Blackhead led its Vajra Ant detachment out and, in short order, hauled all the butterfly wings back.

The wings were strikingly beautiful — vivid colors, intriguing patterns. If you didn't know these scales carried a potent hallucinogenic toxin, you'd truly take the creature for some flower-fairy spirit.

"Needs a name, for the records. Poison Butterfly? Hallucino-Butterfly? Vertigo Butterfly? Cicada-Herder Butterfly?" Oxygen tank on his back, Shen Cong found a spot downwind and scraped the fine scales off the wings bit by bit, bottling them as he brainstormed. "Those names flag the danger well enough, but they don't quite deserve a pair of wings this beautiful."

"Let's just call it the Painted Fairy Butterfly." It had suddenly come to Shen Cong that a brand of cake he used to eat carried a name that sounded almost exactly like it — and the butterfly on the packaging had looked rather like this hallucinogenic one.

So he simply coined the near-homophone.

With every butterfly dead and his anger long since burned off, Shen Cong had settled back into that unrippled calm of his — the state where even his own emotions could be tucked out of sight. Far from cursing the butterfly with something vicious, he'd given it a lovely name.

The butterfly having become the Painted Fairy Butterfly, the cicada naturally got a new name too.

Shen Cong didn't need to think long. "A cicada it is — and since it's a jin beast whose cry works like the tightening-band spell, chanting you to your death, we'll call it the Golden Cicada." Sun Wukong wore the golden band on his head; Tang Sanzang — the reincarnation of the Golden Cicada himself — had only to recite the spell, and the Monkey King's skull felt ready to burst.

Under Shen Cong's scraping, the hundred-plus Painted Fairy Butterflies soon yielded two big woven sacks of scale powder.

He cinched the sacks shut, sluiced himself clean head to toe with river water, and only then returned to the Great Vajra to continue his experiments. The design was simple: have the captured small jin beasts inhale…