Force Astral Plane: Starting with the Chimera Ants

Chapter 37: The Half-Force Ant Queen!

Sensing the "help" signal from the ant pupa transformed from the golden egg larva, Ye Zhi projected her mental energy along the already faint connection in her consciousness. Immediately, a familiar feeling arose spontaneously.

It still has that feeling of an extra part appearing when worker ants are hatching, and the extra part is the individual that is suspected to be a breeding female ant in the ant pupa that is transformed from the golden egg larva.

It can only be said that this golden egg truly made him feel completely drained. Even in the larval stage, it showed that faint sense of connection, and now, even before it has emerged from the pupa, it has already created the feeling that their consciousnesses are connected.

He and the only worker ant stepped forward together, licking the thin pupal skin covering the ant pupa that had transformed from the golden egg, while simultaneously controlling the newly hatched individuals, who already had a faint connection with him, to shed their pupal skin.

The head, antennae, and six limbs break free from the pupa's skin. Finally, two pairs of still-white and tender membranous wings unfold from under the pupa, slowly hardening and straightening in the air, like a cloak carried on the back.

It was still a very strange feeling. His own body and the two half-force life forms seemed to be part of his body. He was both the second-instar primordial ant king Ye Zhi himself and the will of this ant colony.

Judging from its appearance, this is undoubtedly a female reproductive ant, that is, a queen ant that has not yet shed its wings. But it is still too bizarre. Ye Zhi stretched out her antennae and used her consciousness to sense and carefully feel the aura emanating from this "queen ant".

Its aura of Force was similar to that of worker ants, but very different from that of Zoro. It was undoubtedly at the level of an ordinary half-Force life form, except that the total amount of Force contained in its body was much more abundant.

This powerful aura of primal force brought a clearer sense of awareness than that of the worker ants, allowing Ye Zhi to vaguely perceive the essence of this connection.

It seemed to be a different kind of primal force aura, unlike the seven elemental systems emitted by the familiar giant toothed ants, slender floating ants, and other ants, as well as the power system inherent in ants. It seemed to be somewhat close to the most mysterious soul system in the inherited memories.

But it's not simply a soul-based power. Ye Zhi boldly guesses that it's a power related to "space"!

This unique primal force from another system creates special neural pathways in the brains of its own body and the worker ants it produces, as if bridging the nerves remotely to achieve a special effect of shared consciousness, as if they were one.

However, this kind of "space" energy was unheard of in the inherited memories, and Ye Zhi could only attribute it to his mysterious chimera body once again.

Chimera is a single individual "stitched" together from multiple individuals. The worker ants it produces can be considered as an infinite number of "stripping" off from the chimera body in a certain sense. Therefore, the worker ants produced can all be considered as part of itself.

Unable to figure it out, Ye Zhi stopped thinking about it and instead began testing the most important ability of this "Queen Ant" at the half-force life level.

He needed to determine whether this creature, which looked and smelled like a queen ant, was indeed a queen ant and whether it possessed the crucial ability to lay eggs.

Sensing the presence of the "queen ant," it slowly bent its abdomen at Ye Zhi's command, and a bright white ant egg was expelled from the end of its abdomen. The presence of the egg was identical to that of an ordinary ant egg that Ye Zhi "spit out"!

Controlling the worker ants to pick up the ant eggs and place them into the hatching chamber that was originally used to incubate the golden eggs, Ye Zhi can now confirm that this is the queen ant at the semi-primal force life level.

Ye Zhi pondered and continued her experimental attempt to control the queen ant to produce the golden eggs that could develop into a queen ant—but it failed. The queen ant could only produce the most ordinary ant eggs.

This was not unexpected for him—Force-based life forms cannot naturally produce offspring with normal reproductive capabilities. This seems to be an ironclad rule engraved in DNA genetic material as Force modifies genes, and it cannot be broken.

Normal force ant queens produce infertile semi-force worker ants through self-cloning, but their egg-laying method is different; it seems that they "peel" a part from the chimeric body to develop into a complete individual.

In other words, the golden egg is essentially a part that is peeled off from his chimeric body and restored to a complete individual form, which is equivalent to his own external organ, specifically used to produce ordinary infertile semi-primal force life individuals.

Could this be considered a bug in the genes and the Force that was accidentally triggered by the Shishan code generated by chimerism in the genes? Ye Zhi wondered to herself, but her actions did not slow down at all, and she controlled the queen ant to continue laying eggs.

Less than an hour later, five ant eggs produced by the queen ant at the semi-primal force life level were neatly arranged in the incubation chamber that originally contained the golden eggs.

Ye Zhi could only say that it was a proper egg-laying machine, having just emerged from its molts, and its efficiency was far superior to her own half-baked egg-spitting.

In this way, it can focus on producing golden eggs that only it can produce, while other ant eggs can be produced by the semi-primitive queen ant that hatches from the golden eggs.

However, the last time the golden egg was produced seemed to be by chance. Ye Zhi later tried some things and concluded that it seemed that she needed to absorb a certain amount of natural primal force in order to produce one.

Most of the natural force consumed seems to have been used to "convert" it into a kind of primal force related to spatial abilities.

The special primal force required to modify the nerves and connect consciousness alone would take him a considerable amount of time to accumulate before he could transform the golden egg with that "peeling" power.

Since the second stage of evolution, Ye Zhi has felt that she has accumulated some corresponding primal energy, which should be enough to generate another golden egg.

However, the current output is only a second-instar ant queen, which is not very significant. He plans to wait until at least the third instar before generating another golden egg, which will hatch into a third-instar semi-primal force ant queen.

After that, Ye Zhi felt that was enough and decided to wait until the intermediate warrior level before producing golden eggs.

However, it's too early to say anything about that. Ye Zhi felt that with her current growth rate, it would take at least a year to evolve to the intermediate level. Right now, it was more important to prepare for the upcoming three-year stage as soon as possible.

With that, Ye Zhi turned her thoughts around, leaving the worker ants to continue caring for the newly born semi-primal force queen, while she turned around, crawled out of the nest, and took flight.

Before consuming the Force food, he naturally needed to retrieve his divinely bestowed seed, "Chimera," back into his life sac and try to nurture and strengthen his only life seed repeatedly, just like the Flame Spider Warrior.

As a divinely bestowed seed that rose from an insectivorous plant, Ye Zhi was extremely eager to see how the "Chimera," with its already formidable ability to absorb and transform primal force food and flesh, would change after further enhancement.