84: Chapter 84 I'll haunt you even as a ghost

Under the mottled spots of light, that patch of red even shimmered with a certain flowing luster, like a red satin ruffled by the wind.

"It's fruit! Brother Fan didn't lie!" Xiao Qin quickened her pace in surprise, directly overtaking Lili and rushing to the very front.

Lili also quickened her pace.

The soil under her feet became looser and looser, and when her boot soles sank in, she could feel that the soil layer underneath was hollow.

But she couldn't care about anything else.

There was only one thought in her mind:

Grab.

First come, first served; whoever picks more gets the bigger credit.

She pushed aside the last clump of bushes, and her vision suddenly opened up.

An open space covering an area of at least about thirty square meters appeared before her eyes.

Then, she saw clearly what that "red" actually was.

It wasn't fruit.

It was a layer of living, flowing red carpet composed of millions of individual creatures.

Mutant red fire ants.

Each ant was three times the size of a normal ant, close to a plump soybean.

The entire clearing was a gigantic anthill.

Those densely packed small holes on the ground were the entry and exit points leading to the underground anthills.

And Xiao Qin, who had rushed to the very front, had her right foot already stepping on the loose soil on the outer periphery of the anthill.

A scout ant's antennae touched her bare ankle.

The chemical signal was transmitted within 0.3 seconds.

The next second.

"Ah——!"

A miserable scream, so shrill that it didn't sound like it could be made by a human, came out.

It wasn't the kind of scream from being hit by a stone.

It wasn't the kind of scream from being cut by a knife.

It was a piercing scream squeezed out from the gaps of the bones, carrying extreme despair and agony.

Tens of thousands of mutant red fire ants gushed out from the caves underfoot.

It wasn't a sparse few.

It was a wave of red, gushing out simultaneously from every hole under Xiao Qin's feet, climbing upwards along her instep, ankle, and lower leg at a speed visible to the naked eye.

The moment each fire ant bit down, a tiny white dot first appeared on the surface of the skin, and then that white dot expanded into a soybean-sized pustule within a few seconds.

Not just one.

DozeNs, hundreds of them, appeared simultaneously.

Xiao Qin looked down at her legs; her entire lower leg could no longer show its original skin color.

A dense, overlapping layer of red insect bodies clung to her skin.

The jaws of every fire ant were deeply embedded into her flesh, frantically tearing and injecting venom.

Xiao Qin's nervous system completely collapsed.

Her legs were as if all the bones had been pulled out from her knees, and she knelt directly in the exact center of the anthill.

The moment she knelt, her hands braced against the ground.

And her palms pressed squarely onto another anthill exit.

Ants gushed out from between her fingers, frantically climbing all the way up her arms.

"Ah! Ahhh~! No... My hands..."

Xiao Qin hysterically shook her arms, but the bite force of the fire ants' jaws far exceeded the tolerance limit of her skin; they couldn't be shaken off or pulled down.

She frantically used her other hand to dig at them, her ten fingernails snapping directly from the violent scratching, and fresh blood mixed with ant fluids into a bloody mess.

But the ant colony didn't care about blood at all.

To them, blood was a pheromone.

More ants gushed over from all directions.

Xiao Qin's lips began to swell at a visible speed in the fifth second.

Her originally thin lips looked like they had been injected with an overdose of hyaluronic acid, expanding to three times their normal thickness, their surface radiating a sickly purplish-red.

Her throat was rapidly narrowing.

Every breath was like an air leak, "Hiss~ Hiss~"

In the twentieth second, large patches of coalescing red papules broke out all over her skin.

In the thirtieth second.

Xiao Qin's eyeballs suddenly rolled back, and her whole body fell backward, crashing stiffly into the exact center of the anthill.

The moment she fell.

The red wave surged up from all directions, covering her entire body with a thick, constantly writhing living carpet in less than two seconds.

She wasn't dead yet.

She was still convulsing.

But she could no longer make any sound.

Lili stood three meters away, witnessing the entire process of Xiao Qin going from standing to falling.

The whole process took no more than half a minute.

Her brain completely crashed within this half minute.

Until a scout ant crawled onto the back of her own foot.

"Hiss~"

A burning sensation came from the back of her foot.

Lili looked down and saw three mutant red fire ants crawling up along her instep.

The one in the front had already bitten through the skin on the back of her foot. A needle-tip-sized wound was swelling at an extremely fast speed, and the surrounding skin blistered as if scalded by boiling oil.

"No...!"

Lili desperately lifted her leg, turned around, and ran.

But every step she took on the loose soil crushed several anthill exits beneath her feet.

Fire ants frantically gushed out from the crushed holes, running faster than she could.

She ran less than five steps.

Her right foot stepped into a fist-sized main passageway of an anthill.

Her entire leg sank straight down to the knee.

Ants gushing out from the underground anthill crawled straight up from her heels.

The fire ants bit frantically as if they had found a vein of ore.

Lili's miserable screams changed pitch.

From a shriek to a howl, and from a howl to a whimper.

Every inch of skin on her lower leg from the knee down was covered by red insect bodies. They weren't just crawling on the surface; they were embedded into the flesh.

Lili's pupils shrank sharply.

Anaphylactic shock arrived right on time in the eighth second.

Her lips, eyelids, and auricles began to swell simultaneously. Her face was distorted and deformed, and her carefully maintained facial features were catalyzed by the toxin into a terrifying, swollen mask that was almost unrecognizable.

Her trachea was completely sealing shut.

Lili fell down.

Her hands still maintained the posture of tearing at her trouser legs, her ten fingers curled like chicken claws, and her fingernails were full of flesh and skin fragments she had dug out herself.

Xiao Liu ran away.

She was the quickest to react among the five people.

The moment Lili and Xiao Qin fell, she didn't hesitate for even a second, turning around and running madly in the direction she had come from.

She ran about eight meters.

Eight meters.

In civilized society, this was a distance that could be crossed in just two steps.

At the edge of this anthill, eight meters was the dividing line between life and death.

But she didn't run across.

Her foot tripped over an aerial root covered by rotten leaves, and her whole body lunged forward and collapsed onto the ground.

The spot where she lay face down happened to be right above another branch of the anthill.

Fire ants crawled in along her collar, cuffs, trouser legs, and all the gaps between her clothes and skin.

Then crawling in from her nostrils.

From her ear canals.

From her mouth, which was wide open from screaming.

The ants blocked her oral cavity and throat.

Her body arched violently on the ground, her limbs frantically clawing at the rotten leaves and loose soil on the ground.

Her fingers dug into the mud, her joints twisted to an abnormal angle.

Then, she froze.

The two male employees fell almost simultaneously.

They didn't even have Xiao Liu's eight-meter escape distance.

One of them collapsed the anthill beneath his feet the moment he turned around, and his leg sank straight into the loose soil.

The other was climbed up from the ankles by the surging ant tide; he reached out to slap them, and the moment his palm pressed down, more than twenty fire ants bit his palm simultaneously.

At this moment, he saw Lin Fan watching them like watching a show, and only then did he know that Lin Fan had done it on purpose, intentionally leading them here.

"Lin Fan... I won't let you go even as a ghost..."