Chapter 179 - Venomous Ritual

Now that Alchemist Ma was aware of her gender, Ao Wen had no hesitation in stripping down to her waist, covered only by the band of silk that bound her chest. "Xiaohua, I'm in your hands at this point," she said as she lay down on a simple cot in the corner of her lab. She could have done this in the comfort of her own room but ultimately, she and Xiaohua had decided that it was better to have ready access to her complete lab if anything went wrong with the ritual. 

"I wish the manual had more information about how this worked," Ma Xiaohua lamented. "This venom will assail your body and your soul. According to the manual, you'll enter a 'Vision Hunt.' If you find your way through it, your body will absorb the venom and make it part of your strength. If you fail, the venom will kill you," she said, summing things up more for Feng Xi's benefit than An Wen's. "There's nothing that says how long this should take, what you'll encounter in the vision, there really isn't much more there than the instructions." 

"It's likely that those details were passed from elder to disciple within the sect," Ao Wen speculated. "The manual only contains enough information to execute the technique. The rest, if it's written down at all, is likely in other books belonging to the cult. We're lucky to have this much. Let's begin," she said, closing her eyes after giving Feng Xi's hand a brief squeeze. "Before any of us lose our determination."

Slowly, Ma Xiaohua began by dipping a brush into an ink mixed with the blood of a Dark Weaver spider. As much as her heart raced, the disciplined alchemist refused to allow her turbulent emotions to disrupt the precise motions the ritual required of her. Stroke by stroke, she painted runes and symbols on Ao Wen's torso, arms and face. Even her eyelids were marked with a double row of dots, emulating the eyes of a spider. Once she'd made the final mark, Ma Xiaohua moved directly to a set of silver needles. Her movements were swift and precise as she dipped the point of each needle in the refined Dark Weaver Spider venom before piercing one of Ao Wen's acupoints. Sweat formed unnoticed on her brow as the number of needles increased but from start to finish, her focus and precision never wavered. Finally, when she placed the last needle between Ao Wen's brows, a dark greenish energy began to circulate. It wrapped around each of the needles before sinking deep into Ao Wen's body, assaulting her flesh and her soul as it drew the young woman into a deadly vision. 

For Ao Wen, the venom's assault lasted only a moment. Sharp pain pierced both sides of her skull as though something was biting into her temples before a bone chilling cold rushed through her body like a plunge into freezing water. When the sensation passed, Ao Wen found herself somewhere else entirely. 

Behind her stretched a seemingly endless darkness, a void that held nothing, not even the feeling of isolation and apathy that Ao Wen had been assailed by when she confronted the Dark Weaver Spider in the mine. The void, clearly, wasn't a place she was meant to explore in this vision. 

Instead, an immense forest stretched out before her. While it resembled the Darkwood Forest, everything about it felt slightly off, as if she was looking at an artist's painting after someone described the Darkwood Forest to them rather than seeing it as it really was. "Or perhaps," she mused, "this is how the Darkwood Forest looks to the Dark Weaver Spiders." 

In the world of the vision, Ao Wen found herself dressed more simply than she had since leaving Turning Leaf, returning to a loose fitting and practical outfit that would have been at home on the Jun family's training grounds if not for the dark green elements that stood out slightly from the dominant black and dark gray color of her breeches and tunic. At her waist hung two long, curved daggers with heavy blades weighted toward the pommel. Each blade measured close to thirty centimeters, too short to be considered a saber, but the long, curved shape gave it enough familiarity in her hand that she wouldn't be completely lost in using it to hunt whatever it was she was supposed to hunt here. 

No sooner had she thought about hunting than her body was wracked with terrible hunger pains, her stomach clenching and knotting as though she hadn't eaten in days. Her vision narrowed until all she could see was the forest ahead of her while her ears strained until she heard the faint rustles of creatures moving within the forest. "So, step one, obviously food," she muttered, flipping each of the daggers in her hands before moving toward the gloomy forest. 

As Ao Wen stepped into the forest, an oppressive weight settled upon her shoulders, as if the very air had turned thick and heavy with an unseen menace. The dense canopy overhead blocked out nearly all sunlight, casting the world into an eerie, perpetual twilight. Gnarled Darkwood trees loomed on all sides, their trunks twisted and scarred, their leaves a sickly, mottled gray that seemed to absorb what little light filtered through the gloom.

A silence hung over the forest, broken only by the occasional skittering of unseen creatures in the underbrush and the distant, echoing sound of running water from an unknown source. Each time Ao Wen's ears picked up the faint rustle of a bird's wings, or the snap of a branch giving way, the sound's sudden intrusion threatened to startle her, leaving her constantly on edge as she moved in the direction of the sounds. 

As she ventured deeper into the forest, a fetid stench began to assail her nostrils, a nauseating mixture of decay, mold, and something sharply acrid that burned the back of her throat. The scent seemed to grow stronger with each step, as if she were drawing closer to the source of the forest's corruption.

Strands of dark webbing hung from the branches of some trees like tattered curtains, clinging to Ao Wen's face and hair if she was careless enough to make contact with them as she pushed through the undergrowth. The sticky strands seemed to writhe and pulse with a dark, malevolent energy, sending shivers down her spine each time they brushed against her skin. The first time it happened, she tried to incinerate the dark thread with a wisp of her flames but in this strange vision, none of her flames answered her call. It didn't seem to matter if she channeled the techniques of her Flame Wind Fan Dance or attempted to unleash her alchemy flames using the Eight Trigrams, not even her faint Earth Dragon flame responded to her calls. 

Instead, she used one of the daggers to cut a broad leaf off a nearby bush and used that to carefully remove the offending threads without touching it directly. A few moments of work with a dagger later and she'd cut herself a simple switch that she could use to clear the way of webs when the terrain gave her no choice but to move through an area densely hung with the wicked strands. 

In the distance, a low, chittering sound began to build, rising and falling in an eerie, discordant chorus. The noise seemed to come from all around, echoing through the trees until it was impossible to pinpoint its source. At times, it sounded almost like laughter, cruel and mocking, as if the Dark Weavers were reveling in the fear and unease of those who dared to enter their domain.

As Ao Wen pressed on, the air grew colder and more stagnant, as if the very life force of the forest was being drained away. The trees began to thin out, giving way to a labyrinth of jagged rocks and yawning chasms that split the earth like gaping wounds. In the shadows of these crevices, something moved, skittering and scrabbling just out of sight, always watching, always waiting.