Where Immortals Once Walked

More than a dozen spider guards rushed over to deal with the flames, but the fire spread with uncanny speed. They would extinguish the flames in one stone chamber only to find four or five others already ablaze behind them.

To make it worse, a strong updraft was blowing from the depths of the earth. It carried sparks on the wind, scattering the seeds of light and heat even farther.

He Lingchuan had not expected four arrows to work this well.

But he was not exactly happy about it either, because the spider guards had already closed in on him.

The two in the lead actually leaped, and their leap covered about ten meters!

It was his first time seeing spiders that could jump, and in conditions this hostile, no less.

He had no choice but to shout a warning to the team up on the surface. Then he swung his changdao and, straining with everything he had, hacked through two cords of spider silk!

The strands were chalk-white, apparently not Zhu Erniang’s.

Before the jumping spiders could slam into his face, He Lingchuan drew a deep breath and pitched himself backward into the air.

Yes, with arms spread, as if embracing the abyss, he went into free fall.

The jumpers snapped at empty air.

The rest of the spider guards arrived and flung webs to snare him, planning to haul him up and teach him a proper lesson.

Unfortunately for them, their shots fell short by a few meters.

Still, anything that dropped into this chasm seldom lived to tell the tale. They could always go down later and collect a corpse. Losing interest in He Lingchuan, the spider guards turned to fight the spreading fires in the stone chambers; at the same time, they split off a squad of over a hundred and swarmed out of the burrow, going topside to settle accounts with the humans right outside.

Humans—loathsome creatures in the eyes of spiders—never entered Guizhen Stone Forest alone. If one had appeared in their den, there had to be a whole group of them waiting outside.

He Lingchuan plummeted like a lead weight, the wind howling past his ears, still clutching the two cords of silk.

Again and again, he whipped the silk out, trying to snag it onto a distant wall. With how sticky spider silk was, the slightest touch should have glued it fast.

But the strands were just too light and wispy. The updraft from below shoved them straight upward like taut white reeds.

Damn it. So those TV shows were lying to me again!

If he died in the dream, he should wake up in the real world.

Should.

But he did not want to wake up yet. Not now. He wanted one more shot.

At this rate of descent, he had only a few finger-snaps’ worth of time left.

Good thing he had a backup.

The spider queen’s den had grown out of a natural karst cave system, riddled with holes. He picked the largest cavity on the rock face, fixed his aim, and yanked something from his breast. Pouring true energy into it, he hurled it hard.

A thousand days of practice, all for this throw, put to use in a single heartbeat.

He watched it drop cleanly into the hollow, landing right in a pile of dead leaves, and his heart jumped.

He himself was still falling at speed and had to hit a target more than seven meters away. A few months ago, did he have this kind of ability?

Worse, the bottom was coming up fast. He had only this one chance.

Badass. I’m freaking badass. I’ll have to treat myself later.

His lifesaving “treasure” was nothing more than a tiny cicada shell.

Ghost-shadow cicadas live underground as nymphs. Once they grew, they loved to wedge themselves into the crotches of big branches, right in a tree’s armpit, and they could even shift their color to match the bark. That was why getting your hands on a cast-off shell was not easy.

But that shell is indispensable for performing the substitution technique.

He Lingchuan had memorized and practiced how to cast the divine technique by heart. Now, just with his left hand making the seal, not even needing to chant, he vanished from where he was, and in the next instant, he appeared right inside the rock cavity!

In exchange, the ghost-shadow cicada shell swapped places with him. It should have kept dropping, but the thing was so light, and the wind at the bottom so fierce, that it actually bobbed and started floating upward.

He had escaped death by a hair. Cold sweat soaked him through. He slumped back against the stone and let out a long breath.

He leaned out to look down into the abyss and broke into another cold sweat. The distance between life and death had been barely thirteen meters!

Luckily, he redeemed the substitution technique with his military merits before setting out, and it was good that he had been mulling over its applications the whole trip here.

See? Put to use already. Otherwise, he would have been forced to log off ahead of schedule.

He took a few deep breaths to steady his mind, then prepared to push on.

The ground underfoot was extraordinarily soft. By the light of the glowspores, he saw that he was standing on a mat of half-rotted twigs and leaves with a mossy carpet more than a third of a meter thick.

The moss carpet was so springy that his very first step sank right in.

Up close, he noticed what looked like aphids wriggling on that carpet, though they were nearly the size of pomelos.

He had never seen aphids this big.

These strange insects were plump and round, a pale green under the glowspore light. Even with an uninvited guest like He Lingchuan arriving, they only sculled along on six stubby legs, laboring slowly to edge away from him.

Squinting, He Lingchuan realized that in the seventeen-meter stretch ahead, there were at least seven or eight hundred of the fat aphids. Some were eating, some were courting, and some were sleeping away, but almost none had wandered beyond their own tiny plots.

