Bai entered the mist. The transition was immediate. Grey nothing surrounded him, fog so thick it reduced the world to an arm's length of visibility. The temperature dropped further, cold seeping into his bones.
The valley wasn't just a depression. It was a chasm carved into the mountain range itself, swallowed by fog that rose from somewhere below.
He walked forward carefully, testing each step. The ground was uneven, slick with moisture that might have been water or something else. The frozen trees he'd seen from outside were absent here, just bare rock and mist and the constant pressure of cold.
After several minutes, he paused.
The mist was thinning slightly, revealing more of the valley floor. Nothing moved. No sounds beyond his own breathing and the faint whisper of fog currents. No danger yet. His skin crawled.
He turned back the way he'd come.
The return journey should have taken minutes. It took hours. At first, he thought he'd gotten turned around, an easy mistake in fog that made every direction identical. But his Memory concept should have prevented that. He'd noted landmarks, tracked his path, maintained awareness.
Yet he couldn't find the entrance.
The mist pressed closer. The cold intensified. His legs grew heavy with each step, as if the air itself was thickening around him.
Something's wrong.
Bai stopped and activated Memory, directing it inward to view his own recent past. The third-person perspective materialized. And he saw the truth.
He wasn't walking through the mist valley at all.
He was dangling upside-down in a sinkhole, wrapped in thick webbing, suspended above a pool that glowed with sickly green luminescence. Acidic liquid. His skin was dissolving where it touched the fluid, flesh melting, golden blood mixing with the acid, creating patterns of light that pulsed with fading runes.
And his regeneration fought back.
Skin grew as fast as it melted. Muscle reformed even as it liquefied. Destruction and repair, simultaneous, his body caught in a war between dissolution and healing.
But that wasn't what made his breath catch.
Below him stood an insect.
Massive. The size of a fully grown dog. Eight eyes glowing with bioluminescent intensity, their light reflecting off a metallic exoskeleton that gleamed blue-black in the dim illumination.
A spider.
It was watching him. Had been watching him since the moment he entered the mist. Since he'd been caught by webs he never saw, paralyzed by venom he never felt, dragged into this pit while his mind experienced a hallucination of safe exploration.
He deactivated his concept and returned to his real senses.
The illusion shattered.
He could feel it now. The burning. The pain his paralyzed nervous system had been dulling, that his hallucinating brain had been suppressing. Every nerve ending screamed.
He was wrapped in webbing from shoulders to ankles. The strands were thick as rope, sticky with secretion that had seeped through his clothes and into his skin. Where they touched, Numbness.
Paralytic venom. Not enough to kill, but enough to immobilize. Enough to keep prey docile while the spider waited for the acid to finish its work.
Except Bai wasn't dying.
His regeneration though nothing compared to higher stage divine existences was keeping pace with the dissolution. Barely. The spider must have been confused, watching its prey heal as fast as the acid could melt it. That's why it hadn't attacked yet. It was waiting.
Bai's mind raced. He needed information.
He activated Memory again, this time directing it toward the spider.
Pain lanced through his skull, the concept protesting overuse, his reserves depleted. But he pushed through.
Memories flooded back.
The spider was a newborn. Hours old. Born in this nest, emerged from an egg sac deposited by something larger, raised alongside dozens of siblings in the darkness.
Its existence was simple: wait in webs near the mist valley entrance, catch anything that entered, suspend it above acidic pools until death, then consume.
Survival through ambush. Through patience. Through paralytic adhesive and hallucinogenic venom. Not a hunter. A trap. A living snare positioned at the threshold between safe territory and deadly depths.
And it was at the bottom of the food chain.
He understood. If this creature was camping at the entrance, setting traps, that meant deeper threats existed. Predators that would claim this territory if not for smaller, weaker creatures maintaining a buffer zone.
The spider was prey as much as predator. Which meant it could be killed.
He focused on the webbing around his waist, the thickest strand, bearing most of his weight. His hands were partially free, fingers able to twitch despite the spreading paralysis.
He grabbed the web and pulled.
The spider screeched, producing raw vibration through the webbing, a signal to others that prey was struggling.
Movement in the darkness. Smaller shapes emerging from burrows. Siblings. Responding to the distress call.
Bai didn't have time to fight them all. He yanked the web with what little strength remained. The spider tilted forward, just a shift, but enough.
The creature lunged, mandibles spreading. Bai didn't aim for its head.
He struck its abdomen. The round, swollen belly that carried the paralytic secretions that stored the venom used to coat its webs. He hit it with his fist, once, twice, three times, each impact driving into soft tissue.
The spider's screech intensified. Its abdomen ruptured on the fourth strike. Fluid sprayed outward, clear liquid mixed with yellow ichor, internal organs spilling from the wound.
The creature's legs spasmed. Its grip on the webbing loosened. It fell into the acidic pool below.
The liquid consumed it in seconds, exoskeleton dissolving, fluids mixing with acid, bubbles rising and popping with soft hissing sounds.
Bai hung in the webbing and watched it die. His limbs grew heavier. Paralysis spreading. The smaller spiders approaching from multiple directions, coordinated, intent clear.
He'd killed one. But there were many more.
And somewhere in the darkness above, something stirred. Something larger than the dog-sized spider he'd just destroyed. Something disturbed by the noise, the struggle, the death of one of its young.
Movement in the shadows at the edge of his vision.
A shape descending on a single strand of web, thick as his arm, strong enough to support weight far exceeding what the smaller spiders could manage. The creature that emerged was the size of a small hut.
Eight eyes glowing with the same bioluminescent intensity as its children, but older, colder, carrying intelligence beyond simple predatory instinct. Its exoskeleton was darker, black with purple streaks.
The matriarch. Bai's heart clenched. He'd made a terrible miscalculation.
The smaller spider hadn't been camping at the entrance by choice. It had been placed there. Posted as a sentinel by something that controlled this entire nest, that bred children specifically to serve as the first line of defense against intruders.
And he'd just killed one of them.
The matriarch descended further, moving with deliberate slowness. Not rushing. Not concerned. Just approaching with the certainty of a predator that knew its prey had nowhere to run.
A new web shot from its spinnerets.
Different from the others, purple instead of white, thicker, carrying a concentrated dose of the paralytic venom that had been seeping into Bai Zixian's system through the smaller strands.
The purple web wrapped around his legs.
His limbs went completely numb.
What little movement he'd retained vanished instantly. His regeneration tried to fight the venom but couldn't keep pace, the concentration was too high, the delivery too direct.
His vision blurred. The matriarch pulled him closer, reeling in the web with mechanical efficiency. Its mandibles opened. Its eyes reflected his inverted image, a caught thing, a helpless thing, something that would feed the nest for days.
His consciousness flickered.
The last thing he saw before darkness claimed him was the matriarch's mandibles descending toward his face.
Then nothing.