The pages flipped rapidly as Lu Shiyu quickly located information regarding this strange-looking plant.
“Parasitic Star. A plant that parasitizes the roots and stems of trees. Half grows underground while the other half is exposed. Because the entire plant lacks chlorophyll, it cannot perform photosynthesis and must rely entirely on the roots of its host plant to absorb nutrients as its primary source of energy. The petals are fleshy, and the flower can split into a maximum of five segments…”
Shao Xingyang couldn’t help but let out a yawn. “So it actually exists.”
“Don’t open your mouth so wide; be careful not to inhale any more pollen.” Chen Yunliang finally finished collecting a test tube of the powder and tucked it into his bag.
“It says here the primary purpose of the pollen is…”
“To spread pollen and sow seeds, right? I learned about this.” Shao Xingyang answered confidently, but Lu Shiyu’s expression turned complex as she lowered the book.
“No. The primary function of the pollen is to stimulate the tentacles on the petals to secrete a sweet, sticky mucus. That mucus is what actually attracts insects.”
“Exactly! And then the insects spread the pollen. That’s right.”
“No, no, no, that’s completely wrong,” Lu Shiyu shook her head quickly. “It doesn’t attract insects to spread pollen. This plant doesn’t rely on fertilization for reproduction. It attracts insects solely to prey on them.”
As she spoke, the flying insects in the area began to swarm in greater numbers. Shao Xingyang insisted that the group move further away from the bugs before continuing the conversation.
The petals were soon crawling with insects of all sizes, nearly covering the entire surface. Then, the petals moved slowly. This movement didn’t startle many of the insects, but a second later, the petals snapped shut, returning to the “egg” shape the group had first seen. The insects were trapped inside, destined to be digested into nutrients for the flower.
“Although the host tree is their main source of nutrition, they also hunt on their own this way.”
Yan Hong leaned in. “Does the book say anything else?”
Lu Shiyu looked down. “It says the flesh of this plant is a favorite among nearby mutated creatures, so it evolved a hard outer shell. Huh? This is actually edible?”
“If mutated creatures can eat it, does that mean humans can too?” Lu Shiyu stood up and walked toward the “egg.” “The edible part should be these petals… Hey! What are you doing!”
Yan Hong and Shao Xingyang grabbed Lu Shiyu simultaneously and pulled her back.
“Absolutely not!” Yan Hong protested loudly.
“We can eat anything else today, but definitely not that!” Shao Xingyang practically shrieked. “There are literally bugs inside it!”
“I’m just going to look! I really am just looking, you have to believe me!” Lu Shiyu’s words were ignored as the two worked together to prevent her from taking another step forward.
Shao Xingyang broke into a cold sweat and pushed up his glasses. “Honestly, I don’t want to eat this either—at least not if it’s stuffed with bugs.”
“That’s only human,” Tang Zeyu said. “But you two just said you’d eat anything today. What if something even stranger shows up?”
Shao Xingyang fell silent for two seconds.
“It probably won’t be that coincidental.”
Only after Lu Shiyu swore an oath that she wouldn’t treat this Parasitic Star as an ingredient did the two release their hold on her.
“You guys are being way too dramatic,” Lu Shiyu said, stretching her arms. “It doesn’t even look that weird.”
At least not when it’s in its ‘egg’ form, she thought.
“What if eating it has a hallucinogenic effect?” Yan Hong stood with her hands on her hips. “Who knows if those mutated creatures like eating it specifically because of the high?”
“That’s not it,” Lu Shiyu added. “The book says one of the purposes of the powder’s hallucinogenic effect is to cause predators to experience terrifying hallucinations, thereby acting as a deterrent. So, mutated creatures won’t get addicted to its hallucinogenic properties.”
Seemingly remembering his recent hallucination, Shao Xingyang rubbed the goosebumps on his arms. “That hallucination really was terrifying.”
“What did you see?”
“Uh, well,” Shao Xingyang scratched his head awkwardly. “I saw my parents saying they didn’t want me anymore, then they turned and left. They locked me in a room I couldn’t get out of, I had nothing to eat, and there were bugs everywhere.”
“I saw the human base fall. Humans underwent mutations just like those creatures, turning into something neither human nor ghost,” Yan Hong said.
“What we saw varies from person to person,” Lu Shiyu turned to Tang Zeyu. “Tang Zeyu, what did you see?”
Tang Zeyu looked at the flower with a complicated expression. “I saw everyone important to me die in a wave of mutated creatures. Only I survived, and I just started walking aimlessly.”
“And then?”
“There was no ‘then,'” Tang Zeyu stood up. “I just kept walking without an end, until I heard your voices and woke up.”
“The Captain’s hallucination is way too simple. Boring,” Shao Xingyang said, kicking the closed flower. “I wonder what kind of hallucinations those mutated creatures see when they inhale this pollen.”
“Do mutated creatures hallucinate too?” Lu Shiyu mused. “Does that mean they can dream, too?”
“Some can, some can’t,” Chen Yunliang said, wiping the pollen off his glasses. “Creatures with higher intelligence and self-awareness can dream, though what they dream about is anyone’s guess.”
As they spoke, Yan Hong felt something crawl over the top of her foot. She looked down and saw a beetle the size of a fist.
“Crap!” Yan Hong shook her foot to fling the beetle off. The beetle landed on its back, its six legs waving frantically, until Yan Hong used the tip of her boot to flip it over so it could walk normally.
“When did so many beetles get here?” Chen Yunliang looked down; the ground was already crawling with these beetles.
