Laws of the Insect Hive

After transforming into the [Frost and Cold Form], System could clearly feel the free frost energy in the forest, much more clearly than in the normal form.

He can simply manipulate these energies to condense and form snowflakes, just like the snowflakes he sees at an altitude of a thousand meters.

At the same time, he can also control these frost energy into his body and convert it into experience points more efficiently.

System found that through the contract with the Ice Spirit, his experience bar had reached 98% of level 12 before he knew it.

If he didn't use [Power Enhancement] to consume these experience points, he could reach level 13 in less than a day just by absorbing the free frost energy in the air.

After transforming into a [frozen form], the ice elf Neris successfully regained consciousness.

However, System found that when his [Frost Form] was released, along with the disappearance of the icy blue circle above his head, Nellis would also lose her movement because of this, as if she had fallen into a deep sleep.

According to Nellis, this is a method used by the ice elves to reduce the consumption of their bodies.

After making a contract with a living being, they will fall asleep most of the time.

...

Nellis would fall into a deep sleep most of the time outside of [Frost and Cold Form], which made System very satisfied. After all, it was too strange to have an ice blue circle on the head of a grasshopper.

If it was fine in the daytime, at night there was such a thing emitting blue light on his head, and System felt uncomfortable just thinking about it.

Feeling his own body, System realized that after the contract with Nellis, his body had undergone some special changes.

The roots of his tentacles became slightly itchy, and special nutrients were produced in the blood of his body, and these nutrients were gathered into his tentacles.

System found that the tentacles on his body were starting to grow a second time, and at the base of the legs with only two tentacles, the granulation of a third tentacle appeared.

It seems that he has three tentacles on each leg, a total of eighteen, and each tentacle will continue to develop until it becomes 30 cm in length and half a centimeter in thickness.

With this change in System's body, System felt that it should be his new ability [Ice Spike] under [Frost Form].

[Ice Spike] will make System's tentacles end with icy spikes. Perhaps it is this ability that drives System's [Severed Limb Regeneration] and [Insect Adaptation] to make his body continue. The mutation makes his body more adaptable to the environment and increases his survivability.

Using [Perception] to feel the unique information in his own blood, System learned more about the secondary development of this tentacle.

If this mutation reaches the limit and the growing tentacles become stable, he will completely lose the opportunity to re-grow grasshopper legs and completely replace the legs with tentacles.

But System was not without a way to stop the changes that were taking place in his body.

System had a feeling that as long as he now cuts off all his tentacles from the roots with chelating teeth, he can stop this change in his body.

When he breaks these tentacles, his [severe limb regeneration] can play a normal role. As long as the nutrients are sufficient, he will no longer grow tentacles, and re-grow the exoskeleton of the feet, allowing him to become a grasshopper The original six-legged appearance.

...

After some consideration and choice, System finally let go of the changes in his tentacles.

Although the more than ten tentacles growing out of his body did not fit System's aesthetics, the grasshopper's six exoskeleton legs were not much better, and the appearance was just as ugly.

So after some consideration, System decided to keep these flexible and versatile tentacles.

The only pity is the grasshopper's strong and bouncing thighs.

But when his wings grow back and he has the ability to fly, the grasshopper's jumping ability is not so important.

After briefly feeling the tentacles of his body, System set off on the road again. Before the sky was completely dark, he finally managed to return to the temporary lair covered by ice and snow.

Just as System used his [intuition] hunch before and used the ability of [Teleportation] to perceive, System found that apart from Shawa, only two of the nearly twenty ants he kept had consciousness. .

One is the female ant he has been focusing on, and the other should be a worker ant.

Shava's mental fluctuations seem a bit strange. Although she still has a certain degree of consciousness, she seems to have lost the ability to sort out language with spiritual information, and can only convey some joyful emotions like ordinary ants.

System found the direction and immediately began to clear the snow above the temporary nest with his tentacles.

It was a pity that System was not good at digging by nature, neither the grasshopper's body nor System itself was very good at digging.

With fifteen flexible tentacles, System took three hours to dig from the top of the snow to the entrance of the temporary nest. The loose sand-like snow slowed down the digging speed. not come up.

Pushing aside the soft snow at the entrance of the cave, System entered the passage of the temporary lair.

Some of the shimmering mushrooms remaining in the passageway in the temporary nest have lost their light, and it seems that these mushrooms have not fully grown to their limit and stopped growing due to the cold.

These mushrooms are not completely dead. System can feel the faint emotional fluctuations of the fungi in the mushrooms through [Teleportation]. Nearly one-tenth of the mushroom fungi are still alive, but they have entered a dormant state.

However, compared to mushrooms, System's ant people were not so lucky.

Because this temporary nest was widened according to his body shape, and the depth of the nest was only one and a half meters, the cold could easily invade it.

In the tunnel of the nest less than half a meter deep, System found five corpses of worker ants. The IQ of the worker ants is so low that they may not be able to understand that the empty room in the nest is warmer than the colder tunnel. Some.

But the temperature of the empty room was not so high. It didn’t take long for System to find the corpse of three larvae ants and a mature worker ant in an empty room. They were crowded in the corner of the empty room and eventually died. Lost.

Continuing to search the various empty rooms of the temporary nest, System found more ant corpses, as well as a female ant and another worker ant that survived in the nest.

They have all undergone [pupation] and turned into a pupa state.

The female ant's pupae are seven or eight times larger than the worker ant's. It seems that the female ant larvae have eaten a lot during these days.

System used the tentacles to conduct a simple inspection of the female ant and the worker ant, and found that the two surviving ant pupae possessed a similar ability to [cold resistance] at the same time.

System speculated that the ants encountered cold weather during the process of [pupation], thus activating the body's ability to resist cold.

After placing the pupae of the female and worker ants, it didn't take long for System to find Shava in the empty room of the mouse's corpse.

The corpse of the mouse in the empty room has disappeared by one third. It is unknown whether it was eaten by Shava alone, or the corpse of the mouse was shared with many ant larvae.

Looking at Shava's current appearance, System also understood why Shava could not clearly respond to his spiritual message.

Shava had obviously entered the second pupation, and all the exoskeletons of her body softened, forming a giant pupa about twelve centimeters in size.

However, the pupa formed by Shawa was not complete. The skin of the pupa was rough and deformed, and the pupa had a diamond-shaped gap of about three centimeters, with some white juice flowing from it.

The internal heartbeat of the chrysalis is also very abnormal. It beats irregularly, sometimes it stops beating, and sometimes it beats several times in a row.

Fortunately, due to the cold weather, the white sap in the gap of the chrysalis was frozen without flowing too much, otherwise Shava might have died due to the failed second pupation...