Chapter 212 : Chapter 212
Chapter 212: Cocoon
The passage continued sloping downward.
The incline was gentle, but the direction was unmistakable. Underfoot, the texture gradually shifted from neatly laid stone bricks to rough natural rock.
At some point, the carved decorations on the walls disappeared completely, replaced by uneven stone slick with moisture, glistening with a cold, dim sheen in the murky light.
The air was changing too.
That stale smell from before gradually thinned, and something wetter, thicker, began to spread through it.
It was like something left to sit for far too long, rotting slowly without ever fully dying, leaving behind only a faint, cloying sweetness.
The smell was extremely light, like a thread of silk in the air, yet it clung stubbornly to the tip of the nose, sticky as a spiderweb, impossible to brush away.
Ryan’s steps were slow.
Every step was firm. Before each footfall, his eyes had already swept over the ground, the walls, and the ceiling. His right hand hung naturally at his side, no more than an inch away from the hilt of the short knife at his waist.
“Stop.”
Ryan suddenly lifted a hand, the gesture sharp and absolute.
Lillian barely managed to stop in time. Following the direction he indicated, she looked ahead. The passage bent sharply there, the curve so strange it looked like the inside of some living creature’s gut. On the floor at the bend was a pool of thick liquid, reflecting a weak glimmer of light.
Ryan crouched down and gently touched it with the end of the Energy Bar. The liquid was viscous. It stretched into a long, almost transparent strand. He leaned closer, his nose twitching slightly, and then his brows tightened.
“What is it?” Rex asked in a low voice.
“Not blood,” Ryan said as he straightened, his gaze moving toward the deeper darkness beyond the bend. “But it’s close.”
The trail of liquid did not end there. It wound onward, like a bizarre sign painted in dark red, pointing toward whatever lay ahead.
Ryan stared at that “sign” for several seconds, then raised a foot, stepped over the sticky fluid, and kept walking.
“Stay close.”
The moment they turned the bend, the scene changed abruptly.
The rough rock walls had been replaced by polished stone with a dull metallic sheen.
Reliefs began to appear on the walls—but these were no longer the intricate floral patterns of Elven art. Instead, they were twisted, grotesque lines filled with abstract meaning, neither words nor pictures.
The grooves had been cut impossibly deep, their edges sharp as blades. Ryan ran his fingers lightly across one of the channels and felt the cold hardness of the stone, along with something else, something so faint it was nearly impossible to catch—
A pulse.
Like a heartbeat.
He withdrew his hand and went on in silence.
The reliefs grew denser and denser, the lines tangling and layering over one another until the entire wall was covered. They overlapped in such chaotic profusion that the eye could barely endure them.
The light grew thinner here. The weak glow of the metallic stone cast heavy shadows into the deep grooves, making those twisted designs seem almost alive, writhing and shifting at the edge of sight.
Darkness gathered ahead.
Waiting for them.
The passage began to widen, going from barely allowing two people abreast to being broad enough for several horses to run side by side.
The ceiling kept rising until it vanished into a blackness too deep to see. The light had all but died, leaving only the faint phosphorescent gleam of the walls to sketch the terrifying outline of the vast space.
Empty.
Silent.
Oppressive in its sheer scale.
Their footsteps were amplified by the emptiness, stretched, layered, and returned to them, making each step sound like the tread of many people instead of four. Even their breathing became warped into a vague, unsettling white noise that drifted through the silence.
Ryan stopped again.
Ahead, at the end of the passage, there was neither a door nor an exit.
It was a web.
An unimaginably enormous web.
It hung from the unseen ceiling all the way to the ground, a gray-white, half-transparent curtain that completely sealed off the way forward.
The strands were impossibly fine, almost invisible, but under the weak light they gave off a sickly sheen, wet and mucous-like. Tangled and woven together, they formed an impenetrable wall of death.
And hanging from it were “fruits.”
One, two, three...
Too many to count.
Cocoons.
Gray-white and half-transparent, each one the size of a human body, wrapped thickly in silk-like strands, like giant, malformed eggs hanging motionless in the web.
Ryan’s Energy Bar cast its faint light over the nearest one.
The wall of the cocoon was not entirely opaque. Inside, he could just make out a human shape curled inward, its limbs twisted into a posture no living body should ever have been able to assume.
It looked like a specimen.
Like a wax figure.
Like a death frozen forever in that instant.
Lillian’s sharp intake of breath exploded through the perfect silence, painfully loud.
She clapped a hand over her mouth at once. Her fingernails dug deeply into her palm, using pain to hold herself together.
Clang—
Rex’s hand had already fallen onto the hilt of his sword. The scrape of metal rang sharp through the cavern. Vera moved forward without a sound, her gray-green eyes passing over the gigantic web, over the countless hanging cocoons, and finally settling on the densest concentration of shadow behind them.
Something was moving there.
Very slowly.
So slowly it was almost an illusion.
But that massive shape truly was rising and falling.
As though it were breathing.
Ryan stared hard at that patch of darkness, at the vast outline lifting and sinking in slow rhythm. Then, without a sound, a translucent golden panel appeared before his eyes.
[Action: Advance another ten steps]
[Chance of alarming the target: 20%]
He stared at that number, and his heart struck heavily inside his chest.
His foot moved forward one step.
The number changed.
[Action: Advance another ten steps]
[Chance of alarming the target: 60%]
His stride stopped at once.
That sweet, rotten smell in the air invaded everything, slipping into his nose and lungs like a slow-acting nerve poison.
He waited.
He did not even know what he was waiting for. Maybe for the probability to drop. Maybe for the thing in the darkness to shift its posture. Maybe for some opportunity so vague that even he could not have put it into words.
The number changed again.
[Advance another ten steps. Chance of alarming the target: 10%]
Ryan stared at that “10%” for a full three seconds.
Three seconds was a long time—long enough to hear the four different heartbeats around him, some fast, some heavy, some nearly frozen. Long enough to hear Lillian’s suppressed breathing. Long enough to hear Rex grinding his teeth.
And yet three seconds was also short—too short to understand why the probability had dropped so suddenly.
Still, it was enough.
He lifted one arm and made a small gesture backward.
A simple, unambiguous signal.
Follow.
Then he took a second step, a third, a fourth...
And continued forward, steady and silent, toward the vast web hung with countless death-filled cocoons, toward the unknown thing sleeping in the dark.
The thick dust swallowed their footsteps, until they were almost soundless.
The world sank into a silence so deep it could drive a person mad.
Only the sound of breathing remained.
The sound of heartbeats.
And from the deepest part of the shadow, that slow, heavy, endless—
Breathing.