System acted quickly and ordered Foolish to command some worker ants to build a nest where he could spend the winter.

  Foolish was very skilled at commanding worker ants. By spraying a special type of acid and communicating with her antennae, she soon gathered more than a hundred nearby worker ants, then went to a location a few meters away to start digging System's nest.

  Because soldier ants were the ant nest's mid-level leaders, Foolish had the right to dispatch worker ants.

  Usually, soldier ants could command dozens of worker ants, while the more intelligent soldiers like Foolish could also command a few other soldiers. With all of those soldiers working together, they could probably control up to about a hundred workers.

  It wasn't that Foolish couldn't manage more workers. In theory, there was no upper limit to the number of workers a soldier could control with its formic acid.

  However, managing too many workers would undoubtedly make any of the dumber soldiers, with their insufficient ability to command workers, lose track of the overall situation. After that, the workers would eventually fall into chaos, greatly reducing their efficiency.

  Knowing how to manage other ants seemed to come from a soldier ant's bloodline. Soldiers knew how to control workers and also knew the maximum number of other soldiers they could safely control.

  ...

  Although System's pn to have the ants dig his winter nest was good, when he watched the worker ants dig for a while under Foolish's command, he noticed that many of their construction methods were unsatisfactory.

  System had asked Foolish to order these ants to dig a wider nest. He didn't know if it was because she'd conveyed the wrong message with her acid or if the intelligence of the workers was too low, but the entrance to the nest was still too narrow.

  It took nearly an hour of communication to finally get the message across properly. Under Foolish's command, the worker ants gradually widened the nest's entrance.

  But that was just the entrance. System had no idea about the width of the passages inside his nest. Whenever he tried approaching for an inspection, he would get attacked mercilessly by worker ants.

  In the end, System's ability to command these ants came down to Foolish's ability to act as a go-between.

  As a result, Foolish used her low intelligence to command worker ants that had even lower intelligence, resulting in a tragedy that caused System no end of frustration.

  System ordered Foolish to transfer all of the worker ants away so that he could finally perform an inspection on his nest's internal structure. Once inside, he was disappointed to find out that his nest's passages were almost exactly the same as the passages inside the ant nest. They were all so narrow that System couldn't fit in them at all.

  Aside from the first two hours, Foolish's worker ant construction team had worked for the entire afternoon without accomplishing anything at all.

  In truth, there had been a small amount of progress. As long as System had Foolish give the ants very specific commands, this group of worker ants would eventually follow the orders, more or less. Still, this was obviously too inefficient and couldn't reach the passing grade that he'd envisioned.

  'Why can't there be more ants like Foolish?'

  System looked down at Foolish who was rubbing her head against his thigh affectionately. If there were hundreds of worker ants as obedient as Foolish for her to manage, it wouldn't be a problem to build five winter nests, much less one.

  After he instructed Foolish to continue digging with the worker ants, System jumped over to the ant nest again and tried to use [Mental Transmission] to find more obedient ants like Foolish.

  After his lies had made nearly a hundred ants angry and crazy, System finally realized helplessly that Foolish was just a special case among ants.

  Even if he could deceive ordinary ants with his lies, they would basically figure out that something was wrong within tens of seconds, then attack him without hesitation.

  'Tens of seconds?'

  System suddenly realized something, but after pondering for a while, he still couldn't figure out the key point.

  He repyed his experiences with the ants using his Derived Skill [Information Entry], then used the light screen menu from [Personal Information Generation] to input the specific information of the hundreds of ants he'd just deceived with his lies. Once he was done, he began conducting a statistical analysis.

  The time between an ant being deceived by him and the ant becoming angry and crazy was typically between thirty and sixty seconds. Usually, an ant would believe him most strongly for the first twenty seconds, at which point the ant would enter a sluggish state and become mentally confused.

  Once an ant entered this state of confusion, according to the ant's individual characteristics, the time until it woke up varied greatly. The shortest time was only five seconds, while the longest was nearly thirty seconds.

  'Could it be because the lies I told each ant were different?'

  System thought back to what he'd said to the ants and shook his head. The information he'd transmitted to the ants using [Mental Transmission] was basically the same, and even the tone he'd used wasn't much different.

  Thinking back to the scenes in [Information Entry] again, System suddenly thought of something.

  After skipping a few hours ahead in the [Information Entry] video, System finally noticed the key point that he'd previously missed.

  A few hours ago, he'd asked Foolish to bring him an ant rva from the ant nest. Before eating the rva, he'd also lied to it using [Mental Transmission].

  Although the rva had eventually seen through his lie, it had still been deceived for nearly five minutes, a far longer time than when he'd lied to adult ants.

  If Foolish could bring him some ant rvae from the ant nest for his tests...

  No!

  His success rate with ant rvae may still be very low, but what would happen if he lied to eggs that hadn't yet become rvae?

  If ant eggs were brainwashed from a young age, would those ants grow up to be as obedient as Foolish?

  If it was possible for this pn to work, and Foolish brought back some eggs for him to brainwash, then as long as the eggs eventually hatched and the rvae survived to become adults, System could have many ants working only for him.

  The only drawback was that he couldn't be sure how long this process would take. System didn't know how long it took for these bck and brown ants to reach adulthood. Foolish was no help, since she had no concept of time at all. When System had asked her how long it took her to go from birth to maturity, she just showed a very confused expression and couldn't answer at all.

  If it took too long to grow from eggs into mature ants, he could only give up and think of another method to use.

  ...

  As System was pnning and preparing for winter, an insect beast passed through the void to return to the Abyss from Lilt Forest.

  Lilt Forest used to be covered in snow all year round. However, after the Lord of Gciers who lived in the Lilt Mountains had disappeared three hundred years earlier, the snow in the forest had started to melt. The climate had eventually changed completely, becoming one with four distinct seasons.

  Ying had been traveling back and forth between the Abyss and Lilt Forest for thirty years.

  Every year, at the end of summer, she was sent to the main world by her master, an Abyssal Druid, using a special secret method. She then searched for insects that had transcended the limits of their race and brought them back to the Abyss.

  Ying greatly enjoyed the main world's sunshine, but she was never allowed to stay there for very long.

  Abyssal Druids, who had formerly been called Swarm Druids, were good at controlling nature's insect swarms. They were one of many branches of the druids.

  When the Swarm Druids had surrendered to Abyss Lord Ogan, Swarm Druids, having betrayed the rest of the druids, had been renamed as Abyssal Druids.

  They used the flesh and blood of insects to modify demon nests, allowing the hatching efficiency of newborn demons to be significantly improved. As a result of their work, many new types of demons had been developed over the years.

  Ying hadn't known this previously. Only in the st ten years had she gradually started to understand these things.

  She regretted having killed two of her own kind after they'd betrayed her master a long time ago...

  She hadn't known anything back then. The only reason Ying could understand things now was because she'd developed wisdom, just like those two who had betrayed her master.

  After handing an insect to her master that had reached the limit of its species, Ying disappeared into the shadows.

  During this trip, she'd hidden a special insect in Lilt Forest—a grasshopper named Quin. Ying looked forward to meeting Quin again next year. Although the other party was much weaker than her, Quin possessed something that Ying didn't have...