Distant Mountain Battle Song

Chapter 10: The rules of survival remain unchanged.

Birds of prey are quite handsome in appearance and fly with a fierce and swift speed, but their colors are not very attractive. Most are gray, some are black, and a very few are white.

Various small birds flew densely into the sky, their wings touching each other to form a cloud of feathers, making them appear thousands of times larger. Instead of avoiding predatory birds of prey, they bravely swung upwards.

The raptors, naturally unafraid of this false power, fearlessly pierced through the enormous cloud of feathers, their sharp claws and hooked beaks tearing up clumps of feathers. Some birds even fell from mid-air with their necks snapped, while the unidentified birds relentlessly continued to use the cloud of feathers to hunt the raptors...

Yun Ce watched with great interest.

Because these birds are not much different from birds on Earth, except for differences in feathers, size, and crest. Otherwise, they are not much different.

This was good news for him, and it greatly encouraged his plan to leave the tree and explore the ground.

People who live in trees are called bird people, while on Earth they are called nest dwellers. Living in trees is safe, but if people want to live a sustainable life, returning to the ground is ultimately a major trend.

While living in trees is more secure, due to natural selection, they may grow long arms, and their tails, which were originally degenerated, may even grow back in order to live better in the trees.

Yun Ce didn't want to turn himself into a gibbon, swinging his long arms back and forth in the trees, and sometimes he could even use his tail to wrap around a branch and sleep upside down.

Such thoughts are actually quite pointless. As a relatively advanced human being, one shouldn't even have such ideas.

However, last night, when the cold was at its worst, Yun Ce discovered that his body had really improved. The severe cold of at least minus thirty degrees Celsius last night did not cause any harm to his body. After getting used to the cold, he even had a good night's sleep.

Despite things developing in a positive direction, Yun Ce was still worried that he would turn into a dragon after eating the dragon eggshell. Compared to being covered in dragon scales, he preferred his own skin, which felt good to the touch, was warm, smooth, and sensitive.

The nest dwellers on Earth eventually returned to the surface and became cave dwellers, eventually disappearing into the torrent of history.

When I read books before, anthropologists touted this action as something great, but Yun Ce didn't understand it and thought it was a very simple thing.

Now that it was his turn, he stood on a branch less than ten meters above the ground for a long time, hesitating to fall onto the ground covered with withered branches and leaves.

He had been squatting on the branch for an hour and a half. First, he saw a golden beetle the size of a fist with more than a dozen legs crawl out from under the rotting leaves. Before the golden beetle could move a few times, a long worm, about a meter long and also with many legs, crawled out from under the rotten branch and swallowed the golden beetle whole.

If things stop here, Yun Ce isn't afraid; it's just a normal occurrence in the food chain.

However, what happened next required him to take it seriously.

Because the golden beetle that was swallowed kept jumping around inside the worm's belly. As it jumped, it ruptured the worm's belly, crawled out, and continued on its way, climbing up the tree without even glancing back...

The worm with its ruptured abdomen seemed quite used to the fact that its abdomen had been bitten open. When it saw the golden beetle run away, it didn't chase after it. Instead, it twisted its body with the hole in it and burrowed back under the dead leaves.

This incident taught Yun Ce a great lesson.

Golden beetles are incredibly resilient!
The long worm is also very resilient!

After waiting for an hour and a half, the golden beetle finally crawled to Yun Ce's feet, so Yun Ce raised his foot and stomped on it hard.

The expected burst of filling didn't happen. When he lifted his foot, he realized that the golden beetle was already embedded in the sole of his shoe. If it weren't for the steel plate in the sole of his shoe, the golden beetle would have made intimate contact with the sole of his foot.

Using a knife, Yun Ce pried the golden beetle out of the sole of his shoe. Then, he smashed the beetle on the back with a stick. He lifted the stick, and the beetle was unharmed. Yun Ce then raised the stick and struck it repeatedly.

Yun Ce was incredibly strong; in a short time, the stick was covered with lifelike golden beetle molds.

Yun Ce raised his foot and kicked the beetle hard. The beetle flew away immediately. Before the force Yun Ce had applied to it could disappear, the beetle's carapace cracked open, revealing a pair of rainbow-colored wings, and it flew away heavily.

The golden beetle flew in the direction of the sun, and its back view looked incredibly impressive. Yun Ce really didn't understand what was so impressive about this guy he had just trampled under his feet.

However, he felt a vague sense of regret, thinking he shouldn't have kicked the golden beetle away. "Whoosh!" Yun Ce threw a wooden spear, pinning the long-legged worm firmly to the ground. The worm's vitality was indeed very strong; even with its body pinned by the wooden spear, it tightly wrapped itself around it, constantly spitting out specks of transparent liquid that landed on the spear. Soon, many black spots appeared on the spear.

