Chapter 39 Dragon’s Blood

Fatty looked me in the eye, and I said to him, “I don’t know anything and I don’t know why this blood is useful. Just follow behind me.” Then we both rushed into the courtyard.

The entire way forward, I held my bleeding hand down close to the ground as all of the bugs avoided us. Without the bugs bothering us, we smoothly made it to the courtyard door.

Strangely enough, there wasn’t a single bug outside the courtyard. Fatty turned and closed the door before saying, “Shit, I have to stick a note on the door to tell others that there are evil bugs inside. They’re really well-behaved and like to stay in the courtyard. Let’s quickly get out of here.”

“Don’t be so hasty. We have to find a place to rest or my blood will run out,” I said to him. “I cut too deep just now and if the blood doesn’t stop, I’ll surely die halfway down the mountain.”

Cutting yourself was also a skill, and seeing as how Little Brother could cut himself so easily, I figured he must have suffered a lot before.

Fatty looked at my hand covered in blood and clicked his tongue, “Such a waste. You really don’t know how expensive daily necessities like rice, fuel, and salt are. Where are we going now?”

“We have to go to the courtyard with the statue of Little Brother,” I said.

“Why?” Fatty asked.

“I don’t know, I just always think it’s safer to have Little Brother around,” I said. “If he’s not here, at least it’s better to have a statue of him than no statue at all.”

“You’re too fucking superstitious,” Fatty said, but he set off before me. I wondered why they built Little Brother a statue. Was it because he acted like a big bug repellent here?

Anyway, in my mind, the place where Little Brother’s statue was located should be somewhat different.

But what I didn’t think of at that time was that this different thing would give us even more of a headache.

As we moved on, I found that there were no bugs anywhere else in the entire lama temple, and we ran all the way to Little Brother’s statue without any problems. By this time, it was already bright out and Fatty could see the statue’s real face for the first time.

He looked at it and felt that it was strange. “Shit, why does the Little Brother here look so sad?” He asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said to him. “First, let’s see how bad we’re hurt.”

We entered a deserted room with no charcoal stove in it despite the fact that we were turning blue from the cold. I checked both Fatty’s back and my body as fast as I could and found that the bugs didn’t do much harm to us. Although their heads were pointed and could penetrate our skin, they didn’t really want to get their heads in. They just wanted to suck our blood. There were a few bugs full of blood on Fatty’s body, so my hands ended up covered in blood when I squashed them. All the bugs on my body were dead, but I didn’t have any time to clean them up one by one so I had to pick off the most annoying ones. I probably still had a lot more on my back, but there was nothing I could do about them. Damn, I thought to myself. This lama is really vicious having us take off our clothes so these insects can suck our blood.

Fatty treated the wound on my hand, which looked terrible at this point. There was plasma stuck to my palms and my blood was still flowing out. Fatty used his belt to tie my wrist tightly in order to stop the bleeding, then broke open my wound and said, “Why didn’t you just chop off your hand? Look, you almost cut through to the other side. This one needs stitches. Although I have good sewing skills, there’s no equipment here. This fat master can only use crude methods.”

“What do you mean?” I watched Fatty take out the pistol, open the magazine, and begin to bite one of the bullets with his teeth.

“You want to use fire again.”

“Trust me, it works.” Fatty separated the bullet from the casing, put the gunpowder aside, and then wiped the blood off of my hand with his pants. While pressing the wound with his hand, he then poured all the gunpowder on it.

I still remember that pain even now. It definitely couldn’t be described on the same level as adding salt to a wound. As it turned out, what hurt more than sprinkling salt on a wound was sprinkling gunpowder on a wound.

I almost fainted after he was done sprinkling the gunpowder.

“Where’s the light?” Fatty asked me.

I took out my lighter and gave it to him, but when he held it against the gunpowder, we found that it couldn’t be lit at all.

“Hey, the quality of this gunpowder isn’t good.”

I had broken out in a cold sweat from the pain, and when I looked at my palm, I saw that the gunpowder was soaked through with blood but the blood had really stopped flowing. That’s it, I said to myself. It’s really too difficult for Fatty to be reliable for once.

At this time, I looked at the insects carefully and found that they weren’t fireflies but very strange little beetles.

Fatty closed the door and all the windows and then dealt with the dead bugs on my back. I looked at my hand that had finally stopped bleeding and was just starting to feel relieved when I suddenly heard the windows start to shake. We looked over and found that at some point, the dense shadows we had just seen were now crawling outside the windows. But the shapes of these shadows seemed different from before.

How did they suddenly appear? Even if the insects gathered, shouldn’t there be a process? Why did this happen every time?

This time, we didn’t hesitate. Fatty opened the door a crack and a buzzing sound could be heard. He quickly closed the door, but a few bugs managed to squeeze in and immediately rushed at us. I suddenly found that it was a different flying bug this time, one that was a bit like a mosquito but even stranger in appearance. They had two very large wings and their heads were pointed, but they were much larger than those beetles just now.

Fatty flailed in the air and directly smacked the insects to the ground, but they flew up again. He came down hard and held a few of them directly in his hands. Fatty gave an “ah” and immediately spread his hands open, finding that the insects’ pointed mouth had been directly inserted into his palm.

“Fuck, don’t touch this thing, it’s worse than the others!” Fatty roared.

I just couldn’t understand it. It now seemed like a bug gathering, and they were all strange bugs at that.

As we smacked these bugs to the ground and trampled them to death, I noticed that they didn’t seem afraid of my blood.

But the number of bugs here was less than those from before and we quickly strengthened the windows and blocked the gaps. As we were fortifying the room, we saw more and more shadows on the windows and the vibration became increasingly intense.

Suddenly, I heard someone shouting in the courtyard. “Help…Help…”

I was shocked and Fatty let out a curse, “Fuck, the bugs can talk.”

Upon hearing the sound, I thought to myself, has the statue of Little Brother come alive and is now crying for help?

Bang!

Suddenly, the door was knocked open and a man covered in blood rolled in from the outside and fell to the ground, covered in all kinds of insects.

“Little Brother?” I almost cried out. “Is the statue really alive?”

<Chapter 38><Table of Contents><Chapter 40>

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Updated 12/18/2021