Bomb Caterpillars

"Blue forest!"

There was no doubt this overturned Du Ke's expectations. For a long time, the idea that plants were green had been deeply ingrained in people's minds; photosynthesis seemed as though it ought to be carried out by chlorophyll.

Fortunately, shock was just shock. Du Ke quickly accepted it. The New World had no chlorophyll, so it was not impossible for it to use blue chlorophyll instead.

But when he looked up at the sky, he was shocked again. There were actually two suns overhead. The one on the left was slightly smaller, while the one on the right was slightly larger. This was clearly a Binary Star System's "Solar System."

"Good thing there aren't three suns, or I'd have to wonder whether I'd transmigrated into The Three-Body Problem."

There were two suns in the sky. The distant mountains and the forest before him were both blue, while the fallen leaves on the ground were grayish-black. A colorful caterpillar crawled across them.

After confirming there was no danger, Du Ke took a deep breath and stepped into this New World.

One step apart, yet separated by countless billions of light-years. When he arrived in the New World by crossing the dimensions of space and time under the protection of Mind Armor, all his senses—sight, smell, taste, touch, and more—came rushing in at once. Chirping birds and insect calls filled the entire Great Blue Forest.

He did not rush to wander through the Great Blue Forest. Instead, he crouched down and pinched up the colorful caterpillar crawling over the dead leaves, wanting to determine how the New World's creatures differed from those on Earth.

But the moment his fingers touched the colorful caterpillar.

The caterpillar suddenly seemed to sense something. Its body arched, and the hairs on its body shot out like rain. They struck the glove of Du Ke's Nano Armor and rapidly exploded.

Pop! Pop! Pop!

The explosions were not intense, but the titanium-alloy nano glove on Du Ke's hand corroded at a visible rate under their impact.

"Holy shit!"

Frightened, Du Ke immediately dismissed the nano glove, shook off some corrosive substance produced by the explosions, then quickly manifested a new nano glove.

"It's just a caterpillar. Does it have to be this vicious?!"

After swallowing hard, he created a glass shield in front of himself, then manifested a pair of ceramic tweezers and tried to pick up the caterpillar with them. But the caterpillar arched again, firing another batch of long hairs. They struck the glass shield with popping explosions and blasted the glass to pieces.

This forced Du Ke to keep changing materials, trying to see what could block the caterpillar's Long-Haired Bombs. Yet even after the caterpillar had fired every last hair from its body, no material could stop those Long-Haired Bombs.

"Terrifying, truly terrifying. Good thing I came fully prepared, or I wouldn't even know how I died here!" Still shaken, Du Ke's eyes flashed as he used the tweezers to pick up the colorful caterpillar, which no longer had any Long-Haired Bombs to fire—no, it was now a white-skinned caterpillar.

Without its colorful hairs, the caterpillar revealed white skin.

It was about a finger long and somewhat stout. After picking it up, he took out a test tube, stuffed the caterpillar inside, sealed it, and placed it in a temporary storage box on the arm of his Nano Armor.

"This thing definitely has value. I can take it back and study it slowly... though now that its long hairs are gone, I wonder whether they can grow back."

In his opinion, the greatest value of this colorful caterpillar was the long hairs that could explode at any time.

"I'll call you Bomb Caterpillars." While studying the colorful caterpillar, Du Ke had already taken photographs and video footage. He stored the recorded data on a solid-state drive.

He intended to record this entire trip through the New World and document every detail thoroughly.

Once he rose and started walking, the danger posed by a single caterpillar made him extremely cautious. He feared that one careless step might set off an entire patch of dead leaves. He first came to a large tree. Its leaves and the branches in its crown were blue, a slightly aged shade of blue.

The trunk, meanwhile, was bluish-gray, marked by cracked ravines.

Suddenly.

He spotted another Bomb Caterpillar higher up on the trunk, and his scalp went numb. This Bomb Caterpillar seemed to be coming down. Du Ke hesitated, wanting to run—he truly did not want to be blasted again. The armor materials consumed were all Mind Power.

But he could not bear to leave either. He wanted the Long-Haired Bombs on the Bomb Caterpillar's body.

"These Long-Haired Bombs need to be fired before they explode. So if I kill the Bomb Caterpillar directly, won't they be unable to shoot out and explode?"

With that thought in mind, he waited for the Bomb Caterpillar to crawl down step by step until it reached a suitable position in front of him.

He swiftly drew his dagger and slashed at the Bomb Caterpillar. With a clang, he chopped the unresponsive Bomb Caterpillar into the tree trunk. This method really worked. Perhaps because it was pinned against the trunk, the Bomb Caterpillar could not arch its body and fire its long hairs.

So none of its hairs exploded this time.

After waiting more than ten seconds, the Bomb Caterpillar died. Only then did Du Ke carefully pick up its corpse with the tweezers and stuff it into another test tube. He also pulled off several long hairs, then tried cutting them with a knife and smashing them with a stone to see how he could activate the Long-Haired Bombs and make them explode.

The result was that neither cutting nor smashing could make the Long-Haired Bombs explode. They seemed to be nothing more than ordinary caterpillar hairs.

But when he held one of the long hairs with the tweezers and jabbed it into the tree trunk, the Long-Haired Bomb suddenly exploded.

"So that's it. The tips of these Long-Haired Bombs have triggering mechanisms. As long as the tips collide with something, they immediately explode. Otherwise, they won't."

It was a very interesting triggering principle.

He searched several blue trees nearby and found dozens of Bomb Caterpillars in no time. This made him abandon any thought of climbing trees. He did not want to touch a Bomb Caterpillar and get showered by a wave of Long-Haired Bombs. This grove of trees appeared to have been occupied by Bomb Caterpillars, with no other creatures around.

Du Ke hurried forward, wanting to leave the Bomb Caterpillars' territory.

Suddenly, a small black bird flew over and landed on a branch. It watched Du Ke, encased in Nano Armor, for a moment, then ignored him and swiftly took flight again, snatching up a Bomb Caterpillar from the trunk. Pop! Pop! Pop! Explosions rang out around the bird's beak.

But a glow flickered around its beak and head, completely blocking the explosions. They did not harm it in the slightest.

Crunch, crunch.

The black bird swallowed the Bomb Caterpillar whole.

"What was that flash?" Du Ke stared in astonishment. Bomb Caterpillars were already novel enough, and now there was a bird that could glow and withstand explosions. "Was that magic?" The concept of magic suddenly surfaced in his mind. That flash which blocked the explosions really did resemble a magic shield.

As he thought.

Du Ke had already raised his right hand. A huge-caliber barrel rapidly extended from the arm of his Nano Armor. He aimed at the black bird and fired directly.

Bang!

What shot out was not a bullet, but a net of silk threads. This was Du Ke's improved net gun. It had been inspired by the net guns police used to capture criminals, then modified by him to shoot farther and faster. He had designed it to capture small animals alive in the New World. Catching a bird was easy.

The black bird had never seen such extravagant equipment. In the moment it froze, the silk net covered it.

It immediately reacted and tried to break out of the silk net, but weighted projectiles lined the edges. Under the pull of gravity, the silk net firmly trapped it. Light kept flashing around the black bird's body, faint as though a layer of light hovered over its surface, but it was useless against the silk net.