Invincible Snake Emperor

Chapter 38: Chapter 38: Natural Predator

It was a good thing the hillside was teeming with countless bees. Otherwise, Tu Xiao’an would have started to feel the loss.

He also found it a little strange. The number of bees was terrifyingly large. Logically speaking, there shouldn’t be this many.

’Could it be that several Bee Families live here?’

In a certain City, two large trucks had once collided. One of them was filled with beehives. After the crash, over a hundred thousand bees immediately flew into a frenzy, swarming chaotically. They blotted out the sky over the highway and stung people everywhere, causing an immediate traffic jam.

The sun-blotting swarm frantically chased vehicles and pedestrians on the highway, as if the apocalypse had arrived. In just two short hours, more than a hundred people were injured, and seven or eight were trapped in their cars, stung mercilessly by the bees.

It became a full-blown bee disaster. In the end, it took dozens of fully equipped Beekeepers to barely manage to usher away the maddened bees.

A Bee Family is also a small, gregarious society, creating its own civilization, flourishing in its own kingdom, and establishing a strict hierarchical system.

Typically, a beehive is composed of a Bee King (Queen Bee), drone bees, and worker bees.

In a large family, there is only one Bee King, typically 500-1500 drone bees, and tens of thousands of worker bees. A few tens of thousands is already an incredible number, but these bees covering the entire hillside definitely numbered over a hundred thousand.

The Bee King’s job is to lay eggs. It eats the best royal jelly and drinks the best honey, yet it does not need to do any labor.

Its body is large and its lifespan is long, typically three to five years, with the longest-living ones surviving for eight or nine years. It enjoys the fruits of others’ labor, holds all the power in the family, and enjoys all the pleasures its kingdom provides.

Then there are the drone bees. Their task is also very clear: they don’t need to work and toil outside. They only need to mate with the Bee King to fertilize her and propagate the next generation, because only the drones have the necessary reproductive anatomy.

But here’s the problem: there are several thousand drones in a single hive, but only one Bee King. Of course, it’s impossible for every drone to mate with the Bee King; she would be exhausted to death.

So, what is to be done?

The Bee King will hold a martial tournament, just like the ancient contests to win a bride. Whoever wins gets to attend to her majesty.

This so-called martial tournament is a competition of flight speed. The drones fly out of the hive, and the entire group of drones gives chase. Whoever wins first place—congratulations, the Bee King is yours for the night.

This is a very human-like method, which demonstrates the great wisdom of these small insects.

You could call it lucky, but it’s actually a tragedy, and the consequences are grievous. After the drone attends to the queen and experiences the pleasure of mating, its life quickly comes to an end. It will detach its genitals inside the Bee King’s reproductive tract, and then it will die immediately, having completed its one and only mission in life.

This is somewhat similar to spiders. After fertilization, the male spider is immediately eaten by the female to replenish her Energy for producing offspring. In short: you take my body, I’ll take your life.

The animal world is just that cruel and direct. Many creatures must pay with their lives for the sake of procreation.

The losing drones, on the other hand, become the real winners. They don’t have to die, nor do they need to work. They just loaf around in the hive every day, eating well and doing nothing. If you absolutely had to find some use for them, it would be that while lazing about, they constantly flap their wings, unintentionally helping to maintain the hive’s temperature.

The worker bees, by contrast, have much harder lives. They spend their entire existence laboring diligently. Collecting food, nursing larvae, building the nest, making honey, cleaning up, defending the hive, and attacking enemies—these become their sole tasks and goals for survival.

Those songs people sing praising the diligence of bees are really dedicated to the worker bees. They have absolutely nothing to do with the Bee King or the drones.

...........．

At this moment, Tu Xiao’an fought with the might of ten thousand men. A single sweep of his snake tail could take out a thousand troops. Even if a few bees slipped through and landed on his body, they were quickly enveloped by his consciousness and subdued.

His Energy Value was skyrocketing, and it felt incredible. The only regret was that he, as a Snake, simply couldn’t break through. He would kill one batch, only for another to appear in an endless stream. From the sky to the ground, in every direction, there were only bees—so densely packed that the buzzing alone was suffocating.

Slowly, Tu Xiao’an learned his lesson and stopped summoning the bees he had subdued. He realized that when he summoned them, they were quickly killed, so it wasn’t particularly effective.

Besides, these bees can’t sting me anyway. Even though there are a lot of them, I can still handle it. Why not wait until I’ve accumulated enough bees and summon them all at once? Now that would be a real spectacle.

’Too many bees were dying, and they were all his future underlings!’

If he subdued a hundred, summoned a hundred, and then they died, the number of bees in his system would never grow.

’Looks like getting any honey today is impossible,’ Tu Xiao’an thought to himself, stealing a moment amidst the chaos. ’A hundred thousand bees can’t be dealt with in a short time. I’ll have to stick around this excellent leveling spot for a while.’

Having figured this out, Tu Xiao’an started slowly subduing bees on the periphery. As long as he didn’t charge in, he could just about ”keep up” with the number of bees swarming him.

But just then, Tu Xiao’an suddenly noticed a commotion among the mass of bees on the periphery. The buzzing sound they made now carried a note of panic.

He was momentarily confused, but then he saw large swarms of bees flying away. They were heading to another location, no longer stubbornly fighting this venomous Snake to the death.

”What’s this? Can’t win, so you’re running away?”

Seeing the large swarms of bees fly off, Tu Xiao’an wasn’t happy at all. In fact, he frowned. ’If they all run away, what am I supposed to subdue?’

’Or are they planning to let me in, no longer bothered to deal with me?’

After all, from the beginning until now, the number of bees sacrificed had already reached the thousands.

However, he quickly shot down this fanciful idea himself. It wasn’t that the bee swarm didn’t want to quickly get rid of this annoying venomous Snake. Rather, another, more terrifying wave of enemies had arrived on the hillside—ones even more troublesome and difficult to deal with than he was.

The bees needed to divert a large number of their forces to deal with the new enemy.

A strange look appeared on Tu Xiao’an’s face. Seeing the path wide open, he didn’t hesitate and decided to slither in to take a look.

The bee swarm seemed to have suddenly grown tired of this venomous Snake. Without a second thought, they didn’t even try to stop him as he broke through and slithered in. Instead, as if liberated, they threw themselves into another battlefield.

Once Tu Xiao’an slithered to a safe corner, his glowing Snake Pupils scanned the area. He wanted to see just what was happening that could throw such an enormous swarm of bees into a panic.

Even for humans, dealing with these hundreds of thousands of bees would take a great deal of effort.

Finally, when Tu Xiao’an saw another type of flying creature, an even stranger expression appeared in his eyes. ’These bees have some truly rotten luck. First, I killed a good number of their kind, and now another wave of enemies has appeared.’ And this wave of enemies was the bees’ natural predator in the food chain: the Wasp.