A silent, withered forest; a silent small town...
Moving her eight legs, Zhu Daniang picked a house and walked inside.
Moments later, her voice drifted out: "Dead."
A family of six lay sprawled in every direction—from a three-year-old child to an elder in his sixties, all were here.
Every corpse was shriveled, as though sucked dry of the last bit of flesh and blood.
Several round puncture holes pitted each body.
Dong Rui went to check the shed behind another house and clicked his tongue twice. "Not even the pigs and dogs were spared."
The livestock had met the exact same end.
Whoever had slaughtered the townsfolk had truly spared neither chicken nor dog.
Looking at the window, He Lingchuan said, "They broke in from the outside. There were a great many of them."
Several hundred people in the town had been drained dry, perishing here in eerie silence.
He Lingchuan noticed that white netting had appeared again on the open ground behind the house. The webbing was thick and tightly woven, and weighted down by the snow, no ordinary passerby would have had any inclination to disturb it.
Yet he insisted on drawing Fusheng and scraping away the white net.
In this season of melting snow, the ground should still have been frozen solid, unfit for tilling for another month or two. Yet He Lingchuan found the earth surprisingly loose, heaped into mound after mound of small dirt hummocks.
Something had likely burrowed underground, throwing up these swollen bulges.
Calling out to Dong Rui, He Lingchuan went back inside to fetch a shovel and began to dig.
Dong Rui had never expected to do farm work upon reaching a town. He yawned with every shovelful of dirt, digging most reluctantly. Zhu Daniang had no such reservations; once her eight claws got moving, she turned the earth faster than any plow.
After digging down a zhang, she suddenly paused.
"There's something here."
The creature was three feet long. It somewhat resembled a fly, but its entire body was pitch-black, with a broad head, red eyes, a pair of wings on its back, and a swollen belly.
Zhu Daniang scooped it up, shifted her legs, and pressed it against the ground, rolling and rubbing it several times in quick circles.
This was a spider's habit for feeling out prey whenever it was uncertain what sort of thing it had caught.
"Dead," she said, continuing to assess it. "It's a cicada."
The thing had long since died through and through, frozen rock-hard.
"A cicada?" He Lingchuan asked skeptically. "A monster? Can cicadas grow this large?"
Just then, his shovel struck something beneath the soil as well.
He dug it out to find roughly the same creature, but it lacked wings on its back, and its two forelegs were exceptionally long, curved like those of a praying mantis.
Placed side by side, their differences were obvious.
"Are these not even the same species of cicada?"
He Lingchuan tapped their bellies with the blade of his shovel. "Yet their abdomens are very soft."
Being a bug herself, Zhu Daniang could tell at a glance. "There are eggs inside."
With a deft flick of a claw sharper than a knife, the strange cicada's belly was slit open, revealing a great cluster of white spheres within.
Each was the size of a grape and white to the point of being nearly translucent. He Lingchuan could see that the nymphs inside were already fully formed, their legs even twitching and kicking.
By the look of it, they were not far from hatching.
Ordinarily, insects laid their eggs underground or on trees rather than brooding and hatching them inside their own bellies.
"This might be a seventy-year cicada!" Zhu Daniang said suddenly. "The only cicada I know that hatches eggs inside its abdomen is the seventy-year cicada."
Before He Lingchuan could make sense of it, Dong Rui held up his middle finger to indicate its length. "Impossible. A seventy-year cicada can only grow to about this size. Three feet long? No way!"
Zhu Daniang dug out an egg and brandished it at him. "I've eaten who knows how many of these cicadas. Are you questioning me?"
Dong Rui was struck dumb.
Right, right, he had never eaten one, so he had no say.
Examining the cicada carcasses, He Lingchuan said, "Could someone explain this to me?"
"The seventy-year cicada is the longest-lived of all cicada species. In fact, three thousand years ago when spiritual energy was abundant, it was called the seventeen-year cicada. From egg to nymph, it stayed entirely underground, growing at an exceedingly slow pace for sixteen and a half years. Only in its final six months did it molt into an adult, crawling out of the earth to feed and mate."
Zhu Daniang paused, then added, "They die before their offspring hatch, and their carcasses are absorbed by the eggs as nourishment. In today's environment, however, the time it takes for them to molt into adults has stretched to seventy years. Not many cicadas can hold out that long."
"Aren't these holding out just fine?" Dong Rui pointed to the hummocks dotting the ground. Beneath every mound lay at least one adult serving as an incubator, didn't there? "You say they're seventy-year cicadas, but the two we dug up look completely different. How do you explain that?"
"Indeed, I've never seen such a thing before."
"Then have you seen this before?" He Lingchuan pointed to the carcass he had dug up—the one with raptorial forelegs like a mantis.
It was dead through and through, yet its abdomen suddenly rippled in waves, as though something inside were scratching and clawing, preparing to tear its way out.
Anyone else witnessing such a scene would have felt their scalp prickle with horror.
Dong Rui, however, let out a soft "Huh?" and leaned closer to inspect it. "Fascinating!"
One look at his face told He Lingchuan that this mad scientist's urge for research had been ignited once again.
Zhu Daniang waved a claw. "Stand back, both of you." She then extended the tip of her leg and slashed across the carcass's belly.
With a sharp rip, the abdomen burst open, and thirty to forty nymphs sprang out!
Each was a miniature replica of the adult, their forelegs curved into sickle-like hooks, measuring only as long as He Lingchuan's index finger.
The moment they were born, they lunged straight at the two men without the slightest hesitation, as if catching the scent of human flesh.
Prepared for this, Zhu Daniang spat out a mass of webbing, snaring them all in a single cast.
Even trapped in the web, the young cicadas tried to charge at them. He Lingchuan could see their mouthparts—thick, long, and sharp as needles, just as he had expected.
Strangest of all, right before their eyes, the young cicadas began growing at a terrifying speed!
In a mere quarter of an hour, they had reached the size of their mother.
From the length of a human finger to three-foot-long monsters, all within a single quarter of an hour! He Lingchuan had never seen any creature with such a short growth cycle.
Once full-grown, they turned even more frantic, unleashing the classic, grating screech of cicadas.
An ordinary cicada the length of a finger could make enough racket to keep an entire household awake, yet these massive specimens produced a din many times louder.
What was more, thirty or forty of them were screeching all at once, joining in a deafening chorus!
In that instant, He Lingchuan felt as though he were standing right beside a steamship's foghorn, unable to hear anything except the overwhelming drone of cicadas.
His head buzzed and throbbed with the sound.
Zhu Daniang could not bear the noise either; her hearing was far sharper than a human's. She spat a large glob of acidic venom onto the web.
The strange cicadas shrieked in agony, unable to withstand the venom's power, and were steadily dissolved away to nothing.
Zhu Daniang was dissatisfied. "Too slow."
With the potency of her acid, it should have finished them off in a few heartbeats.
Just as the cicadas' screeching subsided, a rustling came from the woods ten zhang away.
Someone's there? He Lingchuan rose to his feet at once.
Immediately afterward, more than a dozen figures burst from the woods, encircling the two men and the spider.
Chapter 745