The Clumsy Locust Hunter

At about the time System had estimated, as the sun sank, he successfully sucked dry two pupae and began making his way back to his nest of dead leaves.

Because of his increased size, the once-spacious nest of dead leaves had now become somewhat cramped. He estimated that after gaining another two levels, this nest would no longer be able to hold him.

System did not return to the nest to give up foraging at night, but to rest briefly.

Once the food in System's abdomen had mostly been digested and his body had become more agile, reaching its peak condition, he would carry out his first hunting operation of the night.

After five straight days of torrential rain, creatures in the forest that System could hunt had become exceedingly scarce.

Most of the insects System could find after the storm were chirping cicadas. However, he was not confident he could kill them, because these cicadas would fly away at the slightest sign of danger.

Moreover, these singing cicadas moved about very irregularly. Though they often called out, when he actually tried to find them, System found it difficult to locate them right away.

There were prey whose habits were regular and thus easy to track. Another kind of prey that moved very predictably, which System had identified, was two spiders.

One was dark brown and roughly six centimeters long. The other was smaller, about three centimeters, its entire body covered in alternating yellow-and-white patterns.

After the torrential rain, the two spiders had already rewoven their webs. At night, they remained in the centers of their webs, while during the day, they rested in temporary nests at the corners of those webs.

However, to System, these two spiders were less prey than hunters. He felt that challenging them had an eighty percent chance of ending in his own destruction, with him being killed instead by their venomous fangs.

After much consideration and weighing of options, System ultimately chose the chirping cricket as his target. Crickets were also insects with fixed nests.

System had already investigated the location of this cricket's nest two days ago. It was a narrow tree hollow.

It was precisely because of this hollow that the cricket had escaped the disaster brought by the torrential rain.

Two days ago, he had only been a grasshopper larva. He had held no obvious advantage against a highly aggressive male cricket three centimeters in size; during a fight, he could easily be injured, crippled, or fall into the water. Therefore, System had not made a move against the cricket while he was still a larva.

Now that he had become an adult grasshopper, System had grown stronger. Dealing with that cricket was clearly no longer a problem.

However, after molting, System had grown much larger and could no longer squeeze into the cricket's tree hollow. Thus, he could only wait until night, when the cricket emerged from the hollow to chirp, before ambushing it.

By the time the food in his stomach had been digested, the sky had turned completely dark.

After making all his preparations, System took several leaps and arrived at a fork in the branch near the cricket's tree hollow.

This cricket's hollow was actually very close to System's nest, only five or six meters away.

[Green Camouflage] activated!

The patterns and colors on System's body slowly changed into the colors and patterns of tree leaves.

Due to the limitations of this derived ability, System could only turn colors close to green. Furthermore, his body was out of proportion with this branch, making the flaws in his disguise quite obvious.

But if he chose a branch farther away, System would not be confident in his ability to attack the cricket. He could only hope that the darkness of night would prevent the cricket from noticing him.

Without moving, he entered a dormant state and waited for the cricket to come out and chirp at eight or nine every night.

At this moment, System was like a venomous snake waiting for prey to take the bait, silently awaiting the cricket's appearance.

Snakes were among nature's best ambush hunters. When food was scarce, they could even go without food or water for days as they waited for prey.

It could be said that reptiles like snakes and certain insects carried the idiom "waiting by a stump for a rabbit" to its very extreme.

Whether reptiles like snakes and crocodiles, or most arthropods such as praying mantises and katydids, their hunting methods were all about waiting by a stump for a rabbit—holding position in one place, waiting for prey to enter their attack range, then suddenly dealing a lethal strike.

Compared to those dim-witted hunters, System was also waiting by a stump for a rabbit, but his goal was clearer and his method more efficient.

He had an extremely clear grasp of when and where his prey would appear.

Just as System had expected, when the pale yellow moon stood slightly more than forty-five degrees above the ground, the cricket crawled out of its tree hollow on schedule and jumped onto the branch beside it.

This male cricket seeking a mate clearly failed to notice System hidden diagonally above it. It simply vibrated its wings on the branch and began to chirp.

System's powerful hind legs began to gather force. The muscles of his wings were also taut and ready, while he repeatedly simulated in his mind the feeding movements he would make after rushing forward.

As a light breeze drifted past, System suddenly launched himself at the male cricket. His wings let out a papapapa roar, further increasing his speed.

In the blink of an eye, System's hunt failed...

Compared with his dim-witted hunter predecessors, who only knew how to wait by a stump for a rabbit, System's hunting skills were far too immature.

The first half of System's ambush had been perfect. Perhaps if he had been a praying mantis or katydid, he would have succeeded by now.

But as a Green-Tailed Grasshopper, a species generally quite small in size, his bloodline had not passed down any hunting instincts to him.

System could only devise hunting plans according to his own understanding.

His plan was very simple: roughly speaking, he would use his four front legs to restrain the cricket, then use his mandibles to bite off its head.

There was actually nothing wrong with System's plan, but his movements were simply too crude, and his luck was not very good either.

System's sudden attack had been swift, and the cricket had not reacted in time. But the first two front legs System extended only pressed down on the cricket's smooth wings.

As the cricket's wings abruptly trembled, the hooked spines on System's forelegs could not exert any force. Combined with his unsteady landing during this attack, the cricket slipped out of System's embrace like a loach...

The instant the cricket broke free from his embrace, System made a swift decision. He immediately rose and moved backward, blocking the cricket's hole.

Several centimeters of standing water still remained on the forest floor. If the cricket fled onto the water's surface, there was absolutely no chance it would escape unscathed. The only place this cricket could preserve itself was that tree hollow.

Yet after System swiftly blocked the entrance, he suddenly discovered that the cricket had vanished.

Because of the ability of [Information Reading], the outlines of everything within one meter around him glimmered faintly in System's eyes. There were no ripples at all on the water beneath the tree branch, so the cricket clearly had not jumped into the water to escape.

"Could it be hiding behind the leaves?"

Recalling the direction in which the cricket had broken free from his grasp and fled, System stared thoughtfully at several leaves sprouting from a branch not far away.

The leaves on this tree resembled maple leaves in shape and size. Their stems were very short, making them easy to hide behind.

System hesitantly began moving toward those leaves, but before long, his antennae detected a faint vibration. He immediately started retreating toward the hole.

But it was already too late. The cricket had beaten him back to its tree hollow.

The cricket's hiding place had actually been directly beneath the branch.

Bound by the habitual thinking of a human, System had forgotten that insects generally possessed the ability to hang upside down...