Build the Swarm Tech Tree in Konoha

Chapter 103 Chapter 102 Let’s call it Physarum polycephalum

Aburame Tetsumaru found that he was obsessed with research and unintentionally dug up a few big mines for himself, no, dozens of big mines. This was the shadow clone that he left outside last year to maintain the illusion of daily activities.

When he just started to rest, a shadow clone that had lasted for four months took the initiative to dissolve, leaving Aburame Tetsumaru stiff for ten minutes and almost vomiting on the spot.

After that, several more shadow clones were forced to disband due to exhaustion of chakra, which made him very embarrassed each time.

But there are exceptions. The dissolution of the shadow clone that cooperates with him in research will have a much smaller impact on him. Probably all the information that the shadow clone knows, Tetsumaru has already known through discussions and exchanges.

This proves that the information returned instantly is not only a heaven-defying bug of forbidden arts and multiple shadow clones, but also the most dangerous danger to human life. Compared with this danger, the so-called chakra requirement is nothing.

Either it is too smart or too wise, and the shadow clone that is separated cannot return brand new information at all.

Or, he is a pure fool, and the shadow clone that is separated does not return much information.

Sure enough, only a strong fool can use multiple shadow clones. Anyway, Aburame Tetsumaru never dares to use multiple shadow clones except in battle.

There is a way. Each shadow clone must communicate as much as possible before disbanding, in order to reduce the discomfort caused by the instant impact of unknown information. The effect is there, but the discomfort is still very uncomfortable. There is no way to do this.

, I have to bear the minefields I dug and shed tears.

After spending half a month to deal with the shadow clones in the village, Aburame Tetsumaru became worried when he thought about leaving the shadow clone in the Kingdom of Wind responsible for searching for the giant scorpion.

Konoha Village is isolated from the inside and outside. I can't go in or out without a proper reason, and neither can the shadow clones. I have no choice but to wait in fear, waiting for these shadow clones to exhaust their chakra and then thunder.

To put it bluntly, I can lie down peacefully because I have too many debts and I don’t have to worry about them. These shadow clones are just trivial and can’t kill anyone.

Aburame Tetsumaru knew that he still had a major hidden worry, and there were many, many bigger shadow clone thunders that could be detonated at any time. Ever since he learned shadow clones from Orochimaru, he had created shadow clones, and they were all

A large amount of chakra is specially injected, which can last for a long time. At least until now, none of it has disintegrated and fed back memories.

The earliest batch of shadow clones lasted for more than three years. If you think about it, you will know how terrible this is.

But maybe it's okay?

After all, these shadow clones were cast towards the distant stars on the sea of ​​souls in dreams.

Not sure.

Putting these uncertainties behind him, Aburame Tetsumaru turned his attention back to the newly discovered biological samples.

The creature that he judged to be far more important than the praying mantis was a community of fungi that was discovered in the small stone house laboratory of Aburame Tetsumaru when he was a child. When Tetsumaru invited his classmates to play at home, he accidentally discovered that he was being raised in

All the bugs in the small stone house were devoured by this terrible fungus and turned into fluffy exoskeleton specimens.

I didn't pay much attention at the time. I thought it was ordinary fungal contamination, so I cleaned it casually. I habitually put part of the fungus in a petri dish, disinfected it with strong alkali, and continued to play with my classmates.

In the evening, a man returned to the small stone house laboratory, preparing to clean up the place completely, but unexpectedly found that the lid of the petri dish was pushed open, and the fungus spread directly from the table to the other side of the experimental table, tightly wrapping the bottle filled with culture medium.

Aburame Tetsumaru carefully inspected and found that the stopper of the culture medium bottle had been pushed open. He was shocked and quickly conducted further comprehensive inspections.

Good guy, what's on the table is only part of it. Along the corners, the fungi have also invaded the wastewater pool and the chemical box. In the chemical box, three types of ammonium bicarbonate, calcium phosphate, and potassium chloride were selected to avoid hydrogen.

Dangerous chemicals such as sodium oxide and sulfuric acid.

What kind of magical fungus is this? It can find the energy, water, and minerals it needs so accurately. Does it have sensory organs? No, it even has the ability to think.

The key is, where did it come from? Why did it appear in my laboratory?

When she thought about this problem, Aburame Tetsumaru became nervous and attracted countless flies, ants, and moths to conduct a carpet-like search of her home and the five kilometers nearby.

After two days of searching and continuously expanding the search scope, we finally found the source of the fungus, which turned out to be the ant sugar ranch run by our family.

