I don’t have a bucket on hand. Making one from banana leaves wouldn’t hold much water, and going back and forth would be exhausting.

I’ll just smoke them out.

Embers.

Right, I have to go back and get some embers.

’But before that, I still need to... Oh, wait, never mind. There’s plenty of ready-made firewood right here.’

’The wood of this cabin must have been completely devoured by termites long ago. I might as well just burn it all down.’

"To keep the termites from biting me, I’ll need to take some precautions. What can I rub on myself that would be an effective insect repellent..."

He looked around and saw the tobacco field not far away.

He slapped his forehead.

"Right, right, right. I almost forgot. This is the perfect ready-made material."

With that thought, he immediately returned to his shelter, dug a smoldering piece of charcoal out of the fire pit, placed it in a bamboo tube, and brought it back to the abandoned cabin.

The bamboo knife swung down.

CRACK.

Just as he’d guessed, the rotten wood on the ground had long since been eaten hollow. A single light chop was enough to make it shatter.

Fortunately, there weren’t many termites inside the wood, and they didn’t seem to notice any change in their food source, continuing to scurry about.

’With a cabin this big, how do I make sure the smoke goes underground?’

He stared at the roughly five-meter-long cabin, lost in thought.

’The simplest method would be to cover it. If the smoke has nowhere else to go, it can only drift into the Ant Nest. The nest has many tunnels, so it’s actually ventilated.’

’As long as one side is open and the other is mostly blocked, it should draw the smoke through, just like a range hood.’

’But before that, I need to pinpoint the nest’s exact location.’

’It would be best if I could dig an entrance open.’

He first chopped up the rotten log in front of him, then opened the bamboo tube and took out the charcoal.

He sprinkled fine wood shavings directly onto the surface of the charcoal, and a small orange flame quickly ignited. He then added larger wood chips.

The flames soon shot up to his knees.

He rolled up the tobacco leaves, roughly chopped them into fine shreds with his bamboo knife, and tossed them into the fire.

The fresh tobacco leaves contained a lot of moisture. As they roasted in the intense fire, they let out loud CRACKLES and POPS. A great deal of steam rose up along with thick smoke.

The acrid, choking smell of tobacco made him cough repeatedly. His nostrils and throat itched, and the smoke stung his eyes, causing them to well up with tears until he couldn’t open them at all.

Peeking through the last tiny slits of his eyelids, he tossed all the remaining shredded tobacco into the fire. Then he stood in the path of the rising gray smoke, letting it envelop him completely.

Lin Chen held his breath and closed his eyes, standing silently in the smoke for a full minute before he finally couldn’t take it anymore. He stepped away, gasping for fresh air.

He lifted his arm and sniffed. He was covered in the unpleasant reek of smoke and tobacco, like he’d just spent an hour in a stuffy old mahjong parlor.

This was a smell he had once despised, but now he had to willingly douse himself in it.

Covered in the scent of tobacco, he could not only prevent termite attacks but was also now a walking insect repellent. He no longer had to worry about being bitten by mosquitoes or other bugs while in the forest.

He had finished clearing the rotten wood from the cabin’s collapsed outer walls. Only seven or eight beams were still lying in the center of the room.

He used the same trick again. First, he cleared a space about a meter wide inside the cabin, pulling up all the weeds to expose the yellowish-brown soil beneath.

Then, he took some embers from the fire outside and built a new one inside the cabin, leaving the other to slowly die out.

Once the fire was going, he tossed in more shredded tobacco and, using a wide banana leaf as a fan, continuously fanned the smoke into the cabin.

Suffocated by the acrid smoke, swarms of termites hidden within the fallen beams scrambled to take flight. Most quickly fell to the ground amidst the billowing fumes; only a few lucky ones managed to break through the blockade of smoke.

After a few minutes, seeing almost no more termites flying out, Lin Chen cautiously approached. He smashed apart all the rotten logs, moving the larger pieces to one side and leaving the small fragments where they lay.

With the beams out of the way, he immediately spotted a small, conspicuous mound of sand and earth rising from the cabin floor. At its peak was a round, crater-like hole.

"The entrance to the Ant Nest! This is it. It looks just like the ones I’ve seen online!"

Using his bamboo knife as a shovel, he plunged it straight in and slashed left and right a few times, destroying the entrance to the nest.

After a few slashes, the mound instantly collapsed, revealing the dark nest entrance below and a teeming army of termites.

A single glance was enough to send a chill down his spine.

[MY GOD!!!]

[Pan the camera away, you’re triggering my trypophobia!]

[This isn’t a shelter, it’s hell!!]

[If I were the last owner, I wouldn’t care what resources were nearby. The second I saw that, I would’ve abandoned everything and gotten the hell out of there.]

[The nest is underground. How is he going to get the smoke in there?]

To distract himself, Lin Chen glanced at the live comments on his watch. Just as he’d thought, most of the viewers were as physically repulsed by the sight as he was.

Fortunately, thanks to the thick smoke, the horde of termites showed no sign of taking flight. Instead, they scrambled over each other to burrow deeper into the nest.

’Now that I’ve found the entrance, the rest will be easy.’

’I don’t need to worry about how many other entrances there are nearby. Smoke gets in everywhere. The nest has a complex structure that often runs deep, so it’ll be impossible for such a massive colony to escape quickly through the narrow tunnels.’

’Simply put, only some of the worker and soldier termites living near the surface might get lucky and escape. The main colony and the queen deeper inside are guaranteed to be smoked to death.’

’Without a queen, the colony will lose its anchor. They won’t return to this area, and they probably won’t even survive for long.’

’The forest is full of predators that eat insects—spiders, frogs, birds, and so on. Not even one in a hundred of the termites that manage to fly out will actually survive.’

He pulled a few larger pieces of wood from the indoor fire and piled them at the entrance to the Ant Nest. He then added a few handfuls of new wood shavings and chips to make the flames burn hotter.