The carrion scavenger would, in the years to come, become the recurring nightmare of countless survivors, a symbol of decay made animate. In her previous life, Jing Shu hated it the most, with a visceral, gut deep revulsion that went beyond mere disgust. The carrion scavenger also became one of those desperate emergency rations people only turned to when there was absolutely nothing else left, a final, degrading line before starvation.
Red nematodes, though bland and tasteless, could at least be dried, ground, and eaten without immediately falling ill, a gritty protein paste.
But carrion scavengers? They were so bitterly acrid one could barely swallow without gagging, and worse, eating them, even cooked, led to violent sickness and dehydrating diarrhea. Unless someone was literally starving to death, their vision dimming, no one with any other option would touch the vile things.
In her previous life, in the fifth, frozen year of the apocalypse, Jing Shu was so hungry her stomach felt like a shriveled pouch, her muscles consuming themselves. She forced down a bowlful of boiled carrion scavengers, their greenish internal juice spurting out as she bit down, too weak to swallow whole. The taste was a complex assault: bitter, gritty with hard chitinous residue, and reeking with a stench as foul as the world's most infamous fermented herring, a smell that clung to the back of the throat.
Yet desperate with hunger, her body screaming for calories, Jing Shu followed the advice of other hollow eyed survivors: carrion scavengers must not be chewed, only swallowed whole like pills to minimize the taste. She endured and gulped them down for two agonizing days, barely surviving until a meager rescue ration arrived. But those two days of relentless, watery diarrhea left her more depleted, half dead, curled on a cold floor.
From then on, Jing Shu swore to herself, teeth gritted, that she would rather die of hunger than eat carrion scavengers again. That terrible year, even maggots and red nematodes, once considered revolting but viable delicacies, had frozen to death in the unexpected glacial period, leaving only the hardiest, most repulsive creature, the carrion scavenger, thriving in the buried rot.
The carrion scavenger was omnivorous and relentlessly opportunistic, with a special, evolved preference for rotten flesh. Where there were carcasses of even the smallest animals, a rat, a bird, there the beetles would be found, a seething mass. Eating one meant filling your stomach with a soup of bacteria and decay, as if consuming concentrated rot itself.
A voice message from Wang Cuihua came through on the family group, sharp with distress: "This must be Heaven's punishment! I just opened a new, sealed bag of rice I'd been saving, and half of it was filled with black green little bugs, crawling everywhere the moment I opened it. Some even flew right at my face! Now my whole kitchen is full of them. My rice, oh my rice! A whole 10 kilogram bag!" Her voice broke.
Wang Cuihua's panic quickly sparked a cascade of horrified replies, a chorus of shared infestation.
[Luo Zhu No. 9]:"These past few days, my water storage barrel kept having a thin layer of dead flies floating on top. I skimmed them off. Today I looked again, and the whole barrel was swarming with those dark green, squirming bugs. I was so terrified I threw out the entire barrel, all 50 liters. Now I have no water left."
[Feng No. 3]:"(╥_╥) I was injured and couldn't take out the trash for days. I had tossed some spoiled meat with maggots into the garbage bag earlier. Today I finally dragged myself to deal with it and found the whole bag crawling, moving, with green squirming bugs. Did the maggots evolve into these? But why are they so much smaller and faster now?"
[Luxury Car Dealer No. 5]:"I got bitten! What do I do?! I woke up this morning to find my whole bed, the sheets, covered in the damn things, and now I'm covered in red, itchy bumps, swelling up. The stupid doctor at the emergency clinic told me it was 'too mild' to prescribe any medicine! Said to wash with soap! With what water?!"
At this point, nearly every household had encountered the carrion scavengers in some form. Whether it was rice weevils that had died and become host, forgotten rotting meat in a failed freezer, or maggots from uncollected waste, all could give rise to these things, a common decay birthing a common plague.