During the past investigation, I happened to meet other ninjas from the Aburome family. It turned out that a fungal disease had recently broken out, causing large areas of pasture to wither, further affecting the production of ant sugar.

As soon as Aburame Tetsumaru communicated with her relatives, she quickly confirmed that the culprit was this brand-new fungus.

The Ant Sugar Alliance is now deeply entrenched, with annual revenue reaching billions of taels, and has zero tolerance for anything that threatens its own sugar production.

With an order, a large number of Aburo ninjas, Uchiha ninjas, and Hyuga ninjas gathered together. The Nara, Akimichi, Yamanaka, Kurama, and Gekko families also came out to thoroughly disinfect all the fungi found in the wild.

With sufficient manpower, everyone dug three feet into the ground within a ten-kilometer radius, confiscated all the samples collected by Aburame Tetsumaru, and threw them into the fire and burned them to ashes.

But this is only a complete annihilation on the surface. Creatures like scientists must seek death, otherwise how can their scientific spirit be reflected?

Aburame Tetsumaru was sure that not only did he leave fungal samples, but other companies also took small steps, and even Orochimaru came over to watch them disinfect them. Is he very free?

Of course it's impossible

Aburame Tetsumaru clearly saw through the field barrier that a snake in the ground swallowed a piece of wood fragments contaminated with fungus and disappeared into a cloud of white smoke. It was obvious who did it.

Nowadays, the underground of Konoha is full of wormholes, as dense as a web. Naturally, this cannot be hidden from the ninjas.

Especially after Aburame Tetsumaru went to Kawa no Kuni, his control over the mineral bugs decreased, and a small number of bugs in the bugs naturally showed their instinct to reproduce and survive.

Ignoring Aburame Tetsumaru's prohibition, they dug around and invaded underground chambers everywhere.

The invasion naturally caused alarm, and ninjas began to investigate, including the Aburame family ninjas. However, they could not find any problems. They could only dig up piles of various worms, scorpions, and mole crickets.

The final conclusion is that Konoha's ecological environment is too good and too much population activity has led to the extinction of some of the natural enemies of insects, which in turn triggered an underground insect plague. This is a natural phenomenon.

Orochimaru, Beiruhu, who are accustomed to digging caves underground, as well as the Roots, Anbu, Intelligence Department and other departments are very unhappy with the bugs around them. They use every means to kill the bugs and fill the holes, but they can't be killed, no matter how they kill the bugs.

It will come back in a few days.

Today, a year later, everyone has become accustomed to it. When they see a bug, they will naturally take out the regular insecticide and spray it to kill it, then find and plug the wormhole, and ignore it.

Orochimaru, a man with a flexible mind, not only used swarms of venomous snakes to eliminate the bugs approaching his secret room, but also used these wormholes to hide his own snakes or sneak quickly underground.

But how could this kind of stealth be hidden from the owner of the wormhole, Aburame Tetsumaru? Naturally, he could clearly see the various interactions among the snakes underneath.

…

Aburame Iron Pill gave this fungus a name: Physarum polycephalum, because when the fungus expands, it will grow with many heads. When it matures, it will grow yellow hairs and a long rod with a transparent bubble.

.

The bubbles grown by the fungus are filled with spores, which are used to sow its own seeds. Once the spores successfully develop, the main fungus will spread in this direction.

The name actually comes from a certain fungus in the previous life. Niu Niu even designed the transportation lines of his city by referring to the expansion path of the fungus.

Why Aburame Tetsumaru attaches great importance to this fungus is of course to create a carpet. The various buildings of the insect swarm are all alive and must rely on infrastructure to feed them. The infrastructure of the insect swarm is the carpet.

The most basic function of the carpet is to serve as a food source for the insect swarm, absorbing inorganic matter from the soil downwards, decomposing the organic matter and then converting it into nutrients for the insect swarm to eat.

If the land is too barren and lacks organic matter, the fungus carpet can also carry out photosynthesis like plants, consuming water to produce organic matter, and finally converting it into nutrients.

This is of course the technology Aburame Tetsumaru desperately wants. You must know that the brood nest he is currently creating is supported by sugar ants and oilseed insects. As the size of the insect colony increases, the brood nest takes on the responsibility of communication and energy supply.

It became a big problem.

Nowadays, in order to maintain communication, we have to strictly limit the size of the insect colony produced by the mother nest. This is not in line with the development trend of the insect colony. Finding more efficient food sources is an urgent need that must be solved without delay.

Aburame Tetsumaru worked hard to obtain live cockle flesh, not only to upgrade the breeding equipment, but also to think about whether it could be transformed into a carpet.

