Ashen God
Chapter 183 - 182: Concentrated Ant Acid

Chapter 183: Chapter 182: Concentrated Ant Acid

Zhang Yanhang woke up very early this morning, around five o’clock. After wasting some time making choices and eating, he started his research at six in the morning and had been engaged in it all morning.

His six hours of research did indeed yield some useful findings. For instance, he ascertained that the exoskeleton, mouthparts, and most organs of the Crimson Iron Ants were of little use to him. Although he managed to craft some white quality equipment, what he needed was higher quality gear.

Well, perhaps knowing these things couldn’t really be considered a discovery. Zhang Yanhang’s real gain was the Ant Acid of the Crimson Iron Ants; he found that the corrosive power of this substance was unexpectedly strong.

Even aqua regia, renowned for dissolving metals, needed several minutes to soften them to some degree, whereas Ant Acid from Crimson Iron Ants? Sprayed onto Crimson Iron Ore, it barely took a few seconds to soften it to an edible consistency.

The gap between the two was undeniably huge. If an ordinary person came into contact with Ant Acid from the Crimson Iron Ants, the affected area would probably be corroded and a large hole formed immediately; after all, if even the hard Crimson Iron Ore couldn’t withstand it, much less fragile flesh and organs.

And this was just the Ant Acid at the level of the Crimson Iron Worker Ant. Their low-level Ant Acid could only dissolve Crimson Iron Ore, but the stronger Ant Acid of the Crimson Iron Flying Ant could dissolve the hard impurities in Crimson Iron, which undoubtedly represents a new level of corrosive strength.

To put it another way, since the excreted Crimson Iron from the Crimson Iron Worker Ant was of green quality, this implied that their Ant Acid could melt white quality materials.

The refined Crimson Iron excreted by the Crimson Iron Flying Ant was of a stronger blue quality, meaning their Ant Acid had melted the green and white quality parts within the Crimson Iron.

Since the Ant Acid of the Crimson Iron Flying Ant could melt materials of green quality in a short amount of time, using it to dissolve an enemy’s fragile body should be no problem, right?

Based on this development idea, Zhang Yanhang fused the Ant Acid of the Crimson Iron Flying Ant several times, or rather, concentrated it several times, drastically increasing its corrosive power once again.

Zhang Yanhang took a piece of frozen pork from his home storage and smeared it with a bit of the concentrated Ant Acid.

The result was like magic; in less than a second, black scars indicative of acid corrosion had spread across the entire piece of pork, and the internal moisture of the pork was continuously absorbed and evaporated, which caused its volume to rapidly shrink.

Then, in the blink of an eye, all that was left in front of Zhang Yanhang was a puddle of pus and a small amount of black pork residue.

Next, Zhang Yanhang experimented with refined Crimson Iron using the concentrated Ant Acid and found that although the melting speed was significantly reduced compared to ordinary pork, it was still quickly softened.

"Concentrated Ant Acid can actually dissolve blue quality materials..." Zhang Yanhang felt that if the corrosive power was of this magnitude, then it certainly was usable.

Although it was not needed for dealing with ordinary monsters, it might come in handy when facing the Lord Monster Tracker. Moreover, based on Zhang Yanhang’s experience with bio-hazard games, acid was indeed particularly suited for combatting them.

The key point was that once ant acid penetrated inside an enemy, it would continue to inflict corrosive damage, which made it quite suitable for wearing down Trackers.

"So the question is, how should I deliver the ant acid into an enemy’s body? Or rather, even if I can’t get it inside, I at least need to make sure it can be applied to an enemy’s surface to cause corrosive damage."

Zhang Yanhang felt he had officially found a viable point of exploitation but was somewhat clueless about how to leverage this forcefully extracted value to earn even greater returns.

He had brought back a good amount of ant acid from the Crimson Iron Flying Ants this time, and so, with weapon manufacturing in mind, as long as a specific design idea could be confirmed, it was entirely possible to produce on a small scale in batches.

"Firstly, I definitely can’t make a melee weapon. If I use this stuff to make a melee weapon, the ant acid will have probably corroded the weapon before I even start fighting. Therefore, I can only make ranged weapons, such as ant acid grenades or ant acid bullets."

Zhang Yanhang gave it some thought, then directly took out some 5.56MM caliber bullets from his waist bag to serve as the subjects for this experiment.

Previously in Ashen World, when he was doing embedding experiments, he embedded a bunch of miscellaneous things, like the alchemy materials used for making barbecue seasonings and now these bullets, which he had fused on the side at that time.

Back then, these items mainly acted as a control group compared to Crimson Iron and Refined Crimson Iron, but unexpectedly, they really came in handy after returning to the Main World.

Next, Zhang Yanhang tried to encapsulate the ant acid directly inside the bullets using alchemy, but found that shortly after being encapsulated, the concentrated ant acid had already corroded the metal shell of the bullets.

"It seems like direct encapsulation might not be the best approach. Even if I could rely on the timelessness inside the waist bag’s space to forcibly keep the bullets in just-encapsulated status, that would be too troublesome to actually use..."

Zhang Yanhang thought that perhaps he should first solve this encapsulation issue before attempting to manufacture the ant acid bullets or, alternatively, find a material that could temporarily resist the corrosion of ant acid but wasn’t too strong.

Zhang Yanhang’s current manufacturing idea was to coat the ant acid with a film that must be able to resist the ant acid’s corrosion for a short period, at least ensuring the bullets wouldn’t get corroded by the acid during the shooting process.

Furthermore, the film’s strength had to be kept low. If it was too strong, it would encase the ant acid and fall off when the bullet shattered. To inflict corrosive damage, the film had to shatter together with the bullet. Only then would it be possible to inject the ant acid successfully into the enemy’s body.

Zhang Yanhang then proceeded to use some common anti-corrosion materials for encapsulating, which included ceramics, diamonds, silicon nitride, silicon dioxide, copper oxide, and glass fiber...

But after a round of experiments, Zhang Yanhang hadn’t found a suitable candidate. "Speaking of which, since ant acid can corrode even blue-quality materials, why am I still experimenting with these ordinary materials from the Main World? Perhaps the approach was flawed from the start."

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