Chapter 761: The Ant Speaks
The "Ant" tried to reach out its hand again, but Qi Xia once more brushed it aside.
This strange gesture made the creature before him understand the situation. It knew there was a person standing in front of it—someone who neither feared it nor ran away.
Qi Xia looked up into the distance. More and more "Ants" were now beginning to converge in this direction. But their state was no different from what he remembered—they just crouched far away, not daring to approach.
At this moment, the "Ant" in front of him finally changed its expression. It let out a breath, then extended its hand once again.
But this time, it didn't offer its palm. Instead, it stretched out a single finger.
Qi Xia pondered the meaning behind this gesture, then reached out and touched that icy-cold finger.
The moment their fingers made contact, the "Ant" gasped sharply. It seemed to want to pull back, but then hesitated, as if thinking something through, its face twisting into an extremely bizarre expression.
Qi Xia realized for the first time that when a person had lost all their facial features, the expressions on their face became infinitely amplified.
The next second, the "Ant" flipped its hand and abruptly grabbed Qi Xia's wrist. Its body sprang up from the ground and crouched onto the windowsill.
Qi Xia could clearly smell a pungent odor of rot and decay wafting toward him, but he didn't step back.
He was too curious about what this "Ant" wanted to do.
The "Ant" held Qi Xia's wrist with one hand, turning his palm over. Then it used the finger of its other hand to gently rub a few times across his palm.
After a few seconds, Qi Xia realized the creature was trying to write something in the center of his palm.
But its hands had once been bent backward and broken, then healed again. Its control over its fingers was clearly very poor, and the characters it wrote were hard to decipher.
After it finished writing, it noticed that Qi Xia showed no reaction. So it could only lower its head, raising Qi Xia's palm up to eye level, and carefully control its finger to write the character again.
This time, Qi Xia seemed to feel it.
It was the character "who."
Qi Xia understood that the creature was probably asking about his identity. But thinking about it carefully, the whole thing was absurd.
Did these "Ants" really have to resort to this method just to find a specific person?
Thinking this, Qi Xia took the creature's hand and wrote two characters on its cracked skin.
"Qi Xia."
He felt like he was tracing characters with his fingertip on dried tree bark. He couldn't tell if the creature could even perceive what he had written.
The "Ant" waited in the pitch-black night for Qi Xia to finish writing. Its hand trembled slightly.
Its withered mouth opened wide, panting continuously.
Before Qi Xia could say anything more, it grabbed his hand again—this time with far more force than before.
It extended a finger and pressed very hard as it wrote a character on Qi Xia's palm.
The character was crooked and twisted, but Qi Xia could still guess its meaning from the structure.
"Escape!"
"What...?" Qi Xia squinted, lifting his palm to look at the nonexistent character "escape," feeling utterly confused.
First, he didn't understand this creature's identity or stance—all he knew was that it was an "Ant." Second, he wasn't sure if its mind was completely clear. Third, he had nowhere to "escape" to.
So where exactly did this "escape" character want him to run?
Qi Xia looked at the "Ant" whose expression was now incredibly exaggerated. He felt that communicating with it would take some effort.
So he took the creature's hand again and carefully wrote a question mark.
When the "Ant" saw the question mark, its expression shifted wildly. It began flailing its arms and legs, letting out garbled sounds from its mouth.
It clearly wanted to speak, but nothing coherent came out.
The commotion woke up Chen Junnan and Qiao Jiajin inside the room.
The two opened their eyes groggily, only to find Qi Xia standing by the window holding hands with a monster. The scene was utterly horrifying.
"Damn it!!" Qiao Jiajin shouted, flipping over and grabbing a nearby chair.
"Fuck!" Chen Junnan stumbled off the table, nearly falling. But he quickly steadied himself and looked around for a handy weapon. Unfortunately, there was nothing here but tables and chairs, so he could only hoist a table.
Qi Xia didn't turn around. He simply reached out a hand behind him to stop them just as they were about to charge forward.
Chen Junnan and Qiao Jiajin stood frozen for a long moment, not understanding Qi Xia's intention.
"Old Qi... if this bug is holding you hostage, just blink," Chen Junnan said.
Qi Xia didn't answer or turn around. Instead, after steadying them, he beckoned them over.
The two exchanged a look, then put down the furniture and cautiously approached Qi Xia.
When they got closer, they found the situation even stranger than before.
The "Ant" was crouched on the windowsill, now holding Qi Xia's palm like a precious treasure, tracing something on it with its fingertip.
"Yo..." Chen Junnan, though baffled by what he was seeing, braced himself and spoke up. "Old Qi, you're not sleeping in the middle of the night... got a fortune-teller reading your palm?"
"Huh...?" Qiao Jiajin scratched his head. "Do they have door-to-door fortune-telling around here...?"
"Come look," Qi Xia said.
The two leaned in to examine this peculiar "Ant."
Its expression was a mix of panic and surprise. It was now repeatedly writing a character across Qi Xia's palm.
Qiao Jiajin kept craning his neck forward. He felt the character had very few strokes and should be easy to recognize, but after staring for a while, he still couldn't make it out.
"What the hell is that..."
Chen Junnan turned and looked at Qiao Jiajin. "Are you stupid? You don't recognize this character?"
"I really don't."
After the creature finished writing the simple character one more time, Qi Xia slowly pulled his hand back, sighed, and said softly, "It's 'dragon.'"
"Huh?" Qiao Jiajin thought he had misheard. "Is that how you write 'dragon'?"
He waved his hand in the air, trying to demonstrate that the character for "dragon" had many more strokes.
"Bro, we use simplified characters," Chen Junnan patted his shoulder.
"Uh..." Qiao Jiajin's hand froze in midair, feeling a bit awkward.
Qi Xia ignored the two bickering behind him and focused on the "Ant" in front of him.
The first character was "escape," the second was "dragon." Did that count as clear communication or not?
He couldn't tell if the creature had lost control of its body entirely, or if these two characters were enough for it to convey its message.
Qi Xia extended his palm again, hoping the creature could convey more. But no matter how many times it wrote, it only came back to those two characters.
"Are you telling me... to 'escape' from the 'dragon'?"