"These ancient monsters are stubborn to the bone—they won't shed a tear until they see the coffin." Ye Qing laughed in irritation, turning his head to shout, "Hou Er!"
The Beijia forces had battled them for over half a year and were more familiar with the varieties of burrow spiders than He Lingchuan was. Hearing the call, a man behind him rushed forward, produced a horsetail whisk, and gave it a violent sweep.
With a sharp swish, countless dense ice spikes fanned out before him.
Under this indiscriminate, wide-area onslaught, smaller spiders were pinned directly to the ground. Larger ones were wounded as well, frost crystals instantly seeping from their injuries. In less than two or three breaths, frost had coated the surface of even the largest elite burrow spiders, leaving them entirely immobilized.
This kind of attack, unleashed through an ancient artifact, was called Brightstone Ice Crystals. In the hands of an ancient immortal, its power would have been several times greater.
Naturally, it did nothing to Zhu Erniang. With a gentle shudder, she shattered the frost encrusting her joints.
A second wave of spiders immediately leapt from her back and charged, every single one utterly fearless.
Her brood was staggering in number. The rustle of their hooked claws tearing through the dirt drowned out even the howl of the wind.
No matter how formidable an ancient artifact was, how many times could these Beijia men wield it? Did they really fancy themselves immortals?
If it came down to a war of attrition, she could bleed every last trump card from their hands.
Yet taking advantage of the moment bought by beating back the first wave of spiderlings, Ye Qing produced a pitch-black, lightless orb and hurled it straight into a puddle ahead.
The rain poured harder and harder, pooling across the uneven hollows in the road.
The moment the black orb sank into the depression, the water level plunged instantly as the sphere expanded at dizzying speed.
In the blink of an eye, it had covered a ten-foot area of ground and sucked up all the rainwater—
It shifted, transforming into a mud man standing over fifteen feet tall.
It turned its head toward Ye Qing, who pointed at Zhu Erniang and barked the attack order: "That's the target. Go!"
The mud man immediately strode toward Zhu Erniang.
Several spiders shot white nets at it, yet they managed only to rip off clod after clod of mud.
Dark, dripping sludge.
Zhu Erniang flung a massive web toward it, the trailing strands anchoring to the trunk of a tree behind it with a sharp hiss.
The mud man made no attempt to dodge, caught squarely in the center.
Yet it was not trapped in the least.
With a forward heave, the mud of its body squeezed straight through the mesh.
Just as a net could not hold water, no matter how sticky a spider's web might be, it was utterly useless against such slick sludge.
Within breaths, the mud man slipped free unscathed, leaving behind only heaps of mire on the lattice.
In all Zhu Erniang's life, it set the record for the fastest prey to escape her web.
Then, with a few bounding strides, it threw itself directly onto her.
The Burrow Spider Queen's body bristled with sharp spines. Such fearless, suicidal fervor took even Zhu Erniang by surprise.
The mud man was instantly run through.
Yet it did not care at all. The instant it stuck to Zhu Erniang, it dissolved, unable to maintain even a human shape as it collapsed into pure, unadulterated sludge.
The mud man's form had merely been a disguise; its true nature was that of a soft mud monster!
A specialty of the Demon Howl Swamp in central Beijia, and one of the oddest demonic species in existence.
From the onlookers' vantage point, Zhu Erniang was now smeared from head to toe in thick mud. Worse, the sludge surged forward aggressively, failing to spare even the tiniest crevices beneath her spines.
This was the first time Zhu Erniang had ever encountered such an opponent.
The foul thing clearly harbored malice. A swarm of smaller spiders scurried onto their progenitor's carapace, attempting to carry off the sludge like worker ants.
Yet the soft mud had already crept beneath the spider demon's abdomen, plugging her spinnerets with its own body!
A burrow spider relied entirely on the four pairs of spinnerets under its abdomen to shoot webbing. The internal ducts squirted liquid that hardened into silk upon contacting the air.
With the soft mud monster plugging them, Zhu Erniang's signature ability was temporarily neutralized.
A spider demon incapable of spinning silk and weaving webs suffered at least a fifty percent drop in lethality.
Meanwhile, the sludge nearest her head slithered swiftly toward her eyes, spreading its body to envelop them viciously!
Zhu Erniang currently had nine eyes; four were smothered by the mud.
The moment it engulfed them, the spider eyeballs sprouted eight legs and fled in a wild panic!
The soft mud monster Ye Qing had summoned carried an odd wasp venom derived from three types of spider wasps, each extracted from the abdominal sacs of wasps possessing over two centuries of cultivation.
Spider wasps preyed upon spiders, using their stingers to inject paralyzing venom into their quarry before feeding or implanting eggs.
Even a regular spider wasp's sting could leave a human convulsing as if struck by lightning, writhing and howling in agony. Once a spider wasp achieved demonic cultivation, its venom specialized further, becoming tenfold more lethal to spiders.
And after Beijia's refined extraction and enhancements, that potency was magnified exponentially.
Zhu Erniang's eyeballs transformed into spiders and leapt down to flee, but after only a few strides they convulsed violently. Pale green tumorous growths sprouted across their joints.
When injected into a spider's flesh, this wasp venom stimulated flesh tumors that severed neural paths and triggered unfathomable agony.
Immediately after, the growths hardened, the petrification spreading across the eyeball spiders' entire bodies.
By the time they tumbled from Zhu Erniang's back, they struck the ground with a solid thud, sounding like wooden carvings.
As soon as the eyeball spiders scrambled away and vacated the sockets, the soft mud monster surged into the empty cavities, thrusting wasp stingers from its pliable limbs and driving them deep inside!