The origin of the carrion scavenger lay in the early, chaotic days of the apocalypse. Fish corpses rotted in unprecedented numbers in seas and lakes, uncollected. Dead poultry from culled farms were buried hastily in shallow, mass graves. With no sunlight to sterilize and break down matter, new microbial life flourished, and from it, new insect species mutated and invaded the niches.
At first, carrion scavengers were tiny, almost microscopic, even smaller than fleas, just 0.3 millimeters long, like moving specks of pepper. But like mealworms, they lived and fed in dense swarms, packed together in writhing, pulsating clusters. Finding one meant there was already a massive, established clump nearby, often hidden in a wall void or under flooring.
The females could fly short distances and burrow into soft materials. Once they found a corpse or rotting organic matter, they ate ravenously while constantly breeding, laying thousands of wriggling offspring. Within days, a new generation of flying females would emerge from the pupae to seek fresh food, repeating the cycle endlessly. Their survival needs were minimal, just one tiny dead weevil or mold spore could sustain a female beetle's reproduction cycle.
Normally, in a balanced environment, carrion scavengers didn't target dry grain. But in the current sustained heat and humidity, stored food spoiled easily in poorly sealed containers, attracting microscopic mold and bugs. When those bugs died, they drew in the scavengers. Human corpses, of course, were their premium feast.
On land, in a functional ecosystem, they had many natural enemies: maggots (which competed for food), red nematodes, other predatory insects, chickens, ducks, and humans with pesticides. But because in the first year the lakes and rivers were stripped of fish and other aquatic life by desperate harvesting, one of the carrion scavenger's key natural predators vanished, allowing them to multiply unchecked, disrupting the fragile remnant ecosystem. For years afterward, every tide brought waves of them ashore from floating mats of algae, crawling over everything, females buzzing lazily as they sought anything edible.
People being bitten, like Luxury Car Dealer, was becoming commonplace. When carrion scavengers bred beyond the carrying capacity of one spot, with no rot or carrion left, they would become aggressive, consuming anything organic, including living human skin, especially on the ill or immobile. Jing Shu guessed Luxury Car Dealer's expensive, now empty house already had an unchecked infestation in the walls or under the carpets, though he, in his pride, had not noticed the signs until they swarmed his bed.
Soon after reading the chats, Jing Shu discovered the first telltale movement in the villa's pigsty, a small, dark, shimmering patch near the drain where some feed had gotten wet and soured. In a blink, though, the patch was devoured completely by the ever vigilant fat chicken, Xiao Dou. With the rapid fire, mechanical frequency of a woodpecker, she pecked furiously at the concrete, darting her head, until the initial small, squirming pile of worms was utterly gone, not a speck left. Jing Shu, watching, thought the plump hen deserved one more nickname: Phantom Chicken, for how swiftly she could make pests vanish.
Unsatisfied, Xiao Dou then began a systematic patrol, scouring the cow pen, the sheep pen, even under the apple trees in the courtyard, her head cocked, searching for more invaders. The only forbidden place was the second floor enclosed chicken coop, which Jing Shu would not allow it to enter for biosecurity reasons. Otherwise, it had free rein during its daily roaming time, a feathered exterminator.
Jing Shu carefully checked the temperature controlled basement next, her flashlight beam piercing the cool darkness. The temperature there was kept at a steady 0°C, meant for long term food and grain storage. Thankfully, it was well sealed and protected, the concrete walls unbreached. She had foreseen this exact problem months ago and had already moved the bulk of their dry grains and valuable seeds inside her Cube Space, leaving only decoy amounts outside to prevent raising suspicion.
She switched on every light in the villa, combing through the indoor mushroom racks in the humid room, the small greenhouse annex, the upstairs storeroom of animal feed. With adult beetles so tiny, and their eggs microscopic, especially during egg laying, they could be lurking in any seam, any crack. Left unchecked, a few could explode into a swarming mass in a week.
This life, Jing Shu refused to allow carrion scavengers anywhere near her family's living quarters. The trauma of that taste, that helpless sickness, ran too deep in her memory, a ghost of hunger she would not invite back.
