Volume 7 Chapter 32 The Secret Under the Moss (Part 1)

Aning said that she was going to pull my belt, and I was anxious. I didn’t know what she wanted to do, so I quickly covered my pants and said, “What do you want to do?”

A-Ning said, “Those bugs are a kind of tick. It’s very troublesome to be bitten by them. If you and Fatso get bitten, you’d better take off your pants quickly if you don’t want to sleep on your stomach in the future. If it crawls into your crotch, your life will be over!”

I really felt a little tickle in my sensitive area when I heard that, but I couldn’t let A-Ning handle it for me. I still held on to my pants tightly and said to A-Ning, “Then give me the knife and I’ll handle it myself!”

“What do you think of your own butt?“ said Aning.

I thought to myself that I couldn’t show you even if I wanted to. At this time, the fat guy next to me started scratching his butt and said, ‘Stop arguing,’ and took the knife from Aning’s hand and said to me, ‘This woman is right.

’Can you handle it?” Aning asked.

“Just heat the knife and burn it. I’ve been in line at least once, let alone letting cattle and sheep go. You should also check yourself. You have delicate skin and are most attractive to these bugs.”

He pointed to the other side of the tree branch and told me to go over there. It wasn’t raining too hard, but the tree branch didn’t seem very sturdy.

I climbed there and looked back. It seemed that Aning and the others could no longer see me. The fat man’s face was distorted, and he shook it off and took off his pants. He said to me, “Hurry up, hurry up, I’m going to be bitten to death!”

I put the miner’s lamp on a branch and looked at it and was dumbfounded. I saw that his thighs and buttocks were covered with blood buns the size of peas, and some were as big as broad beans.

“What’s wrong with you!” I suddenly felt like vomiting and covered my mouth: “This is too exaggerated. How could you climb in so much?”

“These pants are too small. When I was moving rocks in the Devil City, my pants ripped!” He shook his pants: ”There was a big tear. I said it was cool to be ripped, and I never dealt with it. I forgot about it when I entered the forest. It’s really a sin—hurry up! This bug can suck blood for two or three days, and can suck up to six or seven times its own volume. Thirty of them can suck the blood out of a rabbit. I’m already anemic, but I can’t stand this tossing.”

I picked up the knife, but I felt my stomach churning, and I didn’t know how to cut it. I gestured for a long time, and then I wanted to pick it up with my hands. The fat man hurriedly tucked his buttocks away and said, “Don’t pull it. It bites into the meat and burrows its head into the skin to suck. If you pull its head, it will break inside, just like a snow-white hair. You have to do as I just said, burn the knife with fire and scald it!”

I nodded, and I even forgot to scratch my own itch. I took out my lighter and burned the tip of the dagger red, and then I burned the bugs that were sucking like balloons one by one. The bugs were afraid of the heat, and as soon as they got close, they pulled their heads out. I fell down at once and beat them to death with the handle of the knife. Every time he was scalded, the fat man would scream in pain. By the end, I could see that his legs were limp, and so was my hand.

It took us half an hour to finish, and the rain had subsided. I had cleaned the fat man’s thighs and buttocks, and Pan Zi wanted to help after checking himself. But as soon as he came over, the branches started to tremble, so he had to give up. He told us to disinfect after we finished, otherwise it would be easy to get a cold or a fever.

After we were done, we put disinfectant on the fat guy’s legs and I reluctantly took off my pants so he could treat me. To be honest, squatting in that position and having people look at my butt was really embarrassing, but there was nothing I could do. But I was lucky that I was only bitten once, and it was treated in just over ten minutes.

After we put our pants back on, we climbed back up to the others, both of us smiling awkwardly. Pan Zi asked how we were doing, and I nodded and said that I was okay, that I hadn’t been bitten. They asked if they had been bitten.

Pan Zi and Ning had only been bitten a few times on their arms, while Mufeng had not been bitten at all. “Ticks have a very sensitive sense of smell and can smell your blood type. It seems that you two are more delicious,” explained Ning.

I thought about what had just happened and was embarrassed, so I changed the subject and asked her, “Why are there so many ticks here? Aren’t these things lurking in the grass? Why are they gathering on this tree? Do they suck tree sap too?

Blood-sucking creatures are usually found in the grass, because animals pass by more often, and there are almost none on trees.

A-Ning shook her head, indicating that she didn’t understand either: “However, there are these bugs here, and we must be careful in the future. These bugs are the most annoying blood-sucking insects. Other things like mosquitoes and leeches rarely kill their hosts, but these bugs can suck the blood out of their hosts. I saw a giraffe die from this kind of thing in Africa last time I was there. The body was covered in blood blisters, it was terrifying. As soon as we got close, all the ticks swarmed towards us, black and dense, like shadows on the ground moving. The guide at the time was so scared that he used the fire extinguisher in the car to block them, then drove away in a panic.

I thought of the fat guy’s butt, and then thought about the scene that Aning described, and couldn’t help but shudder.

Just then, I suddenly realized that one person was missing.

I asked him where he had gone. Ning pointed with his chin down below, and I saw that Mian Youbing had climbed down to the plant cover where we had taken shelter from the rain earlier, and was looking at something with a miner’s lamp.