The moment Shen Cong entered the cave, the butterflies and cicadas noticed him.

The cicadas clung to the walls and cried out — through the Third Eye he could see the air trembling around them. Even with the Hell Plant Armor sealing his ears shut, a faint thread of the sound still got through.

The cry was extraordinarily soft and gentle. Like a mother at the bedside, singing a low lullaby just before sleep.

The butterflies, meanwhile, flew in wild circles, shaking their fine scales loose until they filled the whole cave.

But Shen Cong had come prepared, and none of it touched him. He held the cave mouth alone: one butterfly came, one stroke of the blade split it. One after another, thirty-plus giant butterflies were cloven in two by the spanner-crab blade, juices spraying in every direction until the Hell Plant Armor was drenched in them.

Thirty-odd kills later, no butterfly dared come out.

Shen Cong walked deeper into the cave over the butterflies' corpses, and every cicada he saw on the walls got a blade driven through it on sight. The cicadas were only washbasin-sized, roughly 0.5H Talent — pitifully weak. Less symbiotic partners to the butterflies, really, than something like battle pets the butterflies kept penned, helping lure in prey.

Cicada or butterfly — against an ultimate-grade iron person, resistance of any kind was meaningless.

Inside ten minutes, the cave had been all but emptied of butterflies and cicadas. He left exactly two alive, shearing off their wings, to bring home for proper study. As for the larvae in the nest, Shen Cong stabbed them dead one by one. A jin beast that could blindside him without sound or trace was a jin beast best exterminated to the last.

If they ever grew up, they'd be a guaranteed calamity.

After finishing the larvae, as he moved to wake the Four-Legged Dragon, Shen Cong noticed a heap of things piled in a corner, like silkworm cocoons. "Butterfly chrysalises? Doesn't look right. These cocoons come in all sizes — the big ones are shipping-container size, the small ones…