Chapter 325: Gaemi’s Soldier Ants

[ Detoxification (Elite): A healing-type skill. Each use consumes some of the user’s leaves to remove part of the poison from the target that consumes them. ]

[ Dissolving Liquid (Elite): A contamination/enhancement-type skill. Each use consumes one clone. After filtering the liquid and spraying it onto a target, it prevents the target from being affected by any diseases. This skill is only effective on plant-type targets. When sprayed onto non-plant targets, it can dissolve insect-type parasitic skills affecting them. ]

[ Rapid Healing (Rare): A healing-type skill. Each use consumes one clone to help the target recover health. ]

[ Photosynthesis (Elite): A cultivation-type skill. Absorbs light energy to meet the user’s own needs and store energy. ]

Joo Joowon paid particular attention to the skills. As for the other details, there wasn’t much to say. As a wild weed, Tori naturally had tenacious vitality. Its other talents were not much different from the descriptions of earth fire.

Now Joo Joowon finally understood why Tori had always been so quiet.

The first reason was that it could reincarnate. It could leave whenever it wanted, so it didn’t care who took it away or whether it would die.

The second reason was that it really didn’t have much ability to fight back. Although it had reached Level 10, not a single one of its skills belonged to the attack category. The only skill that could be considered remotely related to combat was Dissolving Liquid, which, to put it bluntly, was basically just an insect repellent.

Unfortunately, its favorability was still too low. Otherwise, Joo Joowon would have really liked to make it produce more seeds right away.

After all, a single foxtail grass plant could produce tens of thousands of seeds. Strictly speaking, this meant that all of Tori’s skills could be considered skills without cooldowns.

In a certain sense, Tori had already achieved immortality.

Wasn’t unlimited reincarnation essentially the same as eternal life?

There weren’t many people in the territory to begin with. Even Joo Joowon himself was practically a Lord without any subordinates, so there wasn’t much that needed to be arranged.

As a result, the only one who had actually taken up a position so far was Gaemi. She had arranged for some soldier ants to guard the underground tunnel where the Domain Core was located.

Calling it guarding was a bit of an exaggeration. Their main purpose was actually to serve as an early warning system. As for actually killing enemies, that was something he couldn’t count on them to do.

After all, individual ants weren’t very strong. Their main advantage had always been their numbers. Unfortunately, right now, they had neither strong individuals nor large numbers.

Furthermore, these soldier ants had been temporarily brought to maturity by Gaemi when she encountered an unexpected situation. They were essentially "premature babies," so none of their abilities were particularly impressive. They had no brains, no strength, and were basically disposable units.

On top of that, the soldier ants couldn’t feed themselves. The worker ants had to feed them regularly, just like they would care for young larvae.

Therefore, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that, apart from their ability to secrete venom through their mandibles, they were actually less useful than worker ants in their daily lives.

Ordinary soldier ants had difficulty feeding themselves because their evolution had focused too heavily on their offensive abilities. As a result, they needed to be fed by worker ants. In a normal ant nest, soldier ants usually made up only about 5% of the colony. Any more than that, and the worker ants would have trouble feeding them all.

When Gaemi had forcibly brought these soldier ants to maturity, she had deliberately neglected the evolution of their other functions and focused entirely on their toxicity. Consequently, these soldier ants were severely underdeveloped in other areas and had short lifespans.

For Gaemi, they were nothing more than a way to make use of otherwise wasted resources. Once she emerged from her pupa, she would abandon them.

Of course, they weren’t completely useless. At the very least, their venom was genuinely powerful. It was the kind of poison that could kill an elephant with just a single ant.

Even so, Gaemi still regretted bringing them into the world prematurely.

They hadn’t been useful even once. Instead, they had wasted quite a lot of food. To ensure that their venom remained sufficiently potent, they had to eat well and eat their fill.

However, Gaemi herself was surviving on honey. Naturally, the more she thought about it, the more painful it felt to waste so much food on them.

Joo Joowon didn’t interfere with Gaemi’s arrangements. After all, as an ant queen, Gaemi’s abilities were unquestionable. At the very least, she had far more experience than Joo Joowon, who had only ever played strategy games in the past.

Every profession had its own area of expertise. Joo Joowon had no interest in giving random orders in a field he wasn’t good at. After preparing a lavish dinner to celebrate their move today, he opened the Lord Forum and began browsing.

At the top of the Lord Forum was a guide for new Lords. It had been pinned, highlighted in red, and marked as an excellent post, making it impossible for anyone entering the forum to miss it.

Joo Joowon took a look, but he quickly became somewhat disappointed and closed it.

This guide wasn’t particularly helpful to him. It had been prepared for worlds where the game had already been running for a long time.

The guide listed all the things that needed to be prepared for the Lord’s assessment. It even explained how to arrange the initial troops so that the Lord could pass the assessment as quickly as possible and get everything running smoothly.

Of course, the guide was useful. It just wasn’t very useful to Joo Joowon.

Because of the transmission fees, it was much more cost-effective to buy these relatively common resources in one’s own world. The problem was that Gaia had only been open for a short time.