Where Immortals Once Walked

A silent withered forest, a silent little town...

Zhu Daniang moved her eight legs and chose one household to enter.

A moment later, her voice came from inside. “Dead.”

A family of six lay scattered in every direction, from a three-year-old child to an elder in their sixties. Every member of the household was here.

Each corpse was shriveled, as if every last bit of their flesh and blood had been sucked dry.

There were several round holes on every body.

Dong Rui went to check the rear shed of another home and clicked his tongue twice. “They didn’t even spare the pigs and dogs.”

The livestock had all died the same way.

Whoever the killer was that had slaughtered the townspeople, they had truly left not even the chickens or dogs alive.

He Lingchuan looked at the window and said, “They broke in from outside. There were many of them.”

Several hundred people in a town, all drained of flesh and blood, dying here in silence.

He Lingchuan noticed that a white web had appeared again on the open ground behind the house. It was thick, its mesh dense, and with snow pressing over it, most people would not even have the heart to move it aside.

But he insisted on drawing Fleeting Life and scraping open the white web.

During the season when snow began to melt, the ground here should still have been frozen solid. They should have had to wait another month or two before the land could be tilled. Yet He Lingchuan found that the earth was quite soft, with one small mound after another piled across it.

Most likely, something had burrowed into the ground, throwing up these mounds of soil.

He Lingchuan called out to Dong Rui. They went back into the house, took out shovels, and started digging.

Out of everything that he was expecting to happen after arriving at the town, doing farm work like this was definitely one of the things that Dong Rui least expected to have to do. He yawned with every shovelful and dug with obvious reluctance. Zhu Daniang, on the other hand, had no such complaints. Once all eight of her claws started moving, she turned soil faster than any farming tool.

After digging down three meters, she suddenly stopped.

“There’s something here.”

The thing was a meter long and looked somewhat like a fly, but its whole body was glossy black. It had a broad head, red eyes, two wings on its back, and a swollen abdomen.

Zhu Daniang scooped it out, then moved several legs at once and pressed it to the ground, rolling and rubbing it a few times.

This was a spider’s habit when sensing prey, especially when it was not sure what the thing was.

“It’s dead.” She continued sensing. “It’s a cicada.”

The thing had long since died completely and had been frozen stiff.

“A cicada?” He Lingchuan was not sure. “A monster? Can cicadas grow this big?”

At that moment, his shovel also struck something.

He dug it out and found that it was roughly the same sort of thing, except this one had no wings on its back, and its two forelimbs were especially long, bent like those of a mantis.

Once the two things were placed side by side, the difference was obvious.

“So they’re not even the same type of cicada?”

He Lingchuan tapped their bellies with the shovel. “But their abdomen are very soft.”

Zhu Daniang was an insect herself[1], so she was able to realize something at a glance. “There are eggs.”

The tip of her claw, which was sharper than a blade, made a cut with effortless precision. The strange cicada’s belly was sliced open, revealing a large mass of white clusters inside.

Each one was the size of a grape and so white it was almost transparent. He Lingchuan could see that the larvae inside were already mature, and some were even moving their legs.

From the look of things, they were not far from hatching.

Logically speaking, insects should lay their eggs underground or in trees, rather than carrying them inside their own bellies to hatch.

“These may be seventy-year cicadas!” Zhu Daniang suddenly said. “They’re the only cicadas I know that give birth to eggs carried in their abdomen.”

He Lingchuan had no idea what those were. Meanwhile, Dong Rui had already raised his middle finger. “That’s impossible! Seventy-year cicadas only grow this big at most. A meter long? Impossible!”

Zhu Daniang directly dug out a cicada egg and waved it at him. “I’ve eaten more of these cicadas than I can count, and you’re questioning me?”

Dong Rui was rendered speechless.

Right, right, right. I’ve never eaten one, so I have no right to speak.

While observing the cicada corpse, He Lingchuan asked, “Would someone care to explain?”

“The seventy-year cicada is the longest-lived of all cicadas. Actually, three thousand years ago, when spirit qi was abundant, it was still called the seventeen-year cicada. From egg to larva, it remains underground, growing extremely slowly. The process lasted sixteen and a half years, and only in the final half-year does it transform into an adult and crawl up to the surface to feed and reproduce.”

Zhu Daniang paused before continuing, “They die before their young hatch, and their remains are absorbed by the cicada eggs as nutrition. However, under the current environment, their time to mature into adults has lengthened to seventy years. Not many cicadas can endure until then.”

“Aren’t these enduring perfectly well?” Dong Rui pointed at the small mounds in the ground, one after another. Under each one, there was probably at least one adult incubator. “You say these are seventy-year cicadas, but the two cicada corpses we dug up don’t even look the same. How do you explain that?”

“Indeed, I haven’t seen this situation before.”

“Then have you seen this?” He Lingchuan pointed at the cicada corpse he had dug out, the one with two mantis-like forelimbs.

It was thoroughly dead, but its abdomen suddenly began pulsing, wave after wave, as if something inside were clawing and scratching, preparing to burst out.

If anyone else had seen this, their scalp would likely have gone numb with fright.

Dong Rui, however, made a curious sound and leaned in for a closer look. “Interesting!”

One look at his expression, and He Lingchuan knew the mad scientist’s desire to research had been stirred again.

Zhu Daniang waved her claws. “Move aside.”

Then she stretched out a claw tip and slashed across the corpse’s abdomen—

With a ripping sound, the cicada corpse’s belly burst open, and thirty to forty larvae leaped out!

Every one of them looked like a miniature version of the adult body. Their forelimbs were similarly hooked like sickles, and each was only as long as He Lingchuan’s index finger.

The moment they were born, they rushed toward the two men without the slightest pause, as if they had smelled human scent.

Zhu Daniang had already been prepared. She spat out a mouthful of spiderweb and caught them all in one net.

Inside the web, the young cicadas still tried to charge at the two men. He Lingchuan could see their mouthparts clearly now. Sure enough, they were like thick and long needles.

The strangest thing was that under their very eyes, the young cicadas’ bodies actually began growing at an astonishing speed!

In only fifteen minutes, they had grown to the size of their mother.

From the length of a human index finger to meter-long aberrant creatures, they had transformed in only fifteen minutes! He Lingchuan had never seen a living creature with such a short growth cycle.

Once they grew up, they became even more violent, making the classic “zhah, zhah, zhah” call of cicadas.

Ordinary cicadas the length of a finger could already make enough noise to keep an entire household awake. These ones were so much larger that their calls were more than several times louder.

And there were thirty to forty of them crying out together, forming a deafening chorus!

At that instant, He Lingchuan felt as if he were standing beside a steamship whistle. Apart from the cicada calls, he could hear nothing at all. Their calls were so loud that his head buzzed along with the noise.

Zhu Daniang could not stand the racket either. Her hearing was even sharper than a human’s, so she spat a great mouthful of acid onto the web.

The strange cicadas screeched in agony, but they could not withstand the acid’s power. Bit by bit, they were corroded away.

Zhu Daniang, however, was dissatisfied. “Too slow.”

With the strength of her acid, it should have finished them off in no time.

Just as the cicada cries stopped, two soft rustles suddenly came from the woods about thirty meters away.

People? He Lingchuan immediately stood.

In the next moment, more than a dozen figures rushed out of the forest and surrounded the two men and one spider.

1. Yeah, spiders aren’t insects but arachnids. This is most likely just a misconception from Madame Author. ☜

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