After all, living slugs are not only slugs, but also immortals who control natural energy. Can they be developed into infrastructure for absorbing natural energy?

However, the gap between the two species is so great that up to now, let alone progress, there is no idea at all.

That's why this "smart" fungus is a treasure for Aburame Iron Pill. It's a fungus. It looks like the insect colony's carpet at first glance. It's also smart enough to find resources on its own, so its potential isn't too great.

Since this thing was registered in Konoha Village, Aburame Tetsumaru chose to conduct research in a laboratory 1,600 meters underground. This place exceeded the detection range of all Konoha Village's detection methods, and no matter what he did, he would not

will be noticed.

Even if Nagato comes to Konoha Village in the future to fight and removes eighteen floors of the land, the place will not be affected in any way.

…

After some research, Aburome Tetsuwan discovered that this was not a single flora, but a composite flora, consisting of a total of fourteen to twenty different fungi.

The reason why he couldn't determine the total number was because there were six types of fungi that could change from other fungi. He couldn't tell for a while whether these fungi were different forms of one fungus or two symbiotic fungi.

The complexity of the world of fungi is far more exaggerated and wonderful than that of animals and plants. It is not uncommon for one type of fungus to swallow another type of fungus, and the two interact and support each other to form a symbiosis. It is not uncommon for them to suddenly part ways during the symbiosis process.

More than a dozen species of fungi came together, and under the influence of someone unknown, they exchanged genetic material with each other, adjusted their own properties, and formed a rudimentary division of labor and cooperation, seemingly becoming a more advanced life form.

Aburame Tetsumaru guessed that the most likely cause of this change was some kind of virus.

Even these fungi did not exchange genetic material, but the virus invaded and was incorporated into the fungus's genes, just like chlorophyll invades plant cells.

It's just that this time the virus invasion uses itself as a commonality, connecting these invaded fungi into a whole.

The process of functional differentiation of fungi is still proceeding rapidly, making fungi have more activity than single-cell organisms, and their responses to the environment are becoming more and more powerful and faster.

Correspondingly, the fungal mass's demand for energy is also increasing, which gives Aburame Tetsumaru the opportunity to intervene.

He mixed the mantis tissue in the culture medium and fed it to the fungus, allowing it to gradually become accustomed to this food and gradually change itself to adapt to the tissue of the decomposing insect swarm.

As time went by, no culture medium was added, only biological tissues of the mantis were added, and the fungus gradually became good at digesting the mantis's food.

But everything has its pros and cons. When the fungus adapts to mantis meat as food, the fungus in turn becomes edible by the mantis.

At this point, even though he had completed the first step of developing the mushroom carpet, Aburame Tetsumaru was already very sure that this thing was indeed what he wanted.

Immediately, the four Aburame Tetsumaru shadow clones who were in charge of the living scorpion flesh and blood research group stopped the project of transforming the living scorpion into the bacterial carpet and concentrated on the research topic of the strong colonization of the living scorpion cells.

The next step is to induce a wider range of recipes on the fungus, which requires constantly mixing various fungi with them, so that the fungus continues to expand its diet: meat, skin, blood, leaves, grass, wood, fungi.

In this process, various mutants are constantly produced, most of which will perish due to genetic collapse, and the remaining ones will easily become weak, and many of them will mutate themselves and become unsuitable for mantises to eat.

These are unsuccessful mutations and can only be destroyed completely.

There are only a handful of fungi that can successfully adapt to new recipes without mutating themselves, and every success makes Aburame Tetsumaru excited.

As time went by, Aburame Tetsuwan obtained fourteen successful fungus groups, and the next step was to cross-breed these fungi groups, and finally obtain a super fungus group that is compatible with all recipes.

This process will be fraught with failures, disappointments, crashes, and take countless hours, but once completed, Aburame Tetsumaru will have a true Creep, the base model.

The complete version of the creep must also be able to provide treatment to the insect swarm, supply energy to the building, and cover the insect swarm during battle to interfere with the enemy. The recipe must also be compatible with all organic matter to meet the demand, and at a minimum it must be able to digest coal and oil.

It must also have the ability to be self-sufficient in photosynthesis.

But there was no need for Aburame Tetsumaru to do this work himself, it could just be left to the shadow clone, and he didn't have time to continue doing research.

The new mission was sent from the Hokage, and after going around for several times, it hit him on the head.

However, Aburame Tetsumaru was not recruited to join a certain legion or perform a ninja mission, but to be stationed abroad for a long time to protect Konoha's assets.

(End of chapter)