Chapter 28 - A Playful Gag.
All Ti'nna could do was roll her eyes at his shamelessness, realizing day by day, that some humans were just as bad as nightcrawlers if not worse.
The fact that Mantis, Masai, and the others' first idea after surviving this ordeal wasn't to check on the rest of the Daywalkers, but to satisfy their greed was enough proof of their innate depravity.
Even if they do have no energy to fight or move, they could have at least shown some worry for the others, but no...Their faces displayed nothing but utter glee as they kept farming the hundreds of spiders' crystallized seeds.
What's worse? Every time Feng Ling found some survivors and saved them, they acted in the same manner...
Feng Ling saw their actions and seemed unbothered, already used to much worse displays of corruption from both humans and nightcrawlers.
He had already accepted one solid fact...Once a human hung around with a nightcrawler for too long, even if he was one of the kindest and purest beings in the world, he was bound to be twisted sooner or later...
As they say: one's character was seen by the surrounding entourage.
What would one expect from Daywalkers to become when their souls get linked with ruthless and evil beings at a young age; an age when they were most impressionable?
For now, Feng Ling focused on finding as many survivors as possible and specifically, Levi!
He knew that Levi had gone a day earlier with Shia, which drove him to head into the center of the forest.
When he arrived at the ruined Shadow Castle nest, his piercing dark eye spotted a tiny gleam on top of the umbrella's shaft.
He swiftly appeared on top of the shaft and reached out with his hand, picking up the silver jamming device.
'As expected, the signal was being jammed.' He thought as he scanned it for a moment and then placed it in his pocket.
'You won't deactivate it?' Mao inquired from on top of his shoulder.
'No, it's too bothersome.' Feng Ling replied expressionlessly.
'Figured so.' Mao chuckled, anticipating his answer.
She knew that her partner hated nothing more than his peace being disturbed by meaningless chatter or bureaucracy.
If he were to turn off the device, his Neuralens would be assaulted by hundreds of messages if not more after calling a purple emergency.
He preferred dealing with this matter on his own terms instead of listening to their meaningless orders.
If he was one for respecting orders, he wouldn't have been sent to this outpost as a disciplinary punishment.
'Mao, do you hear that?'
Suddenly, Feng Ling's ears picked up on a peculiar faint noise in the distance. As a wind specialist, he was able to command the wind to highlight any strange noises in a massive radius.
He used this innate ability to locate the alive Daywalkers as their battles were making too much noise relative to the silence in the forest.
'Yes, it resembles the noise of trees falling down.' Mao replied, her ears twitching.
With no more questions asked, Feng Ling chased after the faint noise until everything suddenly went silent...Even the creepy rustling noise of spiders disappeared, puzzling Feng Ling and his partner.
"Something weird going on."
Feng Ling narrowed his eyes and continued on the path of the last noise he heard...A couple of minutes later, he came to a sudden halt, his eyes landing on a shimmering dome of light amidst a horde of spider corpses.
'Grade A Solar Dome...Must be belonging to Morningstar's daughter." Mao remarked.
Feng Ling nodded as he looked deeper, finding the fallen Shia's party within it. Soon, he appeared next to the barrier and scanned everyone's vitals with a single glance.
When he confirmed that all of them had steady heartbeats and no life-threatening injuries, he let out a sigh of relief.
He couldn't care less about Shia and the other Daywalkers as he firmly believed that Daywalkers had a responsibility to protect themselves at all times. But Levi and Arthur were still helpless civilians.
Plus, he kinda had a sensitive side for kids who lost their parents at an early age.
"Poor cuties, they must have passed out from exhaustion." Mao commentated.
Feng Ling agreed and left them be, knowing that it was best to remain within the Solar dome since it was healing their wounds and helping them recover faster.
As he looked around him and noticed Nel'Vess' corpse lying under a tree, he blinked next to him and kicked the tree away.
When he saw how he died, his pupils and Mao's thinned in bafflement.
Mao jumped on top of Nel'Vess' stomach and removed his hands from his neck easily.
Seeing the tight marks and shattered neck bone made her exclaim, "He must be a Tier 3 nightcrawler, yet he really killed himself, and his expression screams of not knowing why."
"Is it the Queen Spider?" Feng Ling asked, knowing that it was too far-fetched.