An ancient spider demon had practically achieved the state of an immortal without physical flaws; her entire body presented no opening, and her carapace was impossibly rigid. To pierce Zhu Erniang's armor, one either had to wait patiently for her to molt—as He Lingchuan had once done—or...
Strike through her eye sockets!
The sockets were rich with optic nerves and comparatively fragile, left exposed the moment the eyeball spiders fled.
With that single thrust, the soft mud monster injected its entire payload of venom.
A piercing shriek seemed to echo from deep within the sockets, and then pale green tumors burgeoned forth, each swelling larger than a pomelo.
At the same time, a bizarre transformation gripped Zhu Erniang's wounds.
A rough, woody texture began plating itself across her previously smooth, rock-hard carapace.
Zhu Erniang paced erratically back and forth, staggering as if drunk, her movements growing increasingly sluggish.
If He Lingchuan had been present, he would have recognized this eerie toxin diffusion at a single glance; he had witnessed it twice before.
Once in the Panlong World, and once in reality.
The Woodification Art!
Strictly speaking, this was no mortal technique, but a divine art of the celestial gods.
Wen Daolun's son, Wen Xing, had been struck by a wooden splinter during an attack by a cub of the Ghost Mother of the Ferry, and his own father had watched helplessly as he turned into a wooden statue.
Back then, when Fu Shanyue's younger brother Fu Shanji was struck by the Woodification Art, his body had likewise petrified into wood in short order.
Applied to Zhu Erniang, this divine art proved just as effective, for it had been meticulously blended to diffuse at an extraordinary rate.
Fusing the spider wasp venom with the Woodification Art avoided any conflict between them while granting synergistic effects. At the same time, the original technique's potency had been amplified tenfold so that it could take hold swiftly even on a mighty ancient spider demon.
This was a tailored toxin developed specifically for Zhu Erniang, reputed to be capable of stalling even an ancient spider immortal's body for twenty breaths.
Yu Zecheng could never have achieved this on his own.
It had come from the hand of National Preceptor Shuangye!
"Capture the spider demon, quickly!" Ye Qing barked an urgent order and charged forward with his men.
Potent though National Preceptor Shuangye's custom toxin was, the Preceptor had warned them in advance: while ordinary mortals struck by the Woodification Art had no choice but to await death, an ancient spider immortal's vitality was so immense that she would very likely exhaust the Woodification Art and wasp venom through sheer endurance.
The window would not last long.
Yu Zecheng knew little of the Woodification Art and did not realize that it primarily devoured the victim's life force. The foundational life force of an ancient spider immortal who had survived since antiquity was so vast that not even Baizhantian's divine art of Annihilation had been able to crush it.
Thus, this combined assault had an effective window of at most twenty breaths, requiring precise timing to strike the demon unawares. If they tried it a second time, she would likely have a countermeasure ready.
First, they had to bypass the swarm of spiderlings protecting their matriarch.
Hou Er, behind Ye Qing, grabbed three silver needles and flung them toward the swarm.
The needles clicked against one another in the dark, multiplying exponentially—two became four, four became eight, eight became sixteen...
By the time they reached the little spiders, they formed a dense, glittering rain.
Every needle was coated in lethal poison, killing on contact.
When outnumbered, chivalry was the last thing on anyone's mind.
They had to clear the field in the shortest time possible and secure Zhu Erniang as their captive.
The pitiful spiderlings were cut down in droves in an instant.
The Beijia fighters successfully closed the distance to Zhu Erniang.
The closer they got, the more massive the monstrosity appeared. Had she not been temporarily incapacitated, a casual lift of a leg could have skewered them like meat on a stick.
And had she not been far from her lair, tonight's capture operation could never have gone so smoothly.
A stray thought flickered through Ye Qing's mind:
*Isn't this going a little too smoothly?*
*Can an ancient demon immortal really be captured this easily?*
Yet the doubt vanished as quickly as it came. After all, Captain Yu had planned this capture for over half a year, even dispatching winged messages to seek guidance from National Preceptor Shuangye to finalize this exact chain of maneuvers. It could be said that they held Zhu Erniang's every weakness firmly in their grasp.
With the right method, even a demon immortal was not so hard to capture.
Beijia, after all, possessed vast experience in dealing with great demons—far more adept at it than any ordinary mortal kingdom.
The moment Ye Qing reached Zhu Erniang's side, he produced a gourd glowing with faint green light. Thrusting its mouth against her body, he bellowed:
"In!"
Yu Zecheng had planned the entire capture long ago. A great demon like Zhu Erniang possessed astonishing regenerative capabilities. Not only would the wasp venom and Woodification Art fail to restrain her for long, but even if all eight of her legs were severed, they would grow back before long.
Killing her was out of the question; Beijia was still counting on her confession.
How, then, could she be contained and transported back to Beijia for interrogation?
Conventional shackles were entirely out of the question. Given her sheer tonnage when she squatted on the ground, no wagon or draft beast could hope to haul her.
In the end, it required a magic artifact.
The interior of this Qinghong Treasure Gourd contained a pocket world capable of sucking in immobilized foes.
Yu Zecheng had no fear of Zhu Erniang escaping either, for the gourd's internal world was an exceedingly intricate labyrinth. Unless the gourd's master chose to release a captive, the rules of that pocket world dictated that the unfortunate soul could never leave without unraveling the maze.
To Yu Zecheng's knowledge, the fastest person ever to solve that labyrinth had taken five months. And in his estimation, Zhu Erniang was nowhere near that clever.
Chapter 987