Liu Chang'an remembered that female tea pickers in the past often wore conical hats, covered their faces with veils, put sleeve covers over their arms, and wrapped themselves up tightly from head to toe, all to guard against the various poisonous creatures in the tea gardens.
The most common of these was the "foreign nettle caterpillar," the larva of a slug moth. Its scientific name was Parasa consocia, and biologically, it belonged to the class Insecta, order Lepidoptera, suborder Ditrysia, superfamily Zygaenoidea, family Limacodidae.
If one touched a foreign nettle caterpillar, wherever it touched would swell. Sometimes a large area would puff up; sometimes there would be scattered little bumps. It depended on the degree and extent of one's intimate contact with it.
If not treated promptly, the numb itching and stabbing pain would become a searing, unbearable agony, leaving a profound memory branded into one's soul. Most children raised in the countryside had experienced it.
Besides foreign nettle caterpillars, tea gardens also harbored all sorts of poisonous miasmas. This particular tea garden was especially bad. The old tea leaves had grown so large that they were dark green to the point of blackness, its branches and foliage luxuriant. It was clearly just greenery beside the resort center, with no one pruning, tending, or picking tea from it, making it an ideal place for poisonous miasmas and pestilential vapors to gather.
Bai Hui lifted her skirt. Her skin glistened softly in the night, but there was a strip of red swelling on her inner thigh that extended upward to an area where she was too embarrassed to lift her skirt any further.
"Looks like an ordinary foreign nettle caterpillar. Actually, the pupae of foreign nettle caterpillars can be eaten in their overwintering cocoons..." Seeing the unfriendly look in Bai Hui's