The place where Project C.E. was carried out most intensively was the Amazon in South America.
The Amazon, Amazonia, the Amazon rainforest, the Amazon jungle, the primeval Amazon forest. A place called by names like that.
This place, also known as the lungs of the Earth, was precisely the kind of place IBRA would take as its primary target.
The Amazon jungle was already being devastated, being recklessly damaged by the interests and greed of various countries.
What if they restored a place like that?
IBRA thought their prestige would rise. So at first, they had devoted themselves to restoring that region.
That was what people commonly referred to as the first phase of the project.
To be precise, IBRA’s first phase was a success.
They succeeded in restoring the Amazon to a degree that exceeded their targets. That was why they were able to keep operating.
The Amazon itself is a gigantic living forest.
So when humans briefly reduced development and scattered fertilizer packed with growth accelerants over the devastated parts of the Amazon, there was no way it wouldn’t recover.
Until the first phase was completed, no one had any problems. Until then.
The growth accelerant used in Project C.E. is a fairly terrifying substance.
Of course, IBRA had said it was all fine. That there were no problems. That it merely helped plants grow “smoothly.”
I don’t know what they trusted to be so confident. It wasn’t as if they had gathered data for years. It wasn’t as if they had tested it on every plant.
What the doctor who went to America had been worried about was that growth accelerant.
He said it was an act that ignored nature’s diversity. He said no one knew what kind of mutations that growth accelerant might cause.
And now, after quite some time had passed, those side effects had finally begun to appear.
What I saw was a short video. A video on social media, barely over a minute long.
In it, there were ants the size of a palm. And not just one or two, but an unbelievably vast, uncountable number of them.
The sight looked like black sewage writhing.
Even if ants the size of fingernails gathered in those numbers, it would make your skin crawl.
But things the size of a palm were doing that…. It was horror in and of itself.
To the point where I felt relieved that I was watching it on video rather than seeing it in person.
Those ants held enormous leaves in their mouths and marched in lines toward somewhere.
Maybe that was why it was even more terrifying. Ants carrying leaves and marching in a line. Thousands, tens of thousands of them.
So I shared the video with the doctor. And I asked him what it was.
I also asked if it wasn’t related to Project C.E.
Surprisingly, the doctor’s reply came quickly.
He said it was. That it was indeed a problem caused by Project C.E. That they had already identified them and had even collected samples.
Wow. They move fast. Well, I did see it in a social media video.
If those things had flourished to that extent, the information might already have been shared among experts.
The ants I saw in the video were ants called leafcutter ants, or cutter ants.
Ants that cut plants, carry them back to their nests, and use them to grow fungi. A kind also called farming ants.
He said they were speculating that the reason they had grown so large might be because of the fungi.
After all, fungi spread quickly. And they’re also easily influenced.
Just like the acidic mucus spores had been.
In any case, there were several other hypotheses as to why the leafcutter ants had grown like that.
First, there was the theory that the sudden proliferation of Amazonian plants had locally increased the oxygen concentration.
In fact, he said the oxygen concentration in the Amazon was slightly higher than in other places.
The researchers who went to collect samples had measured it themselves, so that was probably certain enough. It wasn’t as if they would fabricate data like that.
He also said there was a theory that the growth accelerant IBRA had sprayed might have disrupted the insects’ hormones.
According to the investigation team’s trip to the Amazon, leafcutter ants weren’t the only insects that had grown larger.
In other words, they said mosquitoes and certain larvae larger than usual had also been discovered.
The problem was that it wasn’t clear whether they had originally been that way, or whether it was because of Project C.E.
So the investigation team had captured those insects as well and was studying them.
And the doctor gave me other information too.
About the other creatures of the Amazon. About other data the investigation team had discovered on their trip.
The fact that insects had grown larger was certainly a problem.
But there was something just as important as that.
Namely, the fact that the aggression of certain animals had increased. To a degree that was quite alarming.
It was a reaction extremely similar to rabies. But rabies only affects a limited range of individuals.
The data the doctor sent me, however, was not like that.
For now, three species were known.
Monkeys living in the Amazon, wild boars, and jaguars.
It seemed reports of damage caused by them were already continuing over there.
It simply hadn’t become known to the people of the world. It apparently wasn’t severe enough yet to cause serious alarm.
The victims were loggers and people like that.
Maybe that was why it seemed less serious.
People would assume they had been attacked because they entered the animals’ territory.
But P, where the doctor was, didn’t seem to think that way.
Well, P is rather cold-headed. They understand phenomena entirely through numbers and statistics.
