A mostly peaceful month passed by, but the weather was becoming increasingly hot. The Warren Pins had completely entered summer from te spring.

  For insects, the hot summer wasn't something unbearable, but it needed to be treated with caution. Because the grassnd cked trees, it was difficult to escape from the scorching heat of the sun. Ordinary small insects could easily lose their lives from sun exposure.

  System was also considering whether he should adjust the ants' foraging time from day to night.

  A few days earlier, Bck had successfully broken out of her pupa. She, like Shava and the members of the ant knights, had become a centaur knight, but she still had that tiny bck spot on her head.

  Unlike the knights who had formed weapons at the ends of their forelegs, Bck had formed human-like fingers that could move freely and grasp things. Unlike a human's five fingers that varied in size, Bck had six fingers on each foreleg, and each finger was very simir in length.

  System occasionally stared back and forth between Bck's fingers and his own tentacles in a daze, but he didn't envy her newly formed fingers at all.

  While Bck had been pupating, she had also heard the Voice of the World. Because of her high wisdom, she had understood a bit of the information conveyed by the voice.

  She knew that the condition for becoming a magical life form was to break the level lock and that there was an extraordinary life level above magical.

  Bck also comprehended something that System hadn't known, which was the w dictating how the Voice of the World granted abilities. Unfortunately, she had only understood a little bit of this w and couldn't describe it clearly.

  Like most of the colony's ants, Bck didn't know what ability she'd been gifted or how to use it.

  Although she couldn't use her new ability, Aura's [Upgrade Technique] had allowed Bck to eliminate her body's congenital deficiencies and acquire the usual body shape of a worker ant knight.

  Because Aura had channeled so much power into Bck, she had also mastered a bit of frost power. However, her frost power was only strong enough to make a snowball or two for now.

  Bck, who had just emerged from her pupa, was still a little smaller than the other worker knights. System estimated that after a period of time, she would grow to the same size as the other worker knights, reaching roughly twenty centimeters in length.

  According to Bck's feelings, her lifespan was about ten years, which wasn't much different from the other worker knights.

  System had to ment again that the lifespan of grasshoppers was too short. Even with his [Exotic Insect] title that had increased his lifespan, he still only had about five years left to live.

  Shava, who could live even longer than the worker ants, had a lifespan of more than twenty years.

  As for Queen Linda, even before her second pupation, her lifespan had been fifteen years. After she completed her second pupation, System guessed that she would have a lifespan of at least 180 years.

  However, while the queen's lifespan was very long, her second pupation was also slow. System estimated that it would take at least another three or four months for her to emerge from her pupa.

  ...

  Bck's return had greatly reduced System's daily workload, giving him more time to do his own things.

  After encountering a caramel-colored slime a few days earlier, System began raising the two slime friends that he'd found recently in the nest.

  Thanks to Excavator, who could easily manipute the soil, the two slime friends had easily been trapped underground. To prevent the slimes from escaping, Excavator had only left gaps in the soil rge enough to pass food through.

  Certain food sources such as rats near the nest had started getting scarce. In order to obtain a stable source of food, System asked his ant subjects to imitate the leaf-cutter ants from his previous life. Each day, they would cut down a rge number of pnt leaves to bring back to the nest. The colony would then use these leaves to grow their own food.

  However, unlike leaf-cutter ants that used pnt leaves to cultivate fungi, System only pnned to use leaves to cultivate slimes.

  After a few days, the cultivation of the slimes was going somewhat smoothly.

  However, his more than fifty ant subjects had very little to do, and all of them hauling back leaves and grass for an entire day still wasn't as efficient as System alone collecting leaves with his tentacles for two or three hours.

  Still, raising slimes in this way eliminated a lot of annoyances for System and prevented the slimes from jumping all over the pce.

  Because the weather was hot, the slimes liked to hop away and find some abandoned ratman warren to hide in. Every time System lost a slime, it took him a long time to locate it again.

  ...

  After watching the slimes eat for a while, System and Bck headed over to the dungeon located in a corner of the underground nest.

  Over the past month, Excavator had dug the underground nest more than ten meters deep, and there were now more than forty square-shaped rooms. The nest was already starting to take shape.

  Because of System's enhancement of Excavator's ability and the ant's frequent practice, her digging had become much more proficient. Her excavation speed was more than twice as fast as before, and every part of the massive underground nest had been built by Excavator alone.

  In addition, Excavator had also dug a path to a water source nearly twenty meters underground, which had eliminated the inconvenience of the ants having to leave the nest to get water.

  The newly built dungeon that System and Bck were headed to was where System had recently imprisoned a ratman.

  He had captured a male ratman seven days earlier just as he'd wished. Unfortunately, this ratman was also illiterate.

  System had finally been able to castrate a ratman, which he'd wanted to do for a long time.

  However, after his initial excitement from the castration faded, he had only felt emptiness. After all, castrating this ratman couldn't solve System's fundamental problem—his inability to mate due to the [Severance Curse].

  In order to prevent this ratman prisoner from dying to a pgue like the st one, System was using [Mental Transmission] on himself before each interrogation session to carefully check for any suspicious germs on his body. Whenever he found any, he'd go to the river to wash his body, bask in the sun, and wait for a while before interrogating the ratman.

  After several days of interrogation, although System and Bck still couldn't speak the ratman nguage, System found out that this ratman was much smarter than he'd imagined.

  After the ratman had spent the first two days in a panic, he had eventually become very cooperative.

  Between System making gestures with his tentacles and using various items as props, he was able to master some of the ratman's nguage.

  If System's understanding was correct, then even though he'd been careful, the colony's actions had still caught the attention of the ratmen.

  Ratmen were timid and cautious by nature. They had a special connection with ordinary rats and could communicate with them in a simple way. When the rat popution within a kilometer of System's nest had suddenly decreased drastically, it had naturally attracted the attention of the ratmen.

  This ratman prisoner was a ratman warrior who had traveled to the nest for reconnaissance from a ratman gathering pce approximately one hundred kilometers away.

  Because of System's limited knowledge of the ratman nguage, he had been interrogating the ratman about any possible reaction from the ratmen at the gathering pce in recent days.

  System needed to know how the ratman gathering pce would react. He definitely didn't want another ratman wizard like the one who had blown himself up showing up at the nest.

  However, there was no progress in finding out about the situation at the ratman gathering pce, so System asked about something else—the rainy season.

  Every summer, there would be frequent heavy rains in the east of the Warren Pins and the west of Lilt Forest, and many of the low-lying areas would end up flooding.