V2C22

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Lin Jue suddenly stopped. A swarm of aggressive worker bees appeared from the turn ahead and rushed violently towards him.

Lin Jue turned and fled, only to be confronted with a giant mass of bees in the queen’s cell. A terrifying number of bees had blocked off every possible escape route, daunting him in both sight and sound. He had nowhere left to go!

Xia Huan slowly stood up, standing over Chen Lu’s corpse before shakily walking towards the bee-filled tunnel.

“Xia Huan!” Lin Jue shouted.

Xia Huan kept walking without a single reaction. The bees didn’t react either though, letting her walk into the swarm without attacking her.

An idea flashed through Lin Jue’s mind- with how odd she had acted after climbing out of that pond, had she become infected by some kind of parasite?

A swarm of bees plunged at him, leaving him no time to think over it. Lin Jue kept his back to the hive wall, and like his weapon had grown eyes, landed every single strike onto a bee’s head.

They had become much bigger from when the game had started, each now about a meter in length. It was fortunate that the spearhead’s corrosivity let it pierce through their shells in a single swing each time. The mutated insects flew at him, uncaring for their lives, and Lin Jue was pushed to his limits by the endless wave of attacksー until finally, he entered that state of hyperconcentration again.

The endless flood of bees in front of him stopped like he had pressed a pause button. Lin Jue’s polearm swept across in front of him in an arc and that fierce aura immediately rended the bees near him into pieces of flesh.

More and more followed as the spear stabbed them with exceptional precision, head-shotting every bee that dared cross its arc.

At first, Lin Jue was able to calmly count the number of corpses in his mind, but as time passed, a mountain of bees grew around him and he couldn’t remember how many he had killed, just that motion of stab-then-retreat.

Even so, his mind had almost reached its limit, even more than when he had fought the ants.

His arms were sore and he almost couldn’t raise them; his head felt like it was splitting apart, his vision turning a blurry red.

His heartbeat echoed through his silent world, the blood vessels in his brain feeling like they were close to bursting. His face was pale, his lips pursed as cold sweat dripped down from his brow.

If not for one last gasp of air keeping him going, he probably would have fallen down unconscious already. But how long could he hold on for either? He couldn’t think; even the smallest distraction would cost him his life, but there was a limit to human strength. He couldn’t possibly kill forever.

Was this the best he could do?

No! No way! He wanted to see Song Hanzhang, he wanted to go back alive! If he died here, every struggle from before would have just been a joke!

With a shred of energy from god knew where, Lin Jue roared, drawing out an arc of death with his spear and pushing back the onslaught. He turned and ran, a deafening humming coming from behind him as a sharp pain pierced through his back, and his legs, and his arms, followed by a dooming numbness.

Were those stings?

His knees weakened and Lin Jue collapsed onto the ground. He was at the end of his road; he would die here.

An unwillingness and despair came over him. He could no longer move his body and exhaustion fell over him like an avalanche, burying him deep beneath it.

No, no, he couldn’t accept it!

Suddenly, a gush of cold wind swept over his head and the bees closest to him stopped attacking. Lin Jue looked up in a daze.

Lu Ren’s grinning face was inches away from him. “Looks like you’ve got bee stings all over your head. Did the big rabbit try to steal some honey? It’s not good to be greedy.”

Before Lin Jue could recover, Lu Ren had already rushed forwards with his dao in hand.

In between the swarm of bees, he was both swift and powerful. It was the first time Lin Jue had seen Lu Ren fight and it was on a completely different level to him. He had never seen anyone who could wield a dao so naturally, every swing bringing down multiple heads as he himself stepped to a strange rhythm, entering in and out of the swarm like nobody’s business.

“It’s not nice to peek.” Lu Ren arrived in front of Lin Jue again and kicked him down into the shallow pond filled with golden liquid.

Lin Jue was caught off guard and gulped down a mouthful of it, his mouth filled with a strange sweetness. He got up in annoyance to climb out when he realized that his body was oddly energetic.

Was it because of that liquid?

Lin Jue wiped his face and licked the liquid on his hands.

It was a little cloying. It wasn’t honey, but he couldn’t tell what it was either.

On the opposite side, the battle between Lu Ren and the bees was in full swing when suddenly, Lu Ren abandoned the fight and jumped into the pond. Lin Jue’s face was covered by the splash and he glared at Lu Ren.

