“A dream within a dream?” He rubbed his face and exhaled, “It was a dream.”
In reality, he was not so brave. Faced with so many migratory locusts, he could still calmly think about eating fried locusts, but he was afraid that he would close the doors and windows as soon as possible and wait for the locusts to leave.
Looking at the density of locusts, they are much more powerful than those encountered in the fields, and they are also large. They were all yellow, and they were all locusts that had successfully mutated.
“Host, what’s wrong with you?” The system appeared, rubbing its eyes, “Are you up so early?”
An Yinong closed the window and rolled back to bed. He was still very sleepy: “I had a nightmare. I only ate a few locusts during the day, and I dreamed of being surrounded by locusts at night. I won’t talk anymore, let’s go back to sleep first.”
A black crow suddenly appeared on the leafless elm tree in front of Tian’s house, holding a huge locust as big as a baby’s arm in its mouth.
Obviously this locust was much bigger than the crow, but it didn’t dare to move at this time. It just rubbed its limbs as if begging for mercy, and tears actually flowed from its eyes.
The crow, which looked like a tool, said nothing and flew away from the elm tree with it in its mouth. Just when a man who got up early to carry water came back, he was startled:
“What is this?”
The locust incident ended like this. From time to time, people in Tianjia Village could hear news of locust plagues raging somewhere, but there was no locust plague again in Tianjia Village, and there were only a few locusts in the village.
Of course, the wheat fields that attract locusts were gone.
The old grain had been eaten up, and the harvest of new grain had failed. People in the village have come out to look for food, old and young, as long as they can move around. From time to time, they hear rumors that someone seems to have found something good, but most people just waste their efforts.
An Yinong also came out, and he went to the river where there was no water for a long time.
This river was the mother river of the local area. It did not stop flowing last year, but this year the aquatic plants along the river had dried up.
The stone arch bridge over the river was still there, but the river had long since become a sunken, cracked loess. Occasionally, one can see the bones of fish, shrimps and crabs on the loess. They were as brittle as paper shells and broke when picked up.
The villagers shook their heads, thinking they couldn’t find anything here, and left. Only An Yinong still refused to give up. He lowered his head and continued to search. After a while, he was sweating profusely.
“Okay.” He stood up and twisted his arms to relax his back that had been bent for a long time.
“Tian Xi…Tian Xi…”
Someone behind him was calling the original owner’s name. An Yinong turned his head but didn’t see anyone.
“Who?” he shouted, but no one answered, so he lowered his head and continued to look for something edible on the shore. His sweat fell on the loess and turned into smoke before it could moisten the land.
“Tian Xi…”
The voice appeared again, and he confirmed that it was not an illusion, but he couldn’t find the person and didn’t know who was playing a prank.
An Yinong was also a brave man, so he followed the sound until he came to the arch bridge. He didn’t see anyone, but he saw a brown ball of cloth under the bridge. There was also something like a bamboo basket pressed under the cloth ball.
A corner of the cloth was exposed, which was a round, gray-white human skull, with other bones scattered around it. He didn’t recognize who it was. An Yinong felt slightly uncomfortable and took a step back.
At this moment, a gust of wind suddenly came, blowing up a lot of yellow sand. He squinted and vaguely saw the figure of a woman blown out of the yellow sand.
“Wow!”
But before he could see clearly, crows sounded, the wind stopped, and yellow sand fell to the ground. A crow stopped on the handrail of the stone arch bridge, and its black eyes looked at him.
An Yinong was startled and found that the crow looked familiar.
“Wow!” Before he could take a closer look, the crow flapped its wings and flew away.
An Yinong looked up at the scorching sun, looked down at the dry river bed where all the animals had died, and his eyes caught a glimpse of the human bones wrapped in brown cloth. Everything is broken, and even death will be uncomfortable.
The fear in his heart suddenly faded a lot.
“Just think of it as doing one good deed a day.” Anyway, no matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t find anything to eat.
He used a shovel to dig a deep pit nearby, and then gently pushed the brown cloth and bones into the pit. What was exposed under the cloth was made of bamboo.
An Yinong, who has always had good association skills, muttered in his heart: “It can’t be a pig cage, right?”
Thinking of this cruel lynching in ancient times, he shuddered and buried the bones with loess. Then he piled a grave bag with soil clods and inserted blank wooden boards picked up nearby.
“I don’t know who you are or what happened to you. Find a good life in the next life and join a good family.”
Then he went to the other side of the river to continue looking for something, but found nothing. In the original river channel, a wisp of white smoke emerged from the earth bag. There were a lot of sticky black things gathered near the loess pile, as if they wanted to catch the green smoke, but An Yinong’s random pile of loess blocked those strange things.
A woman’s voice sounded like crying and laughing in the air.
After several days of searching, everything near the village was depleted, and many villagers turned their attention to the mountains (the foot of the mountain was eaten bald, and no trace of green could be seen). They all know that there were man-eating beasts in the mountains, but was hunger more bearable than wild beasts?
“When you encounter the beast, kill and eat meat.” When it comes to meat, these people’s eyes were green.
The men took their knives and axes and lit torches to go up the mountain. The women were also looking carefully for anything edible, even grass roots. Wherever humans have passed, there was no grass growing.
An Yinong also followed that day, but he didn’t find anything, because he didn’t even know what things could be eaten and what things couldn’t be eaten.
That night, he had a dream about a young woman wearing light brown clothes walking more than fifty meters in front of him. The woman walked very fast, covering more than a hundred meters in a few steps. Then she stopped, as if waiting for him.
The angle of view slowly zoomed in, as if he was really slowly catching up. When he was about to get closer, the woman started walking again, still very fast, and still stopping to wait for him.