“Yan Hong, save me!” Shao Xingyang jumped and wrapped his arms around Yan Hong’s neck. Yan Hong instinctively caught him, and just like that, she was carrying him.
“Get. Off.” Yan Hong squeezed out the words through gritted teeth.
“Waaaaah, what happened to our years of teammate friendship? Save me!” Shao Xingyang gripped Yan Hong’s neck and shoulders, vowing not to let go. “Sniff, sniff… am I not your little darling anymore?”
Chen Yunliang moved a few steps to avoid the bugs and said to the still-wailing Shao Xingyang, “If you keep howling, Yan Hong really is going to throw you into the bugs.”
Shao Xingyang instantly stopped crying and stared intently at Yan Hong. “You wouldn’t do that… right?”
“I would.”
Lu Shiyu, on the other hand, wasn’t afraid of these bugs. She crouched down to watch the beetles emerging from all directions. They seemed to have been hiding in the soil and were now suddenly surfacing.
These beetles were reddish-brown, allowing them to hide perfectly under withered leaves. They had six thick, hairy legs. The most striking feature of these beetles was the pair of exceptionally large, serrated pincers on their heads. They had one pair of eyes on the sides and another pair on top of their heads, allowing them to detect predators approaching from any angle.
The beetles’ target was the closed Parasitic Star. Several beetles that had crawled out of the dirt climbed onto the rounded bud. Their three pairs of legs allowed them to cling to the surface without sliding off. After picking a spot they liked, the beetles got to work, their pincers opening and closing.
Lu Shiyu leaned in closer. It turned out the beetles were using their pincers to try and bite the bud open. However, after a long struggle, their efforts were in vain; they could not break through the hard outer shell.
Lu Shiyu said, “The book only mentioned a weird-looking, bipedal mutated creature that likes eating Parasitic Stars. I didn’t expect insects to love them too.”
“If this Parasitic Star had just sprouted, these bugs might have been able to handle it,” Chen Yunliang said, putting away his glasses cloth and walking over. “But this one has clearly been growing for a long time. The shell has grown hard enough to prevent bugs from biting through. These beetles probably won’t be able to finish it.”
Sure enough, after realizing they were making no progress despite half a day of labor, the beetles unfolded the wings hidden under their hard carapaces and flew off with a vibration of wings.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAH—” Shao Xingyang let out a series of screams. The person closest to him was naturally Yan Hong, who was holding him. Feeling the piercing pain in her eardrums, she dropped him directly. Shao Xingyang hit the ground, his scream cut short by the pain in his backside.
The beetles didn’t fly very high. After circling the area, they quickly found a new target. Under another large tree nearby, there was another such flower. The difference was that this one looked like it had just started growing; the skin hadn’t even developed the lychee-like texture yet and was still smooth and even.
A Parasitic Star that hasn’t fully matured does indeed look like a star. It has a pale yellow center, and the tentacles on the unfurled petals are still very short—it was much easier to look at than the previous one.
Lu Shiyu thought for a moment, then turned to ask Chen Yunliang and Yan Hong, who had just picked themselves up from the ground: “How about we eat these beetles today?”
“Ah—” Shao Xingyang started wailing again. “That’s not okay! Can we please eat something else? Anything but bugs.”
“Can these things really be eaten…” Yan Hong was skeptical about the usability of the ingredients.
“But didn’t you guys say we could eat anything?” Lu Shiyu countered.
“No, but this is… this is just too much.” Shao Xingyang acted coy, looking extremely reluctant.
Yan Hong’s expression was complicated. “Is there really no room for negotiation…?”
“It’s either the beetles or this. You choose.”
Lu Shiyu pointed at the tender Parasitic Star on the ground, giving them an “either-or” choice.
The two looked at the beetles crawling toward the Parasitic Star, then at the relatively okay-looking Parasitic Star itself, still hesitating.
“If you don’t decide soon, the beetles will eat the Parasitic Star, and then we’ll have no choice but to eat the beetles.”
“Parasitic Star! I choose the Parasitic Star!”
“Me too!”
Lu Shiyu nodded calmly and turned around to brush the beetles off the Parasitic Star, preparing to harvest it.
The two let out a sigh of relief because they didn’t have to eat bugs, unaware that in a corner they couldn’t see, the corner of Lu Shiyu’s mouth curled into a successful smirk.
Plan accomplished.
This scene was fully witnessed by Chen Yunliang and Tang Zeyu, who were watching from a distance. Chen Yunliang once again felt a cold sweat for his two teammates’ IQs.
“I don’t know whether to call Lu Shiyu clever, or call those two terrifyingly stupid.”
Lu Shiyu reached the spot where the Parasitic Star met the ground and began digging away the soil by hand. It wasn’t until she reached a certain depth that she finally felt its root.
The complete Parasitic Star was actually quite large, roughly the size of a few-months-old infant. The roots were coiled around the roots of the tree; that was where it absorbed the tree’s nutrients. The tree parasitized by this plant was clearly not as thick or sturdy as the surrounding trees.
Lu Shiyu left a small section behind, not cutting it off completely from the root, and peeled the Parasitic Star away from the tree. The harvested Parasitic Star looked like a giant pestle; the stem grew thicker toward the bottom, making the part that had been exposed above ground look quite small by comparison.
Lu Shiyu held the entire Parasitic Star with satisfaction. By now, Yan Hong and Shao Xingyang were starting to realize what had happened.
“Were the two of us… just played?”
“It… seems like it.”