The fat guy exchanged a glance with me, and I said to him, “I don’t know anything, and I don’t know why this blood is useful. Just come with me.” After saying that, we rushed into the courtyard.

I kept my bleeding hand low, close to the ground, and moved forward. All the insects avoided us completely; in fact, there wasn’t a single insect on us, and we made it to the courtyard entrance smoothly.

Strangely, there wasn’t a single insect outside the courtyard. The fat guy turned back to close the door and said, “Damn, I need to put up a sign on the door to warn others that there are nasty bugs inside. These bugs are really well-behaved; they only like to stay in the courtyard. Let’s get out of here quickly.”

“Stop complaining; we need to find a place to rest first, or I’ll bleed out,” I replied. “That cut was too deep, and after all that distance down the mountain, if I don’t stop the bleeding, I’ll definitely die halfway up.”

Cutting oneself is an art in itself. The way that guy could cut himself so stylishly, I bet he had endured a lot of suffering before.

The fat guy looked at my hand, which was covered in blood, and clicked his tongue, saying, “What a waste. You really don’t know how precious food and supplies are when you’re not in charge. Where do we go now?”

I said, “We need to go to the courtyard where the statue of that guy is.”

The fat guy asked, “Why?”

I replied, “I don’t know; I just feel like a place with that guy would be safer. If he’s not here, at least having his statue is better than not having one.”

The fat guy said, “You’re really superstitious.” Saying that, he moved ahead of me. I wondered why they would erect a statue for that guy; was it just because he had once led a great retreat against the bugs here?

In my mind, the place where the statue of that guy stood should be somewhat different.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that this difference would give us even more headaches.

As we continued forward, I noticed that there were no insects in other parts of the Lama Temple. We ran all the way to the statue of that guy, and by then, it was already dawn. It was the fat guy’s first time seeing the true appearance of the statue.

He looked at it and found it strange, saying, “Damn, why does this guy look so tragic here?”

I said, “Don’t worry about that for now; check how my injuries are doing.”

We entered a room, and since it had been abandoned, there was no charcoal stove inside. We were freezing, and our faces began to turn blue. I quickly checked the fat guy’s back and my own, discovering that the insects hadn’t done much harm to us. Although their heads were sharp enough to penetrate our skin, they didn’t seem to want to actually dig in; they just wanted to suck some blood. The fat guy had a few insects that had already gorged themselves, and when I slapped one off, my hand was covered in blood. All the insects on me were already dead; I didn’t have time to remove them one by one, so I just slapped off the most bothersome ones directly. I was sure there were many more on my back, but I was at my wit’s end, thinking: Damn, that Lama is really vicious, making us take off our clothes so these bugs can easily suck our blood.

The fat guy treated the wound on my hand. My hand was a ghastly sight, plasma sticking to my palm, and blood was still flowing out continuously. The fat guy tightly bound my wrist with his own belt to stop the bleeding, then pried open my wound and said, “Why don’t you just chop off your hand? Look, you’ve almost cut through to the back of your hand. This needs stitches. Although I’m pretty good with needles and thread, there’s no equipment here. I can only use a makeshift method.”

“What do you want to do?” I asked as I watched the fat guy pull out a handgun, open the magazine, and start biting it with his teeth.

“Are you going to use fire again?”

“Trust me, it works.” The fat guy unscrewed the bullet tip, set the gunpowder aside, wiped the blood off my hand with his pants, pressed down hard on the wound, and then poured all the gunpowder on it.

I still remember that pain; it was definitely beyond what can be described as pouring salt on a wound. It was much worse than that—pouring gunpowder on the wound.

After he finished, I almost fainted. The fat guy asked, “Where’s the fire?”

I took out my lighter and handed it to him. He flicked it into the gunpowder, but found it wouldn’t ignite at all.

“Hey, this gunpowder is of poor quality.”

I was sweating from the pain and looked at my palm; the gunpowder was completely soaked with blood. However, the bleeding had indeed stopped. I thought to myself, it’s hard to expect the fat guy to be reliable even once.

At that moment, I carefully looked at those bugs and realized they were not fireflies, but a particularly strange kind of beetle.

The fat guy closed all the windows and then went to deal with the dead bugs on my back. I glanced at my non-bleeding hand and had just started to breathe a sigh of relief when suddenly, I heard the windows of the house start to rattle. We looked toward the windows and saw that they were now crawling with those dense shadows we had just seen outside, but the shapes seemed different from what we had just encountered.

Why did they appear so suddenly again? Even if the bugs gathered, shouldn’t there be a process? Why does it always happen like this?

This time, we didn’t hesitate. The fat guy opened the door a crack, and with a buzz, a few bugs squeezed in through the gap before he quickly shut the door. The bugs that squeezed in darted straight toward us, and I suddenly realized that this time, the bugs that flew in were a different kind. They looked somewhat like mosquitoes but were even stranger, with two particularly large wings, pointed heads, and were much bigger than the beetles we had seen earlier.

The fat guy swatted them out of the air, directly smashing a few of them to the ground. When they flew up again, he swung his hand down hard and managed to grab a few in his hand. The fat guy exclaimed, “Ah!” and immediately opened his palm, discovering that the sharp beak of the bug had punctured his palm.

“Damn it, don’t touch this thing! This one is worse than the last!” the fat guy said.

I simply couldn’t understand; it felt like a bug convention was happening, and they were all strange bugs.

We smashed the bugs to the ground and stomped them to death. I noticed that these bugs didn’t seem to be afraid of my blood.

However, there were fewer bugs here than the ones we had seen earlier. We quickly reinforced the windows, jamming the gaps with a lot of debris, and as we did so, I could see the shadows on the window getting denser and shaking more violently.

Suddenly, I heard someone shouting in the yard. “Help… Help…” I was taken aback, and the chubby guy cursed, “Damn, this bug can talk.” The voice didn’t sound right, and I thought to myself: Could it be that the statue of the young man has come to life? The statue is shouting for help. Bang… Suddenly, the door was crashed open, and a blood-soaked person rolled in from outside, collapsing on the ground, covered in all sorts of bugs.

“Young man?” I almost shouted, “The statue really came to life?”