Yun Ce waited for the worm to finish spitting out its venom, but half an hour passed. The wooden spear was already corroded and tattered by the venom, but the worm was still alive and spitting out venom.

He wasn't just observing the worms spitting venom, but also the venom that landed on the rotting branches. When the venom came into contact with these rotten branches, it started to smoke. The smoke was very thick, and many small insects fled from the area covered by the smoke. Among them were several that looked colorful and were definitely not benevolent.

Seeing that the snake had almost finished spitting out its contents on one side of the tree, Yun Ce used another wooden spear to move the snake to the other side so it could continue spitting out its contents. Whenever he noticed the snake starting to slack off and stop spitting out its contents, he would poke it again.

Logically speaking, the venom storage of a long worm is limited, and it seems a bit off for this long worm. Yun Ce watched as the long worm slowly flattened its body after spitting venom for almost an hour. However, this did not stop the long worm from continuing to spit venom. It was just that its strength seemed to have decreased, and most of the venom it spat out was scattered on the tree roots.

Seeing that he had taken all the necessary precautions against insects, Yun Ce finally released the poor worm.

Watching the long worm leave without looking back, Yun Ce was very satisfied with the tree roots covered with insect corpses.

On the first day, Yun Ce did not leave the big tree.

The reason he didn't leave the tree was that he still didn't feel hungry.

Yun Ce now believes what Ao Bing said; the dragon eggshell really is a highly nutritious substance.

Back in the tree hollow, Yun Ce lit a fire in the damp hollow. For safety, he lit another fire on a horizontal branch at the entrance of the hollow. The fuel was dry branches from the tree trunk. These branches burned for a long time without needing to be rekindled. However, they produced a lot of smoke. To avoid being suffocated by the smoke, he made a hole in the trunk to allow the smoke to escape.

When the fire started burning, many visitors came to the horizontal branch in front of Yun Ce's tree hole. Among them, a bird with a huge orange-red beak was the most attentive and could not be driven away no matter what.

They seemed to have an extremely persistent passion for fire. Even after Yun Ce chopped off the heads of two birds, they still fell down again, wanting to warm themselves by the fire.

Yun Ce was not a good person, at least not a kind-hearted one. He had considered using these toucans as food.

The toucan's feathers were quite beautiful, and its large beak seemed to have some use. Unfortunately, this bird was incredibly smelly. Even after it was killed, the blood that dripped onto the tree smelled similar to the odor of a camel's hind leg and armpits, and even a strong wind couldn't blow it away. There was no other way, so Yun Ce had to scrape off the blood-stained bark along with the tree bark to save his life.

Seeing how much these toucans enjoyed the fire, Yun Ce divided one fire into three. The toucans couldn't wait to spread their wings and dance around the fire. Some of the bolder toucans even straddled the fire with their long legs, letting the flames burn their feathers, not caring even when the feathers on their bellies and tails were burned away.

Even though the toucan's belly was sizzling and about to turn into roast chicken, the toucan still leaned against the fire, looking quite content.

Finally, a toucan, its belly sizzling with oil from roasting, stumbled and fell from the tree. Yun Ce listened intently, and it took several seconds before he heard the toucan hit the ground; it seemed to be truly dead.

The spot that the toucan made to move was then taken by another oblivious to its own danger.

Seeing how much the toucans enjoyed being roasted by the flames, the kind-hearted Yun Ce deliberately divided the three fires into ten, wanting to observe whether the toucans' suicide upon seeing fire was a group behavior or an isolated case.

Yun Ce was completely baffled as he watched the toucans lining up to roast themselves by the fire and commit suicide.

Some toucans burned themselves to death and fell from the trees, while others lay steaming on the tree trunks. Yun Ce kept poking at these toucans with his wooden spear.
The toucan was dead, its belly still heaving. A moment later, a bunch of worms scurried out of the toucan's anus. As soon as the worms left the toucan's body, they began to crawl purposefully towards the toucans around it. At this time, even the toucans that were warming themselves by the fire were quacking and pecking at the worms with their big beaks.

Seeing this, Yun Ce understood why the toucan had committed suicide.

The parasite inside the toucan's stomach must have made it suffer terribly, which is why it would rather burn itself to death than live a miserable life. But there are many ways to commit suicide, so why choose cremation?
So Yun Ce used a wooden spear to stick a piece of burning charcoal into the insect and threw it on the insect. The charcoal went dark for a moment, and then a large burst of bright yellow flames rose up, like gasoline being ignited... This made Yun Ce want to collect some of these insects.

If we can understand and comprehend the rules governing how this world works, it means that the gap between this world and Earth is not so great as to be incomprehensible. At least, many physical laws are the same as those on Earth.

As the fire on the tree trunk gradually died down, the stinking toucan left without hesitation, leaving Yun Ce with only a large cloud of stench.

(End of this chapter)