Hundreds of meters away from Zhou Qingfeng and the others, above the ant colony cave dozens of meters high, a gray shadow was hanging upside down and crawling slowly on the edge of the rough cave wall.

Gray Shadow had delicate grappling hooks on his hands and feet to keep him firmly in place. From time to time, the grappling hook will encounter glowing mosses that can be seen everywhere, and when moving, the moss will fall and float towards acidophilic ants crawling to the ground.

One of the worker ants touched the fallen moss with its antennae and looked up. The eyes of ant colonies that are accustomed to dark life are degenerate, and they are not visible to gray shadows dozens of meters away. After a while, an ant guard flew over to investigate. The Grey Shadow had left the area.

On the platform beneath the gray shadow, the 'Chief of Alchemy' Fabro was busy sweating profusely. The ant colony could provide too few reagents and equipment to compare to his lab in Coldwind City. He could only rack his brains and use various local methods to get on the horse.

Behind Fabro, Marbury, the son of the city lord, and several of his other subordinates all looked very agitated. The arrogance they showed in front of Zhou Qingfeng was just to maintain the so-called 'aristocratic bearing', and in essence, they were also impetuous.

The expedition team of Cold Wind City followed the route taken by Zhou Qingfeng, thinking that this would be able to enter the elven ruins more smoothly, but there were not a lot of troubles along the way.

Zhou Qingfeng has an information network and two or three hundred hidden servants, and Sophia has built a reconnaissance network two or three kilometers ahead to avoid the monsters and dangers that may be encountered as much as possible, saving time and energy.

There are only fifty people in Coldwind City, and if you increase the number of people, you can't keep up. Due to the lack of an effective cordon, they either ran into gnolls or were surrounded by kobolds along the way, causing a large number of casualties and attrition in the constant fighting.

Before the long-legged city lord had time to heartache, the elites that the family had cultivated for many years were lost one after another, and he himself was surrounded by acidophilus ants with the rest of the people and horses. Marbury, the son of the lord of the city, was left behind and became a captive of the ant colony.

Knowing this, His Excellency the City Lord would not leave the Morco Village if he died, so what if Zhou Qingfeng was allowed to enter the elven ruins first? But now there is no regret medicine.

"Fabro, how long will it take to make the right potion?" The underworld is boring, except for ant colonies where moss and mushrooms are present. Marbury stared at Fabro, asking questions more than a hundred times a day. "Can't you just speed things up?"

"Your Excellency, you must be patient." Fabro, who has entered the working state, does not shy away from the current difficulties, "I have some clues now, but there are too many difficulties, please don't bother me too much." ”

"But my grandfather clearly said in his diary that there was a clever method."

"Maybe your grandfather was wrong."

"My grandfather was the hero of the Northlands, 'Long Legs' Levin."

"But your grandfather wasn't an alchemist."

Before Marbury could lose his mind, his entourage persuaded him to pull him away from Fabro. The empty cave platform was left with only a focused and distressed Fabro, a large pile of potions from acidophilus ants, and a large number of ant-dead eggs.

and the gray shadow hanging from the roof of the cave.

Zhou Qingfeng's side is also facing difficulties. Mondino wanted to build an analysis circle, but the underground ant colony couldn't provide the corresponding materials. It can only be that the teenager forcibly hypnotizes himself into the information network and exchanges his soul crystal for a succubus.

It took two days to build the circle, and even Healy came to help - the necromancer discovered that the human-looking Golemmaid was not only excellent at archery, but also had a deep understanding of arcane and magic webs.

The way Healy transforms the circle is super simple, she doesn't talk about the principle or the operation, she often just says one sentence - the circle you draw now is different from what I've seen.

Mondino also began to argue that his expertise was being questioned. But soon everyone found out that as long as they changed it as Healy said, the effect would be better. As for why, I don't know - the necromancer had to shut up and humbly ask for advice instead.

Previously, a parsing circle was built for the purpose of constant runes. This time it's simpler, just parse. The body and abilities of the Acid Eosinophil Ant are much simpler than those of the Werewolf, and the team is busy until the third day, when they extract the arcane runes from the eggs of many ant corpses.

Zhou Qingfeng borrowed the necromancer's ability as usual, activated the arcane vision, looked up at the arcane runes floating above the magic circle, and first compared the difference between infected and uninfected acidophilic ants?

