Chapter 31: Cockroaches (6)
As Everly had guessed earlier, Diana and James were a couple.
However, not long ago, for some reason, they had a fight and broke up. In a fit of anger, Diana returned to her hometown and applied for a job as an art teacher at an elementary school, while James, full of regret, traveled thousands of miles to Lemot to pursue love.
When the street disinfection started, he had just gotten up and was buying coffee at a nearby café. By chance, he witnessed the entire process of the disinfection spiraling out of control.
At first, everything was normal. The disinfection team wore protective suits and carried manual sprayers, spraying chemicals in streets, alleys, and other public areas. Wherever they went, a large number of cockroaches scrambled out of their hiding spots in panic, only to be killed by the increasingly concentrated chemicals—they flipped over and lay still.
“I had never seen so many cockroaches come out at once. Even at the largest cockroach farm in the U.S., the Gensi-Mei Cockroach Farm, I’ve never seen this many cockroaches at the same time. The sight was truly disgusting…” James exclaimed, then continued.
“At first, the pesticides used by the disinfection company were very effective. Cockroaches would almost die immediately upon contact. However, as time went on, when the team began moving to the next street, people noticed that some cockroaches didn’t die right away after being sprayed—they started molting in place.”
“Molting?”
“That’s right. Cockroaches molt. Take the American cockroach, the most common species here, as an example: from hatching from the egg case to becoming an adult, they go through 5 to 13 molts. With each molt, their shape and body structure change slightly, and after the final molt, wings grow and they gain the ability to fly,” James explained to Everly.
“Are those fist-sized cockroaches the result of molting?”