She kept walking and moved through a canyon paved with white stones. She stopped in front of a large thorn bush, then carefully climbed through the bush, and then crawled through a long and narrow cave. Suddenly, he saw a clear vision in front of his eyes. It was a small valley that no one had ever visited.
The valley was surrounded by steep cliffs on all sides, so high that the top of the mountain could not be seen. And there were many plants growing in the valley. In addition to the kudzu that An Yinong knew, there was also a persimmon tree laden with fruits.
The woman slowly turned her head. She couldn’t see her face clearly from the distance, but she could only see her slowly waving towards her. Just as he was about to go there, he woke up from his dream.
When An Yinong woke up, he felt strange that the things in his dream were too real, but he didn’t take it seriously. Until the next day he had exactly the same dream. This time the woman was even closer to him, only twenty meters away, and he could see the patterns on her clothes. The scene in the dream was as clear as seeing it with his own eyes.
An Yinong woke up again and was confused, jumping back and forth between believing in science and believing in metaphysics.
“Uncle, do you know where there is a canyon covered with white stones?” An Yinong ran over and asked the oldest and most knowledgeable village chief.
The village chief was very surprised: “Why do you ask this?”
“I’ve heard people talk about it.” An Yinong knew as soon as he saw the village chief’s expression that such a canyon really existed.
“Who did you listen to? Do you want to go there to find something to eat? You are not allowed to go there. That is the Bone Beach. If you go there, don’t come back.” The village chief said.
“Bone Beach?”
“Yes, legend has it that the bones of a white snake transformed there. The white stones in the canyon are all the bones of the white snake. When I was young, someone found a spine there that was bigger than a bathtub. Tsk, tsk, tsk, whoever dug the bones It didn’t take long for him to go crazy.
“If you enter it, you enter the belly of the white snake. You will never come back.”
What the village chief said was true, but An Yinong suspected that it was a dinosaur fossil, or that he might have misjudged it.
Seeing that he didn’t take it seriously, the village chief couldn’t help but catch An Yinong talking about it, and An Yinong had to promise not to go.
But after he returned, the more he thought about it, the more curious he became. He was ready to commit suicide, so he said to himself: “If you still dream about it today, I will go there.”
Sure enough, he dreamed again that day, and it was more clear. This time, the young woman was almost standing in front of him, and she could touch her hair with her hands.
She led him to the valley again, and there were still persimmon trees laden with fruit in front of her.
“Thank you, Tian Xi…” The woman slowly turned her head, and An Yinong in the dream looked at her curiously, as if he wanted to see her clearly. At this time, a gust of wind suddenly came, and the wind was covered with yellow sand, and the woman’s body also turned away with the sand.
When the wind blows, it turns the beautiful dream into a sandstorm scene. Then, he woke up. An Yinong was a little scared when he woke up. The scene in the dream was a bit scary when he thought about it carefully.
“To go or not to go?”
“What to go or not to go?” The system came up, it was a little confused.
An Yinong told it everything about the dream, and the system was so frightened that it hugged the quilt tightly: “Host, please don’t scare me.”
“Who scared you? Do you want me to go or not?”
“No! Seriously, don’t seek death! I can’t open the mall now!”
“But I still want to take a look.” After hesitation, he decided to take the risk.
After inquiring about the location of Bone beach, An Yinong set off. Carrying a basket on his back and a hoe in his hand, he walked several kilometers to reach the Valley of Death in the eyes of several villages.
An Yinong was stunned as soon as he got there. It was exactly the same as in his dream, even the arrangement of several iconic stones was exactly the same. His lips were dry because he was sure that neither he nor the original owner had ever been here.
“This can no longer be explained scientifically.”
Behind was a mountain village, a village where food can no longer be found. In front of them was a place cut off from life that the villagers would be shocked to hear, but there may also be some food.
“Wealth can be found in danger.” An Yinong gritted his teeth, clenched his hoe and entered the canyon covered with white rocks.
In the dream, their steps were as light as birds, and they soon reached the thorn bush. But in reality, the stones on Bone Beach were harsh and difficult to walk on. An Yinong walked for most of the day and only walked a few dozen meters.
He found a stone to rest for a while before moving on. He didn’t know how long he had been walking, but his stomach began to growl, and he finally saw the thorn bush in his dream.
An Yinong walked quickly and was surprised to find that the thorn bushes had been divided into two sides by some special force. He held the hoe and walked carefully, taking three steps and looking back, until he found the cave in his dream.
“Oh my god, is there really something entrusted to you in your dream?” The system stood on An Yinong’s shoulders and shook its feet.
An intelligent life was so cowardly. Every time he looked at the virtues of the system, An Yinong felt that he was really brave and fearless.
An Yinong took off his backpack, held a hoe in one hand, and then crawled into the narrow cave. The cave was too narrow, and an adult man would not be able to squeeze through it. However, An Yinong was smaller and could pass through easily.
It was very dark inside at first, but gradually there was light and he saw the exit. An Yinong sped forward and was blinded by the light the moment he walked out of the cave.
He slowly opened one eye, and after a while to adjust, an uninhabited valley appeared in front of him. An Yinong couldn’t help but take two steps forward. The dead grass he stepped on made a rustling sound, and the breeze blew on his face, bringing a sense of reality.
Everything here was exactly the same as what he saw in his dream, except for the woman leading the way.
“It’s really a valley! There are also persimmon trees!” the system shouted in his ear.
An Yinong looked in the direction it pointed, and sure enough he saw a persimmon tree. The trunk was wrinkled and the leaves had fallen off, but the branches were covered with yellow, orange and cyan persimmons.
The persimmon tree was about to wither, but its fruits were full, and each one was like a lantern swaying in the wind.
WhiteMoon x BlackSun 