Finally, in the warm, humid greenhouse, her sharp eyes caught several tiny, clustered movements on the underside of a broad lettuce leaf, a few egg laying females and their fresh clutch. Su Lanzhi cleaned the surfaces daily, so these had only just flown in through the ventilation screen to breed, drawn by the plant's moisture.
With so many fruits and vegetables growing in the greenhouse, it was inevitable there would be small flies and other tiny pests. Any overripe fruit left for days would attract them. Even rich, moist soil in pots could draw them. Spraying essential oils like diluted medicated balm could handle adult beetles, but Jing Shu disliked the idea of spraying any chemical, even natural, where food grew and was harvested daily.
Looking out from the second floor window at Xiao Dou's shadow pecking methodically in the raised vegetable patch, Jing Shu had a sudden, inspired thought. The carrion scavenger, for all its hardiness, had many natural enemies in a complex web, could bees be one of them? She recalled bees were opportunistic, sometimes scavenging protein from dead insects.
On a hunch, she released a small handful of bees from her Cube Space apiary section into the greenhouse. At first, they circled the flowering strawberry plants and tomato blossoms. But finding little nectar in this artificial environment, their attention turned to the small, moving beetles on the lettuce. Within moments, the clusters of egg layers were investigated, then efficiently wiped out, the bees' legs carrying away tiny dark specks.
Seeing immediate, promising results, Jing Shu quickly built a small, simple observation hive in a corner of the greenhouse, transferring a few dozen bees to take up residence. She didn't expect honey from them, only that they would patrol and consume every intruding beetle and egg mass they could find.
Afterward, as a broader deterrent, Jing Shu sprayed a heavily diluted solution of medicated balm and citronella along the villa's baseboards, window sills, and door frames, added floral scented water to the humidifiers, and left the air faintly, pleasantly scented with lavender and eucalyptus. It was an effective, non toxic barrier that most crawling insects instinctively avoided.
Perhaps because she had raised them from larvae in the perfectly balanced environment of her Cube Space for half a year, the bees seemed to recognize her scent, just like Xiao Dou did. They buzzed near her but never stung, landing on her sleeve briefly before flying off. Maybe it was her imagination, a hopeful anthropomorphism, but she took no chances with her family, everyone still had to wear fine mesh head nets when entering the greenhouse, a necessary precaution.
That evening at the crowded dinner table, over a stew of pork and potatoes, Jing Shu mentioned casually that she had found a small, wild hive under the eaves of the toolshed and planned to carefully move it into the greenhouse for pollination and pest control. She also said she would take sole charge of it herself, to avoid anyone getting stung. Su Lanzhi happily agreed, relieved to be free of another potentially risky chore.
"By the way," Jing Shu said, turning to Wu You'ai, who was dissecting a green bean with scientific focus, "can you get more frogs? Like, a lot of them? Through your professor or the bio lab?"
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The author use "腐尸虫" (Fǔ shī chóng) when write about this species.
腐 (fǔ): Rotten, decaying, decomposed.
尸 (shī): Corpse, dead body.
虫 (chóng): Insect, bug.
Based on the description of them as omnivorous, swarming, land-sea creatures that consume rot, I decide to use "carrion scavenger". It feels like prioritize the narrative function—a symbol of omnivorous decay and ecosystem collapse—over a failed attempt at scientific accuracy.
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Didn't I say back in the early chapters that I would use bloodworms instead of red nematodes? Well… when I actually started translating, it felt super weird to me. Like something was missing.
Remember, I told you I've reread this novel 5–6 times already, and every single time it was with red nematodes, not bloodworms. So while working on it, I kept thinking:
"Where's my red nematode??" (＃｀д´)ﾉ
That disoriented feeling was unbearable for me, so I gave in and went back to writing it as red nematode. (≧▽≦)
Sorry about that, LOL (￣▽￣;)