Another half hour passed. The light of the setting sun is getting fainter and fainter. Everyone became agitated, for the dense forest in front of them still had no end in sight.

Ah Li was also walking among the group of women with trepidation, when she suddenly heard a panicked shout from ahead. It was the shouts of the two men who opened the way, with despair and fear. Somehow, it occurred to her that the boy she had just met would never let out such a shout.

The men found strips of cloth in the trees - the one that had been scraped off the woman's clothes. Everyone realized that they had been circling in the jungle for an hour and a half.

But the men, including the chief, swore that they would go in a straight line! A man who was begging for a living in the mountains would never be able to tell the direction of his life.

Two women were so frightened that they immediately cried out loud, and their voices were drowned by their own men. Everyone looked at the head man and waited for his instructions.

The wrinkles on the headman's face seem to have increased by several more. He thought about it for a while before he summoned two henchmen to say a few words secretly. When Ah Li saw the faces of those men, he immediately turned white. She didn't know why she had excellent ears since she was a child, and she could hear what the head man said: "We encountered a ghost hitting the wall, I'm afraid it won't be so easy to get out this time." The women who were traveling with her also knew her skills, and they all quietly asked Ah Li: "What are they talking about?"

Ah Li shook his head, but did not squeak. If they knew that the group had all fallen into a puzzle, they would immediately flee in terror.

The leader took out a small paper talisman from his bosom, bit his tongue and sprayed a mouthful of blood on it. And then there are words in the mouth. The sound fell, and the paper note spontaneously ignited without fire, turning into a small ball of fire and floating forward. The head man breathed a sigh of relief. Let everyone follow the direction of the fireball.

The path of the fireball is very strange, sometimes it goes forward, sometimes it suddenly makes a big bend to the right, sometimes it doesn't move for half a day and then turns a big arc...... According to the chief, this paper talisman is a treasure given by the gods and can guide the right path. The fireball that leads the way is the real straight line, and he is a lineman. All of them were blinded by obstacles, and the straight road they thought they were taking was actually going around in circles in the dense forest.

"Who's fascinated us with detours?" asked an ignorant fellow. As a result, the head man glared at him angrily, and stopped speaking with a gloomy face.

The fireball flew slowly for half an hour, and everyone pushed aside the branches in front of them, and suddenly felt that there was a clear space in the open space. They finally got rid of the endless woods. Even better, there was a farmhouse in the clearing, which looked a little dilapidated, but it was a wood-tossed, thatched-roof building, which looked so lovely in the darkening sky.

Everyone cheered, and rushed forward without waiting for the leader's command.

There was no one in the farmhouse, the furniture was old and covered with a thick layer of dust. The ceiling is inhabited by spiders and mosquitoes. But the mountain people are not afraid of this. The women ignored the fatigue on their bodies and began to clean up inside and out. The house is too small. Unable to sleep everyone, a few strong men looked at the shadowy dense forest and swallowed their spittle: "For the sake of safety, let's light a fire." ”

The leader hurriedly ordered everyone to light a bonfire in the open space to drive away the humidity and chill of the night. This place is really evil, and with a warm fire, it is a powerful consolation to people's hearts.

After a while, there was a burst of women's cheers from the farmhouse. Another piece of good news: they found a bag of rice in the corner of the kitchen!

Rice, it turned out to be rice. The people in the cottage know that the mountains here are stacked, the space is narrow, the land is also very barren, only grass can grow, even the trees do not grow tall, and the ground is damp and bad, which is the most unsuitable for rice growth. The reason why there are still stockades here is because this Grand Canyon is so poor that even the monsters don't want to live here.

Many people in the cottage have never left the surrounding area of the village for hundreds of miles in their lives, and they have never tasted rice in person. What they grow every day is a crop very similar to corn, and after harvesting the fruit, it is crushed and pressed into powder, and then made into paste soup or cakes, which is the family's ration. Even so, the yield of this crop is very low, so the villagers usually have to collect wild vegetables, hunt and even catch river fish to improve their diet.

The head man stood up and walked into the kitchen, grabbed a handful of rice from his pocket and sniffed it carefully, and felt that there was no smell, so he nodded.

That's what you do. The women snorted happily, took out their water bladders and rinsed the rice twice before picking up the cauldron from the kitchen, adding water and boiling.

A quarter of an hour passed, and the cauldron began to smell thick with rice, and the bonfire burned so vigorously that everyone's faces flushed. Ah Li also sat by the fire and waited for the rice to be cooked, but she sat a little far away from everyone, so she saw that the smoke wafting out of the pot with rice foam was very faint green. Ah Li has had five senses since she was a child, and even she has to work hard to widen her eyes to see the colors in the smoke, and others can't see it.

