The dwarf mule is considered a curse in many local dialects, such as the treasure island of Taiwan, which means gangsters, but in our homes, or in the Hunan and Guizhou areas, it is only used to express one meaning: mandrill monsters.

There are a lot of rumors about mandrill monsters in various places, and there are so many strange things that I won't repeat them all.

The dwarf mule I am talking about is a kind of mandrill that is rumored in the mountains of my hometown. They are only a few dozen centimeters short, always wearing red straw hats, with green or purple skin, some people say red, furry, always in groups of three or five, and like to play with people. For example, they would turn the lunch that the peasants took to the fields to eat turned into stones, or in the pots and stoves of the mountain people who had offended them, and for example, some people in the mountain villages would go to the fields in the middle of the night to eat mud and return home to sleep feeling full—this was the delusion of the dwarf mule.

The red straw hats they wear are made from dragon fern grass, which is said to have come from the age of dinosaurs tens of millions of years ago.

Of course, these are just legends, and when I was in high school, I lived in a school dormitory, and every classmate had a belly.

I can't say it's true, I can't say it's false, but the students from the countryside in the west of the Qingshan Realm say it the most.

I studied the broken book all day, and at dinner in the evening, I told my parents that I was going to take a trip to the Qingshan Realm—a blessing or a curse, and a curse that could not be avoided. To be honest, I have lingering pains about the pain I had on the first night of the new year. The pain was beyond human means, and for a while, I even thought about dying.

The mother looked at the statue of her grandmother on the shrine and did not speak, sighing and shedding tears. My father said that my uncle was in the Qingshanjie Forest Farm, and I was going to look for a dwarf mule, so I went to find my uncle, who was guarding the forest house in the forest farm, and the two of them could take care of each other.

My father hung up the phone with my uncle that night, and I set off the next morning.

Uncle Xiao is a regular employee of the county forestry bureau, and he does forest guarding and forest fire prevention work in remote forest farms all year round. Qingshan boundary is a boundary to the west of the county seat, with high mountains and mountains, birds and beasts are difficult to fly, and it is a primeval forest that is inaccessible to people. The county forestry bureau has a station there, and my uncle is on duty in the deepest forest guard house.

I set off in the morning, went to the county seat and transferred to the township, and then transferred to the forest farm, and walked all the way along the mountain road to the forest house, and it was already five o'clock in the afternoon. At that time, it was summer, the sky was still bright, and there was no mobile phone signal in the deep mountains and old forests, but fortunately, there were telephone lines laid in the early years, so my uncle was notified and stood at the slope early to wait for me.

I gave him some gifts, wine and cigarettes, and he happily accepted them.

Their forest guard house was a plastered seal house (that is, a brick house), very different from the wooden houses I had seen along the way, with two rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom. A pot of meat was already boiling in the kitchen, and the smell wafted from afar. There was also a man inside, a skinny man in his thirties, smiling at me, revealing a mouthful of smoky yellow teeth.

Uncle introduced me to me, saying that it was his colleague, named Li Decai, and asked me to call him Uncle Li. Li Decai hurriedly excused himself, saying that he was good to call his brother, he said that he had seen me at my uncle's house before, a good young man, eight or nine years have passed in a flash, at that time he was still a cub that his mother-in-law and aunt didn't ask for, and now his children are running around with snot.

Li Decai's face is dark, his skin is very rough, and there is a scar on the left side of his face.

We sat down to eat, and the pot was cooked with rabbit meat, and there were two of them, both of which were made the other day. The job of guarding the old forest is very boring, and the uncle will often use air guns to shoot some wild things, secretly, and no one cares. The vegetables are all picked from the vegetable field next to it, and they are also fresh. I opened the liquor I bought and drank with them while chatting. Uncle already knew my intentions, and scolded my grandmother with the intention of drinking: "She is an old beggar, who spends all day and night doing insects and superstitions, and now she is going to die, and she will harm you!" ”

I was already a little afraid of these things at that time, and she was also my grandmother, so I didn't follow his words, but Li Decai scolded a few words. Eating meat and drinking wine, and then talking about dwarf mules, I asked my uncle if he had seen it? Uncle Ha Lu Ha laughed, saying that he had lived for almost 50 years, but he had never seen a single one, and it was all made up by others with false rumors and nonsense.

He has spent his life in the deep mountains and old forests, guarding forests and preventing fires, catching thieves who steal wood, if he believed this, he would have been scared to death.

Li Decai glanced at me, looking hesitant, I asked him if he had seen it, and he said no.

After eating, I took the initiative to clean up, but my uncle didn't let me, saying that he would take me outside while it was still dawn. When I came out of the house, it was a little dark outside, and I couldn't see the sunset in the low part of the forest, but I could see the morning glow reflecting the sky on the opposite mountain, and the golden land was brilliant. We walked slowly on the mountain road covered with fallen leaves and grass, and my uncle coughed as he walked. He was an old smoker, but he didn't dare to smoke when he was patrolling the mountains and forests, he just coughed.

The forest guard house is on a small hill bag, we walked a few hundred meters, and my uncle was telling me some interesting stories about guarding the forest. In fact, the work was very boring, and I walked on iron feet every day, and I was very tired and careful, but he told me about an incident in a nearby village, which interested me:

It is said that the nearest village is called Segai, which is located in the deep mountains, and the fields are all slope terraced fields, and the forest is a state-owned forest farm, so it is very poor, and it is poor - some people go out to work and never come back in their lives. There was an old bachelor in the village, because there was an old lady there, so he didn't leave, he worked hard in the fields, and no woman was willing to follow him at the age of 38. One day the year before last, he suddenly went to the gold shop in the county town to sell gold, which was a big lump and worth hundreds of thousands. Last year, the price of gold was 240 a gram, and his lump was more than three catties, and then the price of Huang Laoya in the gold shop pressed him to 200, and he sold it, and got almost 300,000 yuan.

