While the war between the Hunter Warrior Ant Alliance and the parasitic ants is becoming increasingly tense, the protagonist is also working on his own plan to completely eliminate the parasitic ants.

Not far east of [Dongyang Castle], near the edge of the Great Lake, a large number of ants suddenly appeared from last fall.

The ants quickly build a new nest here, which is the lakeshore base named by the protagonist [Great Lake City].

The only task of this secondary nest is to build ships that can be used by the Divine Messenger King's legions to travel to the swamp region. In the future, it will also serve as a naval base for the Divine Legion, as well as a departure base for parasitic ants in the swamp area.

[Great Lakes City] is very selective, and although it is close to the shore of the lake, it is built on a mound several meters above the level of the lake, and even if there is a major flood, it is difficult to easily threaten the nest.

Beneath the sloping slope to the east of the mound where [Great Lakes City] is located, is a small bay on the shore of the lake.

The area of this small bay is only the size of a four-person dining table in the human world, and it is only connected to the lake by an opening of about one meter. For humans, it's a small waterhole connected to a lake.

Outside the mouth of the cove, there are several reefs jutting out of the water, which shelter the inlet like a breakwater and block the wind and waves from rushing in.

As an inland lake, the current of the Great Lake is not intense, only small waves that are not intense when the wind blows. In the bay, the wind is calm, like a stagnant puddle, and some insects such as water spiders that like still water inhabit here.

Such calm inlets, with their sloping earth slopes, are also excellent locations for mooring and building boats.

Calm and calm keep ships anchored here, making it an excellent port, while the slopes make it easier to launch ships built on land and are suitable for shipyard addresses.

After an initial attempt last fall, the protagonist decides to build a batch of walnut ships for the Legion of the Divine Envoy King. The reason for choosing the walnut boat is not only the consideration of practicality and technical difficulty, but also the reason for adapting measures to local conditions.

Not far from [Great Lake City], there is a walnut forest, and dozens of walnut trees grow together.

In the past, the walnuts produced in this walnut tree were also the favorite food of the ants after natural cracking. But now, they have a much more important task.

Last fall, the worker ants [in Great Lakes City] were preparing to build a boat this spring.

In the past, ants did not rely on walnuts for food, and they used walnuts by waiting for the walnuts under the tree to crack naturally or be eaten by other insects, and then get out the walnut flesh as food, and never deliberately collected walnuts.

But last winter, the ants laboriously carried twenty or thirty large, round walnuts to the sandy land not far from the shore of the lake, and then completely covered and buried them with gravel.

After a winter, the buried walnuts were almost dry and had not been eaten by insects. These walnuts are the raw materials for shipbuilding.

After the protagonist arrives in [Great Lakes City] for a temporary stay, the ship-building work begins in earnest. The worker ants, who have already received the information package of the protagonist, under the command of the big worker ants, begin to build ships little by little.

The first step is to remove the outer layer of the walnut from the surface.

When the walnut is not fully ripe, its outer skin is commonly known as "green skin", which is closely connected to the walnut shell as the endocarp. At this time, it is very laborious to remove the outer skin, and I believe that those who have played the walnut "gambling green skin" will be impressed.

But when the walnut is fully ripe, the inner and outer peels are naturally separated, and only a part of them is connected at the top.

The walnuts collected by the ants last autumn were all naturally ripe and landed, and the inner and outer peels had been basically separated. The remaining part of the connection, after a winter, the sand storage is basically separated. The few stubborn ones that do not separate are powerless to resist under the cutting of the ants' copper jaw knives.

Once the complete walnut shell is obtained, the ants face the most difficult step of the process – drilling an entrance into the hard walnut shell.

The walnuts in the walnut forest on the edge of [Great Lake City] are not thin-skinned walnuts deliberately cultivated by humans, nor are they hemp walnuts with very distinctive textures like Wenwan walnuts, but a kind of walnut with shallow furrows but a very thick shell.

The thick walnut shell can give the future walnut ship a stronger hull, but it is also a "roadblock" for ants that need to make holes in the walnut.

If you want to simply let the walnut crack the opening, it is not impossible, as long as the walnut is provided with the right temperature and humidity, the walnut will naturally crack and sprout.

But in this way, these walnuts, which have cracked large openings and have a sharp decline in solidity, cannot be used as qualified carriers.

Only those ungerminated, intact walnuts can be used as raw materials to make walnut boats.

The ants began to drill holes in the eyes of the walnut buds, where the walnuts sprouted and where the entire walnut shell was weakest.

But even the weakest point is not something that the ants' big jaws can cut and move, even with a copper jaw knife.

Fortunately, there is one insect that can help ants, and that is mealworms, which are raised in large numbers by ants.

Mealworms have a complex diet, they eat almost everything, and their teeth are good, and the mealworms raised by humans are often gnawed if they use wood, paper, or even plastic and rubber as containers.

The protagonist takes full advantage of this by having the ants smear aphid honeydew on the eyes of walnut buds and put mealworms to nibble on them. Constantly applying honeydew to the designated area, and then constantly replacing mealworms, the walnut buds are hollowed out little by little at a progress that is imperceptible to the naked eye, and this process takes about a week.

After the bud eye is hollowed out, the next step is to do it, and the walnut ship construction enters the third step of the internal cleaning process.

The ants will gnaw off the walnut flesh little by little and bring it back to the nest as food as they do on a daily basis.

The natural separation between the walnut flesh and the dura has been retained, and the walnut shell and dura divide the walnut interior into several separate and connected spaces, similar to the nest in an ant's nest, which can save the construction of the internal structure.

Subsequently, the ants will use ant glue to coat the inside of the joint joint between the two halves of the walnut to prevent the walnut boat from naturally cracking along the crack over time.

At this point, a walnut ship is almost completed.

The protagonist takes the first walnut boat on a trial voyage in a stagnant harbor, and finds that the effect is good, this boat can indeed carry a lot of ants, and will not sink into the water.

But that's only part of the ship's capabilities. The ants also have to remodel the walnut boat to make it a real ship.