At first, Fatty Niu only thought her hair felt heavy and limp because it was soaked with rainwater. It kept getting heavier, though, a dragging weight, and itchier too, a maddening prickling, until her neck could barely hold up her head. She reached up to brush the water away from her forehead, only to grab a thick, squirming handful of strange, thread-like bugs.
It felt like clutching hundreds of tiny, cold, living snakes, thin and long and impossibly slippery. They were definitely not the familiar, short maggots, and not the segmented carrion scavengers either. What were they? Her mind couldn't process it.
The unknown was always worse, more terrifying. The moment Fatty Niu imagined a dense mass of little snakes crawling across her scalp, biting her or sucking her blood, goosebumps exploded across her skin, a wave of primal revulsion.
"Ah, ah!" A short, sharp cry escaped her.
Her scream, raw and sudden, sliced through the steady roar of the rain in the community. A moment of silence, then a chorus of other panicked cries followed, echoing from different courtyards.
"Help, help! There are so many snakes, so many bugs on my head! Waaa!" Another woman's voice rose in a shriek.
Fatty Niu burst into terrified tears and bolted for the cover of the nearest stairwell, slipping on the wet ground. From behind, it looked grotesque, as if her hair had grown several dozen centimeters in an instant, thick and matted. A dense, seething mass of red worms was coiled and braided through her strands, a living, wriggling horror.
She shook her head furiously as she ran, trying to fling the red nematodes off. Useless. They were linked head to tail in chains and wrapped around individual hairs like a terrifying, elastic mop string half a meter long, anchored.
The red nematodes were busy tangling and mating in the perfect medium of wet hair. They tightly entwined themselves in her hair, knotting themselves into the roots, each restless end seeking a new mate, pulling against its other half.
Gritting her teeth, Fatty Niu yanked at a clump of the red nematodes so hard she nearly tore out a patch of her own hair. The worms stretched like tough rubber bands, refusing to come loose, while her scalp went numb with a sharp, tearing pain.
She gasped from the pain, inhaled by reflex, and sucked in a mouthful of rainwater that was thick with floating red nematodes. Without the torrent of clean rain to wash them straight through, the worms, caught in her mouth, bounced and wriggled frantically against her tongue and cheeks.
It was like chewing a mouthful of tiny, exploding candy that fought back.
"Ptui! Ptui!" Fatty Niu spat them out in frantic bursts, but many of the worms were so thin, like coarse hair, that they snagged between her teeth or caught on her lips.
The red nematodes were suffering from the assault too. The more they were chewed or pulled, the more violently they fought back, their black-tipped ends clamping onto the soft tissue of her gums and lips and tugging, a hundred tiny, painful pinches.
Her mouth became a miniature, agonizing battlefield. She gagged and retched, but nothing came free. She scooped inside with her fingers and felt them everywhere, a tickling, numbing infestation on her skin. Some escaped her fingers and wriggled down her neck, hopping and twisting with their peculiar motion until the maddening itch sent Fatty Niu rolling on the concrete floor of the stairwell, scratching wildly.
Once she reached the relative dryness of the stairwell and got out of the direct rain, under the dim emergency light, she finally saw the infestation clearly. Those terrifying, red, thread-like bugs were all over her body, on her arms, her neck, woven through her clothes.
"Help! Mom! What are these things?" Her voice was a high-pitched wail.
"Ah! There are so many bugs in the rain! God, what are they?" Another voice echoed from a nearby balcony.
"My head, there are so many in my hair! I can't get them out!" A third joined the chorus of horror.
Fatty Niu wasn't the only one. Right after her first scream, Wang Cuihua, Luo Zhu, and all the others who had been eagerly bathing or washing clothes in the rain started shrieking too, the same discovery made simultaneously across the community.
For a while, the entire community echoed with howls, sobbing, and panicked shouts, a symphony of distress rising above the rain.
It was everyone's first encounter with red nematodes. No one understood what they were, where they came from, and sheer, blind fear took over. That first traumatic experience left psychological and physical scars many would never forget. Jing Shu was one of them. In this life, she wanted nothing to do with these bugs, had prepared specifically to avoid them.
In the past, neither maggots nor carrion scavengers actively attacked living people. Unless there was an open wound or a corpse, you didn't see them swarming on human skin. People dug for maggots in compost, they went looking for carrion scavengers in ditches. No one had ever seen a scene like today, where the sky itself seemed to rain down an aggressive, clinging pest.
