Chapter 308
“It’s gonna be troublesome.” Xu Ziyan frowned even more tightly. Even though he had already known that this kind of thing didn’t seem to respond to ordinary fire, it was still frustrating to see the fire go out with his own eyes.
Xu Zirong’s heart moved, and with a flick of his fingertips, a drop of red essence blood turned into a mouse-shaped blood monster after hitting the ground.
Xu Ziyan couldn’t help twitching his cheeks after seeing that bloody mouse. He felt as if it was the same one that was doing lap dance last time.
“Squeak!” The bloody monster turned a few times in excitement, then raised its head and conveyed something to Xu Zirong.
Xu Zirong looked a little surprised, “it turns out that this thing works for bloody monsters! Could it be that…” Afterwards, he started looking a bit worried.
Bloody monsters were only interested in essence blood. Since the bloody mouse looked excited, it means that the layer of secretion was likely to be made from flesh and blood.
Blood-sucking worms fed on living organisms. It means at least 80% of the dark red ground was transformed from the corpses of human cultivators.
No wonder Xu Zirong looked worried, as they were indeed stepping on countless flesh and bones, although they still once belonged to human beings…
Xu Zirong looked away silently. Even though he didn’t know those dead cultivators, he found it really pathetic for someone to become the meal of blood-sucking worms and even a tool to stimulate them after death.
“By the way, why are there fewer blood-sucking worms patrolling?”
The two walked for a while, and they noticed that there were less patrolling blood-sucking worms than that on the periphery of the control area.
“Perhaps there’s no food left?” Xu Zirong guessed.
Xu Ziyan pondered for a while, “speaking of which…the controlled area of the blood-sucking worm was only established about two years after the outbreak, right? If that’s the case, all the monsters here would have been eaten long ago. So, how do these blood-sucking worms survive for all these years? It’s not like they have the habit of storing food like the human-faced spiders.”
With his brother’s reminded, Xu Zirong also found it abnormal. It’s only that cultivators were spending most of their time fighting against the blood-sucking worms outside, and there were only a few times when high-level cultivators sneaked into the central area. At that time, there were still many living organisms, and no one had noticed that there had been a long while since the blood-sucking worms had no food resources.
“Buzz…”
They instantly became cautious with the sound of worms crawling all at once. They looked at each other, immediately restrained their breath, and hid themselves in the canopy of a big tree.
The entire population of blood-sucking worms can be divided into many different types, the most numerous of which were those of the lowest level and the shadow worms spawned by the sub-worms.
These huge numbers of worms undertook all the tasks that required them to sacrifice. They would have been used at the front line in the past, when they’d either kill the human cultivators or get killed in large groups.
But this situation changed after those intelligent worm commanders appeared.
Many worms were then scattered to different areas, taking on the responsibility of patrolling. They patrolled along a fixed area, killing any enemies that didn’t belong to the clan. Whenever thousands of dark red worms crawled across the ground, the scene would make someone with trypophobia faint instantly.
Xu Ziyan didn’t suffer from trypophobia, but he also found this kind of scenes disgusting. When they first sneaked in, they encountered similar patrols several times, and they successfully avoided most of them. After all, the level of these worms was pretty low and they didn’t have sharp five senses. The possibility for them to notice Xu Ziyan was quite low.
However, they encountered a different enemy unfortunately.
“Huh?” Xu Zirong suddenly raised looked in the direction of the group of worms, “brother, see that one!”
Xu Ziyan looked in the direction of Zirong’s finger, and among the red worms that were crawling all over the ground, there were actually a few that were different from other worms.
In terms of appearance, these insects looked somewhat like mantises. They could walk upright and had well-developed forelimbs. There were two small fleshy wings on their two forelimbs that are constantly vibrating, which looked very conspicuous.
With the vibration of the fleshy wings, the few blood-sucking worms resembling mantis turned their heads to the direction of Xu Ziyan and the others, and then let out a shrill sound. The army of insects, that was advancing quickly, stopped suddenly. It adjusted its direction, and charged towards the big tree where Xu Ziyan was hiding.
“They saw us.” Xu Zirong said.
“Those two worms are a bit weird. There is no such worm in the swarm that we saw before.” Xu Ziyan looked very serious, “let’s catch up and we’ll study it later.”
“Okay.” Xu Zirong nodded. Then, he suddenly leaned forward and several seeds popped up in the air, and before he hit the ground, a large grass net formed on the ground.
