Insect Eggs

The fifteen-centimeter toad before him made System tremble all over, much like the feeling he'd had when he encountered the little mantis last time.

His [Insect Instinct] once again exerted a powerful effect. The pair of hind legs responsible for jumping gathered immense strength, while the instincts coursing through his body urged him to leap away from here at once.

"Is this the [Insect Instinct] that makes me immediately jump away whenever I sense danger?"

"But this time, that instinct is having the opposite effect..."

System forcibly suppressed the power of his [Insect Instinct]. The derived skill [Insect Instinct] was simple yet effective, capable of avoiding most dangers and greatly increasing the survival rate of the grasshopper population.

But this instinct was clearly useless in front of a toad.

If the toads in this world shared the habits of those from System's previous life, then jumping around in front of one was absolutely courting death.

System could guarantee that the instant he leaped, the toad's tongue would wrap him up and drag him into its belly, where he would dissolve into a puddle of slurry in its stomach acid.

As it happened, System's memories contained information on the habits of toads and frogs. They liked moving prey and had no interest whatsoever in lifeless things.

It seemed that he had kept frogs as pets in his previous life. Sometimes, when the mealworms he bought were sluggish or had already died, he would tie strings to them and tease the frogs.

Faced with the toad before him, System knew the best course was to remain still, because motionless things held no appeal for toads.

Forcefully suppressing the [Insect Instinct] that urged him to jump away immediately, System gradually slowed his abdominal breathing and entered a state of semi-hibernation once more...

As System waited for the toad to leave, the "ant search party" from earlier gradually approached him and the toad.

The ants clearly failed to notice the toad concealed beneath the pile of dead leaves and continued searching among the twigs and leaf litter for possible food.

Whoosh!

An insect's compound eyes possessed excellent dynamic vision, but the toad's tongue was clearly faster. System saw the tongue flash out of the toad's mouth, and an ant about twenty centimeters away from the toad vanished.

The toad spat out half a dead leaf, which had likely gotten stuck in its mouth when its tongue caught the ant.

The impact of the toad's tongue against the dead leaves alerted several ants. They sped up, crawling in every direction as they searched for whatever unusual thing had caused the leaves to tremble.

But before long, several ants were caught one after another by the toad's tongue. Only one escaped disaster by searching in a different direction, gradually walking farther away.

Even in the face of such an unreasonable and bizarre threat, these ants showed not the slightest fear. System did not know whether it was because they were stupid or simply because that was their nature.

It was probably their nature.

System recalled a scene from a documentary in his previous life. Even when facing their natural enemy—the anteater, thousands upon thousands of times their size—ants would charge forward without retreating in the slightest.

It was not until noon that the toad in front of System finally began to leave.

During that time, the toad had eaten more than a dozen ants, several bee-like flying insects, and one enormous dragonfly.

Once the toad left, System, free from danger at last, finally had a chance to eat.

Eating and growing were survival instincts flowing in a grasshopper's blood, and they were also what System had decided to do after thinking through the night.

For insects like grasshoppers, which survived as a species through prolific reproduction, the survival rate during the nymph stage was dozens of times lower than that of adults. He had to grow as quickly as possible and become an adult early, increasing his own chances of survival.

Shaking off his dormant state, System chose a direction and began hopping forward cautiously.

A grasshopper's jumping felt somewhat like a human riding a roller coaster, but grasshoppers were not humans. While hopping, System felt as though his body were a machine. Nothing felt abnormal, and he could calmly observe any unusual movements around him.

On the first plant he hopped toward, System spotted two white flowers at the top. Each was about five centimeters across, though he could not make out their shapes clearly from so far away.

System had a flash of inspiration and decided to gather nectar. If he wanted his body to grow quickly, he needed nutritious food, and nectar was clearly a good choice.

Not only that, System also wanted to taste what nectar was like. He could eat plant leaves, which tasted slightly bitter to humans, as though they were fruit. What would nectar, sweet by nature, taste like in his mouth?

System looked forward to it.

On the way to the flowers, the cautious System encountered five small white, semi-transparent bugs. Like him, they had six legs and were probably a type of insect.

They were tiny, only 0.2 to 0.3 centimeters long—roughly half his size.

Using their unique mouthparts, the little bugs damaged the plant's outer layer while sucking up the slightly cloudy sap flowing from the wounds.

They were clearly peaceful herbivorous insects, and System did not stand on ceremony. He directly used his strong body to shove one of the little bugs aside, then went to consume the sap they had collected.

Just as System expected, these little bugs were not social insects like ants. Seeing his strong body, the one he had shoved aside quickly fled.

The others ignored System's actions and continued sucking the plant sap. Clearly, they did not think System posed any threat to them.

After seeing how the little bugs reacted, System began drinking the plant sap. It tasted quite good, somewhat like the mango juice he had drunk in his previous life.

But after he continued taking the sap gathered by two more little bugs, the remaining bugs all fled one after another.

System tried biting the wounded plant layer a few more times, only to discover that after the little bugs left, sap no longer flowed from it. He guessed that making sap flow from a plant wound was one of the little bugs' unique abilities. Perhaps their mouthparts injected some special biological compound into the plants.

Giving up on the sap, System quickly climbed onto the flower using the hooked spines on his legs.

The flower was larger than it had looked from the bottom of the plant, around seven or eight centimeters in diameter and shaped somewhat like a chrysanthemum.

The flower's center was packed with dense, sturdy stamens. System tried using his mandibles to clear them away, but ultimately failed. The stamens were still too hard for his mandibles.

The shallow nectar beneath the stamens had already been sucked clean by bees. If he could not clear away the stamens, then the deeper nectar could only be reached by a butterfly's built-in straw.

Helplessly leaving the two flowers, System tried eating some mature leaves instead.

Mature leaves tasted little different from young leaves, and their effect on his growth was similarly negligible. But with his current soft mandibles, shredding such leaves took great effort and was more than three times less efficient.

If he ate only these mature leaves, his eating speed might not even keep up with his digestion. He would undoubtedly grow hungrier the more he ate, so System could only give up. It seemed he would have to wait until his first molt before he could eat these leaves.

And while System continued hopping and watching for danger, System discovered more than a hundred pale green, crystal-clear insect eggs on the underside of a leaf, and a greedy expression unconsciously appeared on his insect face...

A grasshopper's diet did not consist solely of grass. When plagued by hunger, they also ate meat, even young members of their own kind.