Chapter 758: Monster Cicada

Chapter 751: Strange Cicadas

A quiet withered forest, a quiet small town…

Aunt Zhu moved her eight legs and entered a house. Then her voice came out: "They're dead."

All six family members, from a three-year-old child to a sixty-year-old elder, lay sprawled there. Every corpse was shriveled, as if the last drop of blood and flesh had been sucked dry. Each body had several circular holes.

Dong Rui went to check a shed behind another house and clicked his tongue: "Not even the pigs and dogs were spared." The livestock had died the same way. Whoever the murderer of the townsfolk was, they had truly left no living creature behind.

He Lingchuan looked at the window and said, "They broke in from outside, and there were many of them." Hundreds of people in the town had all been drained of their blood and flesh, dying quietly here.

He Lingchuan noticed white webs reappearing on the open ground behind the house. The webs were thick and dense, and with the added weight of the snow, no one else had the inclination to disturb them. But he insisted on drawing Fusheng and scraping away the white web.

In the season of melting snow, the ground here should still be frozen, and it would be another month or two before it could be tilled. However, He Lingchuan found the ground surprisingly soft and saw small mounds built up. This likely meant something had burrowed into the ground, creating these bulges.

He Lingchuan called out to Dong Rui, went back into the house to get a shovel, and started digging. Dong Rui hadn't expected to be doing farm work after entering the town. He yawned with every shovelful of dirt, digging very unwillingly. Aunt Zhu, however, had no such reservations; her eight claws moved faster than any farming tool, turning the soil.

After digging down ten feet, she suddenly stopped: "There's something."

The object was three feet long, somewhat like a fly but completely black, with a broad head, red eyes, two wings on its back, and a bulging abdomen. Aunt Zhu fished it out, moved a few legs, and quickly rubbed it against the ground several times. This was a spider's habit for sensing prey—when it was unsure what something was.

"It's dead," she continued to sense. "It's a cicada."

The creature had been long dead and was frozen solid.

"A cicada?" He Lingchuan was uncertain. "A monster? Can cicadas grow this large?"

At that moment, his shovel also struck something unusual. When dug out, it was roughly the same kind of creature, but it had no wings on its back, and its two forelegs were unusually long and bent like a mantis. Placing the two creatures side by side revealed a clear difference.

"So these aren't the same species of cicada?" He Lingchuan tapped their bellies with the shovel: "But their abdomens are very soft."

Aunt Zhu, being an insect herself, knew at a glance: "There are eggs." With a skillful scrape of a claw tip sharper than a knife, the strange cicada's abdomen was sliced open, revealing a pile of white clusters inside. Each cluster was the size of a grape, almost transparently white, and He Lingchuan could see the mature larvae inside, even wiggling their legs and feet. It seemed they were not far from hatching.

Logically, insects should lay their eggs underground or on trees, not carry them in their abdomens for incubation.

"These might be seventy-year cicadas!" Aunt Zhu suddenly exclaimed. "The only cicadas I know that incubate eggs in their abdomen are the seventy-year cicadas."

He Lingchuan hadn't fully understood, but Dong Rui already raised his middle finger: "Impossible. Seventy-year cicadas can only grow so large at most. Three feet long? Impossible!"

Aunt Zhu directly dug out a cicada egg and shook it at him: "I've eaten who knows how many of these cicadas. Are you questioning me?" Dong Rui was speechless. Right, right, he hadn't eaten them, so he had no say.

While observing the cicada corpses, He Lingchuan said, "Will someone explain this to me?"

"The seventy-year cicada is the longest-lived among all cicada species. In fact, three thousand years ago, when spiritual energy was abundant, it was called the seventeen-year cicada. From egg to larva, it lived underground, with an extremely slow growth process lasting sixteen and a half years. It only transformed into an adult and emerged to feed and mate in the final six months." Aunt Zhu paused and then continued: "They die before their young hatch, and their remains are absorbed by the cicada eggs as nourishment. However, in the current environment, their transformation into adults has been extended to seventy years, and not many cicadas can survive that long."

"Aren't these doing just fine?" Dong Rui pointed to the small mounds on the ground. "Each one must have at least one adult incubator underneath, right? You say these are seventy-year cicadas, but the two cicada corpses you dug up don't look alike. How do you explain that?"

"Indeed, I've never seen this situation before."

"Have you seen this situation then?" He Lingchuan asked, pointing to the cicada corpse he had dug up, the one with forelegs like a mantis. It was completely dead, but its abdomen suddenly pulsed in waves, as if something inside was scratching and clawing, preparing to burst out. This sight would likely have made anyone else's hair stand on end. Dong Rui, however, let out a curious sound and leaned in closer to examine it: "Interesting!"

He Lingchuan saw his expression and knew that this mad scientist's research interest had been piqued again. Aunt Zhu waved her claws: "Everyone stand back." Then she extended a claw tip and sliced across the insect's abdomen—

With a "whoosh," the cicada corpse's abdomen burst open, and thirty to forty larvae leaped out! Each one was a miniature version of the adult, with forelegs curved like scythes, and only as long as He Lingchuan's index finger. As soon as they were born, they charged ceaselessly towards the two, as if they had caught the scent of humans.

Aunt Zhu was prepared; she sprayed out a mouthful of spider web, trapping them all. These young cicadas still tried to charge at them within the spider web. He Lingchuan noticed their mouthparts; they were indeed like thick, long needles. The strangest thing was that, under their gaze, the young cicadas' bodies grew at an astonishing speed! In just fifteen minutes, they grew to the size of their mother. From being as long as a human index finger to becoming three-foot-long monsters, it took only fifteen minutes! He Lingchuan had never seen a creature with such a short growth cycle.

Once they grew, they became even more agitated, emitting the classic chirping sound of cicadas. Ordinary finger-length cicadas could keep an entire family awake, but the sound from these large individuals before them was several times louder than that of smaller cicadas. Moreover, thirty or forty of them started "singing" at the same time, forming a deafening chorus! In that instant, He Lingchuan felt as if he were standing next to a ship's foghorn; he could hear nothing but the overwhelming sound of cicadas. Even his head was buzzing.

Aunt Zhu also found the noise unbearable. Her hearing was even more sensitive than a human's, so she spat a large mouthful of acid onto the web. The strange cicadas shrieked miserably, but they couldn't withstand the acid's power and were corroded away little by little. Aunt Zhu, however, was not satisfied: "Too slow." Given the power of her acid, they should have been dispatched quickly.

Just as the cicada chirping stopped, there was a rustling sound from the woods about a hundred feet away.

Someone? He Lingchuan immediately stood up. Immediately afterward, over ten figures burst out of the woods, surrounding the two people and the spider.