It was a plant specially to kill the blood-sucking worms that were meant to sacrifice first. This grass net was based on the seeds of Milliflora (the same kind of Gao Yi), which had a strong innate desire on blood.
Xu Zirong accelerated the bifurcation speed of this grass net, formed a huge net surface and laid it on the ground. Those sub-worms and shadow worms had to be able to fly to pass through this fatal trap.
There were flying groups among worms, but obviously they never mixed with low-level worms. The sub-worms and shadow worms had no intelligence, and those mantises seemed to have limited intelligence as well. They knew where to look for Xu Ziyan, but they did not react to the grass net that suddenly appeared.
The blood-sucking worms were squirming very fast, and they rushed to Xu Zirong’s side almost in a blink of an eye.
Xu Zirong showed a look of disgust. With a slight twist of his fingers, the entire grass net suddenly burst into a layer of green light.
Those fine grass threads were like the hair of a banshee, tightly entangling the blood-sucking worms. When the grass tip pierced through the blood-sucking worm’s body, the entire grass net was instantly dyed with a faint color of blood.
The blood-sucking worms poured into the grass net one after another, and the mutated thousand strands of grass, that had been nourished by fresh blood, continued to spawn more grass. This group of blood-sucking worms was quickly exhausted, and the few worms that looked like mantis were captured by Xu Ziyan alone.
“Basically, those low-level worms are not really a threat to us. In other words, without the commander, these worms are just meant to be sacrifice.” Xu Ziyan carried the few mantis-looking worms that had been shocked, and his face twitched a little bit when he was looking at the fully nourished grass net.
He’s sure that only Xu Zirong, who’d cultivated the Blood Sea Heart Sutra, could nurture wood-type plants into something like this…
Speaking of which, aren’t wood-type cultivators usually quite gentle? How come Xu Zirong, as someone suffering from clinginess disease, could turn wood-type spells into something like this?
Thinking about the fact that he wanted him to become a medical practitioner in the past, he found himself quite weak…With Xu Zirong’s character, he could turn a plant with the gentlest nature into something murderous!
“Let’s go. Just keep moving forward.” He casually threw the mantis-looking worm into Mr. Little Square and watched the little divine tree tying it up with its branch. Xu Ziyan looked at the map and found the direction to the mine.
“There’s still about a day’s journey.”
“Well, brother, let’s slow down a little bit. I have a feeling that the worms here are a little strange. It seems that those mantis-looking worms were never there before, right?”
“Yeah.” Xu Ziyan nodded in agreement. Any new type of worms might bring huge losses to the Alliance. Last time, the commander’s ambush caused a huge loss of cultivators to the Alliance. And a new kind of exploratory worms really worried Xu Ziyan.
A single type of blood-sucking worms already caused a lot of trouble to humans, and if the mother worm could create even more worms of the same kind…
When he thought of the multi-armed exercises in modern warfare, Xu Ziyan started shivering. If things really became like that, the Alliance of Cultivators would be in deep trouble.
Cultivators did not have the concept of large-scale battles. Almost all the cultivators spontaneously formed small teams of five to ten people. This kind of combat effect was not bad, but if it was to fight against a large-scale army, this mode wouldn’t be effective at all and the squad would be crushed directly.
Even cultivators from the same sect might not have done similar exercises. And since the human mind is so complex, the unity and fearlessness of death of worms were really welcomed by commanders.
“I really hope…that it won’t become like this.” Xu Ziyan muttered to himself bitterly.
He had only been a soldier for two years and was lucky enough to participate in an exercise. That’s why he was relatively sensitive to this kind of things. However, he wasn’t any material in leading an army. If the worms really changed their style in attacking, then the cultivators might be in an inferior state for a long time. And if they couldn’t even find an outstanding commander, then these worms would surely wipe out the human beings in the whole Xuan Yu realm even without the assistance of other demon races.
“Brother…don’t worry, there will always be a solution.” Xu Zirong patted his brother’s back lightly. He could feel Xu Ziyan’s thoughts and distress.
In the Xuan Yu realm, cultivators didn’t have the concept of an army. For them, all armies were useless except if they had enough strength. Therefore, they always looked down on these battles with scale.
Xu Ziyan patted his younger brother on the shoulder with a bitter smile. The horror of fighting in the army was something local cultivators could never imagine. He only hoped that his speculation was wrong, yet he couldn’t guarantee that such kind of thing would never happen, especially after analysis of the information that they’d obtained.
“No matter what, let us check out the mine first. We’ll talk about the new type of worms later.” Xu Ziyan tried to pull himself together and the two quickly walked through the woods.
