The "prey" before it was no longer merely moving like a ghost. It was truly walking with the devil's own steps.
In this ecosystem built around giant trees, no creature had ever moved this way. Whether insects crawling, frogs leaping, or birds flying, all were movements these Ancient Wilderness creatures could recognize and understand.
Some creatures with powerful dynamic vision could even predict their enemies' trajectories.
Only this creature before them moved in a way that completely defied their mechanical senses, impossible to grasp.
But Ancient Wilderness creatures would not develop an emotion as complex as "confusion." Whether they recognized something or not, they simply attacked.
Although it had missed this strange creature several times, something so tiny it could swallow it in one bite could never pose a threat to it, much less approach the fruit it guarded behind it.
What the scorpion did not know, however, was that the silver-gray bug was not fighting alone!
After yet another attack missed, the sensory hairs on the oddly shaped scorpion's surface suddenly trembled.
An unsettling rustling drew closer. The first large ant crawled out from a blind spot behind the branch, followed by a second, a third...
The silver-gray bug floated in midair between the scorpion and the ants using gravity silk. Her mouthparts opened and closed as she spoke in bug language only she could understand:
"Ten thousand arrows, fire!"
In the next instant, offense and defense switched places.
The pursuing ant army had eyes only for Wen Jing. When they were close enough to engage her in melee, they would frantically crawl after her. When she was too far away, they would spread out in an orderly fashion to encircle her while approaching at full speed. And when the distance fell just within their firing range...
"Pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft-!"
A dense barrage of golden resin shells shot toward her like a torrential downpour. Caught between the two sides, Wen Jing changed roles. Like a general leading the charge, she darted aside and, pulled by her gravity silk, "stood" directly on a resin glob as it flew at high speed.
As for how she could do that? Naturally, she had evolved again.
[Exoskeleton I] [Trait acquired: lipid isolation layer]
After spending four skill points, her shell had become harder and thicker. At the same time, her entire body would secrete a special isolating layer of lipid molecules that could keep sticky substances such as resin globs from adhering to her.
Gravity master Wen Jing had calculated the golden shell barrage's trajectory well in advance. Both the timing of the ant army's shots and her own height ensured that they would hit the scorpion.
And if precision was lacking, sheer numbers could make up for it.
With a series of whistles through the air, every resin shell bombarded the unprepared, oddly shaped scorpion under Wen Jing's "command."
As for her, she used the force of the impact to launch herself straight toward the blue-violet fruit on the branch behind it!
Chapter 23
Stepping on the resin shell, Wen Jing rode its momentum forward while shooting gravity silk onto the blue-violet fruit.
But as she drew closer to the branch, her high-definition compound eyes spotted an unusually large amount of white dust in the nearby air. It seemed to come from the fungus-covered leaves.
Was it some kind of poisonous spore?
Wen Jing had no way to avoid them and picked up these white spores as she moved.
Immediately afterward, a faint weariness came over her, like a hibernating animal whose body instinctively reduced its energy consumption when the season arrived.
But perhaps because of her ant venom resistance, or perhaps because of her lipid isolation layer, Wen Jing did not collapse immediately.
Hold on!
Looking at the treasure right before her, she kept her nerves taut and instinctively moved her limbs to stay active.
"Smack!"
At last, pulled along by her gravity silk, the silver-gray bug successfully landed on the blue-violet fruit.
The world before her was already doubling. Wen Jing realized there was no time to "pack up" the fruit and take it away. Fighting the onslaught of fatigue, she opened her mouthparts and bit hard into the fruit.
As the saying went, an antidote could always be found within three paces. She could still barely resist the white spores. If eating this obviously precious fruit could neutralize the poison, she could save her skill points. If not, it would not be too late to evolve then.
She had originally planned to take it back and study it, but she could not worry about all that now. Eating came first!
Her sharp mouthparts pierced the fruit's skin, and a special, mysterious energy within it flowed into Wen Jing's mouth along with the blue-violet juice.
In that instant, she felt like a traveler who had gone thirsty in the desert for ages and finally tasted cool, refreshing ice water. Her entire bug body shuddered.
Just as the attraction she had felt earlier suggested, the fruit contained energy that all Ancient Wilderness life instinctively craved.
Health: 0.02, 0.03... Strength: 0.02, 0.03... Speed: 0.02, 0.03... Spirit: 0.51, 0.52...
On the attribute panel Wen Jing had no time to check, every basic attribute began increasing across the board.
Unlike an improvement to her traits, this was an increase in the vitality of her bug body itself. Her body even began growing larger and longer.
