Chapter 182 - Venturing Into Darkness

Once Ao Wen had eaten her fill, she prepared herself to delve deeper into the darkness of the forest. With what little light existed in the dark wood, Ao Wen quickly realized that her pale skin stood out sharply against the dark bark of the trees and the gloom of the forest. "I don't know if these are actually Darkwood trees or not, but I hope they're close enough," she said, digging the point of her knife into one of the nearby trees and scraping away at the sticky pitch that covered its bark. 

There weren't many things she could work with, but she'd read a recipe for Light Devouring Paste in Ma Xiaohua's notes about the uses for the materials of the Darkwood tree. The pitch worked as both a light absorbing substance and a sticky binding agent, it only needed to be refined and burned into tacky powder before being mixed with water to form the most basic of pastes. Of course, Ma Xiaohua had several more refined recipes that would create a darkness so deep that even the contours of a surface vanished like the object covered by the paste had become a hole in space. Those recipes, however, were far beyond her reach at the moment. Darkening her skin and applying a thin layer over her blades would be enough to allow her to slip through the night without giving herself away like a pale faced ghost. 

In the distance, she could hear the sound of running water but at the moment, the only real liquid she had was the blood of the slain beast. Foul as it might be, she refused to allow the strong odor and unsavory nature of the method to dissuade her from grabbing hold of the advantage the paste could give her. Surprisingly, the beast blood worked well as a mixing agent and the paste spread smoothly over her skin like a fine lotion.

With the paste applied, Ao Wen closed her eyes and focused on her other senses to study the dark forest. Hanging her head down, she let several strands of hair loose from her high ponytail, feeling the wind catching the dark strands of her hair and pressing them against the left side of her face. Turning into the wind, she drew a slow, steady breath through her nose, taking in the complex scent of the forest. Unfortunately, the smell of cooking meat and the bloody carcass dominated everything she could smell in the place where she'd come to feast. 

Opening her eyes, Ao Wen moved slowly through the darkness, placing her feet with care, stepping on rocks or roots when possible and avoiding crashing through the underbrush. Several minutes passed before she once again closed her eyes, felt for the wind, and inhaled the scent of the forest. This time, her trained alchemist's nose was able to separate several distinct odors drifting on the breeze. The rich loamy soil mingled with the scent of decaying plants and pungent flowers that masked the fetid odor of rotting flesh. "For the scent of rot to be so strong, there must be an awful lot of corpses piled somewhere," she realized. It wasn't an unfamiliar scent. During the war against the Yin Fiends, she'd helped fill more than her share of mass graves before lighting the corpses on fire to prevent the spread of disease. Compared to the massive casualties of entire cities falling to ruin, this hardly felt threatening. The important thing was that it gave her a direction. Whatever was responsible for the slaughter was likely close to its midden heap. It might not be a substantial pile of bodies compared to a city destroying plague, but for a predator to accumulate so much death, surely it was a worthy target for her blades. 

The closer Ao Wen came to the growing stench of rotting flesh, the more often she heard the sound of chittering that she'd come to associate with the Dark Weaver spider. Once again, she kept a thin wooden switch in her hands clearing dangling spider webs from her path as she ventured deeper into the woods. Suddenly, the sound of chittering came again, this time not only was the sound much closer than before, it had moved behind her! 

Ao Wen's heart froze for a moment, every instinct screaming at her to spin around and confront the beast in the darkness. Doing so, however, was certain to give away her position. If it had already seen her then it was too late to hide, but if it hadn't, a panicked move would instantly tell it where she was. Slowly, Ao Wen crouched among the exposed roots of a twisted Dark Wood tree, flexing her fingers on the hilts of her knives and looking around as she slowly pivoted on the balls of her feet. 

At first, she saw nothing in the darkness. It wasn't until she moved her gaze upwards that she caught sight of the massive spider, easily twice the size of the one she'd fought in the mines. The spider moved slowly through the upper branches of the trees, carefully picking its way across its webs as though checking to see if it had captured anything on which to feast. A dozen breaths passed and the spider had moved from one tree to the next, heading in roughly the same direction as Ao Wen's line of advance. Thirty breaths later and the spider had moved out of sight, continuing along in the direction Ao Wen had been heading. 

"Let's see where you lead me," Ao Wen thought to herself, sliding out of the hollow she'd hidden in and moving from one tree to the next. Now that she'd seen the spider moving along, she began to recognize the denser webbing along its route, as though the spider had built a vast network of roads in the branches of the trees. The one it currently followed was like a main street, only this one served to trap and kill anyone other than the road's owner. Elsewhere, thinner clusters of webbing radiated out like side streets, perhaps leading to places of occasional interest in the forest or just areas where prey wasn't as plentiful. Whatever the reason for the difference, it gave Ao Wen a clear path to follow and she was able to glimpse the spider several times as she followed it deeper into the woods. 

Eventually, the spider descended from the trees, scuttling across a wide clearing that held a pit full of the decaying corpses of beasts and people. Somehow, Ao Wen had the feeling that the people in the pit represented the real people who had attempted to gain access to the manual and failed at this stage. Fragments of corpses cried out silently like broken souls and tattered ghosts, wailing at the lone traveler who could still leave this place. Were they crying out for her to rescue them? To end their miserable existence? Ao Wen had no way to know. Part of her yearned to set the pit of corpses ablaze, to read the last rites spoken by the more devout members of the Sacred Flame Celestial Temple and to send these broken souls into the cycle of reincarnation to find their next lives. Doing so, however, would only doom her to share their fate. 

Instead, Ao Wen turned her gaze on the retreating spider. Somewhere along the way it had retrieved a person sized bundle that struggled in against the constricting threads of its dark webbing. Like the cocoon that enveloped the souls of its victims, this figure had been wrapped up from feet to shoulders, leaving only their head free from the bindings. The spider, it seemed, wanted to be able to look into the eyes of its victim and see the fear there before it devoured them and added them to the heap. 

At the center of the clearing, the spider ascended the branches of a towering but lifeless and leafless Darkwood tree, carrying its bundle with it before hanging it half way up the tree and taking a position directly above it. 

Once the spider had moved out of the way, Ao Wen got her first good look at the person it had captured. Once she did, however, her heart immediately froze. Of all the people in this world and the others she'd visited, there were few faces she knew as well as the one gazing helplessly into the night. 

The only question was, of all the people this vision could present to her, why did the spider's victim have to be her mother?