Gan Tang hit his head against the edge of the tiled stove.
At that moment, he had just woken up in a sudden jolt from a terrifyingly realistic nightmare. The lingering horror still clung to his nerves, and as he leaped to his feet, the rough edge of the tile cut a small gash on his scalp. He could feel the warm liquid trickling down from his temple, yet strangely, he felt no pain—only a hazy darkness clouding his vision. He blinked hard, and only then did his sight return to normal.
“It was a dream.”
His lips moved slightly, letting out a faint murmur.
Perhaps it was because he had fallen asleep by the stove, with the fire baking him the whole time—his throat was raw with pain, and his lips and cheeks were so dry they felt as if they were covered in a layer of plastic.
“Everything was just a dream.”
Gan Tang repeated to himself, almost neurotically.
But could a dream really feel that real?
He pressed a hand against his abdomen. His nerves were wound so tightly that, for a moment, he truly felt as if something was growing inside him—swelling and multiplying, a cluster of egg-like shapes bulging beneath his thin skin and flesh.
Gan Tang collapsed to his knees, dry-heaving a few times, but only managed to spit out some bitter, pale-yellow stomach acid. Fortunately, after vomiting, the unbearable sense of suffocation eased slightly. He reached for his stomach again, only to find that the swollen sensation had disappeared.
Yet, his body still felt unbearably heavy.
Outside the window, daylight had already flooded in—it looked like it was already noon.
Had he really slept that long without realizing it?
Gan Tang, still dazed, turned to look at the stove. The flames that had once engulfed Cen Zibai’s head had now died down, leaving behind only a few smoldering embers.
And the monster’s head—now nothing more than a charred, blackened skull—lay motionless in the depths of the stove. Its hollow eye sockets still seemed to hold that same greedy, clinging gaze.
Without a change in expression, Gan Tang picked up the iron tongs, reached into the stove, and crushed the now-crispy skull. Then, he covered what remained with the leftover ashes, erasing the last traces of its existence.
With that done, he quickly stepped out of the kitchen.
Falling asleep hadn’t been part of the plan—Gan Tang clearly remembered that he had only dealt with Cen Zibai’s head. The rest of the body was still lying in the main hall.
If his grandma woke up now and opened the door, she would see a headless corpse right in front of her.
That would be terrifying, wouldn’t it?
She was already exhausted, having stayed up all night. If she got such a fright, her body might not be able to handle it…
The thought sent a wave of nervousness and worry crashing through Gan Tang.
Luckily, his worst fears didn’t come true.
When he reached the doorway, he saw that his grandma’s bedroom door was still tightly shut. It seemed that she was truly worn out from the previous night.
Gan Tang let out a slow breath of relief, but his expression quickly tensed again. He had to take advantage of this time to dispose of Cen Zibai’s body.
Unlike the head, a body that large would need… special treatment. Dismemberment, perhaps, to fit it into the stove properly.
But that wasn’t a problem—this wasn’t his first time doing something like this. He should be even more skilled at handling it now… right?
Countless chaotic thoughts swirled through his mind like falling snowflakes. Somewhere deep inside, he felt that something about him was off. But his overworked brain could no longer spare the energy to figure out exactly what it was.
“Ah.”
Gan Tang suddenly stopped in his tracks.
He stood in the main hall, looking down at the spot where Cen Zibai’s body had fallen.
It was empty.
The boy’s body had disappeared without a trace.
All that remained was a pool of sticky blood on the floor—like a deliberate mark left behind to prove that everything had truly happened. That none of it was just Gan Tang’s imagination.
Flies buzzed over the blood, rising and falling, refusing to leave.
Gan Tang’s blood ran cold.
A chill crept up his spine, making him shiver despite the sweltering summer heat.
He gripped the bloodstained scissors in his hand, his breathing growing rapid and heavy.
He had seen the insect monsters before.