A shadow slid across the floor. He darted into the darkness and saw a spider coming down the cross-tunnel ahead.

He was just about to strike from ambush when the spider stepped up to one of the aphids and patted it on the back.

The aphid trembled, then excreted a bead of honeydew the size of a pigeon’s egg.

The spider gulped it in one mouthful as if it were a delicacy. Not satisfied, it begged from four or five more aphids before finally wiping its mouth and moving on.

Only then did He Lingchuan understand that these caverns were pastureland. The burrow-dwelling spiders of Guizhen Stone Forest had copied the ants and were raising giant aphids as a daily food source.

The air was faintly humid, and the sporelight made for perfect moss growth. The aphids were the spiders’ dairy herd, providing them with the equivalent of milk and meat.

It was no wonder that the Guizhen Stone Forest could sustain hundreds of thousands of spiders; the secret was underground all along.

He crept forward with care, treading the thick moss and stepping past one giant aphid after another.

Down here near the abyssal floor, patrol spiders were few and sluggish, so they were easy to avoid. They must have considered the deepest part of the den perfectly safe and, naturally, were slacking off.

Human or spider, living creatures were cast from the same mold.

Slack guards or not, the maze itself was genuinely complex. After only a quarter of an hour, he had no idea where he was. There were always several tunnels ahead to choose from.

Even so, he kept angling for the higher paths.

Another full two hours passed with no sense of direction, but the moss underfoot thinned, and the aphids grew fewer.

Then he stepped into a vast cavern.

It was roughly the size of a soccer field, with a ceiling about twenty meters high. The floor was dry and clean with no dew, no moss, or anything at all.

But the walls and roof were carpeted with glowspores, lighting the chamber as bright as day.

Which was why, the instant he walked in, the sight before him made his heart hammer and his scalp prickle.

A colossal burrow spider stood not ten meters away, facing him head-on.

Twelve great, glossy black eyes glared at him in unison.

Spider Queen Zhu Erniang was as big as a thatched hut, which already counted as immense, but this burrow spider towered to a staggering thirteen meters tall.

For reference, a male giraffe rarely stood taller than seven meters, and a human typically had to crane their neck just to take it in.

This spider loomed there, thick-limbed and massive—a small mountain of pressure radiating off it.

In that heartbeat, He Lingchuan’s back went rigid. Every cell in his body seemed to shriek: Run. Turn and run!

The giant spider did not move.

He Lingchuan even lightened his breathing and eased back two steps. The passage that he had come through was narrow; with that bulk, maybe the monster could not squeeze in after him. Aren’t groups of spiders supposed to have only one leader? Could this be Zhu Erniang’s true body?

But after he retreated four or five paces, the giant spider still lay there, motionless.

Is it asleep, or...?

Spiders do not have eyelids, so whether they are asleep or awake, their eyes are never covered.

Soon, though, he noticed a telling detail.

The ever-present glowspores were growing on the giant spider’s body as well. They could be seen on its back, its brow, its joints, even threaded among its long, bristling hairs.

The spider leaned flush against the rock wall, and on the wall around it, the spores were thicker than anywhere else.

How long has this thing not moved?

He picked up a pebble, braced himself, and tossed it at the spider—not too hard, not too soft.

Tock.

The pebble bounced off its foreleg and clattered to the floor, the sound ringing oddly in the open space.

Still no reaction.

He tried twice more. Nothing. Only then did he edge closer.

The nearer he drew, the more immense and fearsome it seemed. What kind of lifespan, what kind of diet, could grow a thing to this size?

He finally stopped at its feet and gave the foreleg a light tap with his saber.

Dng, dng.

Two muffled notes resounded, like stone striking bronze.

In other words, the outer shell of that foreleg was as hard as rock.

From this angle, he could at last glimpse the spider’s abdomen, and it was patterned like a star-strewn night sky.

The pattern on Zhu Erniang’s abdomen was already gorgeous, but this one’s star map was broader and brighter, as if it held half the Milky Way. You could not look away. The “stars” even seemed to faintly scintillate, answering the glow of the spores that quilted its body.

Bolder now, he set his palm to the foreleg and sent a trickle of true energy into it.

If it were alive, someone had just come knocking at the door. How could it then not respond?

But his true energy vanished like a clay ox sinking into the sea, leaving not the slightest feedback.

What he felt within was desolate, hollow, and indifferent.

Such a magnificent monster had died here countless years ago, and even its corpse was nearly turning to stone.

For no reason, the remains in the immortal’s cave rose in his mind, along with two words: seated death.

Did this giant spider settle and die here?

He moved on through the cavern and came upon another giant spider.

This one was half the size of the first, likewise leaning, and likewise furred with glowspores.

He continued forward and found a third, a fourth...

Eventually, he came upon a seventh.

Each was smaller than the last, and each had a star map on its belly, and none had the faintest vitality.