An animal can become ferocious when something enters its territory. That’s only natural.
But what if such cases suddenly increased?
Then there’s a problem. It’s worth investigating.
If logging or deforestation doubled, and the number of attacks doubled as well, that could happen.
But if the increase in the latter rose much more steeply than the former? Then that’s a problem. Something is wrong.
So P investigated. The problem was that examining the corpses of living animals wasn’t easy.
At best, they could extract this and that from dead carcasses and check them.
But even that wasn’t easy. P might be fairly large in scale, but in the end, it was a private organization.
To proceed with anything took a considerable amount of time. There were many restrictions too.
The one fortunate thing was that the Amazon was in South America.
I have no intention of looking down on them, but fortunately, over there, there are ways to get things done easily.
What people call bribes, or lobbying.
And so, P was apparently able to capture live animals and take them away.
As expected, no matter what you do, it all comes down to money. Doing anything without money isn’t easy. It’s a relief that P is wealthy, at least.
I heard there were also many wealthy people from the Arab world involved with P.
They weren’t taking the lead in participating. They were simply serving as financiers.
They really are astonishing people. They have so much money that they make investments like that as a form of insurance.
Maybe because there are cases where they have to prepare for the worst, investments on that level are nothing to them.
Or maybe it’s just an interest-driven hobby for them.
In any case, thanks to that, even I, sitting on the opposite side of the Earth, was able to get a taste of the crumbs.
If it hadn’t been for the doctor, if the doctor hadn’t gone to P, I probably would still be struggling day by day without knowing anything.
Whether the world was ending or not, I would have gone to work every day wearing a mask and dragged my exhausted body back home.
That’s actually the case. People in our country still don’t know anything about the seriousness of it.
They only crack jokes like, “They say giant ants appeared! Is a gate about to open?”
In truth, that’s how it is. No one is interested in the environment or strange omens occurring on the other side of the Earth.
Unless this becomes enough to fill their dopamine cravings, that will probably be the extent of their reaction.
Of course, by the time it does, the world will already be fucked.
It won’t be dopamine people need then, but a sense of crisis.
I exercised all the put options I had.
The principal of two billion won came back as 3.7 billion after taxes. The rate of return was lower than I had expected, but it couldn’t be helped.
I had to prepare even more, starting now. Money would soon lose all its utility value.
I put up all my real estate as collateral, took out loans, and when I combined that money with the funds I had, it came to about 4.5 billion won.
With that money, I prepared two things.
One was my own laboratory. It didn’t need to be anything grand. It only needed to have enough facilities to manufacture the bare minimum of medicine using the sources the doctor had given me.
But a laboratory, when I didn’t even have a degree or anything. Ridiculous. I was openly doing some shady amateur operation.
The other was oil. Diesel. No matter how much I thought about it, I needed oil first.
Of course, because of the acidic mucus spores, there was a high chance that things that used diesel wouldn’t work properly, but I still needed oil.
Other people didn’t know that. And in any case, there would be things that still ran.
I built an additional warehouse. Since I still hadn’t covered the house with earth, I asked the same place that had built my house last time.
A fairly large warehouse. But it was underground. I deliberately made it underground. Because I had to store drums filled with oil.
Since I had an excavator, buying drums filled with diesel wasn’t particularly difficult.
However, I had to buy drums that were completely well sealed. This had to be stored for quite a long time. I had to make sure to add additives and preservatives too.
So I bought them little by little. I had no desire to invite unnecessary suspicion. It would become a headache later.
Because of that, filling the warehouse with drums took a considerable amount of time.
Still, by the time winter had almost passed, I was able to fill the entire warehouse with drums.
There was no need to leave the warehouse exposed. So I cleverly concealed the entrance and covered the whole thing with earth.
I had spent plenty of money to build it sturdily, so it wouldn’t collapse just because soil covered it.
Besides, this was also practice for when I later covered the house.
So once the weather warmed and the ground had thawed a fair bit, I dug it up and covered the warehouse.
It wasn’t easy. It took much longer than I expected.
As expected, doing anything alone is hard. But I couldn’t exactly hire people either.
After doing this much on my own, hiring people now would be a truly stupid thing to do.
It would be like finishing the cooking, going to the trouble of plating everything perfectly, and then overturning the whole thing.
During the day, I covered it with earth. At night, I practiced with the sling.
I read the materials the doctor had given me and tried this and that as I pleased in the newly made laboratory.
Hmm. Doing this makes me feel like I’ve become something. Like a mad scientist.
And so, when the early summer of my thirtieth year was just beginning to turn into summer in earnest, the animals began to run wild.