Giant Squid

Xia Qiu followed the feedback information and chased into the distance.

The other creature's body was constantly descending, dropping vertically at a speed that was not particularly fast.

Xia Qiu swung his body with all his strength and pursued it, rapidly closing the distance between them.

Boom.

Xia Qiu's enormous body carried immense pressure. His colossal size left the other creature with no desire to fight at all.

It accelerated to flee, but Xia Qiu also swung his body faster and chased after it.

The distance between them steadily shrank, and Xia Qiu soon arrived not far behind it.

It was a giant squid.

The target Xia Qiu had locked onto was a giant squid, an Oegopsida creature—in other words, a squid.

It had a long, narrow conical body and five pairs of arms. Four pairs were relatively short, shorter than its mantle length, and were Short Tentacles.

The other two arms were especially long, serving as feeding tentacles to catch prey. They could also retract into sacs at their bases and were roughly three times the length of the other arms.

This giant squid had a mantle length of around ten meters. Its first pair of arms was only six meters long, its second through fourth pairs were eight meters long, while its feeding tentacles reached nearly twenty meters.

Its mantle length plus the length of its Short Tentacles made up its body length, which was close to twenty meters. It was unquestionably a giant creature.

It was huge.

On Earth, adult giant squid generally ranged from ten to thirteen meters long, with the longest reaching around twenty meters.

This giant squid was twenty meters long, which was already astonishing.

It was fast.

But it was not as fast as Xia Qiu. Xia Qiu caught up to it and arrived behind it.

Whoosh.

The squid suddenly contracted its arms, then violently spread them apart. Its body shot forward, instantly appearing more than ten meters away and continuously widening the distance between the two fish.

So fast.

Seeing its movement, Xia Qiu gave it everything he had, yet he still could not catch up.

They could use their tail mantles and cartilage to spray water from the siphons beneath their bodies. Combined with the force released by contracting and spreading their arms, they could move at extreme speed—up to 15 m/s, or roughly fifty-four kilometers per hour.

Xia Qiu's top speed, meanwhile, was only forty-five kilometers per hour, or 12.5 m/s.

But its endurance was insufficient.

After only a few bursts of jet propulsion, its speed had already slowed, before suddenly dropping sharply.

Hehehe, can't run anymore, can you?

Xia Qiu surged after it and closed the distance again. Rather than attacking from behind, he moved to its side and bit down on its mantle.

Crunch.

Xia Qiu's massive jaws bit into the middle of its mantle. His sharp teeth pierced through its body, but failed to kill it.

Taking advantage of the moment, it wrapped its arms around Xia Qiu's head.

Its five pairs of arms tightly coiled around Xia Qiu's head, preventing him from opening his mouth while dragging downward, hoping to control his body.

The way giant squid hunted whales and sharks was to first suffocate their prey, then feed on it.

Sharks had gills and could breathe underwater, but they did so by constantly swimming, allowing water to enter their mouths, pass through their gills, and absorb the dissolved oxygen in the water.

Once they stopped swimming, sharks would suffocate to death.

That was why squid wrapped around them, forcing them to stop swimming and killing them.

Against whales, squid would wrap around them and prevent them from surfacing, killing them that way.

Of course, the success rate was very low. Against sharks, they could only target sharks smaller than themselves, and because they lived in different waters, they generally rarely encountered one another.

As for whales, their primary opponents were sperm whales, which weighed at least forty or fifty tons.

Thus, giant squid were an important food source for sperm whales.

And this giant squid was trying to use this method to kill Xia Qiu.

A giant squid's arms possessed tremendous strength—not only the force of muscle contraction, but also the gripping suction of its Suckers.

The Short Tentacles had two rows of Suckers, each around ten centimeters across, while the arms themselves were between twenty-five and thirty-five centimeters in diameter.

Its feeding tentacles had four rows of Suckers, even six rows in some places, though they were smaller in diameter and not especially strong.

Its tentacles could grip objects ten or even twenty times heavier than itself.

But they could not restrain Xia Qiu.

First was the difference in size. Xia Qiu's body was thirty-four meters long, even larger than the biggest sperm whale, and he weighed over two hundred tons.

A twenty-meter giant squid, meanwhile, weighed over one ton but not even one and a half tons.

That kind of weight was basically a joke to Xia Qiu.

Its arms could not block Xia Qiu's gills. With its mantle caught in Xia Qiu's jaws, its six-to-eight-meter Short Tentacles could only reach Xia Qiu's gills with their tips. They could not block Xia Qiu's gills completely, and Xia Qiu had four layers of gill openings to begin with.

Nor could it restrain Xia Qiu's mouth. Xia Qiu exerted only a little force, and the arms loosened. He opened his mouth and bit down again.

This time, he bit near the giant squid's eyes, then slowly tore and chewed. His teeth ground through the bitten area, reducing it directly to shredded flesh.

After being bitten twice, the giant squid no longer had the strength to hold on and died immediately. Yet its arms remained suctioned to Xia Qiu's body, an instinct of the arms' control over their Suckers, which would actively attach themselves.

But without the giant squid's muscle contractions controlling them, the force was far too weak. Xia Qiu shook the giant squid's head in his jaws, and those arms gradually fell away.

Then Xia Qiu gnawed through its body and arms alike, swallowing every last bit into his belly.

Xia Qiu felt his stomach fill.

It was not particularly heavy, but its volume was enormous. Just one of them gave him a feeling of fullness.

I wonder whether this one will work.

The squid and Octopus he had eaten before had been no more than five or six meters long at most.

This one was around twenty meters long, and it was a giant squid. He wondered whether it could make him grow arms.

Xia Qiu looked forward to it as he swam back in the direction he had come from. After swimming for some distance, a heat current emerged.

It's here.

The heat current was incredibly scorching, different from before, but it was not particularly abundant. It turned into fine streams of heat and spread throughout his body.

Those heat currents continued to appear bit by bit, only to be constantly consumed.

I wonder if it will work.

Xia Qiu prayed, but the heat current began to fade, and no changes started on the surface of his body.

Did it fail?

I can't grow tentacles?

Was I really just indulging in wishful thinking?

Xia Qiu felt somewhat disappointed. Tentacles could attack, bind, defend, and restrain.

With tentacles, he would no longer need to worry about enemies attacking his weak points.

But he could not grow them.

He belonged to Phylum Chordata, while Octopus and squid belonged to Phylum Mollusca. They were not even from the same phylum, so how could they grow together?

But the next moment, Xia Qiu felt that something was wrong.

Hachi the Octopus was an Octopus Fish-Man, possessing the characteristics of both an Octopus and a human. He was also a combination of Phylum Chordata and Phylum Mollusca.

He can do it, so why can't I?

Just then, Xia Qiu suddenly felt an itch in the front of his abdomen. The itching spread across the area beneath his gills, all the way to between his pectoral fins.

The area was eight to nine meters long, no wider than the sides of his abdomen, and lay between his pectoral fins and pelvic fins.

Along with the itch, the scales on his belly began to fall away, replaced by slowly growing bases.

But as this portion of his body protruded slightly from his abdomen, the heat current vanished without a trace. Even the bases had not fully formed, much less extended into arms.

But their appearance alone was enough.

It meant that he could grow arms.

What he lacked was more Evolution Energy.

So next, he still needed to continue hunting them.