Crawling would have been bad enough, but these things burrowed into folds of cloth and hopped short distances as they wriggled, making your whole body itch insanely, obsessed with finding any hole or orifice to get into.
Red nematodes loved human hair most of all, the perfect anchoring net. Once they tangled in it, they wouldn't come out, their bodies hooking onto strands. They particularly preferred thick, long hair, a forest to explore.
That was why Jing Shu had told everyone in her family repeatedly: don't, under any circumstances, let your hair get rained on. Cover it completely.
The longer it rained, the more red nematodes fell and clung to any exposed hair. Some began mating almost immediately upon contact. The faster ones completed a full, grotesque 360-degree mating posture, tying themselves in knots, and laid clutches of tiny, sticky eggs. Before long, in the warm, damp environment, those eggs would hatch into tiny red nematode larvae just 0.1 millimeters long, invisible to the eye but felt as a crawling sensation.
Never, ever let red nematodes lay eggs in your hair. Once it starts, it won't stop, a cycle of infestation. In her previous life, when the first rains came, Jing Shu, like everyone else, had rushed out to shower like a madwoman, thinking it a blessing. The result?
Her own long, cherished hair became wrapped in thousands upon thousands of red nematodes that wouldn't come off no matter how hard she pulled or washed. Soon, countless invisible eggs were laid, glued to her scalp and individual strands. The eggs were transparent and impossibly sticky. There was only one brutal solution.
Shave everything clean. Every last strand.
Otherwise, your scalp would itch like crazy, driving you mad. You would feel an army of tiny bugs racing and hopping over your head. Some would inevitably crawl into your ears, your nostrils, the corners of your mouth.
There was no clean water to rinse them away. Every natural water source was quickly filled with red nematodes, impossible to filter with household means. The more you washed with infested water, the more would cling and lay more eggs.
Blankets and towels had already been dunked in the worm-filled rain. Even if you were lucky enough to have a dry towel left, you couldn't comb or wipe off the worms that were actively mating and braiding themselves into the very structure of your hair.
The only thing to do, the public health order that would come, was to shave any place with hair. Yes, every place with hair: head, eyebrows, arms, everywhere.
If you didn't, the consequences would be terrifying, a living hell.
Within days, as the news spread, the people lining up at the supermarket distribution points would all be bald, men and women alike, a sea of shiny scalps. It wasn't a fashion statement or a religious choice. It was pure, grim survival.
A couple days later, the government, recognizing the crisis, would set up a row of checkpoints at every supermarket entrance, station a dozen guards with electric clippers, and shave everyone clean, sanitizing the clippers between persons, before they were allowed to enter.
Otherwise, every person who went out into the rain and came back would bring with them ten or so jin of red nematodes (about 5 kilograms), stuck fast and impossible to tear off. Once inside an enclosed space like a market, the worms would leap, spreading the infestation. Sometimes the worms on one person's head would leap onto another's nearby head, tying the two people together physically with living, writhing threads. Then others would get caught, and soon a whole group would be knotted together, unable to separate.
Perfect, a neatly bundled, squirming family of worms and humans.
In her previous life, when Jing Shu went to collect rations, she saw people standing in these tangled knots with dead, resigned eyes, waiting for guards with scissors and clippers to cut them free.
Those with dense red nematode infestations on their heads were literally tied together by the hair via the worms, and even those who had managed to stay clean were infected by passersby. It was hopeless. Scissors often did nothing against the tough worms. Those who wanted in to get food couldn't enter. Those who wanted out couldn't leave. No one dared to move much. Tug one strand of worm-bound hair and a hundred heads would jerk with it in a chain reaction. You could hear the collective wails and frustrated curses from far away, along with phrases like, "Don't move. I will move. If you move, I have to move too. We're stuck."
So the government made it simple, a blanket order. Everyone got a shaved head, no exceptions, to break the cycle.
Jing Shu had even seen a local legend of a woman in her previous life. She had grown her hair for twenty years and never once cut it, her pride and joy. Even when the red nematodes descended and the shaving order came, she refused, clinging to her hair.
Every time she went to the supermarket, her magnificent, worm-infested hair dragged along the ground behind her like a heavy, living net and came away packed with even more red nematodes picked up from the floor. By her own later, horrified estimate, there were tens of thousands of worms living and laying eggs on her head.
