CH 80

Chapter 80: Cave of a Hundred Insects (II)

Right! Wasn't that where the Spider of the Same Age was supposed to be found?

Somehow, in blindly following the strangers, they had managed to find their way here without even realising it –– what kind of serendipity was that? For a moment, Xue Xian felt that something was strange about it all, but before he could really make sense of that feeling, he automatically swept it away.

The text on the wall was like some illegible script from the heavens. Apart from Cave of a Hundred Insects, there was not a single other word that Xue Xian could recognise, as though it were a language invented by some ancient clan. Xue Xian quickly ran out of patience and gave up trying to read the rest.

"All these moths here creep the hell out of me. It's not a good place to linger," Xue Xian said, grimacing as he gestured at the piles of insect corpses before them. "There's another tunnel ahead. Let's go. I don't care what else is waiting for us, I just never want to touch these powdery things again."

Xue Xian looked away from the archaic text on the wall and hummed in agreement. He held up his sleeve to block the moths that continued to buzz around them and led Xue Xian across the chamber toward the tunnel on the other side.

The dragon of fire was as mighty as a thousand soldiers. It blazed across the chamber, killing every last moth.

Xuanmin glanced back, and just that glimpse of the unending piles of dead insects was enough to make his stomach turn –– but upon closer look, something was amiss. 

"Hey –– these damn things actually bite," Xue Xian muttered as he angrily slapped the back of his hand. If it wasn't for the fact that he was a water creature and hated fire, he would long have set the entire chamber aflame with lightning. As he showed Xuanmin the bite on his hand, even he did not realise how meaningful it was that his first instinct had been to complain to the monk.

By the dim, flickering light of the fire dragon, Xuanmin peered at the two drops of blood on Xue Xian's hand, then pointed behind him and said, "Some of the moths here are not normal."

If the Cave of a Hundred Insects really was the breeding ground for magical creatures like the Spider of the Same Age, then naturally it could not be an ordinary cave –– perhaps everything inside it was venomous. These moths had clearly made this cave their home for generations upon generations, so it was not surprising that they might begin to mutate.

But the nature of the moths' transformation was unnerving –– they began to grow bigger, and had decided to become carnivorous.

"Let's go, let's go! If I have to look at them for one more second I'm going to throw up all over you," Xue Xian said darkly as he turned around and began to walk down the tunnel.

As they penetrated deeper into the cave, the tunnel was becoming taller, so that they no longer needed to bend their heads. Xuanmin brought the dragon of fire along with them, and the flame slithered ahead of them to light the way.

By now, Xue Xian, who normally hated warm weather, was now starting to appreciate this fire dragon.

When Xue Xian had been bitten by the moth on the back of his hand, there had been a flash of heat that had quickly died away. He figured that the moth had probably injected some kind of poison into him, and that if he were a normal human, he would either have long died of disgust at the moths themselves, or been killed by that poison. 

Although the fire dragon had burned the moths in the chamber clean, there were still a few perched on the tunnel walls. As Xuanmin had guessed, the moths here were much larger than normal, with the biggest being far bigger than a human hand. It was unclear what it was these insects ate, but their bellies were round and full, and looked heavy.

But they were still moths, and, naturally, they came toward the flame, with some others being drawn to Xue Xian and Xuanmin's presence.

"The more we go in, the weirder the moths are," Xue Xian said as he impatiently batted them away with his sleeve. A gust of sharp wind swept across the horde like a knife, and the moths dropped lifeless to the ground. Then, the wind crashed into the tunnel wall and briefly shook the whole cave. Tiny pebbles began to leak out of the ceiling and covered the two in fine dust.

Xue Xian was even more annoyed now.

Of course, being very powerful was not always a good thing. There was no room for him to do anything in this fragile place. Xue Xian angrily muttered to himself, Thank god Xuanmin is here. His magic has range.

They were deep in the tunnel now, and the moths had stopped throwing themselves idiotically into the flame. They seemed to have become intelligent, and avoided them, flapping their enormous wings further into the darkness as soon as the two came close.

Maybe Xue Xian was just being paranoid, but he detected something peculiar in the way the moths were flying, as though... they were carrying messages for someone waiting even deeper in the tunnel.

As he pondered this, he suddenly felt something graze against the pinky finger of his left hand, as though something with tiny legs were climbing up him.

Frowning, he looked at his hand.

"An ant," he said.

There was an ant crawling across his hand, but the ant was more than twice as big as normal ants, and, in the glow of the fire dragon, seemed to gleam red. The insect was fearless: as Xue Xian watched, it opened its jaw and bit him on the finger.

Xue Xian scoffed. "Another carnivore."

Impatiently, he flicked the ant away. 

Of course, the strength in his finger was far more powerful than humans', and as the ant slammed into the wall, it was flattened by the impact, leaking a streak of fishy-smelling liquid onto the stone.

Just from that smell, it was possible to tell that the ant's daily sustenance was the rotting flesh of corpses. But were the corpses those of animals that had accidentally wandered in... or humans?

Before Xue Xian had even shaken himself out of that revolted state, he felt someone thump him hard on the back.