Do you want to sue everyone? She thought about it, maybe the rice was originally cooked this color, right? If she made a fuss, she would have to eat another meal of wattle whipping. The villagers are never polite to disobedient children who like to make trouble. The villagers were talking, some were sighing, some were crying, but none of this had anything to do with her, and she fell asleep in a daze with her hands.

The rice is cooked. People smiled happily and served a bowl one by one, and the grandson of the head man was only nine years old, the same year as Ah Li. It was known that he was growing his body, and he was additionally allowed to press the rice a little firmer.

The taste of the rice is so fragrant and delicious. Everyone tasted the first bite and was amazed. It doesn't matter if you don't have a dish to eat, just the crystal clear rice is so fragrant that you can't stop eating it.

They devoured and ate and ate and talked to each other, but then they all got into their own hands, and for a moment only the sound of people swallowing remained in the small camp.

There was a man who ate the fastest, and when the rice in his bowl was bottomed out, he stood up without thinking and quickly reached into the pot, intending to add another bowl of rice. He is very thin and weak, and his personality is almost cowardly, and he was originally a second-class villager in the slatted village, but he did not have the right of priority to choose when distributing materials in the village. So this time he took the initiative to reach out and add food, which is actually very strange.

However, what was even more strange was that the middle-aged man closest to the pot suddenly roared, and there seemed to be contempt in his voice. He reached out and slapped the thin man's arm so hard that he almost knocked out his job. The thin man's hand was burned on the large red-hot iron pot with a soft sound.

The injury should have been painful, but the thin man just snorted lightly and withdrew his hand, as if it was not his own hand that was burned, and stared at the big iron pot unwillingly, and then stared at the strong man by the pot, his eyes were full of faint green light.

The rice in the big iron pot was quickly snatched up. Those who failed to grab the second bowl stared at the well-fed guys with hateful eyes, and their throats were ho-ho and like wolves.

A bowl of rice turned them into something like this.

Ah Li slept soundly. After all, she is only nine years old, she escaped from the water last night, and today she has walked with the adults all day, although her spirit is childlike, her body is unbearable. She dreamed of the water last night, with driftwood and a few children of the same age, who usually liked to throw stones at her, but at that time they were floating face down in the water, unmoving, and obviously could no longer threaten her. She felt relieved.

Ah Li also dreamed of the boy he met this afternoon. He smiled softly and gave her a bowl of fragrant rice to eat, but she had just picked up the wooden chopsticks and wanted to take the first bite of rice, when the white rice grains suddenly became green and scary, and each one would squirm!

Ah Li let out an "ah", suddenly opened his eyes wide, and woke up in fright.

The camp was quiet. Everyone fell asleep softly, and slept soundly, probably with good dreams, and with smiles on their faces. But what scared Ah Li was that the skin on their faces was a faint green, like she was in the cauldron steam, like she saw in her dreams.

This feeling of everyone waking up alone was very uncomfortable for her. Ah Li had the courage to shake the thin black woman who was kinder to her. But no matter how she shook, the other party had a smile on his face, and he just refused to wake up.

Ah Li knew that something was wrong. Now she regretted it, why didn't she tell everyone that the smoke in the pot was weird, but what could she do now?

She shook the villagers on the ground, including the headman, one by one, but they were so asleep that no one could wake up.

What could be worse than her little girl sleeping all night in the wilderness while all the adults were asleep?

Yes. That is, at this time, a youkai suddenly appeared.

Ah Li's luck was not good, just as she wanted to retreat back to the farmhouse, a thick fog slowly drifted in, and in the blink of an eye, it condensed into a human form, so fast that she didn't have time to hide.

The monster formed by the dense fog actually has a nose and eyes, resembling a woman, but its body and face are a little blurry, and there is a faint green light in its eyes, which reminds her of green rice when she looks at it.

Ah Li couldn't hold back the exclamation that reached his mouth, and actually had time to take a look at the pot. There were still a few grains of rice left in the pot, but the color was turquoise, and there was a thin layer of fluff on top. Even if she didn't eat a bite, she felt a burst of hair in her throat at this time, and she almost wanted to retch.

The fog demon condensed into shape, and after seeing her, he also showed an expression of surprise on his face, and suddenly opened his mouth: "You are not actually asleep? What are you?" The voice was ethereal, making people drowsy after listening to it. However, Ah Li was not affected, she carefully shrunk her small body behind the head man's body, without squeaking.

The fog demon looked at her twice, perhaps thinking that her little girl could not harm her own good deeds, so she ignored her, and suddenly grabbed a person from the ground and dragged her into the farmhouse. (To be continued......)