System used his [Corrosive Mucus] to block off the area near the rock pile to keep away any passing ants.

  He bounced around between using [Mental Transmission] to brainwash eggs, visiting the ant construction team to check the progress of his winter nest, and choosing new eggs to raise from among those Foolish brought back. He stayed very busy.

  ...

  Three days passed.

  The first batch of thirteen eggs were successfully brainwashed. The process ended earlier than System expected. Most of the eggs had been brainwashed successfully in about two days and would never doubt him again. Only a few had needed him to keep going for the full three days.

  Once the eggs had been successfully brainwashed, as long as System activated [Mental Connection] to connect with them, they would respond as if he were their real mother and send back extremely peaceful emotions. They already regarded him as their pilr of support.

  He estimated that no matter how much time passed, these eggs wouldn't rebel against him.

  However, compared to how smoothly the brainwashing process went, his progress in finding different types of ant eggs wasn't going so well. During the past three days, he'd checked hundreds of eggs, but he'd only found three different types.

  Most of the eggs in his possession were worker ants. Of the other egg types, the second most numerous had a total of five eggs, while the third only had one.

  The group of five should be soldier ants, but System couldn't tell whether the st egg was male or female.

  In fact, even if the st egg was female, System wouldn't be satisfied. What he wanted was to raise both a female ant and a male ant. Only by having both types could he successfully breed ant offspring.

  In desperation, he could only let Foolish continue bringing him more ant eggs to choose from. He wanted to try to gather all four types of ants as soon as possible.

  In the past three days, the worker ant construction team led by Foolish had made great progress.

  That was especially true on the previous day, when Foolish had commanded nearly 150 ants to widen every single passage in System's winter nest to a suitable size. System hadn't even needed to give her any detailed instructions.

  Foolish seemed to have gotten much smarter.

  ...

  Ants were social insects that lived in groups, and their living habits were simple, yet complex.

  They could be said to be complex because of the social retionships in the ant colony. Sometimes ants would behave in ways that ordinary people couldn't understand, but these behaviors usually had a specific meaning.

  They could be called simple because everything the ants did had a clear purpose, which was to maintain the prosperity of the ant nest.

  It was also for the prosperity of the ant nest as a whole that the living conditions of soldier ants and worker ants, two types of females that did not have the ability to reproduce, were harsh and terrible.

  After transforming from rvae to adults, workers and soldiers would work tirelessly, but they would only eat the minimum amount of food necessary to maintain their physical strength.

  The same had also been true for Foolish. She had always eaten a very small amount of food every day. Her situation had only changed after she'd met System.

  After being ordered by System to eat for several days in a row until her abdomen was stretched nearly to the point of bursting, Foolish's body began to slowly grow rger.

  System thought that her level had likely increased, but because she didn't have his [Digital Code] talent, her body's growth was a slow process. She wouldn't suddenly grow much rger the way he did.

  Over these days, Foolish's body had grown from three centimeters long like an ordinary soldier ant to four and a half centimeters long, and this growth hadn't yet stopped. Her body was still steadily increasing in size step by step.

  Because of her level increase, plus the occasional communication with System through [Mental Connection], Foolish was learning how to think.

  Compared to Quin, she may still be a little less intelligent, but Foolish's thinking had obviously improved significantly, and she was even developing new personality traits. While directing the worker ants to build System's winter nest, she always liked to hold onto a peanut-sized translucent stone.

  System had stumbled upon this translucent stone while exploring in the forest. He'd picked it up because he thought it was beautiful. He didn't knew whether it was a crystal, a diamond, or some other kind of stone.

  When he'd noticed that Foolish seemed to like it quite a bit, he'd given it to her. After that, she'd always carried the stone wherever she went.

  Sometimes she'd py with the stone on the ground, and sometimes she'd hold it while observing the sun or moon in the sky. System couldn't tell what she was thinking.

  In short, he thought that Foolish had started to become a little bit spiritual.

  ...

  Because Foolish's intelligence had improved, and the ants had already made his winter nest much more spacious, System directly requisitioned the nest they were working on and had them start building a second nest. The new nest would be one and a half meters deep, and it would be located in the area with the gravel pile.

  Because he was brainwashing so many ant eggs near the pile of rocks, System needed to constantly pay attention to any nearby movements and stay on his toes at all times, which was very hard to do in such an open area.

  The winter nest that Foolish had been building, a quarter of which had already been completed, was now barely suitable for System's temporary use now that the passages had been widened. Some empty chambers inside could also be used to temporarily store food and ant eggs.

  As for the construction of the winter nest, because the efficiency of Foolish's construction team had improved, he'd just have her build a second one.

  System took action immediately after making his decision and soon finished moving all of the ant eggs inside his nest.

  ...

  Two days passed quickly.

  The construction team led by Foolish started building the brand new winter nest in an orderly manner. System estimated that it wouldn't be long before the progress of the new nest reached the same level as the nest he'd requisitioned.

  On this day, after selecting the final eggs from a total of nearly two hundred that Shava had brought him, System finally gathered the st of the four egg types. The most basic conditions for breeding an ant nest had now been met.

  In his free time between brainwashing sessions in the past two days, System had also cultivated a magical crop.

  He'd successfully cultivated a kind of mushroom that was very common in the area. For fertilizer, System was using a mixture of mucus-melted creatures along with dead leaves and other forest debris.

  This was a very magical mushroom, which also happened to be edible. It only tasted like an ordinary mushroom, though, with a faint yogurt fvor.

  Although it didn't have any magical power, this mushroom was still very magical and could emit a weak fluorescence.

  After observing the mushrooms for a while, System discovered that the fluorescence only appeared during their growth process. When the mushrooms stopped growing, the faint light they produced would slowly disappear. He couldn't figure out the principle behind the mushrooms' luminescence.

  Because this kind of mushroom consumed a lot of nutrients to grow, he only cultivated a small number of them in the nest. There were just enough mushrooms growing inside to make his [Dark Vision] work.

  ...

  Another day passed.

  Among the twenty or so ant eggs that System had brainwashed, one finally successfully hatched into an ant rva. It seemed that the growth cycle of these bck and brown ants wasn't very long.

  After the egg became a rva, its attitude toward System didn't change; it still regarded him as the queen of its colony.

  System selected some soft fungi and caterpilrs to feed the ant rva. The rva greatly enjoyed the food System provided and grew very quickly.

  Everything was going steadily according to System's pn.

  However, things usually went wrong in the most unexpected pces...

  During his daily communication with Foolish via [Mental Connection], she suddenly sent a message to him. "You, are not, the queen ant..."

  "What?"

  System could never have imagined that he'd feel such panic when facing Foolish.