But less than three seconds into Wen Jing's frenzied gulping, the components of the fruit juice she had sucked in along with the energy began spreading through her digestive organs, ravaging her blood and nerves like a typhoon.
Seriously?! This fruit was even more poisonous?! Why was the Ancient Wilderness full of traps everywhere?!
When Wen Jing came back to her senses from the surge of energy, she saw the blue-violet fruit, a little less than half of it eaten and sucked away, rapidly receding from view.
At some point, she had lost neural control over the gravity silk at the end of her abdomen and her three pairs of claws, leaving her unable to keep clinging to the fruit.
Wen Jing instinctively tried to move, only to discover that she could not move at all.
The next instant, her vision vanished too. Before her optic nerves died, she saw her longest hind leg twitch ominously.
On the panel in her consciousness, her health, which had risen to 0.12 from absorbing the energy, was dropping even faster: 0.08, 0.06...
Had the precious energy contained within the fruit not counteracted the poison, Wen Jing would not even have had this moment to regain her senses. She would have died on the spot without ever realizing the fruit was lethally poisonous.
"Evolve poison resistance!!"
The silver-gray bug let out a final cry. Her body fell uncontrollably onto a glob of resin below the branch. Since she could no longer secrete the lipid layer on her surface, the resin enveloped her as though she were sinking into a swamp, forming the beginnings of an insect trapped in amber.
"Click, click, click..."
The oddly shaped scorpion was furious at the sudden attack. Given its size, even a surprise barrage of resin shells had only left it coated in resin, not immobilized.
Its purplish-red body grew redder. It had initially intended to hurry back to defend the white branch behind it, but after sensing that the intruder had fallen from the branch and no longer posed a threat, it ignored her and turned furiously to face the ant army.
The ants could not fly to evade the scorpion's attacks. To them, its body was like a heavy tank facing ordinary humans. With one accelerating charge, it plunged into the ant formation that had just gathered.
"Whoosh!"
As it bit through the bodies of two ants near its mouthparts, the oddly shaped scorpion lashed its tail, sending more than a dozen other ants flying off the branch.
Under ordinary circumstances, the ant army would not have chosen to approach this dangerous area.
The oddly shaped scorpion would even actively hunt and eat ants that happened to pass by. But now the ants had gathered, and after suffering such a direct attack, war had begun.
The ant army's fearlessness in the face of death showed itself once again. Ignoring the threat posed by the oddly shaped scorpion, they climbed toward it one after another to bite it.
Even if a single ant's attack could do little damage to the scorpion, such tiny attacks became terrifying when their numbers kept increasing, unending and heedless of the cost.
The oddly shaped scorpion had limited stamina, and the resin shells on its body were also hampering its movements and corroding its shell.
Suddenly, the oddly shaped scorpion shook off the ants on its body with all its might, gathering its energy into its hooked tail.
"Splash..."
A mass of dark-purple venom formed in its tail and gathered at the tip before suddenly spraying toward the ant army before it like raindrops.
This attack did more damage than all its previous moves. The bodies of the ants it sprayed were corroded and melted by the venom, clearing a small area.
But this did not frighten the ant army away. Instead, it only roused their ferocity further.
More ants crawled over the bodies of their kin. Even when they fell after stepping in the venom, another wave of ants behind them advanced over their corpses.
At last, exhausted after unleashing its ultimate move, the scorpion completely lost its ability to move under the frenzied assault and collapsed onto the tree trunk.
The victorious ant army covered the scorpion's body, methodically dismembering their spoils to take back to the nest.
Some of the ants were attracted to the blue-violet fruit behind it, but they stopped before the mutated white branch. Seemingly sensing something wrong, they made no rash moves, merely extending their antennae and probing the air.
Inside a large glob of resin not far from them, a little bug's body gradually changed from silver-gray to the same blue-violet hue as the strange fruit above. Her body also grew visibly larger.
Suddenly, one of her legs twitched.
[Evolution complete] [Trait acquired: abnormal status immunity I]
"That was close!"
The little bug inside the golden resin blew out a few tiny bubbles.
Her optic nerves reconnected. Wen Jing moved her six limbs as sensation gradually returned to them. At the same time, her lipid isolation layer rapidly secreted, allowing her to push the resin aside like jelly and poke her head out.
At the sight, the nearby ants moved their antennae even more frequently, trying to analyze this unknown creature through chemical signals.
Standing on the resin, Wen Jing quickly surveyed her surroundings. Seeing that the battle between the scorpion and the ants was over, she ignored the nearby ants peering about and flew toward the blue-violet fruit once more.