Volume One: The Arrival of the Apocalypse Chapter 64: New Ingredients and Another Encounter with Survivors

After the fat body of the queen ant—over one meter in diameter and nearly five meters in length—was sliced open, it burst like a water balloon, spraying a massive amount of disgusting mucus.

This was one of the reasons why Xiang Chenguang chose to use the Blade of Space to kill it.

With the death of the queen ant, that piercing and sharp insect screeching finally vanished. He Jie said with a somewhat pale face, "Damn it, this thing is terrifying! Just now, I felt countless awls drilling into my brain, trying to mash my brains into a paste."

Wei Wei's condition was even more miserable, with two bloody streaks flowing from his nostrils, yet he still didn't forget to banter with He Jie, saying, "Wasn't your brain already a paste to begin with?"

Xiang Xiaoxiao's condition was no better. She swayed as she wanted to lean against Xiang Chenguang, but ultimately gritted her teeth and drove a steel spear into the ground to support her body.

On the contrary, the three members of the Butcher Wei group were in relatively much better shape; they basically returned to normal once the queen ant died.

The reason was that the piercing insect screech emitted by the queen ant was not a sonic attack, but a mental attack. The mental strength of Xiang Xiaoxiao and the other two was already depleted close to the warning line, making their resistance even poorer after encountering the attack.

After confirming that Xiang Xiaoxiao was alright, Xiang Chenguang began to observe the hall, which appeared unusually tall within the ant nest.

Although they had dug diagonally downward along the nest tunnels of the army ants to reach this place, the actual height from the surface was still more than twenty meters.

To avoid being buried by collapses and also to have illumination, when Wei Wei used his supernatural ability to dig the tunnel, he did not just carve out a passage that could barely accommodate a person. Instead, he went straight vertically upward, removing the obstruction directly above their heads.

This resulted in their entire journey resembling a divine weapon cleaving the ant nest directly into a fissure that reached the underground below and the sky above, allowing them to look up and see a sliver of the sky.

However, this fissure was only a little over a meter wide. After plunging more than twenty meters underground, the light shining down from the top was quite limited, so the lighting in the hall where the queen ant resided was rather dim.

Using the faint light reflected into the hall, Xiang Chenguang estimated that the place where the queen ant resided was over two meters high and covered an area of more than one hundred square meters.

One side of it was piled with a large amount of food cut into fragments, their original forms no longer recognizable, while most of the other areas were stacked with oval, white, egg-like objects the size of an adult's fist.

These should be the eggs laid by the queen ant, though most of them had already hatched, leaving only a few hundred ant eggs that still maintained their complete shapes.

Looking at these ant eggs, Xiang Chenguang's eyes lit up.

Due to the development of otherworldly biological fertilizers and the application of plant-control superpower ripening techniques, the camp was now completely lacking in neither staple foods nor fruits and vegetables.

However, meat was starting to run out again.

The pork, beef, and mutton that Butcher Wei had previously brought into the camp had basically been exhausted. Chef He was now economizing as much as possible when cooking, with only a tiny bit of minced meat visible in a single dish at lunch every day, and even that was about to run out soon.

Previously, when going to pick up the villagers of Wangjiawan to move into the camp, they had indeed brought back more than twenty chickens—no one in the countryside raised pigs or cows anymore, and those who kept chickens were also very few.

These twenty-and-odd chickens were guarded by the entire camp like treasures, and aside from a small portion of the eggs laid being used to supplement nutrition for the camp's children, the vast majority were kept to hatch chicks.

The meat of otherworldly invasive creatures could not be consumed. Once killed, their corpses would quickly begin to dehydrate and dry up. It seemed that their energy was extracted by the system, leaving behind only a pile of debris, which could only be used as fertilizer.

But these ant eggs should be edible, right?

Under the control of Xiang Chenguang's psychokinesis, those intact ant eggs floated up one by one and flew toward him, instantly disappearing the moment they made contact with his outstretched palm.

There were also a small number of ant eggs that could not be stored into the portable space; Xiang Chenguang smashed these eggs onto the ground, and inside the shattered eggshells were unformed army ants on the verge of hatching.

He Jie, standing nearby, saw this and said, "Boss Xiang, do you think if we hatch these ant eggs, we can make the army ants our pets to help us fight?"

Wei Wei chimed in, "Using army ants as pets—wouldn't their growth potential be a bit too poor?"

Xiang Chenguang shook his head with some helplessness and said, "You guys read too many online gaming novels, don't you?"

Ignoring this pair of comical partners, he stored all the ant eggs into his portable space and inspected the area thoroughly once more. Confirming nothing was missed, Xiang Chenguang was just about to exit the ant nest when he felt his clothes being tugged.

Turning his head, he met Xiang Xiaoxiao's bright, large eyes. She raised a hand to point at the corpse of the queen ant and said, "Energy crystal core."

Only then did Xiang Chenguang remember. Because he had killed too many army ants, he had subconsciously assumed that giant army ants did not possess energy crystal cores.

Another reason was that the corpse of the queen ant was far too disgusting, making him emotionally averse to searching for an energy crystal core amidst that pile of foul mucus.

Enduring his disgust, Xiang Chenguang activated his psychokinesis to move away the queen ant's corpse, which had been severed in two. Amidst a mess of chaotic organs and mucus, a flash of light caught his attention.

Soon, a translucent bead the size of a thumb spun as it flew before him.

A wisp of white smoke slowly swirled within this translucent crystal, exuding a dreamy aesthetic under the illumination of the overhead light.

Although he had already manipulated the crystal core to spin at high speed to fling off the filth on it, Xiang Chenguang still had Old Hu condense a ball of water to thoroughly wash the crystal core clean before handing it over to Xiang Xiaoxiao, whose eyes were already sparkling.

Returning to the surface, Xiang Chenguang looked at the massive amount of building materials in the yard with a headache and said, "How are we going to transport all these back?"

There happened to be two small pickup trucks parked in the yard, but there were no car keys, and none of them possessed the magical skills seen in movies where one could pull out two wires from beneath the steering wheel to start a car.

The seven of them searched the yard carefully and managed to find two manual pallet trucks, while also discovering a spatial rift behind a pile of construction materials.

In fact, Xiang Chenguang had long since confirmed the location of the spatial rift through spatial perception. Its visual appearance was identical to the spatial rift in the mountain forest, similarly connecting to three layers of space, with the spatial barrier of the third layer currently bearing only some tiny cracks.

Helplessly, Butcher Wei said, "How about we carry some steel materials back first?"

In the end, Xiang Chenguang used his metal-control superpower to melt and cast some steel materials into one-cubic-meter cubes, loading twenty such cubes into his portable space.

His portable space had expanded once more after his mental strength exceeded 30 points, possessing a volume of at least thirty cubic meters or more.

Meanwhile, the five members of Butcher Wei each carried a large bundle of metal water pipes of the same specification. Guarded by Xiang Chenguang and Xiang Xiaoxiao, the group embarked on their return journey.

As they passed through the Golden Triangle area, another batch of survivors came forward to seek help, wanting to join them.

Xiang Chenguang discovered that most of these people were old acquaintances—precisely the group who had fled without hesitation upon hearing earlier that they were going to fight the ant tide.

At this moment, the anti-routine system even jumped out to join the fun, issuing a quest.