Kelvier looked at Number Two's severed half, thinking to himself: This is the real survival of the fittest...

  Before he could finish the thought, the entire cave began to rumble ominously. Slowly sinking, Kelvier was suddenly caught in a torrent of water gushing from a crack at the bottom of the cave. Lifted by the current, he was nearly paralyzed, yet his mind sharpened in clarity.

  Wondering what was happening as he tried to see through the murky water, Kelvier was stunned into silence when he finally made out the source of the chaos.

  A monster! A massive creature, unimaginably large, was before him. Earth harbored such colossal beings?

  A giant head emerged above the water, with an even more enormous body hinted at beneath the surface. Next to this leviathan, the lizard and the toad were as flies to a hen.

  The toad and lizard ceased their fighting as Kelvier received a barrage of thoughts flooded with terror and fear.

  Two powerful jets of water shot from the monster's mouth, striking the lizard and toad and slamming them against the cave walls before they fell back into the water.

  Kelvier noticed that neither dared to dodge. It seemed the monster's fearsome reputation was well established; they didn’t even attempt to escape!

  If they had been terrestrial creatures, they surely would have been cowering and trembling on the ground by now. However, given their bodily structures, trembling was not an option for them. They remained silent and motionless, as if already dead.

  The monster shot two lighter jets of water, merely tossing the lizard and toad about without much harm.

  "Do not attack!" A thought transmitted, perhaps from the monster.

  The monster communicated through thoughts? Kelvier paused, puzzled—was the monster speaking to him? After a moment, he decided it must be addressing the lizard and toad; the monster couldn't possibly know he was capable of thought communication.

  The creature turned and slowly approached Kelvier, lifting him gently with one of its forelimbs. Virtually immobilized and certainly no match for the creature, Kelvier opted to observe it instead.

  The monster had a bizarre appearance, somewhat resembling Godzilla mixed with a Tyrannosaurus Rex, adorned with several unevenly sized and randomly placed stubby horns.

  It observed Kelvier intently for a while before setting him down and departing.

  Feeling the massive presence fade into the water, Kelvier's heart tightened. The toad and the fish were still here—what if they decided to devour him once the monster was gone?

  As if to show respect for the monster, the lizard and toad remained motionless for a long time before finally dispersing.

  Kelvier, heart pounding, slowly regained some strength. He hurriedly swam to the bottom to find Number Two, discovering that a third of its body was missing!

  In a moment of poignant sorrow, Kelvier stubbornly tried to feed a small fish to Number Two's lifeless body. After forcing the fish into its mouth, there was no response... Number Two was truly gone.

  Exhausted and injured, Kelvier found his movements sluggish, painfully aware as he watched small fish dart around him effortlessly. Normally, he would have been able to catch them with a burst of speed, but now it took an eternity to capture just one by playing dead to surprise the fish.

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  After consuming the fish, Kelvier's energy slightly recovered, making subsequent hunting somewhat easier. He quickly filled his belly.

  Kelvier carried Number Two toward the shore, feeling an increasing heaviness in his grasp. In theory, insects are some of the strongest creatures relative to their size, capable of lifting objects many times their own weight. Despite his injuries, lifting many times the weight of Number Two should have been no problem, yet Kelvier felt an overwhelming burden growing heavier and heavier...

  Helplessly, he looked at the half-eaten fish in Number Two's mouth, the one he had forcibly inserted. Normally, it would have pounced with excitement, but no more! No more! This must never happen again!

  In a sudden frenzy, Kelvier voraciously devoured several nearby fish and plunged back into the water.

  "I must eat! I must evolve!"

  A massacre ensued, a feast like no other. Dozens of small fish entered Kelvier's mouth.

  He was full, yet he continued eating. He needed to regain the energy lost from his missing limbs.

  As the fish entered his mouth, they were instantly digested, transforming into streams of energy that flowed to every part of his body.

  Kelvier could distinctly feel the energy converging wildly at his stumps, coalescing and reforming. Not all the energy gathered at the stumps—similar to a subway construction site, even with a large workforce, not everyone can be at the frontline due to space constraints.

  Sensing the flow of this energy, Kelvier noticed that once his body's energy saturation point was reached, it started to convert and condense in subtle ways, then slowly spread across his carapace.

  Kelvier knew the energy had become a green line, almost perceptible in its systematic arrangement, but the pattern eluded him.

  After a significant portion of his total intake had been converted, the green line... didn’t seem to thicken at all!

  The density of the energy in the green line...

  Suddenly struck by an idea, Kelvier trembled with excitement. He tried to bite his own carapace, but, unfortunately, insects don’t have necks, and his mouthparts couldn’t possibly reach his back.

  Though not strictly an insect anymore, Kelvier’s body structure was largely the same. So, he exerted all his strength, but his mouthparts still fell short of reaching his carapace.

  Thinking quickly, Kelvier backed up to the cave wall, spread his carapace against it, and pushed with all his might to try and break it.

  Kelvier overestimated his strength and underestimated the durability of his carapace.

  Eventually, he found a crevice in the rock and, leveraging it, managed to snap off a small piece of his carapace at a spot already weakened by the fish’s bite.

  He needed to break off his carapace where the green lines were concentrated; the abundant energy in the green lines might just save Number Two!

  Kelvier frantically bit through the elytra and the green filament, grinding them into powder, and carefully poured it into the mouth of Number Two.

  "Make sure to..."

  Kelvier's thought was cut short. Another thought exploded in his mind:

  "Going to die going to die going to die going to die going to die going to die going to die going to die going to die..."

  In the following days, it seemed like a return to the past. Kelvier thought several times about checking out the lair of the monstrous creature, but now there seemed to be territories clearly marked among the big fish, the toads, and himself, which they wouldn't easily overstep.

  The territory of Kelvier and Number Two was naturally the smallest, in the furthest corner of the cave. But Kelvier cherished it. Given time, he was sure the victor would be himself!

  He was also thankful to the monster, which had essentially saved his life and given him an opportunity to thrive!

  During this time, he had also come to a realization; he had always thought of the monster as the largest animal on Earth, but that moment was so perilous that he couldn’t discern much. "Large" was relative to his own size, and reflecting on it now, the monster must have been over three meters tall—roughly the size of a rhinoceros.

  Kelvier had never ventured to the other side of the pond that sank into the water. It seemed that the pond must be very deep and large, and the monster likely resided there. The simple truth that large places breed large creatures was evident.

  Then came the days in the cave without any concept of time.

  Were it not for Kelvier's racial talent, he truly wouldn’t have been able to keep track of time.

  Before he knew it, half a month had passed.

  Kelvier was back to his normal self.

  Number Two’s injuries were too severe; its ability to consume food was not as proficient as Kelvier’s, and it would probably take another half month to recover to its original level.

  The monster had left behind a command to not attack, which clearly had a powerful deterrent effect, seeing that the big fish and toads no longer dared to trouble him.

  But Kelvier was also worried; this kind of command must have been issued by the monster a few times before. Although it was intimidating, it would gradually fade, otherwise there wouldn’t have been a "Three Kingdoms" war before.

  Now, what Kelvier needed to do was to delay the arrival of that time as much as possible.