Survival at Sea: I Became Number One by Growing Mushrooms

Why do these disgusting insects even exist? She wished they would just disappear. Xu Jiawei thought that if these things were useless later, she would still have to eliminate all these ticks.

It's still unknown whether these insects have any effect on those things or on the monsters. If they do, Xu Jiawei plans to raise more of them, even if they look disgusting.

She was able to convince herself to accept it.

Thinking that Xu Jiawei had taken out a bottle of worms from Rainbow's belly, she prepared them in advance.

She happened to encounter a nest of mutated, demonized rabbits, a total of 5. Their size hadn't changed much; they were still the size of a normal rabbit. Their burrows weren't of much use to Xu Jiawei, so she decided to pour a bottle of ticks directly into the burrow.

Although these rabbits are small and have only half the health of those large demonized creatures, they are very agile and fast. Whenever Xu Jiawei tries to attack them, they immediately burrow into their burrows to hide.

Moreover, these burrows are interconnected, like a cunning rabbit having three burrows. These rabbits must have eighteen burrows, just like in a game of whack-a-mole, where the rabbits peek out from different places and then ambush her.

The key is that these rabbits are not only fast, but also deal high damage. They can even take down 50 HP from a single sneak attack. If they attack 20 times, they can kill Xu Jiawei outright.

Xu Jiawei couldn't catch them, and dealing with them was very troublesome. This time, she could test the power of ticks.

Upon opening the bottle, the tick, initially bewildered, shook its dizzy head, seemingly still unaware of its surroundings, before crawling down the rabbit hole.

Within a minute, the entire litter of rabbits rushed out, seemingly trying to shake off the black spots on their bodies. However, the ticks clung tightly to the rabbits' flesh. There were probably several hundred ticks in the bottle, more than enough to overwhelm a few baby rabbits.

The toxins released by the ticks turned the rabbit's skin a light gray color, and the rabbit cried out in agony.

Xu Jiawei thought to herself, this must be tick poisoning. On Earth, if there are too many ticks on your body, you will also get tick poisoning. However, the toxins of a single tick are not high and will not have a great impact on the organism. They will only paralyze the organism and make it unable to feel the presence of the tick. But what if hundreds of ticks are together?

Even if it's a bloodsucker, it could probably drain these little rabbits dry.

Xu Jiawei later asked Robert, who had been bitten by ticks all night and lost 100 points of blood. This was based on only twenty ticks, and Robert's weight and size were definitely larger than the little rabbit.

Under Xu Jiawei's watchful eye, the rabbit began to lose health rapidly, though the rate of loss gradually slowed down. However, its rate of health loss was much higher than Robert's, likely due to the rapid loss caused by blood loss.

It seems that ticks are deadly to these small animals, but may not be so effective against larger animals.

Once the rabbit was completely immobilized, Xu Jiawei eliminated both the rabbit and the ticks.

The rabbits that had been giving her such a headache were so easily eliminated by ticks. What surprised Xu Jiawei was why these rabbits didn't attract ticks at all.

If ticks pose such a great threat to rabbits, then rabbits and other small animals should have gone extinct long ago and could not possibly have survived. Perhaps the reason lies nearby. So she searched carefully around and found no ticks on the grass leaves around the rabbit.

This was even stranger. She didn't know what was going on, so she tried putting the tick on a blade of grass, and the tick quickly flew away.

She then tried putting the grass blades and ticks separately in a glass bottle. The ticks scratched frantically against the bottle walls, unable to escape, and crawled to the furthest point from the grass blades.

The tick stopped moving. But when Xu Jiawei opened the bottle cap, the tick jumped out as if it had been startled and fled far away. It seems that ticks really hate this kind of plant.

Whether it was because she disliked them or because they were poisonous to the ticks, Xu Jiawei put the ticks and grass leaves together again. To make a control group, she divided them into three bottles: one opened at dawn, one opened one day later, and one opened three days later.

Xu Jiawei picked all the grass in the area and discovered that only the grass with round leaves was free of ticks, so only this type of grass was useful. She collected a dozen or so plants and continued walking in the direction of the compass needle.

The further they went, the fewer plants there were, turning it into a desert. It was incredible that an island could have two different landscapes. Although the distance wasn't far, it didn't seem strange considering that this was a magical world. She felt it was normal for an island to have four different weather conditions.

She felt the temperature starting to rise, so she had to take off her coat. The first faint light of dawn appeared in the east, and the temperature was gradually climbing. Before it was fully light, she was already sweating. Observing her surroundings, she realized that the area had completely turned into a desert.

The sun rose from the east, shining golden light on the sand, but the surrounding area was shrouded in darkness, making it appear somewhat gloomy and oppressive.

Having arrived in the desert, surrounded by sand, she knew she couldn't find a cave. She needed to find a place to stay, and with a whole day left, she didn't know if she could leave this desert in a day.

Xu Jiawei dared not rest. She drank a bottle of energy potion and a stamina potion to restore her energy and continued on her way.

Xu Jiawei took a few steps forward and then felt a strange movement coming from the ground.

It seemed as if something was hiding under the sand, moving rapidly, and its direction was directly beneath Xu Jiawei's feet. Xu Jiawei immediately flew up and looked at the ground.

A thick vine burst from the ground, soaring into the air and attacking Xu Jiawei. Xu Jiawei dodged in mid-air and unleashed a skill on the vine, causing it to retreat back into the sand.

Then came several more whooshing sounds as five vines attacked. Xu Jiawei dodged everywhere, but the vines were so fast that her body was still grazed by them.

The sand underground surged rapidly, and more and more vines broke through the soil. Xu Jiawei immediately made a judgment, chose the right direction, and ran away.

The vines chased after her at breakneck speed, and even when Xu Jiawei sped up, she couldn't shake them off; in fact, the number of chasing vines kept increasing.

She could only look for an opportunity to fight back. She quickly dodged an attack from a vine. Then, a photon meteor struck the vine, setting it ablaze. The vine lashed out at the flames, but when it couldn't extinguish them, it retreated back underground.

It quickly broke through the ground again, its flames now extinguished.

Xu Jiawei was very surprised. What was going on? Her flames shouldn't have gone out. Could there be something under the sand that could suppress her bright flames?

Thinking of this guess, Xu Jiawei's face turned very ugly. Why are all the demonized creatures on this island so troublesome?

It was clearly targeting her. She cursed the system's shamelessness in her heart, thinking it really didn't want her to have an easy time.

Since Photon Meteor is useless, just use Light Spore to slowly whittle down her health, while she just needs to dodge.