Dreaming for 10,000 years

Chapter 203 Drought
The weather has become increasingly weird in recent years.

Since the beginning of winter last year, the sky has been as cold as an iron pot, and not a single drop of rain has leaked out. In the first two or three months of spring, the sun was so hot that it could burn oil out of a person's spine, but there was still no rain.

It can’t be said that it didn’t rain.

It rained during the Qingming Festival a while ago. The rain was like a yellow dog peeing, just a little bit, and before the smell of earth could rise, the sun licked the ground dry.

If a month passed, Goudan's parents would squat on the ground and sigh.

just now……

My parents are gone. There is no need to sigh in the wheat fields.

After the locusts passed, all that was left in the wheat fields were the grass stubble that the locusts had eaten. They were twisted and swayed, looking like soul-calling banners stuck all over the ground.

Goudan looked up at the yellow sky. The locusts in the sky had turned the clouds into turbid egg yolk. The rotten smell at the tip of his nose reminded him of his parents and elder sister.

The once bustling village was now silent, and Goudan was waiting quietly.

He had nothing left but his last breath and all that was left was to wait.

Waiting for the time to come, waiting... the last breath leaking out from between the fingernails.

His consciousness gradually faded. People who died of starvation do not feel pain, because they no longer feel hungry.

Just then, he suddenly heard a noise.

Is it a rat?
In the past few months, everything that could be eaten has been eaten up. Only rats are left. People eat rats, and rats eat people.

As Goudan was thinking, he saw someone push open the broken door: "There are still people alive here."

Afterwards he was picked up, carried to the yard, and fed some rice soup.

The moment the rice soup poured into his throat, his toes curled up in pain - the warmth was like a rusty blade scraping the blood scab in his throat.

But there was not much rice soup, only half a bowl.

"Hungry..." The clay bowl clanged against his broken teeth.

"Don't feed him too much, he's very weak now!" another person said, "Feed him too much, he might die of bloating!"

"I know!" said the person who pushed the door open earlier.

After downing half a bowl of rice soup, Goudan suddenly felt a wave of heat in his stomach. He vaguely saw wheat seedlings growing out of the cracks in his bones and locusts eating the newly grown shoots.

Shi Fei lifted the door curtain of the east room, and saw a half-dried corpse lying inside, with maggots popping out from between his fingernails.

Shi Fei sighed, looking at the skinny boy of about 13 or 14, whose ribs could be used as a washboard, and said to Ah Ruo, "This is the first living person we have met in the two days since we came to Shandong."

After he and A Ruo left Tanzhou, they headed north, passing through Wuhan, Lu'an, Fuyang, Xuzhou, and finally arrived in southern Shandong.

When in Xuzhou, Shi Fei saw many people fleeing there. He learned from them that the drought in Shandong was very severe, but he did not expect it to be so severe.

It was clearly just a drought, but it caused countless people to flee famine, some even "selling their children and daughters, and robbing people for food when they were hungry."

After arriving in Shandong, Shi Fei saw something even worse than he heard.

The cracked dry land was like a torn sheepskin, and a child's finger could be inserted into each crack. The rustling sound of the locusts rolling along the ground was like the King of Hell shaking out the book of life and death.

Droughts are often accompanied by locust plagues. Once a locust plague occurs, tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of locusts will form a locust belt tens of kilometers long and wide, eating everything edible.

Shi Fei wanted to find someone to ask for clarification, and after walking for two days, he finally found a living person, Goudan.

They passed through seven villages along the way. Broken lanterns hung from the eaves swayed in the wind, filled with brown sacs of locust eggs. Ah Ruo used a long knife to pry open a pottery jar on a stove. What came out was not stale grain, but a black mass of locusts.

The cricket is the larva of the locust.

"Where the locusts pass, there are three lights."

Drought and locust plague together constitute the tragic situation in Shandong!
In the village where the boy lived, some fled and some died. Goudan was the only one left. It was estimated that his family had missed the opportunity to flee the famine and had no energy to do so. They could only wait to die in the village.

Shi Fei looked up at the cloud of insects that was always hovering above the land. He suddenly grabbed a locust and crushed it. What flowed out of the locust's abdominal cavity was not grass juice, but pus and blood mixed with black threads.

"Something's wrong." He shook off the sticky liquid on his fingertips, and a wisp of green smoke came out of the insect corpse as it fell to the ground.

Ah Ruo closed the can of rice soup on her back, and the scorpion-shaped silver pendant suddenly felt hot at her collar.

That's the insect's warning!

He nodded and agreed, "Once the locusts cover the sky, they will move with the wind. Why would they stay here forever? The Scorpion God told me that there is a unique scent in the wind."

The rice soup was prepared by him and Shi Fei in advance. It can satisfy hunger and quench thirst, which is just right for the fragile stomachs of hungry people. People who have been hungry for too long cannot eat too much at once. They need to eat liquid food for a few days, and then they can eat some food after their stomachs have adapted.

Locust nymphs are the name for locusts in Miao villages.

"Just keep an eye on him. When he wakes up, I'll go and try!" Shi Fei said to A Ruo.

Ah Ruo nodded upon hearing this.

Shi Fei leaped lightly and flew towards the sky like a big bird.

The energy around him was surging like a fire, and red flames burst out from his palms, condensing into a thirty-foot-long fire dragon in mid-air.

As the fire dragon swept through the cloud of insects carrying flames, the strange patterns on the wing membranes of thousands of locusts suddenly lit up - each insect wing was branded with a tiny yellow talisman.

“The wind is coming!”

As Shi Fei shouted, the clouds split open into a green tornado. The wind helped the fire, and wherever the whirlwind carrying sparks passed, the smell of burning mixed with the stench of decay.

The burned insect corpses fell to the ground, but turned into quicksand before touching the ground and sank into the soil!

The fire dragon ravaged the locusts and soon burned a big hole in the sky, but the number of locusts was too large, and the locusts burned to death by Shi Fei were just a drop in the bucket.

Even if Shi Fei could burn 10,000 locusts to death in one second, it would take tens of thousands of seconds for the locusts to cover the sky and the sun, which would be enough for Shi Fei to burn for half a day.

What's more... Shi Fei saw that the newly emerged locusts from the dry soil above the ground were covered with talismans.

These living spells pieced together a distorted outline of a yellow robe in the air, and a strange sound between a flute and a whimper seeped out from the cracks in the ground.

Shi Fei controlled the fire dragon to crash into the yellow phantom formed by the swarm of insects.

The flames licked the void and left behind charred finger marks, as if an invisible object was tearing the sky apart.

Every time the locust ashes touched the ground, more slimy maggots pushed up the rock, with asphalt-like substances flowing from their shells, gradually forming winding yellow streams across the wilderness.

In the flames, locusts fell from the sky and rose from the ground again, neither increasing nor decreasing, and continued to circle in the sky, as if mocking Shi Fei!

Shi Fei saw the outline of the yellow robe and the distorted horizon a hundred miles away. Countless yellow-robed believers were crawling out from the folds of drought, and their prayers made every grain of sand grow compound eyes.

He already knew who was behind the locust plague!
The Lord in Yellow, Hastur!

(End of this chapter)