High on the top of the church, light shone in through the worn shutters on the face of a pale and emaciated nun with an obvious look of death.

She was almost a hundred years old, and she stroked the face of a three-year-old child with her dry hands, lowered her head, and said in a hoarse voice: "Sia Banga, you said you saw ants, did you?" ”

The boy was thin, chronically malnourished, his cheeks were sunken, his skin was tan, he nodded in fear and said in a panic: "Yes, Marianne, I ...... I saw a swarm of ants in the back of the church, it, they suddenly came out of the ground, red, bigger than normal ants, they looked very different. ”

The hundred-year-old nun's eyes were painful and sad, she bent down, covered the boy's mouth with her hand, and said, "Enough, Sia Banga, enough, don't tell anyone about the ants, you know?" ”

Siabonga blinked suspiciously, and asked his esteemed elder "why" with his eyes.

Marianne said bitterly: "These ants don't come out of nowhere. They have lived on this land for a long, long time. ”

Sia Banga was even more dazed, "They have lived for a long time? ”

Marianne had tears in her eyes: "That's right. I, my mother, my grandfather, have seen them. They're here again. ”

Sia Banga clumsily wiped away tears for her.

"No one knows how these ants appeared, just as no one knows where the missing bodies went in the massacre," Sister Marianne said. With trembling arms, she hugged Siabanga and said, "God, how long are they going to survive on this land?" The old man's hot tears seeped into the boy's neck.

How long they will survive on this land, even Sister Marianne does not know.

"I've seen them, I've seen them many times."

She, her fathers, her grandparents, had seen them. Perhaps these ants first ate honey and sugar, but at what point they tasted human blood and flesh, and they have remembered the taste of "human" for generations.

Colombia's coffee and bananas are far more famous than mining and tobacco, and under the huge profits, vultures and hyenas from various countries have come one after another. The town's fruit company has been around for many years and was founded by a few Americans.

The rich banana grove outside was their nightmare.

Her mother and sister died of yellow fever; The elder brother died from the intense labor day after day; The younger brother died of starvation three months after birth. The family huddled into a small, dilapidated room, where the smell of feces and urine blended with the stench of rats.

When she was a child, she was hungry every day, and her mother would tie her to a banana tree with a rope for fear that she would eat dirt when she was young. In 1928, my father and his wife were oppressed and went on strike. So many people gathered in the banana grove just to denounce the meager wages to survive. But they were greeted by insults from the captain, and at the sound of an order, everyone became a live target, and was suddenly strafed by machine gun fire.

The banana patch was stained red with blood, and she fainted with fright, and when she woke up, she hid behind the haystack and opened her eyes to see a swarm of ants burrowing into her father's corpse. The blacks pressed down on him, they went into his nostrils, into his eyes, into his ears. And through the bullet holes in his body, into his stomach, into his neck. Ants cross the border like locusts.

Marianne was frightened again, and when she woke up again, she was already on the train to the capital, Bogotá. She tried to call her father's name, but her grandmother covered her mouth and told her, "Marianne, nothing is happening here."

She didn't stay long in Bogotá either, when another riot in Colombia and clashes between the Liberal and Conservative parties reignited the flames of war. The land, from the low-lying valley floors to the primeval forests to the barren mountains of the Andes, is a killing place.

There was no escape.

The grandmother was killed, and the men pulled out her tongue long and wrapped it around her neck. The "gorilla lieutenant" stepped on his grandmother's stomach and laughed wildly.

She screamed, frightened, scared to the point of delirium. A man fled into the forest, and then, heard many painful cries of pregnant women giving birth. The officers carried out massacres in the countryside, the villagers had to wander everywhere, and the women dared only to hide in the forests to give birth.

There are a lot of mosquitoes carrying the virus here, and one child after another is dying at birth.

The dead children were drenched in blood and thrown into the grass, and the stench was overwhelming.

Again in the forest...... She saw ants. Black ants, like thick tides, drown dead babies.