He turned to see Xuanmin drop his hand. And by his feet laid several ants with their legs twitching emptily in the air... as well as numerous more ants coming his way, crawling across the uneven stone floor or creeping across the jagged stone walls.

The long line of ants marching toward him was almost awe-inspiring: they seemed to spill endlessly from the darkness beyond the flame's light.

This was even worse than the moths –– because ants could go from your feet all the way up your body.

Xue Xian turned to Xuanmin again, and just as he'd thought, the monk's ice cold expression was cracking and about to turn into shaved ice. There was no way he was going to be able to tolerate ants streaming up him beneath his clothes.

With his sharp vision, Xue Xian peered farther into the pitch-black tunnel and made a face. The ants coming toward them now were only in a queue, but, deeper inside, they would be teeming all over the ground with no space to step.

And the ants moved rapidly. They had only stopped for a little while, but the ants were already coming in as relentless as a tide, a dense, infinite mass. In an instant, they would begin climbing up the two's shoes –– it was as though they'd known the two were coming.

Xue Xian couldn't help but recall the moths, and wondered if all the creepy-crawlies in this Cave of a Hundred Insects were this intelligent. They were close to becoming magical beasts.

They couldn't step on the ground, they couldn't touch the walls, and even the ceilings were covered in ants now.

Xue Xian knew what he had to do. He summoned a gust of wind beneath their feet, no longer caring whether he would collapse the cave. He grabbed a handful of Xuanmin's robe and let the wind carry them forward. With the wind rumbling across the ground, they did not have to touch the ants, and instead stepped lightly above that chittering mass.

The howling wind was extremely strong and shook the walls of the tunnel. More dust began to fall from the ceiling, scattering tiny pebbles along the stone floor. The wind flung countless carnivorous ants into the wall, where they were instantly flattened, and others were directly ripped apart. 

And the dragon of fire continued to blaze after them, scorching those ants that had survived the wind, so that, as they swept into the tunnel, they left a trail of corpses behind them.

Xue Xian finally understand what Old Qu had meant by Even hearing the name 'Cave of a Hundred Insects' will take away half your lifespan from sheer fright. They had only made it to this point because they were Xue Xian and Xuanmin –– ordinary people would enter as living beings full of blood and flesh, and walk out as clean white skeletons.

The tunnel was long and dark, and Xue Xian didn't know when it would end again. They continued down the tunnel in a tornado of wind and flame for as long as it took for a stick of incense to burn, killing who knew how many more insects...

"Moths, red ants, centipedes, millipedes, scorpions..." Xue Xian counted the different types of insects they were barrelling through, then looked down at the stone floor and laughed coldly. 

These annoying things were becoming increasingly venomous, increasingly large, and increasingly hard to battle as they dove deeper into the tunnel. Some seemed to struggle extensively against the flame before finally dying.

But no matter how inconvenient they were, they were ultimately still just bugs to Xue Xian and Xuanmin. All they had to do was step on wind across them –– of course they were not going to be defeated here. But this was not why Xue Xian had chuckled.

The reason was that, as they headed deeper into the cave, the floor began increasingly to be covered not just in the bodies of bugs, but also in human bones. 

Those naked bones were pale yellow in color, and the flesh on them had been completely devoured clean. At first, they seemed to have been here for many years already, but upon closer inspection, Xue Xian could see that the blood streaked on them was fresh and sticky, with a highly familiar stench.

"Those are the people from the funeral stop," Xue Xian said, holding his nose. They had finally stopped encountering insects, so the wind dissipated and he stepped onto the ground again.

Frowning, Xuanmin scanned their surroundings, then retraced his gaze. He, too, stepped back onto the ground.

They were standing at the end of this tunnel: all that lay ahead was a flat wall. But in front of that wall was a spiral staircase that led to an upper level –– it was unclear what dynasty the staircase had been constructed, for it was not only small and narrow, but also covered with a thick white cocoon of cobwebs.

But the intricate layers of cobwebs had been swept aside by someone, and now floated listlessly from the banisters.

The cobwebs immediately made Xue Xian think of the "Spider of the Same Age" –– of course it couldn't be a coincidence. At the top of the staircase was the place they were looking for.

"Someone got here first," Xue Xian said as he studied the cobwebs. "Looks like all those people from the funeral stop were human shields."

Xuanmin replied, "But there were not that many bones along the tunnel. There must still be more of them."

"Perhaps they're upstairs." Xue Xian pointed at the staircase.

The two exchanged glances and, without hesitation, began to walk up the stairs.

These steps were also covered in that sticky fresh blood, in which were lodged various other filthy substances. The two decided not to actually touch the steps at all, which also meant that they were avoided making the noise that would have come out had they stepped on those substances.

The staircase wound up and up, taking them ever farther from that tunnel. It seemed to have more than a hundred steps. But the two arrived very quickly at the top.

An ordinary-looking chamber that seemed to contain two bedrooms was spread out before them. In the middle of the chamber was embedded a pool full of black water, and beside the pool was a copper mirror. The mirror, in turn, was surrounded by puddles of blood, which seeped from the wall all the way to the stone border of the pool.

And on one of those white stone tiles was were five bloody streaks –– a handprint, as though inflicted by someone struggling to stay alive.