It only took two or three hours for Sophia, who was in charge of the information processing center, to come to the conclusion that whether it was an ant corpse or an ant egg, whether it was infected or not, it did not affect the essence of the arcane rune.

"Brother, I have a suggestion, can you borrow the information network to link the brains of everyone in the team, and together provide computing power to parse these runes. Then consume that Qingjing first to build an accelerator, which will increase the computing power by dozens of times. ”

With the help of the computer knowledge in Zhou Qingfeng's head, Sophia has been evolving through self-learning. The little girl's idea is to treat more than a dozen people in the team as a computing node, and use the accelerator to use the computing power as a whole.

"If we succeed, we will not only know what is going on with the rot disease of the ant colony? It is even possible to deepen the knowledge of its related arcane runes. ”

Regarding Sophia's suggestion, Zhou Qingfeng didn't think about it for too long. He happily consumed the cyone equivalent to the doctor's knowledge and ability, allowing it to be transformed into an accelerator in the data center, and also took the initiative to link up with the rest of the team.

Analyze together, share together.

At the critical moment when you don't succeed or you have to die, you have to do your best.

So everyone gathered under the analysis circle and looked up at the floating arcane runes. The runes that were originally condensed together were constantly disassembled, and a lot of computation work was quickly completed in the time of minute by minute.

There are actually two characteristics of acidophilus, one is 'acid' and the other is 'psychic connection'. Considering the characteristics of 'rot disease', the first thing to be analyzed is 'acid'.

'Acid Gland' and 'Strong Acid Protection', which are secondary runes associated with 'Acid'. The rune of 'Strong Acid Protection' appeared, and Zhou Qingfeng immediately received a double request from Mondino and Justen and others - they wanted to obtain this rune.

Wizards and priests alike were particularly agitated because they often came across acidic objects. There are many spells in both the Divine and Arcane that have an acid attack with them. If you can get 'strong acid protection', it is really a big advantage.

Zhou Qingfeng was not stingy, and allowed Sophia to record the information of the relevant runes and transmit it to everyone in the team. But this is the end of the analysis of the 'acid', and the 'rot disease' has nothing to do with the runes of this series.

That can only be used to parse the 'Psychic Connection', and this rune combination is much more complex than the 'acid'. Zhou Qingfeng had to consume a large amount of soul crystals and life gels to maintain the lives of everyone in the team.

When the high intensity of depletion continues until the fifth day, the 'Psychic Connection' is deduced to multi-secondary runic structures. The reason for the curse of the 'rot disease' has finally emerged - the previous speculation was correct, there are two curses in the colony.

Healy was the first to see through the strangeness, and she said in the information network: "The rot disease is caused by a problem with the psychic connection of the ant colony. When there is too much of an ant colony, the queen's ability to control the colony decreases, and the physiology of a single acidophilus ant will get out of control. ”

In Zhou Qingfeng's view, the current rune analysis is a bit like checking for bugs in the program code. A lot of computing power is invested in it, and the evolution is constantly simulated until the problem is found.

There were too many 'rune codes' of werewolves, and Zhou Qingfeng could only roughly understand their functions. The 'rune code' of the acidophilus ant is much simpler, and in the case of strengthening the computing power, it finally finds its flaws in the runes.

The cause of the colony's own rot disease has been found, and unless the runes of its innate nature are modified, the bug will always be there. But the decay of the eggs is another matter.

The deduction continued, and in the rune analysis of the ant eggs, a line of alien curses from infinity became more and more apparent. Ciric exclaimed, "These ants have been cursed by some god. ”

Cursed by the gods?

Healy also found out what the problem was, and said in a deep voice, "The queen must have something to hide from us. Rot disease is associated with psychic connection, but ant egg infection is a curse from an alien god. There were other secrets hidden inside the nest, but the queen didn't want to tell us.

Alien curses are actually not difficult to solve, and some alchemical potions can do it. But ordinary people can't tell who the curse is coming from, and they are often smug about cracking it randomly. But if the curse comes from the gods, once it is broken, it will be counterattacked.

The queen wants us to suffer the consequences of the curse shift, and this is her real sinister intention. If it weren't for the fact that our alchemy level was too poor, we were forced to analyze the runes directly, and we really wouldn't have been able to find out the reason. ”

So..... the ants provoked that god?