After each killing, they emerge from the land to clean up the pieces for humanity.

Marianne looked at them.

They seemed so familiar to her.

They ate her entire family, crimson blood surging beneath the glossy black carapace.

If the ants only come out after killing.

Then these ants are only witnesses to the killing.

But many, many years later, overnight, they suddenly became the creators of killing.

Marianne didn't know.

That year is called the first year of calamity.

This colony of ants, who have lived in Latin America for generations and drank blood here, finally, became an A+ class heretic in an instant when the calamity came.

They multiply quickly, are ambitious, leave Colombia and open up their territory.

There are endless [ant plagues] all over the world.

But soon, the ants were hit hard by the Unnatural General Bureau, and they had to retreat back to the town, and even the queen ant began to hibernate for a long time.

No one remembers them except Marianne.

Marianne remained unmarried for the rest of her life and did not return to the town until she was dying. In a pile of rats on the side of the road, she picked up a boy whom she named Sia Banga. The world is changing with each passing day, and everything is slowly getting better, and although there are still banana companies in the town, they have put on a layer of moral civilization. In order to show their compassion and kindness, this group of people even built the original workers' dormitory into a banana welfare home.

When she dies, Siabanga will be sent to the Banana Welfare Home. It used to be where Marianne lived as a child. She lived a miserable life, but she hoped that Sia Banga would grow up safely.

Marianne ...... You, you say that ants eat people? ”

Listening to her talk about the past, Sia Banga couldn't believe it, as if she was listening to an absurd mythological story.

"That's right." Marianne's old fingers trembled and caressed the boy's face, her eyes were full of tears, and she said in a dumb voice, "So Sia Banga, promise me never, never tell anyone about your discovery of ants." ”

These ants reappeared after nearly being wiped out.

They came for her. She remembered them, and they must have remembered her.

Sia Banga didn't know the seriousness of the matter, his eyes widened, and he nodded seriously.

But Marianne saw it, and he didn't understand it, and he didn't listen.

This is the memory of Sia Banga, or the memory of Marianne, in the entire Banana Welfare Institute, only Sia Banga can see those big black and red ants. They emerge from the low wall behind the orphanage, forming a long procession, dragging food to come and go quietly to feed the newly revived queen.

Originally, this was a secret that Sia Banga knew alone, until one day, the child king in the banana welfare home suddenly came over and asked him with a grin: "Sia Banga, what are you looking at?" Is there anything fun, do you want us to play together. ”

Play together, let's play together.

For the young Siabanga, peer recognition was too important. He always held his tattered soccer ball and watched them enviously on the swing. So at the olive branch that Miguel threw at him, Siabanga's cheeks flushed with excitement, and he quickly took it. He said seriously: "I found a swarm of ants here. ”

In a word, it brought ruin to himself and to the entire welfare home.

Ants walked around Ye Sheng's fingertips.

Ye Sheng's eyelashes trembled and he opened his eyes.

Chapter 300: The Ant Pit

Qi Zhou led a group of people into the bedroom of Sia Banga, pinched his nose, endured the strange smell, and began to rummage through the cabinets inside.

"It stinks in here." "yes, it's even more stinky than the nurse's dormitory, and the walls are moldy." "Where is Sia Banga's bed? Oooh, I found it. ”

Everyone's bed had their name written on it, and they quickly found Sia Banga's bed. Qi Zhou lifted the quilt and saw the Latin American version of "Arabian Nights", and his eyes lit up with joy. He raised his arms and shouted, "I've found the key clue!" ”

"The Legend of the Silver Land" was donated to the welfare home by the few Americans in the town who owned a fruit company, and it was just a hypocrisy. So it doesn't matter if the child can read it or not, it's all in English. Thankfully, each story has art so that Sia Banga can pass the time.

Qi Zhou flipped a few pages and muttered: "This is a book of mythological stories?" What the hell. He turned another page, and when he saw the words written on the paper, his brow furrowed even deeper, and he called out to the person next to him: "Do you know the words on it?" The fat man who was called by him shook his head, afraid to say, "No, Brother Qi, I don't understand." ”

Qizhou was so anxious that he immediately turned on the live broadcast.

