Volume 7 Chapter 33: The Secret Under the Moss (Part 2)

I was curious and asked Ning, “What is he doing down there?”

“I don’t know.” A-Ning looked at the miner’s lamp below with a complex expression on his face. “He went down without saying a word. I don’t understand your friend.”

I sighed. Since that conversation in the Devil City, Mian Youbing has said even less. Recently, his face has even frozen, and no expression has ever appeared. I don’t know what this person is thinking in his head. Maybe he really is like Dingzhu Zhuoma said: in his own world, there has always been only him, so he has no need to reveal anything at all.

Looking at the light down below, it should be on a branch, swaying in the wind. I was a little worried that he might fall, and then I thought to myself, this kid is a professional missing person, would he take this opportunity to slip away by himself?

Ah-ning and the others are inexperienced, this is really a bit of a mystery… I looked at the swaying light down below, and I couldn’t see clearly whether he was there or not.

Thinking of this, I couldn’t rest easy, so I turned on the miner’s lamp and said to Ah-ning that I would go down and take a look. Then, I carefully descended, holding onto the tree trunk, in the pouring rain.

When I reached the edge of the lamp, I looked around, and my heart sank.

There was no one there!

The area under the tree where we had been sheltering from the rain was empty, and there was no sign of the oil bottle!

“Damn it!” I cursed. “Did he really run away?” I was so angry that I couldn’t help it. This person is so rude. Compared to the fat guy, who would say hello to you before doing something bad, this person simply doesn’t consider us to exist.

I was so angry that I was about to call the fat guy and the others down to discuss a countermeasure, but suddenly the entire branch moved, and the oil bottle poked out from the darkness above the plant cover, startling me. I looked up and saw that he was standing on top of the cover, not sure what he was looking at.

After a false alarm, I let out a long breath. He saw me come down and was slightly stunned, but then beckoned me to come up.

I climbed up and saw that the surface of the plant covering, which was covered with green moss, had been cut open by him with a knife. The moss was scraped off, and a large number of vines inside were cut off, revealing what was wrapped inside. A large number of tiny grasshoppers could be seen in the rainwater rushing down these vines.

I didn’t know what Mung Oil Bottle was looking for in this pile of stuff, but I could smell a very bad smell. I was about to take a closer look when Mung Oil Bottle tore open a large piece of dead vine. In an instant, I felt my eyes sting, and a large mass of bugs poured out of the opening.

I was so scared that I quickly backed away, almost falling from the tree. Fortunately, it was raining heavily, and the grasshoppers were washed away by the torrential rain. I held onto a branch and covered my nose before going over again. I saw the mass of things wrapped up inside.

It was the remains of an animal wrapped in a mass of rotting fur. The fur had turned black and I didn’t know what kind of animal it was. Muyoubing stuck a dagger into the fur and stirred it around. He found that the remains had rotted away completely, and that the skin was just bones. The vines had grown into its body and tangled around its bones, tightly entwining the remains with the tree. It was covered in moss, so we thought it was just a normal plant symbiosis on the tree, going down to shelter from the rain.

“I don’t know what kind of animal it was, it was huge, probably infected by the blood of these bugs, and before it died, it lay on the tree, attracting all the bugs around it, sucking them dry, and then the bugs rested on the corpse, waiting for the next victim.” Mian Youping frowned and said to me.

I listened and thought about the time we were hiding from the rain below, and I felt a wave of nausea. To Mian Youping: ”Are the ticks here so powerful? The corpse is all rotten, and they haven’t died yet?”

Muyoubing shook his head, probably indicating that he didn’t know, and looked down at the pile of bones again. He didn’t know what else to think, so he suddenly pulled out his black gold ancient knife, cut his palm, squeezed the wound, and blood flowed from his palm. Then he grabbed my sleeve and smeared the blood on it.

I was stunned for a moment, not realizing what he meant. He suddenly leaned forward, his long fingers sticking out, and put his bloody hand into the bones under the vines.

Suddenly, countless grasshoppers swarmed out like a tide. I screamed in fright, and in a flash, his hand pulled something out of the skeleton.