"Impossible, Queen Spiders will never kill their own children unless their survival is threatened, and they were ordered to." Mao tapped on Nel'Vess' chest, "As for him? Only a powerful mind control ability or Tier 7 and above nightcrawlers' authority is high enough to make him kill himself."
"Are you suggesting..."
"I am not suggesting anything; the clues are." Mao replied with a stern tone as she returned on top of his shoulder, "We should move with caution, a monster might be hidden in the forest."
"I doubt he is still around if there is truly one."
Feng Ling shook his head, understanding that if a Tier 7 nightcrawler were still in the forest, they wouldn't be chatting.
"The fact that only spiders and nightcrawlers had self-inflicted wounds implies that the target might be the Lurker Spider Queen," Feng Ling said.
"You mean she is already dead?" Mao asked.
"We are about to find out."
Feng Ling relied on the same innate ability to find out the path leading to the nest, understanding that this many spiders popping out in the middle of the forest entailed one thing...A massive underground network.
Within moments, he caught a faint breeze leading into the underground. Following it from the surface, Feng Ling soon found himself several kilometers away from the forest.
'It's here.'
Feng Ling tapped his feet on the hardened ground while looking around him, seeing nothing but a desolate wasteland and no entrance to the underground.
'Are you going to dig a path?'
'Yes.'
'I am down to stretch my limbs.' Mao said as she stretched above his shoulder, purring cutely. Then, she transformed into the black saber, landing on Feng Ling's hand.
Feng Ling closed his eyes and released a cold exhale as he tightened his grasp on the saber. While his eyes were closed, the sight before him was of many windy auras connected tens of meters under his feet, creating a massive, chaotic underground space.
Any disturbance to the wind appeared as a dark area, allowing him to see what was going on underneath, even if it wasn't perfect.
When the entire underground cave was painted in his mind, he couldn't help but knit his eyebrows in confusion.
'What?'
'Check for yourself.'
Mao tapped into his wind vision and found out that the anticipated scene of hundreds of spiders moving around was nowhere to be found.
It was deathly silent with no movement whatsoever.
'Don't tell me?'
Feng Ling's response came as an action. He pointed the tip of the saber on the ground and then murmured, "Zephyrian Wind Arts: Piercing Tornado."
Whoosh!
The still wind gathered tightly around his saber, swirling at the tip with precise control until it began to emit a faint glow. The excess wind funneled toward the hilt, forming a small but fierce tornado.
Feng Ling leapt into the air and positioned himself like a spear, letting the wind surge around his body as he spun rapidly.
In a flash, the saber drilled into the ground, cutting through everything in its path until he burst out on the other side.
Without hesitation, he unleashed the full force of the swirling tornado he'd built up.
Boom!
The wind exploded into a thunderous shockwave, pushing away everything and anything around him.
Only then did Feng Ling's eyes scan around with great vigilance, anticipating an attack from the Spider Queen.
However, when his eyes saw the scene before him, they couldn't help but widen in shock.
'What the...' Even Mao's slits enlarged from the saber in disbelief.
Their reaction was understandable before the ludicrousness they were witnessing.
The terrifying Lurker Spider Queen that would make anyone piss their pants in fright from a single glance was sliced up in pieces and hung from her own web. The head, the torso, the abdomen, the limbs.
Everything was hung up by a singular string of web in various positions, and each cut was clean like it was made by an artistic surgeon.
As for its children? They were nowhere to be found. Only small stains of blood were seen marked on the walls and the ground around their mother.
'How terrifying...A tier 5 Lurker getting dealt with like this...' Mao muttered, 'There were no signs of a fight, just a pure one-handed slaughter.'
'Slaughter?' Feng Ling shook his head as he flew to the bottom of the cave, standing in front of this horrifying artistic work.
The moment he faced it with Mao from the bottom, his eyes reflected a new scene. The hung-up limbs and other body parts lined up perfectly, creating an image of a flipped middle finger with the Queen's head as the tip of the middle finger.
As Feng Ling and Mao gazed at the horror painted on the Queen Spider's eight eyes, they could only imagine what kind of beast she faced.
"This is nothing but a playful gag to him..." Feng Ling uttered, his voice calm, but carried a faint hint of dread.
Even he, realized that maybe it was for the best to never meet this monster...