"What kind of language is this, does anyone understand it?"

His live broadcast room is very popular, and there are many native Spanish speakers, and someone immediately pointed out to him that Sia Banga was asking for help.

Through these words, and some clues that were later found in other people's rooms.

Qizhou slowly understood the whole picture of the story of that year.

The director of the banana orphanage was mean and cruel, and planned to wait for the boys to reach the age of thirteen and then sign a contract to sell them into the banana grove as child laborers. So they turn a blind eye to the usual bullying of the boys.

Sia Banga's childhood was painful and lonely, he was born thin and small, and he was always the target of bullying.

In order to fit in with the group of peers, despite Marianne's dissuasion, he took the initiative to share with them a secret that only he knew: he found a particularly strange ant under the wall behind the welfare home.

The largest of them was a man with two thick fingers and a black shell, and the boys had never seen such strange ants, and they were very novel, and for a long time, they all played around the ants.

At first, the mischievous boys were just curious about what such ants ate and grew up.

So they stole rice, fruits, and vegetables from the cafeteria, only to find that the ants ate everything.

On another rainy day, after witnessing the ants dragging the carcass of a dead mouse out, they had a bold idea: Will these ants eat people?

So they mischievously grabbed the ants on the ground and threw them at Sia Banga. Siabanga was red from the ants, and he cried and rolled on the ground, full of ugliness. The boys were amused by his ugliness and continued to throw a lot of ants at him. The worse Siabanga cried, the more they laughed.

A few days later, they discover another big secret.

More and more ants are pouring into the orphanage from outside, and the ants actually build their nests here, and their nests are built under a mud pit!

They applauded the discovery.

The boys come up with a vicious idea on a whim. "Sia Banga, we're going to take you and feed the ants."

How can an ant kill a person. At most, they bite Siabanga all over the body, make him cry to death, and provide them with laughter.

"Arrest him!"

One rainy day, they snatched Sia Banga from his dormitory. Sia Banga was born in a rat pile, and he looked like a gray mouse, unable to nourish, with thin limbs and just the size to be thrown into an ant pit. They grabbed him by limbs and gagged him so that he could not call for help. He tied him up with rope and threw him into a puddle of mud.

"Hahahasia Bonga! Just stay here! ”

"We'll come and see you after dinner."

For these boys, it's just an ingenious prank.

After they finished playing football and eating, they didn't remember that Sia Banga was still in the ant pit until the evening. In the evening, while the nurses were leaving, the boys secretly took flashlights and came to the back of the house.

They stepped on the ground, and found that the rain-soaked ground was surprisingly soft, and when they stepped on it, it was a pit, and red water seeped out of the soil and wet their trouser legs.

It was so quiet that they couldn't even hear the whimpering and struggling, and the boys began to get scared.

They slowly approached the ant pit and pushed away the tall weeds, but they didn't see Sia Banga inside.

They breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that Sia Banga had been saved.

Suddenly, in the grass, the rat "squeaked".

After everyone followed the sound and turned the light of the flashlight over, they saw a line of black ants dragging a thin skin out.

Sia Banga has brownish-black skin, and after being eaten empty of flesh, the skin sticks together. From a distance, it looks like a huge, gray, rat skin.

In the light, the ants dragged the "rat skin" out.

The black rat stood beside it, witnessing the killing, it still had blood on its mouth, and its paws dragging a small piece of flesh, the remains of Siabanga. The mouse rolled its eyes, its dark pupils looking at them, and barked again.

The boys screamed, threw away their flashlights, and fled!

The superintendent and the nurses didn't care about the disappearance of an orphan, so they made up a lie, saying that Sia Banga had escaped without permission, and that Sia Banga's body had been eaten cleanly and no one knew the truth. The dean blushed his neck and cursed, but he didn't blame them.