He had seen bodiless heads, using the writhing creatures that grew from their severed necks to move—slithering, creeping like snakes.
And now, as he stared at the bloodstain where the headless body once lay, the image appeared vividly in his mind.
He could almost see it—how that thing had silently risen from the floor.
How, from the ragged stump of its neck, countless wriggling parasites had sprouted, their sharp, twitching limbs reaching outward.
How, guided by those writhing creatures, the corpse had staggered forward, step by step—
—until it disappeared into the shadows of the room.
Maybe, at this very moment, that headless corpse was still lurking in some corner of the house, greedily watching him…
“Tang Boy?”
Almost at the same instant those eerie and terrifying images flashed through his mind, Gan Tang suddenly heard a low, hoarse call.
Out of the corner of his eye, a tall shadow appeared—
Gan Tang’s heart clenched in an instant.
His mind went blank, and purely on instinct, he tightened his grip on the scissors and stabbed straight toward the figure.
“Shit—”
Schhk.
A startled curse, mixed with the sound of something being pierced, rang out at the same time.
Someone, in a panic, grabbed Gan Tang’s wrist. His pupils trembled for a moment, and it took a long while before he could finally make out the shocked face of the person before him.
It was Yu Huai.
…It wasn’t the headless corpse of “Cen Zibai,” it wasn’t an insect monster—it was just Yu Huai.
Yu Huai looked absolutely terrified.
The bloodstained scissors were now firmly lodged in a tattered notebook Yu Huai held in his hands. Just now, he had instinctively lifted the notebook in front of him—if he hadn’t, the scissors might have gone straight into his forehead.
“I—I f*cking—Tang Boy, what the hell are you doing?!”
Yu Huai clutched Gan Tang’s wrist, exclaiming in shock.
Having narrowly escaped death, he was still reeling from fear when he took a closer look at the boy standing before him. And then, his expression grew even more horrified—
Gan Tang looked absolutely terrifying.
The boy’s head, hands—his entire body—were covered in visible wounds, his face smeared with so much blood that his real appearance was almost unrecognizable. His gaze was empty, pupils dilated so wide that his eyes looked like two pitch-black voids, devoid of any light. His clothes, too, were stained with so much blood that their original color was impossible to discern. The edges of his clothing were even scorched in places. At the same time, an unsettling, burnt stench clung to him.
“Bugs.”
Then, Yu Huai heard Gan Tang rasp in a hoarse murmur.
Rather than answering him, it seemed more like Gan Tang was muttering to himself.
“Bugs… I killed all the bugs… That thing wasn’t Cen Zibai—it was a bug… The bug wanted to drag me into the well…”
As he spoke, as his mind slowly regained clarity, the blank expression on Gan Tang’s face finally crumbled, revealing the fear and vulnerability that a boy his age should have. His body trembled violently, and suddenly, his legs gave out, sending him collapsing to the ground. Large, heavy tears welled up in his eyes and spilled over.
With a clatter, the scissors slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor.
Only then did Gan Tang realize that his hands were already cramping.
His heart pounded wildly in his chest, like a broken machine running out of control.
He struggled to form words, desperately trying to explain to the dumbstruck Yu Huai what had happened earlier. But to his surprise, the moment he mentioned the bugs, Yu Huai’s expression changed.
“So… you ran into them too?”
Yu Huai asked, his face dark with seriousness.
Yu Huai was, in everyday life, someone who loved getting involved in excitement.
Simply put, he was the type to poke his nose into everything out of sheer boredom.
This village was filled with elderly folks, leaving him with almost no peers to talk or play with. On top of that, he and his crazy father were one of the rare families in the village with an outsider surname. So even though Yu Huai had grown up here, for the most part, he always felt like an oil drop in water—forever out of place.
Things like Uncle Xijiao’s supposed corpse revival or Uncle Zhang Er’s disappearance—those were the kinds of village spectacles Yu Huai would normally never miss.