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So, a little random ramble from me ( ･ω･)ﾉﾞ
I rarely go searching for new novels to read ever since I started posting on Webnovel. If you haven't noticed yet, my favorite tags are NoCP first, then FemaleMC. Those two are my "core" tags, so whenever I go hunting for something new, I always start with those. After that, I'll look at "sub tags" or other tags that pair well with them, like #Infrastructure, #Historical, #Xianxia, #Rebirth, #Game, #Counterattack, #Transmigration, #System, #Apocalypse, #QT (quick transmigration), #BehindTheScenes, and #Entertainment. Basically, all those are genres I love, as long as they're built around a NoCP + FemaleMC setting.
It's already been 157 days since I uploaded my very first translation, I Became a Fairy and Lived Forever in the Fairy World, up to my latest project, The Cube Queen's Apocalypse Feast. And in all that time, I honestly haven't gone looking for new novels—I've just been focused on translating nonstop, from the moment I wake up at morning/noon until I crash at morning. I haven't had a job this whole time (◞‸◟;), so honestly, your donations on my Ko-fi and Patreon are my main source of income. That's also why I can pour all my time into translating. This is what my schedule has been like: I usually sleep around 4 am and wake up at 6 or 7. If I have something to do in the morning, I just sleep for those few hours. If I have no activities or my sleep quality was good, I go back to sleep and don't truly wake up until 2 pm in the afternoon.
Out of my ongoing projects, 3 are the ones that need the most attention: Troublemaker's Guide to Immortality and The Cube Queen's Apocalypse Feast both already have more than 200 chapters queued up in drafts, while True Heir of Chaos: From Villainess to Empress has around 100 (because I've been rushing to finish Mom's Apocalypse Survival Log and Reborn as the Fallen Idol, I Leaned Into the Chaos!). And for the 2 projects that are serialized, I've also stocked up plenty of draft chapters for those like what I said yesterday.
So, since I've been feeling a little "free," I wandered over to xxsypro, which is usually where I search for novels rather than other sites. The reason? The filters there are actually useful! You can pick "state" (all, serial, completed), "property" (all, free, paid), and even "renew" (last update within 3 days, 7 days, 15 days, or a month). There's also word count filters (like within 200k, 200k–300k, 300k–500k, 500k–1m, 1m–2m, or more than 2m), plus sorting options like "Comprehensive Popularity," "Best Seller," and "Most Favorites."
You can even narrow it down by "type" (Ancient Romance, Modern Romance, Fantasy Romance, Sci-fi, Fairy Tale, Short Stories, Game Competition, etc.), and "labels" (Popular Tags, Profession, Identity, Character, Background, Plot, School, Style). For example, under "Popular Tags" you'll see things like System Flow, Farming, Strong Women, NoCP, Game Alien World, Quick Wear, etc. Basically, the filters are complete, easy to understand, and—most importantly—actually clickable (unlike some sites that write categories/tags but don't let you click them… so annoying).
Anyway, since I was already there, of course my first stop was the NoCP section, and wow, there were tons of new novels with really interesting intros. And now I'm kinda tempted to add another serialized novel project to translate. Don't worry, if I do pick one up, it'll definitely be something with a smaller chapter count or word count. I'm not crazy enough to throw myself at a monster-length novel right now with the way things are (¬_¬;)
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And guess what… I just came back from browsing the NoCP section, and my eyes were literally sparkling ☆:.｡.o(≧▽≦)o.｡.:☆. I found 13 new novels with less than 200 chapters and 7 more that already have over 200 chapters. The intros were so good, my soul got hooked instantly.
Not to mention if I start diving into other sections like Female Supporting Role, Strong Women, Cultivation, Infrastructure, Playing Pig and Eating Tiger, Empress, Boss, Game Otherworldly, Apocalypse, Counterattack, Heroine, Super A, Rebirth, Entertainment, and Vest… that's basically heaven on earth for me (≧◡≦).
Of course, sometimes "NoCP" isn't listed under the tags. Instead, you'll see it written in the description/intro like "无CP", or sometimes not mentioned at all, which means you have to either catch the hints in the intro or rely on your NoCP radar being strong enough (lol).
Anyway—decision, decision, decision. (Important things must be said three times!) (╯✧▽✧)╯