Chapter 33: Re-enter the Game：Village Carnival 8
As Wen Nannan was eating delicious fried bamboo shoots, the players who had escaped from Fuguo Town built a fire by the stream and ate wild fruits they had picked along the way.
The fruits were small and a bit sour, but they were the only remaining food in the mountains of the mountain after countless rounds of searching by both townspeople and players.
The players were clearly divided into a few factions. Xu Fang led the female players in searching for firewood, while the male players were led by Li An.
"Everyone, let's count our numbers. We're in the middle of the game now, and we must stick together."
Li An's words were met with nods from several players standing nearby. They were all new players and couldn't understand the unpredictable nature of the survival game. To survive and return home, they had to cling to the experienced player, Li An.
Xu Fang, who was not far away, scoffed.
Stick together?
In this game where people devoured each other, there was no real unity. Only the naive new players would believe such a flimsy excuse.
"Lin Xing and Tang Wan didn't escape…"
A female player exclaimed, and everyone fell silent.
The town below had already been swept by the locusts, and the fate of those who hadn't escaped to the back mountains was imaginable.
The surrounding atmosphere was as silent as death, only the sound of the gurgling stream and the suppressed sobbing of the female player could be heard.
"I want to go home… this game is so scary, woo-hoo."
Dusk fell. Although it was the height of summer, the evening wind carried a chill. The other players looked dejected.
This wasn't their first survival game, and they had survived close calls. But who could truly adapt to the feeling of being on the brink of death?
"If crying helped, we might as well all cry together!"
Xu Fang sneered, her words startling the female player, but she was forced to stop crying.
"Who doesn't want to leave this hellish game alive? The priority now is to find supplies, not sit here doing nothing."
After saying this, Xu Fang wiped the tears off the female player's face with her sleeve, a hint of disgust in her tone, and walked towards the deeper woods.
As night fell, Wen Nannan used a stick to stir the fire in her cave, raking out the charcoal and storing it in her spatial item. Fuel would become scarcer as the game progressed, so she saved it whenever she could.
After handling this, Wen Nannan, full and satisfied, began to worry about survival. Why has the number of locusts increased so drastically?
Wen Nannan's eyes flickered as she connected a few clues in her mind.
The locust carcasses, locusts flying over Fuguo Town.
Wen Nannan's eyes narrowed. Suddenly, her mind went back to a scene she had witnessed in the rice fields on the day the locusts appeared.
A locust had eaten one of its own, and then split into two. The two smaller locusts that resulted from the split clearly hadn't developed consciousness and continued to repeat the cycle of eating or being eaten.
The locust swarm constantly devouring each other was like a process of breeding poison. Each new generation that survived had a stronger ability to reproduce, leading to a growing number.
Wen Nannan suddenly felt like she had discovered something extraordinary, but to confirm her hypothesis, she decided to conduct an experiment.
...
The path down the mountain was much harder than the path up. Wen Nannan stumbled along, keeping an eye out for any players or locusts that might suddenly appear.
But she regretted it after taking a few steps. She was a weakling, and instead of being cautious when facing danger, she was actively heading towards a toxic zone. She was crazy, she must be crazy.
Halfway down the mountain path, the scenery abruptly changed. The path ahead was empty, with no trees, not even a single weed.
Looking further ahead, the entire mountain footprint, including Fuguo Town below, was a scene of devastation ravaged by the locusts.
Under the night sky, without the cover of trees, every gust of wind carried with it dirt and dust.
Wen Nannan had never seen such a desolate place. The locusts had turned the town into a desert, practically. The only difference was that a desert only had sand, while it was just land and dirt.
Wen Nannan caught a few locusts, broke off their wings and legs, leaving only their bodies and mandibles, and put them in a metal box, letting them devour each other.
She crouched down, her eyes fixed on the locusts tearing at each other in the box.
A locust, after eating a neighboring locust, began to swell. Its wriggling rear end slowly expelled four locusts.
Although it was "giving birth," the mother locust did not stop consuming its counterparts in the process. Shortly after "giving birth," the mother locust was eaten by another locust.
The locust that devoured it was even stranger, directly expelling six young locusts from its abdomen.
Within minutes, the locusts in the box were multiplying, almost spilling out from the sides.
Gifts
-- Gift
received Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone