Chapter Ninety-Seven: Man, Spider, and Silk

The route he had taken a month ago still lingered dimly in his memory, and by following that recollection, Liu Chang made his way cautiously toward a certain area at the forest’s edge.

Dusk had already come. The sun was about to sink below the horizon, and Liu Chang quickened his pace, calculating the time in his mind. He wanted to reach the spider-infested zone just as the sun was setting.

At that hour, the last glow of daylight could still grant him a little more vision, allowing him to distinguish those transparent crimson threads without giving any opportunity to the enemies trailing behind him. From sunset to full darkness was about twenty minutes, and that hound-nosed woman would chase him for at most half an hour. That was the moment Liu Chang aimed to seize. He wanted to enter the spider territory where he could see the webs, while those who followed would be unable to see a thing.

And with the precision of his calculations, his pace and route were timed exactly. By the time he arrived at the place he remembered, the sun was indeed setting.

Carrying the final trace of daylight, Liu Chang stepped into the freshly reclaimed spider zone, now several times larger than it had been a month earlier. By that last sliver of light, he saw dense clusters of spiderwebs stretching one after another, packed side by side. In both number and thickness, they were many times more numerous than before.

Where there were that many webs, there would be that many spiders, and the number of spiders here was already far beyond what it had been a month ago.

After seeing the webs, Liu Chang carefully slipped through the gaps between them, not daring to brush even the slightest edge, afraid of causing the faintest tremor in the webbing.

He knew that spiders, especially web-building spiders, were unlike most predators: they hunted primarily by touch. The bristles on the eight legs were extremely sensitive to vibration. So long as prey entered the web, or even the slightest tremor stirred the strands, they could detect it instantly and swarm in.

Beyond that, however, their eyesight and sense of smell were fairly ordinary. So Liu Chang believed that if he moved carefully enough, he should be able to evade their sight.

Threading his way between the webs, Liu Chang used his extraordinary vision to spot many spiders within their own nets, feigning sleep. He cautiously used the red mist as cover and did not disturb these killers who had not yet entered their nocturnal hunting phase.

After he had worked his way through the webbed maze, darkness gradually descended. With the last bit of light, Liu Chang retraced his path, stepping back out of the spider zone. Then he closed his eyes and began silently calculating and analyzing in his mind. Based on what he had just seen, he sketched out a mental map of the spiderwebs spread across the area, then located the openings among them. He linked those openings together in his head, forming a network of route-like paths.

When all of that was done, Liu Chang removed his coat, tossed it into the spider forest, and then disappeared into the darkness as well.

More than ten minutes later, the woman with the hawk nose arrived at the outskirts of the spider domain with three synthetic men.

“The target is inside,” the woman said, standing at the edge of the area and carefully sniffing the scent in the air. “It’s stopped moving. There must be some kind of trap in there!”

“Hm!” The three synthetic men did not understand the second thing the woman had said, but they were unusually sensitive to the first. Once they learned that the target was inside, all three of them strode in without the slightest hesitation.

Seeing this, the woman sighed and followed after them.

But they did not get far before the first synthetic man stuck to an “invisible” web and roared in fury.

“Hm!” The first one to be caught was the leader of the group. He was still in mid-stride when he suddenly felt his feet unable to move. Agitated, he immediately struggled, and with a force so great it could have snapped steel cable, he tore free of the spider silk, ripping the sticky web apart and smearing himself with its adhesive strands.

His thrashing naturally alerted the spider that had spun the web. Sensing its web had been damaged, a spider as large as a half-grown person sprang out at once and attacked the intruder.

Hidden in a dark corner, Liu Chang saw that the spiders in this region had, after a month, become even more perfect than before. By perfect, he meant the perfection of their hunting apparatus. Their bodies had not become larger, but the bristles on their backs seemed much tougher, their eight spider legs looked far more powerful than before, and their mouthparts were sharper as well.

One look was enough to tell that these spiders were at least twice as formidable as they had been a month ago.

Even so, although the spider that sprang out was lightning fast, it was smashed half to pulp by a single blow before it could even land on the synthetic man, collapsing away dead beyond any doubt. In terms of individual strength, even after evolving again, the spiders were still far inferior to the synthetic men.

But Liu Chang, lurking in the shadows, had long been waiting for this moment. From the beginning, he had never expected the first spider to inflict any real damage on those synthetic men. What he was waiting for was the brief pause in their movement. And when that moment came, he did not hesitate to pull the trigger of the giant handgun for the first time.

The target was in view. The target was not moving at high speed. The target was only a dozen meters away. For Liu Chang, whose calculations were precise to the fraction of a millimeter, a clean headshot under such excellent conditions was no difficult matter.

Besides, he firmly believed that no matter how strong those synthetic men were, if the giant gun struck a part not protected by body armor, it would still inflict a grievous wound. And if that wound landed on the head, then whether they were synthetic men or superhuman beings, they would die.

Bang!!!

The enormous muzzle energy produced an equally enormous report. In the burst of fire, a massive bullet shot from the barrel, sliced through the air, and struck the synthetic man’s head directly. It blew out a fist-sized wound there and hurled his body several meters away.

One shot, one kill. Clean and decisive. As long as Liu Chang had time to aim, the giant gun could deliver a fatal wound to these synthetic men.

And with his calculating ability, the chance of missing was nearly nonexistent.

But as the old saying went, killing a man was easy; escaping was hard. The moment Liu Chang fired the first shot, danger arrived. The other two synthetic men reacted instantly at the sound of gunfire, charging toward the source of the shot in the same instant they heard the blast and saw the flash. The distance of a dozen meters was covered in almost a second, and the beastlike instincts in them made their approach bizarre and unpredictable, leaving Liu Chang with no chance to fire a second shot.

At the same time, the thunderous boom of the giant gun fully ignited the feverish state of the spider-filled forest. Deep within the woods, nearly all the spiders that had been feigning sleep were roused by the roar in the night. Upon learning that intruders had entered, they leaped and bounded among the webs like agile mountain monkeys, rushing toward the scene.

So Liu Chang, who had foreseen all this from the beginning, immediately turned and ran after the first shot, plunging headlong into the spider forest.

The two synthetic men behind him also pursued at several times his speed once they spotted the target. But Liu Chang did not look back. He moved through the woods, each step following a route he had already planned. The two synthetic men chasing him, however, met webs every few steps, stumbling and pausing at every turn. After only a few strides, they would crash into another web. Though their strength was enough to break free, the repeated snags greatly slowed the chase.

Worse still, every web they tore apart sent a vibration signal to the spiders arriving behind them. The spiders, rushing in wave after wave, saw their painstakingly woven homes ruined, and immediately attacked the two synthetic men.

Of course, they were not the only ones under assault. As one of the parties involved, Liu Chang did not draw quite so much hatred, but there were still scattered spiders that turned on him.

The spiders attacked with remarkable organization, as if days of communal living had honed them into masters of encirclement and pursuit. Their methods were not limited to lunging and biting; they could also shoot silk from the rear and bind prey from a distance. And when they realized these intruders were far stronger than any individual spider, the majority of the approaching spiders adopted this long-range encirclement tactic.

Strands of silk poured down from above like a net from the heavens, wrapping toward the two synthetic men.

The synthetic men surged left and right, but paid no attention to the spiders at all. In their eyes, only the mission target mattered; everything else, even their own lives, ranked second.

Thus the two synthetic men continued racing through the spider forest, chasing Liu Chang across the entire world. Meanwhile, Liu Chang, while dodging the entangling silk, also steadily led the two monsters toward doom.

And in the course of that relentless pursuit, Liu Chang discovered for the first time that his precise calculation ability had an enormous advantage in group combat.

For every strand of silk that fell from above, he could calculate its landing point based on the position of the spider overhead. And when the spiders swooped down from the air, because they were not as fast as he was, he could always find the optimal escape route amid the chaotic melee and slip easily through the encirclement.

Thus he ran more and more smoothly, evading more and more effortlessly. In contrast, the two synthetic men became increasingly strained.

Charging forward in a wild, headlong manner, they had wanted to avoid the layers of silk raining down from above, but they were helpless to do so. As they kept crashing through the forest, more and more webbing clung to their bodies. Every web they broke left fragments sticking to them, and with fresh silk descending from the sky as well, they were caught between above and below. Before long, a layer of sticky silk membrane had covered them from head to toe, severely impairing their mobility.

Their speed grew slower and slower, the membrane grew thicker and thicker, and once Liu Chang felt the moment was ripe, he turned back and fired four shots in succession.