I said lucky, this man doesn't know where he picked it up.

Uncle said yes, they all said that he was lucky, the ancestral tomb was smoking, and when he came back, he was going to go to the town to do some small business. But blessings and misfortunes depend on people, and people just can't be too proud. Later, that Huang Laoya brought a group of people to him, saying that the gold tuotuo he gave was put in the safe, and it turned into cow that night, and asked him to pay the money back - how could gold become cow? It was clearly bullying the old bachelor, but a bunch of people couldn't get along, Huang Laoya beat the old bachelor, and later a lawsuit, somehow, the court sentenced the old bachelor to be suspected of fraud, and he was only released this year.

I said, how could it be judged like this? At that time, it must have been real money when inspecting the goods, otherwise someone as shrewd as Huang Laoya would give money? The uncle smiled and said that Huang Laoya had an uncle who was above, he pointed to the sky, shook his head and laughed, and didn't say much. I watched the light in the forest dim little by little, and said, "It's too dark, let's go back." ”

So we walked back with a deep foot and a shallow foot.

********

I stayed in the forest guard house for two days, patrolling the forest during the day and reading books at night. There is a lot of humidity in the mountains and forests, mosquitoes and snakes, and the conditions are actually very difficult, but I didn't care, I suffered more when I went south to work, I slept in bridges, caves, parks and unfinished buildings, where there are beds and mosquito nets, in fact, it is already possible. Because there is no TV, life in the mountains is actually very boring, only reading books.

Staying in the mountains, accompanied by only two companions, when not speaking, it is silent, only the insects in the forest outside are singing, the heart is calm, holding the book and reading, it is easy to see in.

After reading a lot, I realized that "The Twelve Methods of Suppressing the Mountains" is actually not a pure book of witch doctors and goddesses, but a hodgepodge of various occult techniques such as Taoism, primitive witchcraft, Buddhism, and head-lowering techniques, and even mixed with anecdotes and wild things.

Gradually, I began to read with relish.

As I progressed through my reading, I began to enter a whole new world, and it felt as if my usual life had been completely turned upside down. There are a lot of things in it that feel fake at first glance, but there are also some things that seem to make some sense when they look at it, and some things about raising Gu, lowering heads, raising ghosts, and making zombies are disgusting to watch.

There are also records of mandrills. This is a villain who can freely interact in the spiritual world and reality, they are cunning by nature, but they are not cruel, they like to play tricks on people, hold grudges, like to eat pine cones and sweet potato vines, and will only haunt the inaccessible deep mountains and old forests, and occasionally go to the homes of mountain people to play tricks on humans.

I stayed for two days without seeing the legendary dwarf mule, and on the third day, I returned to the county seat with my uncle, and he went to hand over it, and I purchased a few catties of pine cones, a basket of sweet potato vines, incense candles, native eggs, red thread, new glutinous rice, hunting knives, ropes, and nets...... Then I went home and picked out a few yellow talismans from my grandmother's relics, and after I finished preparing them, I returned to the forest guard house deep in the mountains on the fourth day.

That night, the moon was very bright, and I sprinkled pine nuts and sweet potato vines on the slope not far from the forest guardhouse, and then squatted quietly.

There are wild things in the mountains and forests, and my uncle is not worried about me, he could have gone back to the county to rest for ten days, but he heard that there was a murder and corpse mutilation case in the Qingshan realm, and he was not at ease, so he transferred to another shift with others and accompanied me to guard in the dark. There are many mosquitoes in the mountain, but we don't dare to move, so my uncle smeared me with a layer of black grass residue, saying that it can prevent insects. I waited quietly, feeling everything in the clearing. As I said earlier, I used to work in a lot of factories.

When I was working in a circuit board factory, I looked for defects every day, and it took my eyes to see it, so I had a little myopia, and I could see things in the distance vaguely. But now in the dark night, although the moonlight is very bright, you can clearly see the subtle things ten meters away.

The same change is in my body, which is getting stronger and stronger, more energetic, and with a clear mind.

I gradually became convinced of what my grandmother said when she was dying: she had left me an inheritance, but I still had to go through a test to inherit it. If you cross it, everything will be fine, but if you can't do it, you can only face death.

It was late at night, the crescent moon was slanting in the west, and there was nothing in the quiet of the night - only the insects chirping, squeaking, squeaking. Uncle was old, and he was so sleepy that he lasted less than an hour, and I drove him back to sleep. The humidity in the mountains was heavy, and the night was as cold as water, and I listened to the insects humming, but my heart was very calm, as if I had some premonition, and waited quietly. I waited for seven hours from nine o'clock in the evening, until it was about four o'clock in the morning, when a dark shadow appeared on the slope of the relaxation child.

The appearance of the dark shadow made my nerves tense immediately.

However, when I looked closely, I realized that it was a mountain mouse that was as fat as a kitten. The rats arched and arched on the slopes, knocking pine nuts for a while, chewing sweet potato vines for a while, and digging the soil with their hind legs.

I didn't move, and took the new glutinous rice mixed with local egg whites out of the bag. My stomach hurts, it's not serious, but it's like diarrhea, I can't help but fart little by little, no sound, so it stinks, and I feel uncomfortable with the smoke, and even the gnats that have been surrounding me have dispersed a lot.

After a while, a few dark shadows emerged from the bushes.

I couldn't see the colors, but with the help of the faint moonlight, I could see that these black shadows were about thirty centimeters long, walking upright, with a mess of horizontal lines on the part of the head—that was the outline of a straw hat.