Bai Zixian woke to silence.
His eyelids were heavy, crusted with something he didn't want to identify, sticky with residue from webbing that had been pressed against his face. He forced them open anyway.
Darkness greeted him. Not complete darkness, faint luminescence came from somewhere below, the green glow of acidic pools providing just enough light to see by.
He was still upside-down.
His body was wrapped more thoroughly now. The matriarch hadn't taken chances after he'd killed one of her children. Fresh webbing covered him from neck to ankles, layers upon layers of rope-thick strands ensuring he couldn't move, couldn't struggle, couldn't do anything except hang and wait.
Blood rushed to his head. His skull throbbed with the pressure of inverted circulation. But beneath the discomfort, beneath the fear and the anger and the growing certainty that he'd made catastrophic errors—
Silence.
Wrong. Unnatural. This was an insect nest housing dozens if not hundreds of creatures. There should have been sound, the clatter of exoskeletons against stone, the scraping of mandibles, the constant background noise of a functioning hive.
But there was nothing.
Just his own breathing and the faint drip of liquid from somewhere in the darkness.
Asleep? Or hiding?
The roar he'd heard that first night echoed through his memory. The creature from deep in the mist valley, the one whose intent had pressed against his consciousness with promises of consumption and death. That thing, whatever it was, had scared even the insects.
If they were frightened of the night, if they went silent and still when darkness fell...
That might be his chance to escape.
Except he couldn't move.
The paralysis from the purple web had worn off slightly, he could feel his fingers now, could flex them marginally but his limbs were bound too thoroughly for that limited mobility to matter. And his regeneration had stopped. The wounds from the acid hadn't healed. Golden blood had dried on his skin in crusty streaks, marking where flesh had melted and never reformed.
Fourteen days without food or water. That was the maximum a divine existence at his stage could endure. He'd been in this realm for... how long now? Three days? Four? Time had become uncertain, measured only by periods of consciousness and unconsciousness, by the cycle of pain and numbness that defined his captivity.
He wasn't dying yet.
But he was getting closer.
Hunger gnawed at his stomach. Thirst made his throat feel like sandpaper. And the rules of dead realms echoed through his mind with mocking clarity: Do not consume any living thing. Do not eat meat or honey or eggs or anything derived from creatures that might have been touched by contamination.
The beetle and spider corpses that littered this nest were forbidden. Off-limits. Consuming them would be suicide, not through poison, exactly, but through the contamination that infected all living things in places like this.
He needed tree fruit. Plant matter. Something grown from the earth rather than born from flesh.
But there were no trees in this sinkhole.
Bai hung in the darkness and assessed his options.
Wait for morning. Free himself when mobility returned. Fight the matriarch even though victory seemed impossible.
Staying here meant certain death. Fighting at least offered something else.
But first, he needed to understand what he was truly dealing with.
He activated Memory again, this time directing it toward the webbing that held him. If he could see how it was made, understand its structure, identify weak points—
Pain stabbed through his skull.
His concept protested. Too much use in too short a time. His reserves were dangerously low, his body demanding rest that he couldn't afford to take.
He pushed through it anyway.
The memory of the webbing revealed itself, the object's own history, its creation, its composition, its purpose.
Silk produced by spinnerets. Coated with paralytic secretions. Woven in specific patterns that distributed tension evenly, preventing escape through physical force alone.
But there was a weakness.
The silk, while incredibly strong when pulled along its length, was vulnerable to sawing motions. Friction applied perpendicular to the strand would eventually wear through it, given enough time and effort.
He just needed something to saw with.
Bai Zixian looked around the chamber with his limited vision. Stone walls. Acidic pools. Scattered corpses of previous prey items in various states of dissolution.
And there, partially visible in the green glow, a piece of exoskeleton. Part of a beetle, judging by its shape. One of the acid-spraying insects that apparently cohabited this nest with the spiders.
Its edge looked sharp.
Bai Zixian began the slow, agonizing process of rocking his suspended body. Creating momentum. Building swing. Trying to position himself closer to where that broken exoskeleton piece rested.
Each movement sent fresh waves of nausea through his inverted body. Blood pounded in his skull. His wounds throbbed.
He kept moving. Kept reaching. Kept trying.
Because the alternative was waiting to die.
And he'd decided that wasn't acceptable.