Lu Ren laughed, scooped up the liquid, and took a few mouthfuls. As if he wasn’t having enough fun too, he pushed Lin Jue’s head down and forced him into the pond once again.

Lin Jue choked on a few mouthfuls of liquid, almost drowning in the sweetness. It took two hard struggles for Lu Ren to finally let go.

“Drank your fill? If so, let’s run,” Lu Ren said and flipped out of the pond, lifting Lin Jue out by the collar. Lin Jue stumbled a little before following him, massacring a way out of the giant cell.

As he ran, Lin Jue felt like there was something wrong with him again. Even though he had been exhausted a few seconds ago, he was filled with strength now, and even the places where the bees had stung him felt only a little fuzzy, no signs of poison or numbness present. Was it because of that odd liquid?

“Here!”

Someone grabbed Lin Jue’s elbow and Lu Ren followed him into a small cave.

Song Hanzhang blocked the hole with a kick to a bee corpse. “What happened to the both of you?”

Lin Jue explained hastily, “I was surrounded by bees and Lu Ren helped me out.”

Lu Ren nodded with a grin. “Mhm, completely correct.”

Song Hanzhang scanned them from head to toe before wiping off Lin Jue’s face and tasting the liquid smeared there. “What is this?”

Only then did Lin Jue realize that his entire body was sticky with the liquid, but the wounds on his body were completely healed.

Lin Jue shook his head honestly. “There was a pond in the cell I was surrounded in that was filled with this strange liquid. I saw Xia Huan and Chen Lu crawling out from it before Xia Huan… killed Chen Lu.”

“A person can’t die twice.” Lu Ren sat on the ground and said in a strange tone, “I saw with my own eyes poor Miss Chen Lu clawing at her chest before a cute little thing ripped it apart from the inside. The poor miss couldn’t seem to feel pain and just watched as that thing broke her ribs apart, chewed through her flesh, and poked its head out from her pale little chest.”

“She did get possessed by a moth,” Song Hanzhang confirmed.

“When?” Lin Jue had just asked the question when he suddenly remembered when they had just met up with Gu Fengyi’s group, and Gu Fengyi had ran over to save Liu Qingqing while Chen Lu was pushed onto the ground by a moth. “Was it back then?”

Song Hanzhang nodded. “The scalic powder on the moths’ wings have an anaesthetic and hallucinogenic effect, so she herself likely didn’t know she had been used as a nest. Before entering the hive though, she had already begun to experience nausea and spasms. She had probably realized that something was wrong already.”

“A woman’s instinct, what a strange thing,” Lu Ren joked.

Lin Jue recalled what Dan Liang had said about Chen Lu pushing Xia Huan into the bee swarms, and so recounted this along with his fight with Dan Liang to Song Hanzhang.

Song Hanzhang nodded briefly without giving any special acknowledgement to it. Lu Ren wiped the dao in his hands, silent.

“Did you know that the pond had healing effects?” Song Hanzhang asked Lu Ren.

Lu Ren hummed. “Chen Lu’s corpse was still lying by the pond. Her clothes were ripped apart, but there weren’t any wounds on her, so I figured that it had to have been something to do with the pond water. Naturally, I used him to try.”

Lin Jue, the guinea pig, choked.

“From your description, that should have been the queen cell where the queen is born. It seems as if the queen first laid its egg inside Xia Huan, then Chen Lu, who had been killed by the moth already. The queen inside Xia Huan hatched first and used her body to kill Chen Lu who hatched later…”

Song Hanzhang paused and his eyes suddenly lit up. “This is our chance.”

“What chance?” Lin Jue asked without thinking.

“As is the custom for bees, when a new queen is born, the old queen will leave to build a new hive with a large number of followers. The defences of this hive will be at their lowest, and the new queen is still in its larval form, unable to leave its host. This is our only chance if we want to kill it,” Song Hanzhang said and glanced at Lin Jue. “There was another excellent opportunity, but unfortunately, we’ve missed it.”

Lin Jue lowered his head in shame. The best time would have been when the two newly born queens were fighting.

“Oh? Is this the boss? Sounds interesting.” Lu Ren stopped wiping his dao, his eyes glinting like a wild beast’s.

Song Hanzhang rubbed his temple. “Wait a bit, let me plan a route. I don’t want to head straight into the hive like a headless fly1.”

Two headless flies silently lowered their heads and stayed silent.

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