The ancient return was exposed by his sister's live stream.

She had been riding on the deer's back, and her view was obstructed by the terrain in front of her. Now that she was on higher ground, she could see the whole picture.

On the grassland ahead, a living carpet was spread out.

Tens of thousands of animals are running.

The white horses charged ahead, followed by silver-gray six-legged beasts weaving through them, while the heavy and slow herd of bulls lagged behind but moved with ferocious momentum.

And there were other things she had never seen before... a flock of blue birds with wingspans of over two meters flying low, flapping their wings frantically.

A group of unidentified four-legged beasts, about the size of cheetahs, with horny plates on their backs, ran so fast that they left other animals far behind.

A stampede of horses. No, not a stampede of horses.

All the beasts fled.

The scale was ten times larger than the Great Wildebeest Migration depicted in any nature documentary. The ground trembled... Even from a distance of more than a kilometer, Chen Siyao could still feel the hills beneath her feet shaking slightly.

Yang Wanqing stood next to her, her lips trembling slightly.

"What... is chasing them?"

Chen Siyao was also searching. Her gaze went beyond the running herd of animals, looking further into the distance—in the direction the animals had fled.

At first, all I could see was blue grass.

Then the line appeared.

There is a black line on the horizon.

It's not a mountain ridge. It's not a river.

It is alive.

The black line was moving. It wasn't moving fast, but it was incredibly wide... stretching out from left to right, with no end in sight.

"What is that...?"

Chen Siyao manipulated the image crystal to rise and fly towards the direction of the black line.

The crystal flew 500 meters before the image was transmitted back.

On Chen Siyao's phone screen, the black line turned into a black wave.

mouse.

Black rats, twice the size of normal rats. They were densely packed, layer upon layer, with those in front stepping on those behind, the living stepping on the dead.

They weren't running, they were surging, wave after wave, like a black flood overflowing a dam.

The chat in the live stream almost stopped for a second.

Then the popularity score started to jump up.

Five hundred million.

Five hundred and two hundred million.

Five hundred and fifty million.

Chen Siyao stared at the black tide. The image quality from the recording crystal was clearer than any camera—she saw the details.

A slow-moving six-legged beast was caught up by the vanguard of the rat swarm.

It's still running.

Black rats swarmed onto its hind legs.

one second.

Gone.

Not even bones were left.

Only a small, damp, dark red stain remained on the blue grass, which was trampled away by the rats that followed three seconds later.

Chen Siyao's scalp tingled.

Yang Wanqing covered her mouth.

The rat swarm wasn't advancing very fast, but it covered a very wide area.

Looking down from the top of the hill, the black waves stretched out horizontally, with no end in sight.

It moved forward at a steady, mechanical pace, swallowing up everything in its path that didn't have time to escape.

The crystal for Chen Siyao's photo is suspended high up, capturing the entire scene in the lens.

Ahead lay a raging torrent of beasts, behind them a black tide of death. The distance between them was slowly closing.

Those who ran fast—unicorns, silver-grey six-legged beasts, and armored cheetahs—had already created a safe distance. But the slower ones were falling behind.

A giant bull.

Its pace was noticeably slower than the other cattle, and its left hind leg was slightly lame, possibly due to an old injury. It was at the very back of the herd, desperately trying to keep up, but the gap between it and the herd only widened.

The Black Tide vanguard has caught up.

First the hind hooves. Then the hind legs. Then the waist and abdomen.

The three-meter-tall giant bull struggled in the black tide for less than three seconds. From standing to disappearing, it was too fast to be real.

There were no screams.

Or rather, the squeaking was drowned out by that "rustling" sound—the sound of millions or even tens of millions of rats gnawing at the same time combined into a continuous, uniform "rustling" sound.

Yang Wanqing huddled up next to Fuzhu, his face pale.

"It's all gone... there's nothing left..."

Chen Siyao didn't speak. Her hands, holding the phone, were sweating.

The live stream chat was sparsely populated—not because no one was watching, but because too many people had forgotten to type. The number of online viewers was still rising, reaching 600 million. But unusually, only a few comments were appearing in the chat.

"That's terrifying!"

"If this thing appeared on Earth..."

"Nature's Cleaners"

"Survival of the fittest"

The Fuzhu creatures around me were restless. Their four legs kept pacing in place, and the light pulses on their seven-colored horns flickered. They wanted to run—to get farther away from here.

Chen Hao reached out and pressed his hand on the forehead of the leader, Fuzhu.

A faint light pierced through his palm and entered the deer's head.

The feral beast's agitation subsided immediately. Its four legs stopped thrashing, and its breathing became steady. Seeing that its leader had calmed down, the others also quieted down.

"Brother, won't this swarm of rats come over?" Chen Siyao asked.

"No. They travel in a straight line, heading slightly east. This hill isn't on their route."

Chen Siyao nodded, but still subconsciously took a half step back.

For the next half hour, they stood on the hilltop and looked around.

The black tide surged in from the right side of their field of vision, spanning the entire grassland and pushing eastward.

The middle part of the rat swarm was the thickest, with several layers stacked on top of each other, and the blue ground was completely covered by black.

The edges are slightly thinner, and you can see sparse blue grass peeking out from between the mice—but it's quickly trampled away.

During this time, three or four more stray animals were caught up.

Each engulfing process takes no more than five seconds.

Regardless of size, the result is the same. Nothing is left.

Yang Wanqing stopped looking at it later. She squatted on the ground, hugged her knees, and stared at the blue grass at her feet.

"I'd rather run through the cannibalistic forest again... at least the cannibalistic trees left their bones..."

Chen Siyao patted her on the shoulder.

Half an hour later, the tail end of the rat swarm finally appeared.

The last batch of mice disappeared from sight, leaving behind—

There was nothing there.

The grasslands are gone.

In the area traversed by the black tide, the blue grass was trampled to a pulp. Not eaten—rats don't eat grass—but crushed into the mud by countless feet.

What was once a dense thicket of grass, half a foot high, has turned into a dark brown muddy ground, full of potholes, marks left by rat claws, and crushed plant debris.

Looking out from the hills, the path of the rat swarm was so clear it looked like it had been drawn with a ruler. To the left was pristine blue grassland, and to the right was also pristine blue grassland—but in the middle, a strip of skin five or six kilometers wide had been ripped away.

Like an ugly scar.

Chen Siyao said to the photo crystal, "This is the natural law of this world."

She squatted down and touched the blue grass at her feet.

"The grass won't die out completely. It will grow back after a while. Then the herbivores will come back. And then... the next rat infestation will come. And so it goes."

Yang Wanqing stood up from the ground and patted his pants.

"Let's go. I don't want to stay here anymore."