than a week of tossing and turning, no real iron ore has been found, and the red stones or particles found by the ants are basically chicken liver stones, and even some red agate has been found near the river bank, but there is no real hematite.

If you want to say that there are additional gains, such as the small particles of red agate found, they were transported back to [Xinyang City] by the protagonist to decorate the dormitory of some high-level male ants, which is very popular.

The protagonist sees that the male ants like this bright stone, and thinks that the leafcutter ants like shiny gold, so will they also like beautiful and bright agate?

After testing the waters, the leaf-cutting ants really accepted the red agate and were willing to trade some hematite powder for small red agate particles.

They began to draw runes where they needed to use agate particles with a more vivid red color, using the technique of ant glue inlay. For this reason, they even abandoned the previous tradition of painting red runes with hematite powder.

In the concept of leaf-cutting ants, as long as the rune is red, the redder the better. Not only are the runes made of red agate more beautiful, but they are also not washed away during the rainy season like the ones made of hematite powder.

The demand for hematite powder dropped sharply at this time, and they simply took part of the output to trade red agate, and both parties were happy.

Seeing that the most important use of hematite for the Leafcutter Ant Nation has been lost, the protagonist once again starts the idea of buying or leasing and contracting hematite.

The refusal was made, and the leafcutters were unwilling to give up their forest territory in any way, nor did they want ants of any other race to live in the forest for a long time.

The Legion of the Divine Kings had to continue to rely on the only source of iron ore to survive.

As an added bonus, the Flying Knights also flew across the river to search for iron ore on the other side of the river.

Although they did not find iron ore, they did find that there were multiple ant races on the south bank of the river.

Previously, because the river was impassable, the protagonist didn't care about the situation on the south bank. This time, the flying knights had a rough grasp of the South Shore by mistake.

From the point of view of the distribution of ant races, across the river directly across the [Xinyangcheng] Peninsula is a group of burrowing ants, a group of paving ants in the west, a group of leaf-cutting ants in the woods in the east, in addition to the presence of big-headed ants, corn hairy ants, and bowback ants.

The Flying Knight did not explore a large area, but found that so many ant tribes were surviving in such an area, so it seems that there is no particularly powerful country on the southern bank, but the coexistence of various races.

However, this may also be related to the terrain of dense rivers and scattered forests on the south bank, where different terrains are fragmented and not large, and ants of various ethnic groups have an advantage in the most suitable terrain for themselves, which is difficult to expand, but also not easy to conquer.

These ants were not highly civilized, and the Flying Knights did not find that they had runes, towering nests, or domesticated insects like the ants on the North Shore, which were the higher characteristics of civilization. Their level of civilization may be close to that of the Big-Headed Ant Kingdom or the Paving Ant Barbarian Kingdom of the Native Land Period.

The value of this additional discovery is limited, and the protagonist has no interest in the ant country or tribe on the south bank of the Great River for the time being, the other party cannot threaten him, and he does not need to go to the south bank of the Great River.

- I'm the dividing line -

In August, after both the Leafcutter Ant Country and the Red Fire Ant Country continued to increase troops and hoard supplies on the border line, the Red Fire Ant Country finally took the lead in launching a large-scale offensive. Although the Leaf Cutting Ant Nation has a larger army, it was actually defeated this time.

This battle set off a chain reaction that almost completely upended the relationship between the Leafcutter Ant Country, the Red Fire Ant Country, and the Divine Envoy King Legion!