Cave Refuge-Chapter 327 - 298 Ye Liuyun’s Frenzy
After listening to Ye Liuyun’s report on the situation in Pi State, Dong Tianyu immediately spoke, "If I’m not mistaken, the monster that appeared in Ning County is similar to a gecko."
Hearing Dong Tianyu say this, Ye Liuyun didn’t find it strange and directly replied, "You guessed it right!"
What’s there to guess? We’ve already encountered monsters resembling scorpions, toads, centipedes, and venomous snakes. According to the traditional Chinese "Five Poisons" concept handed down by our ancestors, if we really go by the Five Poisons, then the only one left in Ning County would be the lizard.
When Dong Tianyu first heard about the Five Poisons as a child, he always thought that spiders were one of them. He never imagined that geckos, which are harmless to humans and livestock, would be included among the Five Poisons.
It wasn’t until he grew up and looked into it more closely that Dong Tianyu realized geckos aren’t actually poisonous themselves, but they feed on various poisonous insects. Despite the gecko’s high toxin resistance, preventing it from being poisoned by consuming toxic insects...
...over time, the toxins from the insects they eat accumulate in their bodies, gradually making the gecko’s body fluids toxic.
Under normal circumstances, this has little impact on humans, since most people don’t go around attacking geckos. However, the toxins accumulated inside geckos are expelled with their urine.
The urine volatilizes over time, and the toxins it carries disperse into the air. If the airflow in a house is poor, over time the residents may develop chronic poisoning without realizing it, due to the toxins in the gecko’s urine.
Since geckos are omnivores, the types of toxic insects they eat vary. The toxins from the consumed insects mix and ferment within the gecko, eventually forming highly unique toxins.
Whether these toxins are fiercely potent or mild, because they are all mixed toxins, finding an antidote becomes very troublesome.
It is because of this that geckos, though useful to humans in clearing out toxic insects from their homes, ended up being classified as one of the Five Poisons by our ancestors.
And geckos are among the few animals that do not produce toxins themselves but carry them instead.
In fact, geckos are also known by a scientific name abroad: house gecko. In ancient times, they were considered witchery insects; before the disaster, they were kept as pets. But during the disaster, geckos in Ning County transformed into behemoths capable of devouring survivors.
Compared to other monsters in various regions that, even with their huge size, weren’t overly threatening, the lizard-like creature in Ning County had grown nearly as tall as a rhinoceros.
Don’t be fooled by the rhinoceros’s short legs; there is still a space between its belly and the ground. While a gecko’s legs are long, it frequently adopts an M-shaped posture, with its belly close to the ground. If you were to straighten a giant gecko’s legs, it would certainly stand taller than a rhinoceros.
However, although a larger size often indicates formidable combat strength, it’s precisely because the monster is so large that the survivors in Ning County were well-prepared in advance. They did not suffer mass casualties before unexpectedly discovering the causes, like the people by Weishan Lake did with the floating creatures.
Nor did they need to be wary of venomous snakes suddenly emerging from ground fissures to launch surprise attacks, as was the case in Pi State.
The giant gecko’s skin is extremely tough, even comparable to the carapace of the Giant Scorpions in Saxon County. Ordinary firearm bullets simply cannot penetrate the skin of the giant gecko. To inflict damage with firearms, one must aim for the eyes or other vulnerable areas.
Fortunately, the proportion of the giant gecko’s eyes is not much different from that of regular geckos, so blinding the giant creature is not too difficult.
The large-bodied giant gecko is similar in use to the Giant Scorpions of Saxon County - its meat can be made into jerky for consumption.
Unlike the Giant Scorpion, which has a poison sac connected to the tail’s stinger, the giant gecko has a pouch near its throat. When the survivors dissected the giant gecko, although its body had cooled, the surface of the pouch was still somewhat warm when they took it out.
As the survivors curiously continued to dissect the pouch to see what was inside, the moment the dissection tool penetrated the pouch, it was like pressing a detonator button. It blew up the surrounding survivors into pieces.
Those who knew were aware they were dissecting the dead body of a Giant Scorpion. Those unaware might have thought they were defusing a bomb.
After listening to Ye Liuyun recount the situation around Pengcheng, Dong Tianyu also fell into deep thought.
Dong Tianyu hadn’t quite figured out what the situation was, starting with the weather. Although the weather had become very bizarre and extreme, it still felt somewhat predictable.
It seemed as though the revival of Spirit Energy allowed humans to practice martial arts and boost physical health, yet many new species of creatures had appeared.
The series of natural disasters had nearly wiped out most of the species on Blue Star, except for humans. After all, with the constant extreme weather, the only creatures that survived were those humans took special care to protect and nurture for the sake of preserving biodiversity.
Almost all wild animals living in nature had become extinct; not to mention wildlife, even plants renowned for their hardiness couldn’t withstand the relentless assault of natural disasters.
Yet now, just before the earthquakes started, diverse species mysteriously appeared all over China, though Dong Tianyu wasn’t sure whether similar creatures had emerged in other regions.