But this time, from beginning to end, he had not taken part in the village’s latest “big event.”
The reason was simple. That day, after hurriedly saying goodbye to Gan Tang and sneaking back home, he looked up—and met the icy, sharp gaze of his insane father.
His father had suddenly seemed… a little less crazy.
It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened.
Every year, there were one or two occasions when his dad would suddenly snap out of his lunacy, regaining clarity for a short while just to pass on a few cryptic messages to him. But these moments never lasted long—the longest time had been just over ten minutes, the shortest only a sentence or two.
This time, at least, his dad had managed to string together a few complete sentences before slipping back into madness.
…
“He first asked me what year it was,” Yu Huai said, “and then… his face changed.
“I mean, I’ve seen him look terrifying plenty of times, after being crazy for so many years, but I’ve never—never—seen him look that scared.
“It was like he’d seen a ghost.”
Yu Huai spoke.
“Then he told me to run.”
Inside his grandma’s hall, the dark-skinned boy deliberately lowered his voice. Even though there was no one else around, he acted as if he were afraid of something eavesdropping on their conversation.
“He said the time had come. This year was that thing’s… what was it… its breeding season. He also said he could smell something on me—that scent was the mark the creature in the well used to tag its prey. He said I had to escape before the monster returned underground. Otherwise, I would definitely be dragged into the bottom of the well…”
Yu Huai swallowed. “To be honest, my dad was talking really fast, all jumbled up, just kept yelling at me to run, to get as far away as possible. At first, I thought I had misunderstood, that he was still just crazy. But then… then the dog in my yard started barking. It was howling, like it was in agony. So I figured I should go check it out…”
As he recalled what had happened not long ago, all the color drained from Yu Huai’s face.
Back then, he could clearly feel how desperate his father was, nearly frantic. However, years of insanity had long since robbed the man of proper speech.
The more desperately his father tried to explain, the more incoherent and disjointed his words became. After listening for a long time, Yu Huai had only managed to understand two things: There was a monster in the well and they had to escape before the bugs dragged everyone underground.
Even when the dog was barking, he hadn’t thought much of it. His family was dirt poor—if someone were trying to steal something, there wasn’t much to take anyway.
But when Yu Huai stepped out into the yard to check on the skinny dog, he was stunned.
He saw a chicken. He had no idea how long it had been dead—its feathers were already gone. Its abdomen was splayed open on both sides like a kite, but inside, there was nothing but a writhing mass of thread-like worms.
The chicken was hunched over the dog’s head, its wriggling parasites squirming down into the dog’s ears, eyes, and even its desperate, howling mouth.
Before Yu Huai could even react, the dog’s agonized cries stopped.
He stood there, frozen, watching as the dog suddenly fell silent.
The chicken slid off its head and began crawling slowly across the ground, inching toward the corner of the wall—until it disappeared.
And the dog, as if nothing had happened, remained standing there motionless.
“…I called its name,” Yu Huai said quietly. “It even responded.”
If he hadn’t seen the worms burrow into the dog with his own eyes, he might have simply thought the dog was unusually quiet that day. He would have never realized that beneath its warm fur, something else had already taken over. That underneath its skin, clusters of worms were gnawing away at its flesh, controlling its body.
Unfortunately, by the time Yu Huai realized something was terribly wrong and stumbled back into the house, his father had already reverted to his usual deranged state. He couldn’t get any more answers.
“This… isn’t right, Tang Boy.”
Yu Huai stared at Gan Tang, his voice trembling.
“Something is really wrong here. My dad may be crazy, but he actually did research that well in the back mountain. We still have a bunch of notebooks about it at home. But I can’t read… Tang Boy, can you take a look? Can you see what he wrote?”
The boy nervously licked his lips.
“And then… let’s get the hell out of here.”
“When I came over, the village was way too quiet. So many livestock, so many people—not a single sound…”
“They… they probably all turned into bugs, didn’t they?”
